The Club(76)

‘He’s a human being. You can’t just kill another living human being because it’s convenient.’

She looked around – no sign of Keith. Freddie looked like a deer caught in headlights, ready to bolt at any second. She needed to keep him talking, to work out if he’d blabbed the plan to anyone after wimping out on it, if Keith at least had followed through.

‘Your fuck-ups, your little hotel room meetings to sell stories, that’s what we’re all trying to cover up here though, isn’t it? Your grubby little secret,’ she spat. ‘What I don’t understand, Freddie, is this: you’re a wealthy man. You’re successful. Why do it to your friends?’

He shook his head, rubbed his face in both hands.

‘I didn’t want to. I’ve never wanted to. There was a . . . journalist. A friend, I thought. A lover, once upon a time. We did things. Together. With other people. Lots of other people. Consensual things, but things that would see my career on TV finished so fast your head would spin. You can probably imagine. They’ve got the footage. Phone footage, stuff shot secretly when I was wasted, when I . . . when my attention was elsewhere. Photos too. And every so often they need a front-page scoop and can’t be bothered to go digging for one. So I get a call. And because I’m paranoid now, about being recorded, I always insist we meet on neutral ground, somewhere private, somewhere safe. Somewhere phones aren’t allowed.’

‘Home,’ Annie said.

‘Yeah,’ said Freddie, wiping his mouth with his cloak, the whiteness of his shirt under his tuxedo jacket practically all that was visible of him. ‘Home. Oh, the irony.’

‘And Ned? What happened just now, with Ned?’

Annie took a few steps closer to Freddie, her fingers tightening on the masonry block behind her back. If he had told Ned anything, she had decided, he was a dead man. If he said anything about going to the police . . .

‘I didn’t see.’

‘You didn’t see?’

‘Jackson turned up, all weird and crazy-eyed, demanding to see Ned. We followed them both out of the ballroom, trailed behind them upstairs. Keith and I were waiting outside the room while Jackson was screaming at him, hoping he might do the job for us. Then I realized: I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to – but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Even if it all comes out, every story I’ve sold, every friendship I’ve tainted, even if Kyra never talks to me again, I’d still rather live with the shame of that than the guilt of knowing I’ve killed a man.’

This struck Annie, at that moment, as pretty much the epitome of selfishness.

It’s not all about you, she was tempted to say. This was her career, her life, perhaps even her freedom on the line. Conspiracy to murder. Incitement to violence. She could just see the tabloid headlines already. In her head it felt like she was trying to play chess, very fast, a bit drunk, even though she was stone cold sober. If Keith had managed to overpower Ned, if the GHB had kicked in, then maybe, just maybe everything was going to turn out okay. If Ned managed to fight Keith off, even for long enough to shout for help, they were all fucked.

Someone was coming, stomping noisily through the bushes, scrabbling around on the far side of the wrong wall for the orchard door, swearing to themselves. Freddie flinched, looked up, and in an instant was through the door and gone.

In the dark, the pale trunks of the apple trees all around were ghostly. Somewhere in the branches over Annie’s head a pigeon was cooing to itself, brrrrp brrrrp.

Tell me Keith hasn’t bottled it, she thought to herself. Tell me Keith Little isn’t about to start bleating on about his conscience too.

Having finally rounded the corner and found the door in the wall, Keith staggered through.

‘Over here,’ she hissed, under her breath. The shape stopped, turned in her direction.

‘Annie?’

‘Keith?’

‘My God, Annie, my fucking God.’

‘What happened?’

With her free hand, Annie reached her phone out of her pocket, switched the torch on, held it up so Keith could see where he was stepping.

‘What happened?’ she asked again.

In answer, he held up his hands, and in the stark light of the phone she could see his torn palms, the deep bloody tracks in his hands, the paths the cord tie of his cloak had worn in his flesh. His skin was strangely greenish in the light, like the skin of a man at the bottom of the sea, the blood absolutely black.

‘You did it,’ she said.

His face looked not just haggard but hollow, great dark shadows in the indentations of his cheeks. He stared at her.

‘He’s dead?’ she prompted.

He continued to stare at her. Had she detected just the slightest hint of a nod, or was that just the hand that was holding the torch quivering? The blood was literally dripping from Keith’s hands, trickling stickily down to the ends of his fingers. He barely seemed even to notice.

‘You did it,’ she prompted again. ‘Keith?’

She was tempted to click her fingers in his face, clap her hands, slap him. Something, anything, to break this stare, snap him back to reality.

‘It wasn’t him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It wasn’t Ned. I don’t know what happened. We followed him, like you told us. Jackson Crane had been shouting his name, for fuck’s sake, in the ballroom. And then from the back, when I went into the room upstairs after Jackson stormed out, he was slumped on the armchair and from behind it could only have been Ned, his silhouette, his back and neck and shoulders. But it wasn’t Ned.’