The Club(63)

Adam had not either, then.

He would never forget it, that terrible night, only a year and a half later, that phone call.

Ned discreetly answering his mobile, frowning, covering his free ear with his hand, looking around for a quiet corner of the rooftop bar at Covent Garden Home, where he and Adam had been having dinner, not finding one, stepping into the cold December night to take the call outside. Ned pacing up and down the length of the pool, free hand waving as he barked into the handset, then gesturing through the window for Adam to join him. You did what? Why the hell did you do that? Where are you now? Give me a second and I’ll call you back.

Both of them rushing down the fire escape to Ned’s suite as his brother explained the situation: Jackson, pissed as a fart, on the wrong side of the road, driving that stupid fucking tank of a four-by-four at twice the speed limit, colliding head on with some little tin-can car, and then driving off.

It was on speakerphone, from Ned’s suite, that they’d called Jackson Crane back. On Ned’s laptop, via the cameras in Jackson’s cottage at Country Home, they’d watched as he flinched at the phone’s sudden ring, stumbled over to it, picked it up, stood there listening and occasionally taking an impatient gulp from the tumbler of something in his hand as Ned had him talk them carefully through events once more to make sure he completely understood the situation – clarifying exactly what had happened, exactly where, Ned soothing, cajoling, remaining reassuringly calm.

And what a damning confession it was. Not just in what Jackson was saying – his mumbled admission that he could not even hazard a guess how many drinks he’d had since lunchtime, the frequency with which he repeated himself, the stark facts of the situation – but the tone in which he was saying it. His flashes of irritation at having to explain again what exactly had happened, and how. His increasingly obvious frustration that he was still the person having to deal with all this: wasn’t this what he paid people for, after all? His complete lack of concern – or even curiosity, it seemed, about the people in that other car. His snappishness every time a familiar female voice – anxious, strained – from across the room reminded him of something or corrected something he was saying or simply asked a question.

Oh God, Adam had thought, had she been in the car too? Perhaps that was why Jackson had been all over the road – showing off, messing stupidly around, trying to impress or terrify her. He could just imagine her, screaming at him to slow down, Jackson laughing, Jackson waggling the wheel, clipping the hedgerows, Jackson speeding up.

When this hits the press, Adam thought, that will be it. The end. Not just of Jackson Crane’s career, of her career, but all of it, all of this, Home itself. The whole brand irredeemably tainted. And even as he caught himself thinking this, he recognized what a horrible thing that was to focus on, at a time like this, and felt a fierce little stab of self-disgust.

And then Adam had seen his brother’s face, the little smile playing around his lips. And that was when he realized that Ned was not trying to clarify the situation, or get to the bottom of it, or work out what to do next for the best – he was making sure they had all of this recorded on camera, making them go through everything out loud so that he could be sure it had been caught by the microphone. That was always the moment Adam found himself returning to, the moment of that realization. Because he could have called the police right then, but he hadn’t, hoping that he would not need to, that the accident would be reported and they would trace the vehicle and it would be taken care of. Because up until that point it had still been just about possible to persuade himself that all this blackmail stuff was something that Ned and the business would grow out of, that once Home was on a stable financial footing, there would come a point at which they would be able to draw a line under all this. That was what Adam had told himself. They were only doing it once or twice a year, after all – blackmailing cheaters, shaking down coke fiends, putting the squeeze on creeps. Never had he foreseen anything like this. Never, he told himself, could either of them have foreseen anything as awful and terrifying and tragic happening as this.

Then he had clocked the expression on Ned’s face, clocked that little smile, and that was when he knew. This was the plan. This had always been the plan. This or something like it – an accident, an incident, a crime – was exactly what Ned had been hoping for all along.

It was in that same instant Adam had realized just how deeply, inextricably entangled with all this he was too.

Then Ned’s voice changed, and he had gone from offering consolation to taking charge of the situation, giving instructions.

And Adam could hear him saying: ‘Is she there? She’s still there? Okay, okay, put her on the phone.’

And he could hear his brother saying: ‘Okay, are you listening? You need to keep him in the room – lock him in the bathroom, put him to bed, it doesn’t matter. I can fix this, we can fix this but you need to do exactly what I say.’

Perhaps in different ways they had all discovered what they were truly capable of, that night.





Jess

One thing was for certain – this weekend had confirmed everything Jess had ever heard about Jackson and Georgia Crane living very separate lives. Since Thursday night, according to the system, Georgia had notched up three hours of yoga, four hours in the gym, several solo screening trips, at least three hour-long runs and three facials. She did not appear to have bothered to try to check in with her husband even once.