How to Kill Your Family(62)
‘Thank you, Grace, I know you must be tired. I’m just going to run through some questions and then we’ll let you go. You must be longing to get home.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bryony died before Caro’s accident. Looking back, it’s funny to think of Caro’s family gossiping about Bryony’s tragic demise, just weeks before her own unhappy end. I wonder if Caro’s death hit them as hard as Bryony’s hit Simon. I suspected (correctly) that Bryony would be the kicker for him. You could always marry again, and a man like my father, well, he wouldn’t wait long. A new squeeze half his age would emerge before the headstone had time to be engraved, I was sure of that. But Bryony was his only child and, unlike his wife who spent her time shuffling between plastic surgery offices and stuffy restaurants in Monaco, Bryony actually chose to live with Simon. I thought her death might well tip him into some kind of action. So Janine would go first.
I’d decided how to kill Janine before I’d even thought about anyone else in the family. That seems ridiculous really, but there it is. A lot of these plans have come down to luck, despite the constant plotting I did as a teenager, coming up with meticulous and ingenious ways to kill these people. It turns out that as with everything, the reality is always slightly more given over to chance, or an idea that pops into your head at 3 a.m. Janine’s murder was a bit of both. I read an article in some Sunday supplement three years ago about the rise in ‘the internet of things’, a term which gets bandied around a lot by excited nerds but basically means a bunch of devices connected to the internet which can communicate with each other. They have automated systems and can gather information and carry out tasks – collate a shopping list when you run out of cleaning products for example, or turn on your heating when you’re set to come back from holiday. It’s hardly the vision we had of the near future, this isn’t The Jetsons and we still don’t have flying skateboards – but we can now expect our houses to do more of the work. No keys needed for the front door when it just takes a fingerprint, no time spent vacuuming when a robot can do it for you while you’re out. At the moment, the most normal people come to having a smart house is by buying an Alexa or something like it, which they smugly instruct to play music or google something. Mainly in front of bored friends who dread coming over. But for the uber-wealthy, it can mean linking up your entire house and everything in it.
Guess what Janine had done with her penthouse in Monaco? That’s what I mean about chance. I read that piece with a slight hangover and only a vague interest one morning, and three weeks later, Janine was featured in the magazine Lifestyle!, a monthly glossy which mainly featured interviews with very rich women photographed on plump sofas and let them talk about whatever they wanted. Normally that was a charity lunch or a renovation project which involved a lot of glass and marble and an overuse of the word ‘authentic’. I think the only people that actually bought this magazine were other rich women who wanted to hate-read pieces about their society rivals, but they ran a lot of adverts for exclusive interior design companies and craftsmen and so the serpent ate the tail and the magazine stayed in business.
Janine’s feature focused on her new terrace, something she’d added on a whim when she realised that she wanted somewhere to do yoga in the morning sun. The roof garden was at a slightly tilted angle, she explained, and was much better suited to the evening light. I wondered how the interviewer reacted to this, presumably with genuine sympathy for such a terrible burden. But she didn’t stop at the terrace, which seemed to have been modelled on some kind of Grecian vision, with large terracotta pots and an honest-to-God white marble fountain twice the size of anything else in the space. There was a tour of the rest of the penthouse, which spanned three floors and housed nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a, wait for it, ‘serenity room’ which seemed serene only in that it didn’t contain any furniture apart from one cream sofa and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Janine explained that she retreated to it when ‘life gets overwhelming and I need to recentre’, which didn’t explain the mirror but perhaps sometimes it’s better not to ask. The reason she moved to Monaco, she explained, was for her health. A heart scare made her ‘reassess how she lived’. There must be an awful lot of health benefits in the principality. The tax loopholes? Not mentioned.
As the interview spread out over 5,000 words, the interviewer clearly got slightly desperate for something new and original and prompted Janine to talk about her clever wardrobe. ‘Tell us about your dream closet, it’s got some special features I can imagine every woman reading this will be dying to hear about.’ Accompanied by a photo of an enormous walk-in wardrobe, Janine explained that every item in her cupboards was itemised, photographed from every angle, and stored in a database which she could access from an iPad. It made dressing in the mornings a dream, she told the magazine, because the system could tell her which item to match with what. ‘It reminds me of clothes I’d forgotten about. Just last week I bought a beautiful Chanel bouclé jacket in royal blue, only to find, when I added it to the database, that I had two exactly the same!’ Those jackets retail for ￡5,000. How we all laughed. The technology didn’t stop with the wardrobes though. That was just the start. Everything in the home had been connected to the internet, Janine explained. The lights were no longer turned on with switches, the oven did not have buttons (‘Not that I’ve cooked in a while,’ she trilled) and even her morning sauna was temperature-controlled by the smart hub. Every room was able to be locked remotely, in case of a security breach, and it gave her so much comfort to know that, she confided, ‘I don’t completely understand how it all works really, but our wonderful housekeeper has really mastered it and I barely have to do a thing.’ That was the motto of Janine’s life really.