The Club(80)

Perhaps Nikki hadn’t intended to kill Ned, but she had nonetheless done so.

To get to the jetty you walked to the end of the rear lawn of The Manor, passed through a gate in the hedge into a rose garden, through yet another gate (this one marked Private) and made your way carefully down a long stepped stone path to the beach. Often over the past few weeks, Ned would retire down here at the end of the night, to admire the yacht he’d bought and restored at great expense, to pace the jetty, stare out across the waves. He often called her to demand she join him – even if she was already in bed. Coat on, Nikki – I’ve got some notes for you to take down. So she had known where he’d be heading, when he left the party on Friday night. For one last drink, a cigar to round the evening off. To reflect on his triumph. She had known too that he’d do so alone.

Hearing her footsteps approaching across the wooden boards, he’d looked up with a frown of irritation. Nor did this dissipate immediately when he saw who it was. ‘Had enough of the party, Nikki?’

Running all the way down both sides of the jetty was a row of sunken uplights, illuminating the drifts of spray from the waves. Between the boards you could look down and see the swirl and surge of the water.

‘I want to know why you did it.’

Had he snorted? In her head, as she tried to remember the sequence of events now, he had definitely snorted.

‘Are you pissed? Not like you, that. Did what?’

‘You knew, didn’t you? All along. You knew how old I was when I started on the coat check. The kind of girls Ron Cox went for. The kind of girls he groomed.’

He gave a little nod of recognition, an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘It all looked pretty consensual from where I was sitting.’

‘I was fifteen years old, Ned. There’s a word for what he did.’

Ned brought his cigar to his lips, inhaled.

‘You set the whole thing up, didn’t you? And then you filmed it so that you could blackmail him: nice-guy director cheats on his wife with a child. He’d been a member a while before I ever met him – so you already had him on film sleeping with other girls, but you couldn’t easily prove they were underage. And there’s only so much an everyday adulterer is, presumably, prepared to pay to hush it all up. Having him sleep with me made it so much worse for him, didn’t it? And so much better for you.’ She gave a short, mirthless laugh.

‘You must have thought you’d won the lottery when you found out I was pregnant. What a stroke of luck! I was so much more valuable then – you used me to make him give you the money for Manhattan Home, didn’t you? Your lawyer sent me over the contract – signed and dated by Ron three days after I told you I was pregnant. I was worth a lot, I suppose, because the lawyer also told me the loan was simply cancelled a few months after, that you never had to pay those millions back. That’s a pretty big gift. And he kept on giving you cash every now and again, when you asked for it, didn’t he, until his dementia meant you could no longer put the squeeze on him. That part I understand.’

Ned offered no response.

‘What I don’t understand is why you gave him my baby, Ned. Whose idea was that? What was the point?’

‘The point?’

‘Tell me, Ned. Because that’s what I am really struggling with. I mean, there are bits of it I’ve figured out. I know why you needed to get me over to the States, for instance. I know why you needed me to have, and then give up, the baby there – to sign the papers while I wasn’t in the UK. It wasn’t just because that would make it more convenient for Ron, was it?’

Ned said nothing, waited for her to continue.

‘It was the law over there, it was on your side, on his side – you knew that, because you were a lawyer. Family law, wasn’t it, your specialty? And closed adoption meant that once I’d agreed to it, there was no way I could ever legally find Kurt, or he could ever legally find me. You couldn’t have done that here. The law wouldn’t have allowed it.’

There was in Ned’s expression a hint, Nikki felt, of grudging admiration.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. They’re a nightmare in England, those adoption agencies – all those checks, does everyone agree, does everyone understand. It’s the Wild West over there in comparison. We just did the whole thing through an old associate, a lawyer friend. But you signed the papers. Nobody made you do that. You said you never wanted to find your baby. And you never have tried to find him, have you? The thought of looking for you never seems to have occurred to him either. The law in New York was changed just last year actually, so he could now access his original birth certificate, the one with your name on it, if he wanted to. It was a smart thing that Ron did, not telling those kids who were biologically his.’

He glanced at the end of his cigar then back up at her.

‘So the truth is, Nikki, yes, I did set it up. I never broke my word, you know. I promised I would give you a way of giving him a better life than you could offer him, and I did. Not doing badly, is he? Haven’t heard him complaining much, the past twenty-whatever years.’

‘I still don’t understand why,’ she said. ‘At first I thought it might be some mad coincidence, when he told us his birthday. Then I saw his birthmarks at the pool, and I knew that it wasn’t. But what I can’t understand is, Ron was paranoid about birth control when I was with him, so why would he want to secretly adopt our son?’