How to Kill Your Family(81)

You know where I’m going now, don’t you? You should, it’s incredibly obvious. I don’t want to have to be holding your hand as you read this. Fucking inspired, if I do say so. Not that the idea wasn’t handed to me on a plate. God sent me a boat and all that. About ten people a year die from food-induced anaphylaxis each year. Even with all the money and privilege, why wouldn’t she be one of them? And it’s hard to pin a deadly peach intolerance on an unseen enemy.

But why shouldn’t this one be easy? Some of these kills took proper planning – let’s not forget the weeks of frog drudgery, and the deep dive into London’s sex party scene. I spent months figuring out just how much I could manipulate a kid on the internet so I could get to Janine. Hard when you have a full-time job, an increasingly obsessive long-distance running habit (Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, trying to scrub imaginary blood from her hands, I run for miles in any direction away from my crimes, yeah it doesn’t take a therapist thank you) and a dispensation towards anxiety that isn’t so much a character flaw, but doesn’t help when you’re juggling responsibilities.

I never knew quite how close Bryony was to her parents. For all that I studied the family and befriended their staff, they were set apart, living in a world I would never gain access to – no matter how high I climbed or how much I stalked. What I knew for sure – that she was an only child, that she still lived at the family home, that she never mentioned her parents on social media – was mixed in with other titbits. Her mother had spent most of her time in Monaco (nobody does this unless they’re very keen on avoiding tax), living there for at least eight months of the year for five full years. Simon would fly in and out, but seemed to be based here full-time. Bryony, like all the other girls in her world, frequented St Tropez but didn’t seem to show up chez Maman very often. The last official visit (official as in she posted it on Instagram) was two years before Janine had her unfortunate accident. Even after Janine died, there was no direct mention of her on Bryony’s social media. She took a three-week break from posting, and then came back with an image of her silhouette against a disappearing sun, complete with a heart emoji, and was posting sponsored content two days later. Janine was buried in England, and the house she owned in Monaco had sat empty ever since. I don’t imagine that was for any sentimental reasons, but because the house was where the business was registered.

Then there was just total supposition based on all of this information. I suspected that Simon and Janine had lived completely separate lives, probably for a long time. This wasn’t just because of the Monaco situation (though it obviously bolstered the theory – who spends most of the year away from their partner if they don’t need to?), the gossip had long been that Janine had grown tired of Simon’s constant infidelities and had finally taken action to protect herself and her stake in the business. The rumour (backed up by Tina, who reiterated it in an excited whisper one day when I met her for a drink after work) was that the kicker came when Simon was discovered to have kept another yacht for his mistress and had been using a speed-boat to ferry him between the two when the family were on holiday. Threatening to divorce him and take half his money, Janine played a blinder and somehow managed (with the help of a truckload of accountants who she must’ve been paying handsomely) to persuade Simon that there was another option. No divorce or loss of assets, but he had to sign the business over to her. Simon must’ve done the maths, realised that this deal kept him Janine’s prisoner, and still signed the papers. Better to be a rich prisoner than suffer the indignity of the tabloids raking over your private life and having to hand over a hefty chunk of cash to boot. There was an upside – Janine living in Monaco meant that he would no longer pay tax. Rich people see tax the way some people see climate change – it’s a social justice issue worth taking to the streets for. The very rich mainly live under the impression that they earned their money. They have no time for any theoretical argument about whether it’s truly possible for anyone to deserve such an individual accumulation of wealth – once they have it, they turn Gollum-like, ferocious in their protection of their goods and wealth.

So Janine had lived a nice life in Monaco, where lunches took weeks of planning and there was much complaining to be done about the responsibilities of staff, and Simon was free to do whatever he wanted back in London. Bryony wasn’t involved in the equation at all really. She was their daughter, in that she held the family name and provided the bridge between her parents, but it didn’t seem like she was playing Monopoly round the fire at Christmas with them. It didn’t feel like the kind of family you would recognise – either functional or dysfunctional. Instead their unit felt like one which had all the bearings of something enviable, with none of the emotions which would actually make it so.

Maybe I was wrong. The problem with doing all of this from a distance was that I could never really know these people and their innermost thoughts. Then again, I thought I understood Jimmy inside and out and he’d surprised me. His betrayal made him 5 per cent more interesting at least. Maybe Janine and Simon really did love Bryony in a very deep and real sense. I could only go on what I glimpsed. Not that it mattered, I wasn’t trying to absolve myself or hope that it wouldn’t hurt Simon to lose his daughter. I’d have killed him first if I wanted to spare him that pain. No, obviously the sequence in which I murdered his loved ones was crucial. That’s why he came last. He had to experience it all. The reveal would be the thing that broke him.