The Club(71)

‘I’m sorry?’

Their eyes met. Impossible to tell what expression was on Georgia’s face, beneath that grinning mask. Her voice – that familiar, unmistakable voice – had sounded genuinely puzzled, genuinely confused.

Jess repeated herself.

‘Murderers,’ she said.

No doubt under other circumstances Georgia would have moved away, would have made a fuss. For a moment, it was clear, she was wondering whether this was part of the performance. When she did take a discreet step back, away from Jess, she collided immediately with the person behind her, who shifted foot to foot and could be seen applying a little shoulder pressure back.

Jess leaned in even closer – until the foreheads of their masks were almost touching – and said it again, a third time.

It was the truth. Georgia and Jackson Crane had murdered Jess’s parents. One of her parents quickly, one of them slowly. They had murdered her parents and then they had driven back to Country Home, and he had wept and shouted and drunk himself into a stupor, while she had made and received phone calls and paced the room, her dark hair swinging. Calling who? Receiving calls from whom? Their lawyers? Their agents? Some kind of fixer?

Because neither of them had called the police. Neither of them had called an ambulance. Neither of them had even bothered to look and see if there was anyone else in that car. A little girl with barely a scratch on her by some miracle, hanging upside down in her seatbelt for hours and hours, talking to her parents and not getting any answer, in the freezing cold, screaming, crying, terrified, distraught. And when you watched that video, that footage on the memory stick, there was a whole hour, just over an hour – you could see the timer jump in the bottom of the screen, from 02.15 to 03.21 – when the woman in that room disappeared off to do something, or have a shower, or perhaps just change her clothes, because she was in a different outfit when she returned. And Jess found herself thinking that even then if she – Georgia – had alerted the authorities then, told someone what had happened, even anonymously, they still might have been able to do something to try to save her father, and her mother might not have spent the rest of her life in a coma. There had been moments, growing up, when Jess had found herself wondering if Georgia was a victim too. What she had seen this afternoon banished that suspicion for good. It had been more and more frustrating, each time she had watched the video, how little actual footage of Georgia there was, how she always seemed to be captured from behind or speaking from just out of shot, how you never got a clear view of her face or her expression. But even so, even in all that footage, there was not one moment at which she could be seen or heard expressing any concern about the people in the car, any remorse for what she and Jackson had caused, any worry about anyone other than the two of them in that room.

Even though the dance had now begun, even though the music had started and the dancers were slowly uncoiling from the poses in which they had been frozen, Jess had Georgia’s undivided attention.

‘Listen,’ Georgia said. ‘I don’t know what this is but if it’s part of the performance I think it’s in very bad taste. And if it isn’t . . .’

She took a step towards Jess but Jess anticipated her attempt to reach up and flip her mask off, to find out who she was talking to. And as Georgia’s hand came up, Jess caught her arm by the wrist, and she gripped it, and she turned it, just a little, like you would at school but harder, much harder, her fingers digging into the soft part of Georgia’s forearm, and she kept twisting it.

Inside Georgia’s mask she heard a gasp, a sharp inhalation of breath.

‘The twelfth of December, 2001. Does that date mean anything to you?’

Georgia’s eyes narrowed in her mask’s eye-slits. She thought or pretended to think for a moment. Then she shook her head.

Two weeks before Christmas. That was when it had happened. They had been at her aunt’s house for the afternoon, down the road in the next village. It was only a fifteen-minute drive at that time of night. Jess had been wrangling with them about whether or not she could have another mince pie when they got home, whether or not she could stay up for a bit and help decorate the tree with them.

‘Try harder,’ said Jess. ‘Have a think.’

She did not turn Georgia’s wrist again, but she slightly increased the pressure from her fingers for a minute, to show she was not teasing, to make it clear this was not part of the performance, that she did not care if there were bruises on Georgia’s lily-white arm in the morning or how much it would cost and how much time it would take to digitally remove them for whatever film she was shooting now or next.

‘I was in Tahiti,’ Georgia said, eventually, somewhat hesitantly, after some consideration, after some further application of pressure. Then with greater confidence, more firmly: ‘That Christmas, 2001, I was filming in Tahiti.’

‘You were in a black four-by-four, travelling too fast, driven by your husband. On a dark country road, on a dark night.’

And the joke was, the awful joke was, if they had just come forward and told the truth this would probably all be in the past now. They would have hired the kind of lawyers only people like the Cranes could afford and the prosecution would have settled for whatever lesser charge they thought they could actually get to stick and after a few years no one would even bring up the crash any more. Or how much he’d had to drink that night. Or whatever drugs he surely had in his system. Or that he had fled the scene.