The Club(48)
Now you could sit here with your little remote and look into any room in any suite in any Home club anywhere in the world, and zoom in if you wanted, or rewind, choose your angle from the multiple options, all strategically placed. That was always a strange rush, a peculiar feeling. Being able to check instantly on the booking system who was in, where they were staying, who they had signed into the club that night and at what time, what they’d ordered in the bar even, and then just call the suite up instantly. Being able to scroll back through the day and watch as Freddie Hunter – say – carefully rubbed himself wet with a damp towel, winked at himself in the bathroom mirror and then hopped backwards into the shower. To be able to flick the sound up on cabin twenty and hear Kyra Highway’s raspy snoring. In cabin seventy-nine – the name of the single occupant appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen – there were movements under the blankets and immediately in the same corner of the screen the little indicator came on to note that this was being flagged and filed, automatically, because the system had identified one of its key words or detected a certain pattern of activity, and that this was footage that would find its way somehow along one of these bundles of wires into one of the banks and banks of servers that filled the other rooms of the temperature-controlled bunker; footage that would join, in the annals of Home, the decades of carefully labelled memory sticks and disks stored in the other rooms down here, all those other rooms, down all those long, pipe-lined corridors.
How many hours of footage were there down here, all in all? Thousands, probably. Enough footage to end hundreds of careers, at least. To ruin hundreds of lives, end hundreds of marriages.
Among them, according to Ned, Adam’s own.
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29
How could Home’s security have let it happen? That was the question people kept asking, shocked members, the media. How could the eighty-strong team tasked with safeguarding guests allow a car to be driven onto a waterlogged causeway? To fail to prevent a murder? To have no explanation for the fact a man had vanished, seemingly, into thin air?
The explanation, according to John McBride, former Head of Security for Island Home, is simple: ‘We were far more concerned about people trying to get onto the island than about anyone leaving it. There had been an incident on the Thursday night, on the mainland, so we had more guys than usual over there, and we were prepped to respond if anyone caused more trouble.’ Asked if he thinks anyone did manage to get past his team in that direction, McBride says he thinks it highly unlikely. ‘And I mean highly unlikely. We had security patrols circling on foot and two boats regularly circling the island’s circumference. But you simply can’t be everywhere at once, no matter how many of you there are.’ Under the circumstances, he believes his team did all they could.
‘Members expect to feel safe, but they also expect discretion,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to see a load of big blokes in Puffa coats standing around muttering into walkie-talkies. It makes for a challenging set-up. And just for the record, when you see members interviewed, talking about how upset they were that Sunday? In reality, all those people, those same people, were outraged that their weekend was being curtailed. Ringing and ringing reception to order room service, furious no one was answering. Hammering on the spa door for the massage they’d booked, outraged the clay pigeon shoot had been cancelled. Kicking off. Making a fuss. Home members are used to getting what they want, the second they want it.’
McBride scratches at a grizzled sideburn. ‘Look, at the end of the day, those cars were meant for staff, not drunk members. Yes, perhaps the keys should not have been left in the ignitions, but they were all in a staff car park and Home members aren’t notorious car thieves, are they?’ He raises a bushy eyebrow. ‘And the causeway? There was a huge sign with the tide times on it. It was well lit. The only mystery is where the hell they thought they were going, and why it was so urgent.’ As for Ned Groom? He shakes his head. ‘I ask myself that. Only the perimeter of the island has CCTV – very deliberately, to ensure the privacy of Home’s members – plus the lobby of The Boathouse and the reception area of The Causeway Inn. Nothing suspicious was seen on any of them.’ As for Freddie Hunter’s helicopter? ‘Well, forensics checked it very thoroughly, more than once, but they found nothing at all to suggest Ned had ever been inside it. And anyway, have you met the man? Being attacked by Freddie would be like being mauled by a kitten. So. The last multiple-confirmed sighting of Ned is just after midnight on Friday night. A chap at the absolute apex of his career, shuffling a little shoe with Georgia Crane on the dancefloor, a little stumbly maybe, a little flushed. Then he heads out, patting the pockets of his jacket for a lighter maybe, a cigar or a cigar cutter perhaps. And then he’s gone. Just’ – he makes a gesture with his fingers – ‘gone.’
Chapter Six
Saturday Morning
Adam
‘Not coming? What do you mean he’s not coming?’
It was six thirty in the morning and Adam and Nikki were the only people in The Barn, apart from the thirty or so Home staff polishing glasses, laying tables, gossiping covertly in corners, waiting attentively for the slightest hint that he or Nikki wanted something. Soon members would start arriving – most of them for their first breakfast on the island – nursing their first hangovers of the weekend. Parts of the walk up from Adam’s cabin had felt as though he was wandering through the aftermath of a music festival – an abandoned golf buggy lay on its side by the path, empty champagne bottles and shards of wine glass, stem still attached, littered the gravel, a single high heel sat upright in the mud. No doubt when members did start emerging for breakfast, some would look like they’d spent a rough weekend at Glastonbury too.