How to Kill Your Family(75)

Pete messages me. Mega funny but it’s been ages now. I think she’s really struggling bb, shall we let her out? I don’t care if she stacks it but it’s your call.

One minute. She’s fine. Turn it up a notch and give it a bit longer. I reply, staring at Janine, who’s tracing something with her finger on the glass. I strain my eyes, trying to make it out. She makes a noise, but it’s muffled.

‘Did you want to say something?’ I say. She whispers again. I feel irritation rise. ‘Louder please, you’ve probably not got long so if you want to say something, speak UP.’

But she’s not listening now, intently moving her finger up the glass again. She’s barely able to move more than a millimetre before stopping. We watch in silence, until the first shape becomes clearer. A letter G, wobbly and small but clear enough. I feel a tiny pang of nausea. Pete is engrossed. What is she doing, an SOS message? The next letter starts to take shape, a long line, and then, as she tries to prop herself up against the door, a circle stuck to it. She’s drawn an R. The waves crash onto the beach as my vision goes a little blurry. She is going to write Grace. She knows. She knows everything. She’d probably always known – about me, about my mother, happy to let us live in poverty while her daughter had it all. And now she’s going to expose me. When Simon finds the message, he’ll know. Maybe not immediately, but he’ll put two and two together, think back over the other deaths and realise what was happening. He and Bryony would be safe and I would be in jail for the rest of my life.

TURN IT UP, I message Pete. All the way. The bitch deserves it.

God you really hate her huh? That story was mad, makes my stepmom sound like a fucking angel. Cranking now.

Janine is trying to finish the R. Her perfectly coiffed hair is stuck to her face, which is mottled, parts turning a weird purpley blue. I sit there in the sun, one hand clenched around the phone, the other holding my neck so hard I can feel my eyes bulging. And then, as I watch, her finger slips down the glass, her head disappears from sight and there’s a loud thump. Silence. I down a glass of water. No movement.

My phone beeps. That was DRAMATIC. I think she’s fainted now. Want me to release the doors?

I signal to the waiter to bring me another glass of wine. Let’s do it.

That thump wasn’t just her body falling to the floor. It was too loud. She’d hit her head. I check my watch, Lacey isn’t due back for another two hours. Enough time for her to suffer irreversible damage, if she wasn’t already dead. The door to the sauna opens, and steam pours out, obscuring the view for a minute. As the waiter brings me a fresh glass, I can see the bathroom slowly come back into focus. Janine’s feet are lying by the door to the sauna, her body slightly out of sight, inert and small. The shaky G was already fading away into nothing.

Henry has slept through the whole thing. Truly, we don’t deserve dogs.

*

Well she died. The heat and the shock and the burns would have got to her, even if she hadn’t had a mild heart complaint. I guess no heart complaint is mild when you’re stuck in a furnace. God bless Lacey, who never asked a single question of me when I waited outside the promenade the next day. Did she suspect anything? Hard to say. I feigned shock and sympathy at the news. But Lacey seemed completely untroubled by the scene of horror that had greeted her. If anything, she was walking taller, no longer in her uniform but in jeans and a T-shirt, with gold flip flops showing off remarkably jazzy orange toenails. She picked up Henry and stroked his silky little ears.

‘I’m going to give you some money, Lacey, it’s the least I can do during this difficult time,’ I said, looking concerned. ‘Will you be going home now? Or will the family keep you on?’

‘Mr Artemis has given me a month’s pay and told me I can stay for a week, but it’s OK. Madame Janine’s best friend Susan called last night to ask me to come and work for her. She has a much bigger house up in the hills and she’s offering me more money. She told me she’s been planning to ask me to leave for a while.’ She smiled brightly. ‘And she’s not a bitch like the dead lady. And I’m taking Henry. Nobody will stop me.’ I waved her off, marvelling at the incredible chutzpah of Susan, a woman who hired her best friend’s housekeeper less than twenty-four hours after she had died. In another life we might have been friends.

*

Pete was a slightly trickier task. He didn’t go to pieces and panic about what we’d done as I worried might happen. Instead he was euphoric, wanting to go over and over the day’s events, sending me memes about barbecues and asking who we could target next.

This could be a business baby, he texted me a week later, as I was drinking a glass of wine and contemplating what colour to paint my toenails. The hormones of a teenage boy are not to be messed with so I didn’t throw the phone in a river and disconnect from him entirely. The boy was infatuated and I didn’t want to test his tech limits so I handled it delicately. Mainly by finding God. A sudden flurry of bible passages every time he messaged me something flirtatious really slowed down the frequency of his contact. Nothing like a bit of smiting to get rid of a horny teenager’s spontaneous erection. But three months later and he wasn’t giving up entirely. He was still getting a trace high off the fumes of our adventure together and wouldn’t leave me be completely. So I took a rougher route. I pretended to have catfished him. I mean, I had catfished him, but I doubled down. Aware that a reverse image search would be easy for him, I joined an online chat forum where you could video chat with anyone on the planet and I clicked through until I found the gnarliest bloke who spoke basic English. I endured five minutes of his company, which mostly consisted of him gesturing at me to show him my breasts. I asked him to send me a selfie first, saved it to my phone and then deleted my account. With the resulting photo, which showed a bald man-mountain grinning and waving, I waited for the next suggestive (read – masturbating) video message from Pete. As sure as the sun rises, there was a wanking video within time. Immediately, I sent back the photo.