The Club(85)
Two weeks after the interview he had emailed asking about the possibility of free membership.
As she watched the countryside skim bleakly past the car window, she wondered if there would be any journalists there today, hovering ghoulishly outside the church. A fieldful of crows rose and scattered. Where was this place? When she had agreed to come to Adam’s funeral – after some careful consideration of how it might look had she not – Annie had known it would be nothing like on the same scale as Ned’s, but she had at least assumed it would be in London. My God. Was this where they had grown up, Ned and Adam? No wonder they never talked about it. What would they have said? There was literally nothing here – miles and miles of flat brownish fields.
She steeled herself, knowing she would have to talk to everyone, look sad, sound sad. And it was sad, she supposed, for Laura and for Mr and Mrs Groom. But nobody else missed him much – Adam with his banter, Adam with his wandering hands, Adam with his casual sexism and his everyday laziness. It was a shame he was dead, she supposed, but it was not her fault. Not really. Not exactly. And overall, it was better for the business. What would Home have been like with Ned’s brother in charge?
‘Nearly there,’ her driver noted, pointing out the road sign they were passing.
As for Island Home itself, it was still closed to members, operating on a skeleton staff, everyone else laid off. The police had given them the all-clear to reopen months ago, and bookings had gone through the roof when they’d started to take them again for the following year. But Annie wanted to at least appear respectful and, more importantly, to attempt to get into the bunker beneath Ned’s cottage. There had to be thousands of hours of footage down there. Filmed over decades. Ned had ensured that the door was so well disguised, the police hadn’t even realized it was there – why would they even think to look? – just as he’d ensured the cameras wired into every cabin went completely undetected. It was not just the members under threat if they’d been spotted.
Because somewhere in that bunker there was footage of her too, from the weekend Jackson Crane had invited her to a cottage at Country Home. Footage of them fucking. Footage of the glossy black old-fashioned phone beside the bed ringing and Jackson breaking off to have a conversation with Georgia, in Tahiti, and Annie lying very still and very quiet. Footage of them discussing where to go for dinner, and Jackson insisting he wanted to drive over to a local village and have a pint in a real English pub. Footage of them drinking another bottle of wine in bed. Of him downing a whiskey chaser. Footage of Jackson indignant at the suggestion they should call the idea off, or get a cab. Footage of them returning later that evening, stumbling in, the full horror of the situation just starting to sink in. Footage of her on the phone, nodding along as Ned talked her through what to do – where to drive Jackson’s four-by-four to, which part of the lake in the grounds of Country Home was deep enough to drive it into, what route to take to get there, what to do with the handbrake and the windows, how to wedge the pedal down with a brick. Footage she did not know at the time was being captured – that, once she had realized, she then spent years wishing he would delete. Footage that would destroy what was left of the late Jackson Crane’s reputation and everything she had worked for in one fell swoop.
The trouble was, only Ned had known the combination to the door. She had tried their birthdays, tried their parents’ birthdays. She had tried the date of the Covent Garden Home relaunch and the date England had last won the World Cup. She had tried 000 000. She had tried 007 007. The tumblers had turned. The locks had not opened. The walls of the vault were ten feet thick. The door itself was the same. You could not get in there with a drill. You could not get in there with a bulldozer. The place was literally designed to resist the blast from a nuclear bomb. She’d briefly considered drafting in some sort of help, but where would she have found it and how would she have been sure she could trust them?
That was what made her heart race out of nowhere, forced her to take deep breaths until it passed. Not memories of that night with Jackson, and what they had done – she had long since developed ways of not thinking about that at all. Not guilt about Adam’s death. Not sorrow about Ned’s. It was the realization, which had only sunk in slowly in the days, the weeks after their deaths, that, with a few exceptions, she had very little idea exactly which of their members Ned had been blackmailing, for what, or for how long. Some she suspected, of course. Some she could guess. But in order for Home to survive, in order for Home to flourish, the truth was that they were going to have to acquire a whole new generation of wealthy members. They would have to let the wankers in – tech millionaires, hedge funders, rich-kid influencers and bullshit wellness gurus – and accumulate a whole new catalogue of dirty secrets, recorded in the hidden little Home Cinemas in every club, which thankfully had been easier to access and understand. Probably a whole new type of secret, given the sort of people she was hoping to attract to Home. It would take months. It could take years.
That was the thought that woke Annie up at night, in Ned’s bed, in one of Ned’s suites, the only rooms in the clubs that were not extensively bugged, and sent her to splash water on her face in Ned’s sink and look at herself in Ned’s mirror and ask herself if she could do this, if she was strong enough to do this. If she was brave enough to do this, if she was merciless enough to do this. And, to harden her resolve, she thought of them, all those members, all those disgusting members, all the things they got up to when they thought no one was looking, all the things they thought would never catch up with them. And she told herself yes, she could do this. She was even going to enjoy doing it because, as Ned always said, all you need to do is present them with something you know they can’t resist, somewhere they think they can get away with it.