How to Kill Your Family(32)

This was when the fog that I had always felt swirled around me started to lift and my life became clearer. I got to a place where I felt safe and in control, and I was able to look to the future with more focus. In some ways, it meant slowing down and becoming familiar with the art of patience. I’ve worked at the same company ever since. I have stayed in the same flat, which I still rent from the ancient Turkish man who lives above me and has not raised the rent since I first moved in, much to the chagrin of his son. I have saved money, kept a low profile and lived life on a small scale, all the while waiting for the moment when I would kick-start my plan and begin a new chapter. It’s not a time about which great tales will be written, but so many people live like that every day and don’t seek a next chapter at all. They are content with their small and banal lives, their basic requirements met and ‘ooh a nice bottle of prosecco’ as a treat once in a while. So I don’t find it especially odd or disappointing that I spent those years living dull. The best years of your life are said to be those which whizz by in your early twenties when you can drink and party and live spontaneously. Mine were not like that. Instead, those years were followed by a thrilling hurtle through time as I carried out my plan, and now I anticipate many years to come which will be as large and as exciting as I wish them to be.

I don’t mean to imply that I lived like a puritan. There were little luxuries now and then. I do seem to appreciate the slightly nicer things in life, a predilection which I imagine I inherited from both my mother and father in some ways, and unleashed by living at the Latimers with their penchant for organic wines and exorbitant interiors. It’s why my small flat has one wall dedicated to shoes, the most basic starter drug when women look to treat themselves. As I got a little older, I took wonderful solo holidays to places I could barely have imagined when I was growing up with Marie. And every time I sat and drank a glass of wine on a terrace somewhere, I squashed the thought that perhaps my life had turned out better than it might have had Marie lived. Sure, I suffered a huge trauma in the loss of my mother and the Latimers were never my family, but gaining instant entry to the affluent upper middle class and harbouring a vicious and long-standing grudge had worked out somewhat well for me. I pushed the thought away most of the time.

The alarm has gone off again. It’s probably just the weird girl three cells down who won’t stop screaming but I have to go line up. More later.





CHAPTER EIGHT


I felt bouncy as I walked to work that sunny Friday morning. A dull week of slogan brainstorming had slowed time down to a crawl, and I’d been taking late-night runs around the city just to burn off some of the boredom. But that weekend I’d cleared my schedule, I’d made sure I had good wine and nice candles in the flat. I’d booked a massage for Saturday with my favourite masochist masquerading as a masseur and I was going to a sex party in the evening. Spare me any shock. Don’t be horrified, or worse, excited. This isn’t a random swerve into my particular proclivities. I went for research.

It had been nine months since I’d watched Andrew Artemis float away to be with his beloved frogs and I’d been keeping my head down, working hard and resisting all urges to jump back into my plan. I knew before I started that the pacing had to be strict, despite the constant yearning I had to get rid of them all in a week and take the consequences. The initial, and let’s face it, more irrelevant murders had to be well spaced out so as not to cause suspicion early on. ‘Tragic accidents’ was what I wanted people to say. This could then grow to ‘an unlucky run for the family’, before ramping up to ‘curse on the Artemis clan’. At a push, the last murder might make a few people mutter about foul play, but by then the whole family would be dead and buried and too many others would stand to benefit. I felt confident that nobody would be rushing to avenge them.

So I’d let the dust settle after Andrew. And I’d felt little joy when I looked back on it, unlike the euphoria I’d had when Kathleen and Jeremy rolled off that cliff, so I’d been happy to step back for a bit. I knew Andrew’s funeral had been well attended, by earnest people in cagoules and red-faced private school chums alike. I had read that his mother Lara had been utterly devastated by her only son’s death, making no public comment but pulling back from her work as Artemis Holdings Vice President and establishing a charity for wildlife preservation in Andrew’s name. I wondered whether the incident had caused her to break from the family as well as the brand. The society pages still constantly featured Lee, but Lara seemed to have retreated from London entirely, staying mostly at their farmhouse in Oxfordshire. I’ve seen the property on Rightmove. The main house is entirely painted in shades of muted grey, and there are a wide variety of tasteful Persian rugs throughout, but then there’s also a driving range in the grounds and it has the biggest hot tub I’ve ever seen overlooking the herb garden. It’s not hard to see who chose what there. If it helps you guess, Lee wears cowboy boots and calls them ‘his signature’.

From what I had read, Lara seemed totally unsuited to Artemis life. Perhaps that’s why I initially assumed Lee couldn’t be as nightmarish as he came across, despite all the signs pointing to him being exactly that. She was smart, a first from Cambridge and an MBA from an Ivy League college. He was a chancer, steeped in privilege and greed. The Artemis family might be canny, but I was confident that Lara was rarely stimulated by intelligent conversation at the family dinner table. According to Tina, who continued to gossip her head off to me long after I’d left the office, there was still much bafflement about Lara’s choice of partner. ‘He was handsome, everyone thought so. Don’t roll your eyes! That’s not nothing when you’re young. And he was good at adapting his behaviour to mirror those he was around. He’d get these big inspired eyes when she talked, and tell everyone how clever she was. She was shy, but you could tell she was flattered by the attention. This lovely looking young girl, awkward as hell but just so smart. She wasn’t prepared for a man like Lee and by the time she understood who he was, it was too late. Of course, his parents didn’t like that she was mixed race. They didn’t say it explicitly, but it was obvious. And he shut them down completely. He did love her, I think. In his own way.’ It was a weak explanation and it didn’t seem enough for Lara. Aged 18 you might get fooled by a man like that, but you learn. You learn fast or you end up trapped.