The Club(66)

By the time Jess started secondary school she had got used to the way people’s faces changed when she started talking about ‘all that’, the way their expressions stiffened, the absolute certainty with which she could guess what they were thinking; she’d heard all the reasons someone might give as to why it could not have been Jackson Crane driving, why it could not have been Georgia in the car. Because she had been shooting something else on the other side of the planet at the time. Because why, if he had been filming down at Pinewood, which was near London, would Jackson Crane have been zooming down some country lane in Northamptonshire? Because what happened to the car he’d been driving? Because how on earth would someone as famous as Jackson Crane have got away with something like that without the press finding out, the whole world knowing?

And so, sick of people’s reactions, unable to answer these questions, Jess had stopped mentioning Jackson Crane, stopped mentioning Georgia Crane, even to her closest friends. An anonymous hit-and-run driver, that was what she told people, when she told them anything about her parents. Because she could just imagine what they would say, how they would react, all those girls at school who loved Jackson Crane, had a poster of him on their locker, his picture encased in sticky-back plastic on the front of their ring-binders, if she told them the truth about him, that he had killed her parents – and that Georgia Crane had done nothing to stop him or report it. Nutter, they would call her. Attention-seeker.

And it was then, perhaps, that her fantasies had begun to darken. That her childish visions of bringing Jackson and Georgia to justice – all her clever, ludicrous plans to confront them and trick Jackson into a recorded confession or prick Georgia’s conscience – had begun to fade, and other fantasies began to take their place. Of crueller comeuppances. Of more savage reprisals. It didn’t matter why, or how, or even if she had any hand in it, she just wanted them to suffer. Their films to fail. Their marriage to founder. But they did not. And it did not. And none of the even worse things she had sometimes wished on them happened either. Instead she had to read and hear about how happy they were, and how successful. How much their respective latest films had made at the box office. How excited everyone was about the production company they were launching. And she had tried to forgive them, Jackson and Georgia. She had read with impressed fascination of those mothers who could bring themselves to forgive, to correspond with, their child’s killer. She wished she could forgive them, the Cranes. She could feel what it was doing to her inside, all this anger. And maybe she might have been able to forgive them, to start to move on, if they were just normal people she could pretend did not exist, if one or other or both of them were not always there, every time you sat at a bus stop or went to the cinema or opened a magazine or logged on to the internet. It was like being stung, being scalded. Time and time again. Every time she saw one of them laughing, on some red carpet, say, it was as though they were laughing at her. At what they’d done. At what they had got away with.

Even if she still could not quite work out how Georgia Crane could have been in the car that night with Jackson.

As far as Jess could ascertain, Georgia had been filming in Tahiti at the time of the accident, for weeks beforehand and weeks afterwards. You could watch videos online of Georgia on set, talking about how much she missed her husband, how hard it was to spend Christmas apart. You could watch her, in material that had presumably been intended originally for the DVD extras, being interviewed on the beach with her co-stars, visiting the Pearl Museum in Papeete, learning to jet-ski. She had a tattoo done in a traditional pattern on her ankle – she mentioned it on Freddie Hunter’s show, pulled up her trouser leg and showed the audience – so that she would always remember her time on the island. Nevertheless, Jess knew what she had seen that night.

Occasionally, when Jess was tempted to go to the press with her story, or to post something online, she thought about the way those who loved her most had struggled to believe her. It was not hard to imagine what would happen to the person who went public with a claim like that, the avalanche of ridicule that would have been levelled at her, before you even started to think about the legal ramifications of making that kind of public accusation against a man that wealthy, that powerful, that beloved, with no evidence to back it up.

Now, unfolding onscreen in front of her eyes, here it was. Jackson Crane and a woman who could only be his wife, Georgia, rowing in a hotel room on the night in question, a room she now, given the context, had no doubt was one of the suites at Country Home, just down the road from where the accident had happened, screaming at each other about a car crash. About whose fault it was. About what to do next. About whether or not to call the police or an ambulance, or a lawyer, or Ned. Evidence. That was what it was. Precisely the kind of hard, undeniable evidence Jess had fantasized about and hardly dared even to long for all her life.

It was thirty-four minutes long, the footage. When she had watched the whole thing, tears in her eyes, body shaking, Jess went back immediately to the start and began to watch it again. And then she went back to the start and watched it again.





Vanity Fair


MURDER ON THE ISLAND

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35

‘Gone to London.’

Those three words, emailed by Ned Groom to his PA Nikki Hayes at 2.36 a.m. on Saturday, 30 October, have prompted perhaps more speculation than almost any other single aspect of the events at Island Home.