How to Kill Your Family(93)

For those with a slower cognitive process, I will spell it out. I did not kill Simon Artemis. My one aim in life and I will never get to achieve it. And why not? Because he’s dead. Dead but from a terrible accident and not by my hand. I’d rather he lived another 50 years in ignominy and sadness than to die by fucking accident. What a cruel joke.

Three days after I was arrested for the murder of Caro Morton, Simon was reported missing by The Times newspaper. It wasn’t front-page news at first, taking up half of page three (my initial arrest only made page six). But the next day, his face was on the front of every paper. Why would it not be? The story had everything, money, power, death, scandal, and an intriguing mystery. The media revisited their reporting on the tragic year in the Artemis family. Lee, whose death had been hushed up somewhat successfully at the time, was outed as a sexual deviant. A tabloid reporter managed to get into Janine’s empty apartment and take photos of the sauna, sombrely accompanied by a caption which read ‘Burned alive, did Simon take his own life after tragic wife’s gruesome death?’ Before there was any real certainty that he was dead, friends of Bryony used the story as an excuse to post photos of her with the hashtag #reunitedinheaven. If Heaven welcomed in sleazy moguls and spiteful posers, then something had gone horribly wrong in Elysium’s HR department.

Simon had disappeared at sea. This makes him sound like an ancient mariner when in reality he’d started off on his speedboat while drunk, despite warnings from the crew. He’d fled to his villa in St Tropez, apparently. I didn’t even know he had a house there, given that it’s just round the coast from Monaco, but perhaps Janine wanted a country house for much-needed rest. The rich are slippery. None of these properties are ever in the name of millionaires. That’s what anonymous offshore trusts are for. An assistant went with him, out of concern that he might do himself harm, which was pretty prescient as it happened.

According to the assistant, Simon was driving too fast, pushing the boat up onto its side. Alarmed, the assistant went to take control, and as he pushed past him, my sozzled father tumbled over the edge. The boat was travelling fast, and the assistant took a while to figure out how to get it under control. By the time he’d managed to slow it down and turn back, Simon was under the waves. The other man circled around for thirty minutes, searching in vain for any sign of his employer before returning to the yacht to call for help. The coastguard was called and a search took place but the dark sky and the expanse of water proved too much, and Simon Artemis was presumed dead. Presumed dead just means dead, doesn’t it? They hadn’t found his bloated corpse nibbled on by sea creatures, but perhaps it was only a matter of time. Or maybe his body sank to the bottom, quickly disintegrating, never to reemerge. It all amounted to the same thing. And as I write this, the authorities have yet to find any trace of him. Not even a monogrammed cufflink remains. He is gone. He never got to know what I had done.

I wept. I wept for two full days. The sorrow I felt was worse than when my mother died. Not for Simon but for all I had pinned on killing him myself. That it would make my life mean something. I would avenge Marie and prove that I could rise above my circumstances. I would make things fair. Now all I had for my troubles was the knowledge that I successfully killed some pensioners, drowned a nice boy who wanted to help amphibians, enticed my uncle into a deathly sex club, and bumped off two spoilt women the world would never miss. Not quite the glorious victory I had envisaged for myself.

I didn’t even have the opportunity to drink wine from the bottle and walk around my flat listening to The Cure in the bowels of sorrow. No such fun. I was charged with the murder of Caro Morton and arraigned. That I now had to face a trial for a murder I didn’t commit felt like a surreal joke. I had been bested by the universe and if you believed in karma, which I do not, given that it’s for people who also set store by crystals, then you would think I’d been whacked in the face with a suitcase full of it.

I’ve mentioned that I fell into some sort of depression early on in my prison stay. Perhaps it’s a bit more obvious why it hit me so hard now. I didn’t feel as though there was any point in bothering to fight the case because I didn’t know what kind of life was now on offer to me that would be worth raising my hopes again for. I look back and see a shambling, vacant-stared husk of myself. I was being completely pathetic. Happily, the shock lifted. Partly the routine became less unbearable, you really do become institutionalised at a startling speed. I began to find it less scary and more boring and as my brain lowered the threat level, I started to think about things other than how to breathe normally when the doors locked at night. That meant taking an interest in my case and waking up to the weaknesses in it. I’d gone through the trial like a zombie, barely engaging with the process at all, weighed down by my own failures. But I began to see how my verdict could be challenged. That’s when I brought in George Thorpe. As with so many parts of British life, if you want to be listened to, taken seriously and treated with respect, employ a posh white man to speak on your behalf. Even better if he’s middle-aged. That’s the privilege jackpot right there.

Thorpe made me see that I didn’t have to take a jury decision as final.

‘Grace, jurors are, let us say, not always the type of people we necessarily have to listen to. They are often wrong, largely motivated by their own small personal animuses and have a remarkably basic grasp of actual facts. There are many options open to us so let’s see their verdict as a mere opening offer, shall we?’ I could have kissed the man, had he not been wearing actual braces under his suit jacket.