The Club(32)
In other words, it all seemed to be going very well indeed.
And then she stepped inside to rejoin the throng. This deck of the yacht, the third and highest, was connected to the one below by an open-sided spiral staircase, and from the top looking down, she could see Ned and Adam, deep in conversation, Ned showing Adam something on his phone, Adam looking serious. She was tempted, for a second, to call down something silly, do something to startle them. Ned loved those little jokes.
Then she saw Ned’s face.
Then she saw on his iPhone screen what he was showing Adam.
‘Who the fuck does she think she is? I’m Home? I AM Home? I’ll tell you what she is. She’s done. She’s fucking done. Come the end of this weekend, come the end of this party, Annie Spark is fucking history at this company . . .’
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21
It was former journalist and Home’s long-serving head of membership, Annie Spark – something of a celebrity herself amongst Home’s regular clientele, with her flamboyant dress sense and constant changes of hair colour (sea-green one week, peroxide-white the next) – who first raised the alarm that Ned Groom was missing, on Sunday morning. ‘She started asking all of us when we had last spoken to him, or heard from him, and no one could pinpoint it. And you always remember an interaction with Ned,’ says one former Island Home waiter, who has requested to remain anonymous. ‘We were all trying to work out what that meant and what was going on. But she was so completely calm that nobody panicked. Before that, I hadn’t taken her seriously, because of the outfits probably, the air-kissing, but she really stepped up. Someone had to – it was chaos. It wasn’t just people on the island going crazy, we had calls coming in from the media, from all the other Homes. It was Annie who told us what to say, what not to say, who to hang up on, who to pass on to her. She was completely unflappable – it was like nothing that day could surprise her.’
In fact, Annie’s measured response is one thing on which everyone who experienced the panic and confusion of that Sunday on Island Home seems to agree. Freddie Hunter even went as far as thanking Annie personally in the solemn monologue he delivered at the start of his first Freddie Hunter Show after the tragedy.
‘At first, in the underwater restaurant at breakfast, none of the staff seemed to know what was happening, if there had been a security breach on the island, if we were all in danger. Bear in mind, most of us normally have a security detail, but that’s never been the vibe at Home – you leave your bodyguard at the door along with your phone,’ recalls one party guest. ‘When the police turned up, they didn’t seem to know quite who to speak to or what to do. But Annie was telling everyone where to go, explaining what had happened and what was going to happen next, reassuring members that we were safe, that we would be escorted back to the mainland safely and soon.’
It was not until every guest was off the island – a full thirty-six hours after the last confirmed sighting of him – that police began their full-scale search for Ned Groom. By that time it was established that if he had left Island Home, there were no witnesses who had seen him do so. He did not appear on CCTV at any time, in any kind of vehicle, leaving via the causeway. No unidentified boats had been seen approaching or leaving the shore. It appeared that his mobile had been switched off at some point early Saturday morning. Under the circumstances, it was clear his vanishing had to be treated as suspicious.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of people to search a three-hundred-and-eighty-acre island, even with the assistance of local volunteers, and those Home staff who had chosen to remain, including Annie Spark herself. Days of tramping through the woods in the drizzle, traversing sodden fields. Of inspecting cabins, and peering under them. It was the wilder, more inaccessible part of the island, where Ned’s private cottage was located – the side that had been rented for decades by the Ministry of Defence – that the police decided should be the focus of their search efforts. The police officers and volunteers had all been shown a photograph of Ned, been issued a description of what he had been wearing when last seen – a white shirt, blue trousers, Gucci loafers, his uniform of sorts. They had been told what make and model his phone was. They had been told, if they did find something, not to do anything that might disrupt or contaminate a potential crime scene.
They searched in the driving rain, with the biting wind whipping off the water. They trekked through glades of soaked ferns. They poked around in bramble-clogged ditches. They tramped, heads down, along wet pebble beaches. They scrambled down wooded slopes, climbed up muddy banks, slipping and sliding and swearing. They searched all morning, they searched all afternoon, even as the sky grew dark they continued to search, by torchlight.
They found absolutely nothing.
Chapter Four
Friday Afternoon
Annie
‘A few more bottles of that Vermentino!’ Ned barked at the waiter, with a side glance at the empty glass in front of Jackson Crane. ‘So what do you think of the island so far, Georgia? I know it’s October, but if you squint on a sunny afternoon like this I reckon we could all be in the Med.’
Annie did not catch the reply. She was sitting at the far end of the table, next to Nikki, and Georgia Crane spoke quietly at the best of times.