The Club(84)

She grows thoughtful. ‘I hope he would, anyway,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I’m sorry.’ She takes a moment, a deep breath. ‘It’s still hard to talk about. I think a lot of us, we’re still coming to terms with it, the idea that he isn’t coming back. There are still times – when we’re sitting here, for instance – when part of you expects him to come walking in through those doors, laughing, cracking jokes. I guess that’s the thing: if you’re a big personality, a larger-than-life human being, you really leave a big hole behind you when you go.’

It is the death of Ned Groom that remains the final tantalizing mystery of that weekend. All eyewitness accounts of Ned at the party describe him as being in good spirits, ebullient, slightly intoxicated at most. He was a man at the height of his success, the peak of his career, in good health, both physical and mental, very comfortable financially. ‘Gone to London,’ he wrote, in that last, cryptic, mystifying email – but all the evidence suggests he never left the island alive. Was there some kind of accident? Did he for some reason enter the water, fully clothed, not a strong swimmer, intentionally? Was he murdered? We may never know. Perhaps, were Keith Little or Adam Groom or Jackson Crane still alive, one of them might be able to shed some light on the loss. There are certainly those who believe that one or more of those men was with Ned at the time of his death, or caused it. Theories abound on the internet, as elaborate as they are ingenious. But the truth is, life is always both more and less complicated than fiction.

The classic murder mystery ends with a neat set of motives, a culprit and a comeuppance. Perhaps that is why we read them. Perhaps that is why we love them. Because real life offers us so few of these consolations, so few of these satisfactions. Maybe one day a clue will be uncovered or a confession will come to light to offer us the sense of closure the books and the movies have taught us to expect, and to believe we deserve.

For now, however, there are still some secrets Island Home insists on keeping.





Epilogue


A Funeral


Annie


It had worked out rather neatly, thought Annie, placing the copy of Vanity Fair into the pocket behind the driver’s seat, checking the clock on the dashboard as she did so and calculating the remaining time to their destination. Ned dead. Adam dead. Keith dead. Jackson dead. It was no wonder so many of the articles about Island Home made references to Shakespearean tragedy.

Not that she recognized it at the time, but all that first week, before Ned’s body had been found, Annie had felt like a sleepwalker. One of the symptoms of shock, after all, is that you don’t realize you are in shock. As acting CEO of Home – who else was going to do it? – she was issuing instructions, managing damage limitation. Taking phone calls from the press, reassuring members, telling the police over and over again what her movements had been, what she had seen, what she had heard. Unpacking how Ned had been acting, the toll the opening of Island Home, delayed and over budget, must have taken on him. Guessing where he might have gone, if he was hiding. Did she think he might have taken his own life? In all honesty, before he was found floating lifeless in the North Sea, she’d had absolutely no idea where he was or what could have happened.

Answering questions about Keith, his state of mind that night. Explaining Jackson’s movements that weekend, as far as she understood them. Describing Adam, what he was like as a person, who could have held a grudge and why.

After a while, she had given her version of events so many times it had started to feel like the truth. She had even thought about starting to introduce some inconsistencies so it would not look like she was sticking strictly to a carefully devised mental script.

It was only after a week – when one of them asked her if she thought it possible that Jackson Crane or Keith Little had murdered Ned and disposed of the body – that she’d realized the police did not have a clue where to even start. After a brief flurry of interest in his helicopter, they had seemed to forget about Freddie Hunter as a suspect entirely.

She’d been very lucky. Keith leaving the memory stick in his cabin, rather than taking it with him for the police to find on his body. Freddie keeping his mouth shut. Ned murdered – she did not for one second believe it had been an accident – without a single drop of blood staining her own hands.

It really did feel as though, if you wanted something enough, the universe arranged it.

How strange it had felt, at first, walking into Home and feeling the atmosphere change and realizing she was the person changing it. After all those years second-guessing Ned, trying to read the weather, now she was the weather. Acting CEO of the Home Group, only awaiting a few formalities before the final rubber stamp made the position permanent.

She resisted the temptation to retrieve the magazine and read the article again. News is what someone, somewhere, wants suppressed – isn’t that what they said? Everything else is just PR. And really, she couldn’t have hoped for a better puff piece – mostly because she had all but written it herself. Ned had always teased her about that: ‘You writers,’ he would say, scanning his daily press cuttings, ‘must be the laziest people in the whole bloody world.’

He wasn’t wrong.

The Vanity Fair journalist, in his bobbly V-neck, with his thinning hair, his rheumy eyes, about a decade older than his byline picture would have suggested, had turned up with the air of a man determined to get to the bottom of things, ready to investigate and judge, dissect and pontificate. Instead he’d just soaked up every word she told him, believed it, transcribed it, then paraphrased it in print.