How to Kill Your Family(69)

I decided to chance it. I threw on a black suit with a white T-shirt and added the neon heels of the night before. A cab took me to Janine’s at 7.30 p.m., and I asked the driver to wait across the road for my friend. At 7.45, Janine stepped out of the front door (she’d plumped for the gold dress), accompanied by a flamboyant man in a silver blazer, and headed down the steps to a waiting Mercedes. As the car pulled out, I gave a theatrical sigh and told the driver that my friend must have forgotten that I would pick her up. We followed the car for about eight minutes, pulling up outside a restaurant with a large red canopy and bouquets of flowers in stands around the door. Janine was helped out of the car by her young friend and they walked into the restaurant, a doorman bowing slightly as they passed him without acknowledgement. I gave it a minute, and followed. A woman in a tight polo neck greeted me without a smile. When people like this try to intimidate you, the only thing to do is mirror their behaviour. Without saying hello, I asked for a table.

‘Have you booked?’ she said, looking me up and down.

‘No? I can’t imagine it’s necessary for just one,’ I replied, making a show of checking my phone. She sniffed and walked over to the ma?tre d’. A few minutes later I was given a seat at the bar and left alone. Janine was sitting in a red velvet booth, the colour and fabric conspiring with her dress to give her an unfortunately festive look. Her gaudy companion sat beside her, and two other women completed the party. I was too far away to hear much of their conversation, but I was content to watch. They were hardly likely to talk of anything interesting, but it was nice to see her up close properly. It would have felt sloppy not to see her in the waxy flesh before I killed her, this way I got to feel like I’d given her a proper send-off.

I had a mildly disgusting chicken dish and two glasses of wine, occasionally watching the young man adjust Janine’s hair or offer her a bite of his food. It was weirdly flirtatious, even though he was obviously gay and at least twenty years younger than her. Perhaps the arrangement was that he accompanied her around town and gave her attention that Simon clearly did not. In return, she paid for his dinner and bought him little gifts? How retro. Occasionally they’d all break into tinkly laughter and Janine would stretch her face into a smile. When I saw her signal for the bill I did the same, and followed them out into the night air. The man lit a cigarette as the women chatted, one of them telling Janine that she’d pop over on Thursday for coffee. Janine shook her head ‘No, come tomorrow. The maid is off Thursdays and I’m going to sleep all day. I’m off to Morocco on Friday and need to relax before the early flight.’

I walked back to my hotel. Could Pete set it all up for Thursday? Perhaps that was a rush job, and I knew that rushing led to mistakes. But the thought of being here when she died appealed to me, it would give me a sense of control I was lacking with this plan. And I had no idea how long she was going away for, which might mean weeks of waiting for the next opportunity – who knew if Lacey would get cold feet in the meantime? At the ATM next door to the hotel, I took out 500 euros, the most my bank would allow me to take out in one go. The residents of Monaco would be appalled by such a rule – the initial options for withdrawal started at 500, the kind of petty cash you need on you to tip waiters on yachts, I guess.

Pete was annoyed I’d been offline all evening, and I had to endure twenty minutes of him complaining about his dad not letting him have a lock on his bedroom door before I could move him back to the business in hand. Teenagers are extraordinarily self-absorbed, all during the stage in their lives when they are at their most uninteresting. It took all the restraint I could muster not to tell him that freedom to masturbate at all hours wasn’t a basic human right and that not being allowed a lock on his door was not privacy violation, no matter how much he talked about the Fourteenth Amendment. I told him about the plug I’d ordered, and said that it would be in the house tomorrow. Then I explained that I wanted to freak out my stepmother before I left on Saturday. I thought a little basic reverse psychology might work well on Pete, and assured him that if he wasn’t up to the technological challenge of it all, then that was fine.

It’s just nice to have made a friend in u, I wrote, I can probs find someone else who can help now.

That got his head back in the game. It was too predictable really. He replied with a broken heart emoji, telling me that he was definitely up to it, and would stay up all night to work on the plan. I’d told him what I wanted to do – up to a point. He knew that I planned to lock Janine in her sauna and turn up the heat, but he didn’t know that I wanted to keep her in there until she was overwhelmed by it. And he didn’t know that she had a heart condition that might speed up that process. For all his teenage bravado, I didn’t think he’d fully embrace my real intentions, no matter how much he wanted to impress me. I figured it was better just to pretend I’d pushed it too far, and then place the burden of responsibility on him later if he panicked.

We need access to the CCTV in order to know her whereabouts, he said, launching into action. It should be on the same network but we’ll only know for sure when the plug is patched in. Then we control the place from our phones – you can tell me what you want to do and I’ll make it happen. You can even speak to her if you like, that would really shit her up huh?

We went back and forth into the small hours, Pete telling me how it would work, and me asking him to speak in plain English over and over. By 3 a.m., he was trying to veer the conversation into a more personal one, sending the dreaded voice notes again, so I turned off the Wi-Fi and went to sleep without saying goodnight.