The Club(78)

Perhaps only a man whose hands made it impossible for him to drive would have agreed to get into a vehicle that night with Jackson Crane, whose blood alcohol levels were off the scale, although apparently – according to the toxicology report, leaked to the British tabloid press – this was nothing compared to the cocktail of drugs (Xanax, zaleplon, temazepam, zolpidem, ketamine, cocaine) in his bloodstream. A cocktail so potent it was remarkable he could walk or speak, let alone get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and attempt to operate it.

All night long, as one man lay dead, folded into vintage luggage, as two more were en route to their deaths by drowning on the causeway, and one was already floating, face down, in the Blackwater Estuary, the party on the island continued.





Chapter Nine


Sunday Morning


Jess


It was impossible.

At first, despite the evidence of her eyes, her ears – her nose, as he had stumbled past her – Jess was unable to believe it. Jackson Crane, the man she had dosed with enough sleeping pills to kill a horse, who had washed them down with at least a bottle of whiskey, whose greyish, unmoving, seemingly unbreathing body she had looked down upon in the mess of his bed, was still alive.

Admittedly, he had looked better. Georgia, standing next to Jess, had given an audible gasp when she had recognized him, visibly stiffening as he made his lurching, reeking way across the dancefloor of the ballroom, bellowing.

There was at least a minute or two when Jess had assumed he was bellowing about having been spiked, having been poisoned. Then she realized he was shouting for Ned. Did he even know how long he had been passed out for? Did he have any idea how close to death he had come? Or was this just a typical weekend in the life of Jackson Crane, more or less how rough he always woke up looking and feeling? He called Ned’s name again, loud enough this time to pierce the hubbub even at the furthest reaches of the room.

Some of the people near Jess and Georgia tittered, but nervously, and they stopped immediately as his glare swung in their direction.

For a moment his eyes rested on Jess directly.

Then someone – Ned, presumably – took him by the elbow and steered him up the stairs, and someone at the other end of the room dropped or upended a whole tray of drinks, to scattered, ironic cheers.

And even in the state of mind she was in, even with all the things going through her head, Jess thought Georgia Crane’s response interesting: she did nothing. Once, when he stumbled, Georgia flinched and took half a step in his direction, then she very visibly stopped herself. Her hands, clenched at her sides, were shaking. Her eyes, when Jess glanced up at her face, were cold with fury. No, perhaps something even stronger than fury. Perhaps something more like hate.

She didn’t know, Jess found herself thinking, in wonder. She knew about the cheating, sure, but not about the accident. And Jess tried to imagine what that felt like. And for a moment she wanted to rush to Georgia, to comfort her.

Before she had even had a chance to think about what she was doing, where she was going, Jess found herself pushing through the crowd in the other direction, barging her way to the opposite side of the room from the staircase up which Jackson had just exited, shoving against backs, crashing into people’s chests. Someone shouted something she did not hear. Someone pushed her back, hard.

Then she was running full tilt down one of the corridors of The Manor, people turning to watch her go. And as she ran she realized she was crying, sobbing, the sounds echoing strangely in the mask she was still wearing, her cloak flying out behind her and tugging at her throat.

And then she was running down a path through the woods. In the distance, through a screen of thin trees, a group of people were visible standing around a bonfire. One of them threw something onto it and sent a cloud of sparks swirling upwards. Someone laughed. She kept running.

It was impossible.

Jackson Crane was alive.

Among the many jostling feelings inside her – the anger, the fear, the horror, the disappointment – there was one, quiet but persistent, which took her by surprise. It was relief. Relief she had failed. Relief that her plan had misfired so completely. Relief that she was not a murderer. That she was not a killer. Because Jess now had in her possession the evidence that Jackson Crane was.

There was a point up ahead where the path crossed over a little stream, a hump-backed wooden bridge over the water. At the top of the bridge she stopped, removed her mask, fiddled loose the knot that held her robe on, and let them both fall down into the darkness, the cloak a deeper patch of shadow for a moment on the surface of the water, the whiteness of the mask disappearing as the stream closed over it. Somewhere up ahead on one of the roads a Land Rover screeched past, its headlights sending the shadows of the trees moving, the music on its radio distantly audible. Jess rubbed her eyes. She wished it was possible somehow to reach inside her head and rub her brain.

Even now, when she pictured the face next to Jackson’s in the front of the vehicle he had been driving that night, it was Georgia’s face she pictured. Even now. Which meant that all these years, whenever she had thought she was recalling the night of her parents’ death, refusing to forget what she had seen, refusing to believe she had forgotten a single detail of that moment, her brain had been at work, embroidering, reordering.

The lights in the corridors of the staff accommodation were turned down, the corridors themselves deserted, the blue light of someone’s television showing under their shut door the only sign that anyone was awake. Just as well, probably, given how spattered with mud Jess was, how incapable she felt of any kind of normal human interaction right now. Back in her room she locked the door, pulled the curtains closed, sat in the darkness on the corner of her bed, and brought out her phone.