How to Kill Your Family(92)

The vague plan I’d always carried in my head was one which looked something like this:

Kill my family

Make a claim on said family fortunes (this was pretty blurry in my mind, I didn’t want the whole toxic empire, just a few million quid to be able to live life in any way I chose)

Get together with Jimmy (obviously this was almost stymied by Caro, but her helpful demise and my wrongful conviction meant that this was very much back on the cards)

Buy a house, travel, make some friends, adopt a dog

Get away with all of the above.

It was the scheme of a child, a lofty and ridiculous one, with no specifics or safety nets tacked on. The money was an added extra that I increasingly believed was in reach. But the plan, which formed when I didn’t understand the wealth just beyond my fingertips, was all about revenge. I kept it stoked even when there were moments where I admitted to myself that it was a damaging obsession. But somehow I’d followed it fairly faithfully – grandparents, a breeze. Andrew, painful but well executed. Lee, pfft. Janine and Bryony, a triumph – and I was now tentatively sure I’d be able to follow it to completion. That feeling, after years of adrenaline, was intoxicating. So instead of actually knuckling down and finishing it all, I spent hours on estate agent websites looking at houses. St John’s Wood was too gaudy, full of beautiful houses lived in by greasy people who thought chrome banisters were the height of elegance. Primrose Hill was exactly the same, only the people who lived there bought expensive vintage knick-knacks and thought they were better than chrome. Kensington is a terrible place altogether and I would never consider living in Clapham or Dulwich or anywhere else buggies outnumber adults. It took me three days to settle on Bloomsbury for my fantasy new home and a further two days of teaching myself how to do lino cuts before I realised how fucking slack I’d become.

I’d fallen into the danger zone of complacency and I was gloriously wallowing in it, stretching out and wiggling my toes. I gave myself a stern talking to, deleted dating apps, packed away books, nail varnishes, and anything else which might entice me into distraction, and cleaned my flat until it was all in order. Then I stuck an A3 piece of paper up on my bedroom wall and got back to it.

An hour later, I had written down ten ideas and they were all ridiculous. This part of the plan suddenly felt like the most gruelling, when I’d always thought it would be the best bit. Kill the boring Z-list members of the family to get to Simon. Race through the starters to get to the main course. But instead, I just felt like I was trudging on. So I put on my running kit and set off for Hampstead, taking a route I knew like the back of my hand. I ended up outside the Artemis gates hoping for inspiration. The road was quiet, except for a private security contractor in a yellow bib who wandered past me smoking a cigarette. He barely glanced at me, which confirmed my long-held suspicion that private guards are just there to give a false sense of security to paranoid rich people but could no more disarm a burglar than your grandmother could. Depending on the grandmother, she might actually have a better chance.

I stood just beyond the reach of the CCTV camera attached to the gate and looked up at the house, set back from the road and almost concealed by a garden which wrapped around the property. The blinds were drawn on every window, shutting out the world. The front door, partially obscured by an enormous Range Rover, was firmly shut. It wasn’t just a house in mourning, the homes of the ultra-wealthy often look as though they are uninhabited. Which, a lot of the time they are. When you’ve got four or five houses, you’re not in one place very much. If Simon decided to flee to his Barbadian bolt hole or spend months walking around the Monaco penthouse wailing for Janine, I’d be in trouble. That last option was less likely, since he didn’t seem to have spent too much time grieving for his wife, and I can’t imagine wanting to hang around in the place where she came to a fairly grotesque end. But then the gates whirred into motion, and a soft-top sports car hove into view, being driven by a young guy who I guessed was an assistant. That must mean Simon was at home and that gave me some hope.

Back at home I crossed off all the plans I’d held in my head for him over the years. Some of them were silly, fanciful, unworkable. An early plan to pose as cabin crew on his private plane made me particularly embarrassed. How long would I have had to train to get to that point? Stupid Grace. Some were more realistic and I didn’t disregard the idea to send a condolence parcel to his office which might just happen to contain a substance which just potentially might kill him within seconds. But mainly I felt a sinking feeling, that I’d done it all wrong, that I should have killed him before the rest of his terrible family. I’d made him paranoid and prone to hide away. In my excitement and my insistence on build-up, I’d made the final target almost impossible to reach.

My gloom infected my confidence and made me pull back from every partial plan I had laid out. Then matters were made infinitely worse when Jimmy got engaged to Caro, darkening my mood and causing me to wake up in the night, pulling at the skin at my neck, breathing heavily, sweating through my T-shirt. I felt a looming sense of doom, as if things were rushing ahead of me, already out of my grasp. I could not get a handle on anything.

And I was sadly, horribly right. Did you look back to the beginning of this text and note that I killed six members of my family? Did you see that we seem to have already reached this magic number? Well, there are no prizes for such eagle eyes. Don’t be smug, or think me too much of a fool. I have already spent months dealing with my failure, trying to shake off the feeling that it was all for nothing.