How to Kill Your Family(70)

I woke up to the sun streaming through my windows and lay in bed for a bit, feeling positive about my progress. Janine would be a big scalp to take down. Simon might not be a faithful or devoted husband, but they had been married for decades and she was his gatekeeper in many ways. His parents would have been a loss, his brother probably less so. I doubt he’d registered the death of his nephew in any profound way. But losing his wife would knock him sideways. Would he begin to see a pattern, to question the string of deaths? He didn’t strike me as someone who’d buy into any idea of a curse, but would he think that he had an enemy somewhere out there, cutting down his family but never making themselves known? I hoped these notions started to seed. Not enough for him to take any action, but enough that they wormed their way into his brain and made it hard for him to think about anything else. He’d made enemies in business, people he’d fucked over on deals, companies he’d bought and restructured – a polite way of saying that he’d fired a lot of people. He’d had mistresses since my mother, the papers hinted as much. Would he look back and wonder whether any of them hated him enough to take such dramatic revenge? Rich people are paranoid at the best of times, with their security systems and their armoured cars. Perhaps he’d beef up security, hire a private investigator to look into possible enemies. Maybe he’d even go to the police. All sensible tactics, but ultimately pointless. Jeremy and Kathleen were long buried, and their car accident would never be shown to be anything but down to their own carelessness. Andrew was a troubled weirdo in the family’s eyes, his death was a tragedy but hardly suspicious. Lee, well, the less the authorities dredged up about his messy end the better. And Janine had long-established heart problems, she really shouldn’t even have been in the sauna. Let the question linger on people’s lips. ‘But wasn’t she supposed to …?’ Always nice to add a little victim-blaming.

I checked my mobile. One message from Jimmy, asking if I wanted a drink tonight, one from my neighbour telling me there was a parcel waiting at her flat for me. Two emails from work that I ignored. Then I turned on the Wi-Fi on my other phone – the one I used for Artemis-related business, and was alerted to new messages with a string of beeps. Nine from Pete. Scrolling down, one was a message telling me that I had to find out what system the hub was on. I could ask Lacey to get that information. The next few were links to articles about smart doorbells which had been hacked and then there was a message asking where I’d gone and a photo, which when I clicked on it, showed Pete in front of a mirror. His head was cropped out of shot, but his tracksuit bottoms were pulled down and I could see his penis, held up to the camera like a special offering. Why do men send unsolicited pictures of their dicks? I am not friendly with many women, but I feel confident that I could answer for most of my sex when I say that nobody wants to wake up to that. Especially from a barely legal teenager with too much pubic hair and a sad case of chest acne. I felt simultaneously depressed by having to see it and sorry for Pete, who obviously thought it was an obligatory rite of passage when talking to a girl. I saved the photo, and sent it to my real phone. Might as well keep it in case Pete had a crisis of conscience. I messaged him back gently asking if we could take this all a bit slower. I hope I struck a note which made him feel more than a little self-conscious, while still giving him hope that there’d be some sort of reciprocation at a later date. He’d never get anything back from me of course, but I wouldn’t feel too bad for the lonely teen. If you strike up a friendship based on hacking, you deserve to get scammed. In fact, you should expect it.

*

As soon as my package had arrived, I took it up to my room, unboxed it and read the instructions. I wrote them down in an abbreviated form on a small piece of paper, and then rolled up the plug and put it in a small toiletry bag along with the money. It was pretty compact now, and would fit in Lacey’s pocket without causing any concern if Janine saw her coming back from the walk. Next door, I took out another 500 euros, added it to the bag and walked down to the promenade, seeing Lacey appear in the distance. She was in a better mood today, clearly she’d spent time planning how she’d use the money. Or perhaps Janine had been extra vile that morning and Lacey just wanted to take back some agency. Probably it was a little of both.

I gave her the money and told her what she had to do. ‘There are instructions in the bag too, if you need them. And my number, so please text me when it’s installed and give me the brand of the hub, and the serial number on the side. It’ll be sixteen digits.’ She nodded, and told me that Janine would be going away on Friday. I reassured her that we’d turn off the listening mode while she was gone, and only activate it again on her return. I wondered whether Lacey kicked back when Janine was out of town, painted her toenails in the cushion-stuffed lounge, smoked in the kitchen, had long baths in Janine’s tub. I hoped so, but she was probably too scared in reality.

‘We only need a week or so of audio – that should give us enough examples of this kind of shoddy behaviour. Then you can remove the plug and throw it away OK?’ She nodded again, and bent down to stroke Henry under one ear.

‘I do this for my family, and so that other women don’t suffer like I do with a bad boss. It makes me feel good to help someone.’ Henry was busy trying to bite her fingers, and I suddenly felt a tiny pang of guilt. She wasn’t helping anyone except me. And she’d be out of a job too, soon enough.