The Club by Ellery Lloyd
Acknowledgements
By the time the Land Rover was halfway across the causeway it must have been obvious they were never going to make it. Not at the speed that tide was coming in. Not with that distance still to go. At which point, what do you do? One passing point aside, even at its broadest, the road linking the island to the mainland is only ever about a vehicle and a half wide. Even at its highest, at the lowest tide, the road is only a foot or two above the level of the surrounding mudflats. There is nowhere even to attempt a three-point turn. There is no way you are going to get back to the island in reverse, blind drunk, in the middle of the night, in a borrowed and unfamiliar vehicle.
Behind you, on the island, the party is still going strong, fireworks popping and fizzing. A mile or so ahead you can just make out the silhouette of the village – the orange glow of the harbourfront, a light or two still on here and there in an upstairs window. So what do you decide? Your first instinct is to keep going, to put your foot down. To take your chances at forty, at forty-five, fifty, on this unfamiliar, sinuous track in the pitch dark, the headlights illuminating just one unpredictably curved stretch of the causeway in front of you at a time, black waves already lapping across it, the road ahead rapidly narrowing, disappearing. You could sound the horn, flash your lights wildly – but even if you did manage to attract someone’s attention, even if somebody on the mainland did see you or hear you and call the coastguard, what could the coastguard possibly do, given the speed things are progressing, considering the distances involved?
And then the horror becomes not just what is happening, but how easy it is, numbed and jumbled and fuzzy as you are, to imagine what will happen next. The grimly dawning realization that within minutes the water will be up to your axles, up to your headlights. That at some point, probably sooner rather than later, the engine will suck in water and choke, and the whole vehicle will grind to a halt.
And all this time, the Land Rover’s other occupant is screaming at you from the passenger seat, telling you this is all your fault, demanding you do something, flailing around, panicking.
And it occurs to you that you should call someone, call anyone, but then of course you realize your phone is still on the island, they took your phone, and even if they hadn’t, there probably wouldn’t be any reception out here anyway.
And you wonder how long you would survive out there, in the cold water, in the darkness, if you tried to swim for it, given the time of the year, and the strength of the currents, and how far you are from the shore.
And at some point it dawns on you that whatever you do now, the end result is inevitable.
And at some point it dawns on you that the media are going to have an absolute field day with this.
And perhaps at that moment – but only perhaps, and only for a moment – it dawns on you that this is no more and no less than the ending you so richly deserve.
CRIME
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
It was the club you’d kill to join; the launch event to which the A-list were dying to be invited. What no one could have anticipated was how tragically things were about to go wrong. In this exclusive investigation, Ian Shields cuts to the heart of the case that baffled the world . . .
The party on the island had been going on for days.
All Friday morning, all Friday afternoon, helicopters had been arriving, departing, circling. Speedboats thumping back and forth across the glittering waves. A steady stream of blacked-out SUVs making their way down hedgerowed Essex lanes, past bare brown fields and damp black trees, through the narrow streets of the village of Littlesea. At around midday someone counted three Model S Teslas drive past, one after another.
A celebrity wedding, you might have said, if you didn’t know better. Some millionaire’s fiftieth birthday.
All Saturday afternoon, all Saturday evening, from across the water, sometimes louder, sometimes fainter, came drifting the steady doof-doof-doof of distant bass. Here and there over the course of the weekend, in the late mornings, in the afternoons, if your eyesight was good enough or you had a pair of binoculars, you could just make out from the mainland where people had laid big blue and white striped blankets on the foreshore. A head bobbing in the water. A horse kicking through the sand, its rider bouncing along in the saddle.
Now and again, in the evenings, you could make out through the trees the flicker of huge flaming torches, the front of The Manor illuminated in yellow or green or blue. There were even times, if the wind was in the right direction, when it was possible to imagine you could hear the crowd: their cheers, their whoops, their laughter. Their screams.
As well as celebrating Island Home’s grand opening, the lavish event also marked thirty years since the company’s CEO Ned Groom – one of hospitality’s great visionaries – had inherited The Home Club in Covent Garden from his grandfather and boldly set to work transforming it from a dusty and undersubscribed private drinking den for ‘actors, performers and other stage professionals’ into the modishly renamed Home, the most exclusive and talked-about London nightspot of the decade (that decade being the 1990s), whose famous front-door superstars stumbled out of and straight onto the pages of the next day’s tabloids. Kate Moss had her birthday party there several years in a row. Kiefer Sutherland and his entourage were famously turned away one night. The entire cast of Friends took over the roof terrace for their final London press junket.