The Club(64)

This hadn’t gone unnoticed among Jess’s team. Every so often, as they were looking over the job list, Ella would remark – with a slight smile, a gently raised eyebrow – that the ‘Do Not Disturb’ instructions were still showing on the notes for Jackson’s cabin, make some wry comment about it, and Jess would pretend to check this was still correct. Every so often Bex would express surprise that Jackson had been absent yet again from some event or activity Georgia had dutifully attended, and would wonder aloud how she felt about that.

‘Probably relieved,’ someone else commented.

Over the past two days, Jess had heard plenty of other stories about the Cranes, from her new colleagues, from people who had been with Home a while. About someone once having knocked and come in to turn the beds down and found Georgia tucked up in one of them, mid-afternoon, sobbing into the phone. About blazing rows behind closed doors, things thrown, things smashed, accusations howled. Ella had described one night she was working at Covent Garden Home when Georgia had been waiting in the lobby for ages for Jackson to come down and take her out to some premiere in Leicester Square, and he had not come down, and he had not come down, and eventually she had gone up and knocked on his door, and there had been a huge argument, a vase broken, an ambulance discreetly called, and several stitches administered to a six-inch gash to the side of his head.

Would people really believe that Georgia Crane had killed her husband? Would the police? Once those sorts of rumours started swirling publicly, Jess had every reason to think they might. Soon enough she would be finding out.

Before that, though, there were still a few final things she needed to do. For several minutes now, as the late afternoon turned to evening, she’d been standing, hesitating, on the footpath leading up through the trees to cabin ten. ‘Okay,’ she told herself. ‘This is it.’ Still, she didn’t move. She really didn’t want to go into that cabin. To see that body.

The drizzle that had started as a fine mist was thickening into rain now, pattering all around her in the darkening woods on either side of the path, the light on the horizon turning a burnt orange. In the distance, she could see the headlights of one of the golf buggies – someone heading off for dinner, or to get a last-minute blow-dry at the spa. Up ahead through the bushes she could see the light of the cabin’s porch.

It would only take a minute to confirm he was dead. From the end of the path it was five or six steps to the front of the cabin, where the bicycles still sat upright in their stands, the electric scooters in the same place they’d been before. It seemed unlikely anyone had been here since she’d shut the door behind her, the housekeeping team, and everyone else, on strict instructions to stay away. She knocked quietly, unlocked the door with the master key and opened it gently.

‘Hello?’ she whispered. Then more boldly: ‘Room service?’

Still no answer. Jess made her way slowly down the hall, noting that nobody seemed to have touched anything in the bathroom, that the pile of towels on the edge of the sink remained undisturbed, that everything hanging on the hooks in the hall – the waxed coats, the Home-branded umbrellas and wellies – remained exactly where she’d left them. Then she popped her head around the bedroom door.

On his back in the middle of the bed lay Jackson Crane, the blankets and the duvet piled by his feet, a pillow over his face. The empty decanter lay cradled in the crook of one arm. His other arm had been flung out to the side. Jess cleared her throat. The body on the bed did not move. After she’d watched it for some time, counting in her head, counting the number of seconds and then minutes that passed without any sound or sign of movement from the bed, she took a couple of cautious steps into the room. The body on the bed did not stir. The body on the bed, Jess felt confident in stating, was never going to stir again.

She had expected to feel some kind of triumph at this moment, at the well-deserved death of the man who had killed her parents. She did not feel triumph. She certainly did not feel any kind of happiness, or that any kind of resolution had been reached. Instead all she felt was an overwhelming sadness, a crushing sense of universal regret, for everything, on behalf of everybody. For her parents. For herself. There was a horrifying instant at which she found herself imagining, were they alive, what her parents, who had loved her and known her as a child, a sweet and placid and innocent child, would think if they could see her now – and found herself wondering how she could even begin to explain to them how it had come to this. There was a moment, as she took one last look at the body on the bed, when despite everything and despite herself she almost found herself feeling sorry for Jackson Crane.

Then she remembered once again the final moments of her father’s life, the final years of her mother’s.

Then she noticed a dent in the wall they had not quite been able to get rid of, a patch of paint that had not fully dried yet.

Then she remembered the memory stick.

Each of the many large wall-mounted flatscreen TVs in the cabin had a USB socket at the side into which such a memory stick could be slotted. On the basis that it was the farthest room on the ground floor from the bedroom, it was into the side of the set in the lounge that she inserted it. What was she expecting? Jess did not know. All she knew was that ever since she had first found it, on the floor of this cabin, it had struck her as being out of place. If it was nothing, some films he had downloaded for the flight home, some audition clips of unknown actresses for his next project, then she could just tuck it into the pocket of a jacket hanging in the hallway and go. Her fingerprints would not matter – she was housekeeping, of course they were everywhere. Still, if it was nothing, there was no sense having it in her possession, just in case when the body was discovered and the police inevitably searched the island, they went through the staff accommodation too.