The Club(42)
By this stage, he explains, he was in his Surrey mansion, wondering if he would even have a job to go back to in the US. ‘I remember sitting in my kitchen, due on a flight back to LAX in six hours’ time, supposed to be on TV interviewing Jennifer Lopez the next night, and thinking what the hell are the network going to make of all this, half expecting a call telling me not to bother coming back, that I was somehow tainted, could no longer front a primetime show. And then I turn on the news and they’re saying they’ve found another body on the island.’
Freddie takes a moment, glances at something offscreen again, adjusts the hem of his shirt. ‘Three people dead, three people I knew, three people with friends and families and people who loved them,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘And someone else I know is missing. And still all these keyboard detectives are treating it like it’s a game of bloody Cluedo.’
Chapter Five
Friday Evening
Jess
It was one of those afternoons when time seems not just to be moving quicker than usual, but vanishing in great unexplained leaps and jumps.
When Jess had returned to the staff block from Jackson Crane’s cabin, Bex and Ella were still there, waiting outside the building for one of the housekeeping vans to pick them up for the next round of cleans and turndowns.
‘Everything okay?’ Ella had asked.
Jess gave them a double thumbs up, her biggest smile. She was not sure she quite trusted herself to speak.
She could still save him, probably, perhaps. Pick up the phone and call reception and tell them she was a bit worried about Jackson Crane, or send one of her girls over to knock and check if he needed anything. Even if he had managed to finish that bottle of whiskey, there might still be time – assuming the causeway was passable – to send for an ambulance, have his stomach pumped. Even now she could change her mind. Even now this might not work anyway.
Which was exactly what she had been telling herself every step of the way, of course. Ever since that night a few years back, listening to her old school friend talking about Jackson Crane and telling her about Country Home, when the whole thing had first occurred to her – and her horrified brain had dismissed it immediately as impossible. All the times she had thought about it since, turning over the practicalities, telling herself it was just a sort of weird mental exercise she was doing, a way of dealing with her hurt, her anger, her trauma. The number of jobs she’d applied for at Home, in the almost complete confidence that she was never even going to receive a response, that the universe would ensure she was unable to test her resolve. All this week, in a slight state of shock, as she had been packing hastily for the island. Even as she had been grinding those sleeping pills up this morning, the ones she had brought and the ones she had stolen. Even now.
Jess had checked her watch.
She could still save him, maybe.
Instead she had waved Bex and Ella off and gone inside to double-check that the strict ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the staff instructions relating to Jackson Crane’s cabin was still in place.
She had often wondered what it might feel like, to know you had killed someone. She had often wondered what it would feel like, to have someone’s life in your hands.
It did not feel like she had expected at all.
None of the language people use to talk about death or revenge or regret seemed particularly pertinent to what she was feeling now. In fact, if anything, they all seemed rather abstract and artificial. Perhaps, she thought, it was the fact that nobody else knew about it yet that made the whole thing so hard to process, to take seriously. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the situation itself, the wondering every time she checked her watch what was going on in that cabin, knowing that at some point she was going to have to steel herself to return and confirm, to close the curtains, to wipe down all the surfaces, to make sure everything was in its right place.
Perhaps it might have made a difference if there had been a single moment in the past few hours when she hadn’t been trying to do one thing while simultaneously conducting a conversation with someone – over text, on a walkie-talkie, across the room – about something else. Island Home was now operating at full occupancy and all afternoon the complaints, the queries just kept coming. Was there a seamstress on the island, an acupuncturist available? What time did the spa open? Would it be possible to speak to someone about the hardness of the pillows, the softness of the beds, the water pressure? When the person asking was a member of Home, and the occasion was a weekend such as this, it had been made very clear to Jess that the answer was always yes.
The woman in cabin twenty-three – Jess owned two of her albums – had already called reception to complain that there were pine needles on her balcony. The man in cabin forty-six had rung to complain about the loudness of the birds. The couple in cabin eighty, he a director and she a producer, according to Jess’s notes, wanted to know if there were dry-cleaning facilities on the island – if so, they wished to arrange a collection for two bags of clothes and a pair of curtains they’d brought with them. In all three cases Jess had promised to see what she could do.
The couple in cabin seventy-eight had thrown a fit about their cabin being too gloomy. Jess had popped over personally to show them how to operate the dimmer switch. One she had recognized from the cover of a magazine, the other from an Evian advert on the tube back in London. Despite cabin eighty-four being at exactly the temperature specified in Jess’s notes, the inhabitant hadn’t been in there five minutes before he was complaining it was too cold. Jess had checked the thermostat, and pointed out that the temperature was exactly the one he had specified. He said he was sure that could not be correct and asked her to come back with a thermometer.