The Club(28)

On the floor, next to a torn envelope, was a crumpled letter printed on Home notepaper. Jess stooped to pick both up, turning the letter over as she did so to see if it was important. Jesus, she thought. The letter was from the Home Group, welcoming him to some new exclusive level of top-tier global membership. At the bottom of the letter it said, in much smaller print, how much it was going to cost, annually, in perpetuity.

No wonder Jackson Crane was upset.

If she had received an invoice on that scale she would probably have been quite tempted to start smashing things up herself.

Jess stooped to feel if a darkened patch of carpet by the drinks cabinet was stained or just damp. And then she noticed the memory stick.





Adam

I can’t do this any more, Adam thought to himself, looking out from the yacht’s prow across the choppy water. I just can’t do it.

It had been almost eleven by the time the police had left The Causeway Inn, past midnight before he got back to the island, almost one by the time he got to bed, another hour and a half – brain churning over the events of the day, body unable to find any position it was comfortable in for more than three minutes at a time – before he finally managed to get to sleep.

They had been fucking lucky that brick had not hit anybody. He had been fucking lucky it had not hit him. The thing had come straight through the window, right next to where Adam was standing, pretty much where his head would have been if he had taken a step back. Three times along the table it had bounced, smashing glasses, before coming to rest at the feet of a startled old lady in a green tweed jacket.

Then all at once everyone in the room seemed to be screaming or shouting or cowering on the floor or pushing forward to see what had happened.

From outside, from the lane on the other side of the wall that ran the length of the inn’s garden, Adam could hear laughter, footsteps, a starting engine, a motorbike speeding off.

For some reason one of the men in the front row was staring at him, furious, as if this were something Adam himself had planned.

One of the women in the second row was holding up the sliver of glass she had just found embedded in the lapel of her coat.

Probably teenagers, the police said, when they eventually turned up. Young people often went down to the quay, to drink and smoke, via that lane, Adam was informed. The police would of course investigate whether CCTV had captured anything or if there had been witnesses to the incident.

‘Teenagers?’ Adam had said. ‘Seriously?’

The police officers – there were two of them, one with very neatly trimmed stubble, one with blonde hair tucked back in a bun, both pretty fresh-faced themselves – asked whether he could think of anyone who might dislike or resent Home’s presence in the village or have a grudge against him or his brother.

‘How long have you got?’ he had replied.

Quite apart from all the disgruntled Littlesea locals, there were plenty of people Ned had hired and fired in the area, plenty of others he had refused to hire. Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, gardeners, scaffolders, roofers, you name it really. Their Head of Housekeeping, fired for asking for a day off the week of the launch – to attend her sister’s funeral, it had come out during the row that followed, although of course even then Ned had not backed down. It was no wonder, really, that Island Home was opening far later than expected, or that it had gone over budget by so much. Adam had more than once tried to calculate how much it must have cost the company in total, Ned’s perfectionism, Ned’s unpredictability. There had been plenty of times he had been tempted to lob a chunk of masonry at his brother himself.

The brick had been wrapped in one of those photocopied signs some of the people in the village had in their windows, the ones that said ‘Home Go Home’, secured with elastic bands. Unsure if he should be handling it, unsure if it constituted evidence, Adam had nevertheless stooped to pick it up between a thumb and a forefinger before he noticed the thick brown smear next to the brick on the rug, another smear of a similar brown substance right across the flyer itself.

That was the bit of the story Ned kept insisting he repeat to people. To Annie. To Nikki. To every member of Home staff they’d bumped into all morning, in fact.

‘Only Adam,’ Ned kept saying, struggling almost to get the words out, he was wheezing so hard with laughter, jabbing with a finger in Adam’s direction. ‘Only my brother would actually pick up a shitty brick.’

And of course they had all laughed along, Annie, Nikki, their waiter at breakfast, even if there wasn’t actually a joke there, the way there would have been had he picked up a literal hot potato or the wrong end of an actual stick, even if half the staff Ned insisted he repeat the story to had never actually spoken to Adam before.

It was all part of the pattern, of course, a pattern that had gradually established itself over time.

And he deserved it, a little ribbing. Sometimes he had drunk too much at dinner, or lunch, been hungover in a morning meeting, said something stupid, done something stupid, nodded off. The thing with Ned was he never let you forget it. Never let you forget it, and never let anyone else forget it either. You were expected to simply sit there, nod, smile, take it. And somehow, somewhere along the line, without really noticing, he had gone from being a person to being a running joke. Somewhere along the line he had got so used to being shouted at and blamed for everything, called names, told he was useless, had got so used to just sitting there while other people were informed of his uselessness, that he barely noticed it, most of the time.