The Club(89)

On the surface of things, then, whatever he had done, whatever Home had footage of him doing, Freddie had got away with it.

There was just one moment, though, on his show, when the conversation had turned a little serious, when they’d talked about the island and Kyra had mentioned Adam’s name and, for a second, just a second, Freddie’s smile had grown very forced indeed, and if you paused the footage at that very moment you could see in his eyes, flicking left, what looked to Jess like genuine terror – and you found yourself wondering exactly what he knew about Adam’s death, and what he knew but had left out in that much-praised eulogy for Ned.

She did find herself thinking about Georgia Crane, and all she’d been through, and the decisions she’d obviously made – and the toll they might be taking. To be told your husband is a killer, and then to learn your husband is dead in the space of a few short hours. To be forced to undertake the work of mourning in public. To be forced to defend your dead, murdering husband from accusations of complicity in the death of Adam, the death of Ned. She was, of course, a very wealthy woman now, Georgia Crane. Even with all the money she had given away to charity, to worthy causes. Even with all the money it would cost her to run for political office, as she had recently suggested she was considering doing.

‘You can call; you should all feel you can call,’ Annie had told them. ‘I am sorry we can’t keep you all on, but I’m here if you need me, you all have my mobile number.’

They did. Jess did. How often had she thought about calling it? Every time she was alone in a bedroom at The Grange, every time she was out for drinks and someone else left their phone on the table. She had imagined calling Annie’s number and saying something cryptic, something damning, perhaps saying nothing at all while Annie panicked and threatened and begged and pleaded.

It wasn’t until her father’s birthday – the day that would have been her father’s birthday – that she actually did it. Jess took the afternoon off from the hotel, as usual, visited her father’s grave, laid some flowers too on her mother’s, crossed the road to a phone box, fed it with coins, and dialled Annie’s number.

Annie answered on the third or fourth ring, but didn’t immediately say anything. Had she been in a meeting, or at some sort of lunch event? Jess could hear her apologizing to people, people muttering, then what sounded like high heels on flagstones. ‘Hello?’ she said brightly. Jess stayed silent. ‘Can I help you?’ Annie asked, still friendly. Jess did not speak. ‘Who is this?’ Jess did not answer. ‘Is anyone there? I can’t hear you. Hello? Listen, it might be my reception.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ Jess said slowly. ‘I’ve seen what you did.’

There was a long pause.

When she eventually spoke again, Annie’s voice was almost a whisper: ‘What do you want from me?’

But the truth was there was no longer anything Jess wanted from Annie, nor was there any way of taking back what she’d done. The footage itself she had already uploaded to YouTube just before going out, emailed it as an attachment to the police. What happened next was in the hands of the law, and the media. What happened next was the rest of Jess’s life.

‘It’s over,’ she said, and hung up.





Nikki

And just like that, it was over. Without even a thank you or a sorry. After twenty-five years. Just a quick, blunt phone call from Annie to say that ‘obviously’ under the circumstances Nikki’s services would no longer be required. A phone call. And an extraordinarily large lump sum payment that had landed, without fanfare, in her bank account.

Nikki could not have been more relieved. Every time she thought of Home, every time she thought of Ned, she could feel a sort of existential shudder go through her.

Some people asked her what she was going to do next. Surely the offers of work must have been rolling in – members had spent years trying to poach her. Surely she was just playing hard to get and weighing up offers. And it was true, one or two had gently sounded her out at Ned’s funeral – an event she had forced herself to attend, for appearances’ sake, just as she had forced her face to remain neutral through all those heartfelt tributes to him.

What Nikki kept telling them, those people with their questions, their offers, was that she was just not sure she was ready to jump into another position like that with someone else right now. And so the offers kept escalating, the terms getting more and more generous. And still Nikki kept politely declining, or deferring a decision. And people kept asking what she was doing with herself, and didn’t it all seem terribly quiet after her glamorous life with Ned? And the truth was she was just pottering around the house, mostly, or in the garden, and seeing people for dinner, and reading, and thinking about Kurt.

Her son.

Sometimes, when she was sitting in front of the TV in the evening or cooking herself dinner or running in the park, she would look at her watch and work out the time in LA and wonder what he was doing, Kurt, how he was processing what he had learned on the island. And it did cross her mind to call him, tell him the truth, the whole truth. And she found herself asking herself whether that would be a kindness or just selfish, whether if she were him she would want to know, and whether she could really trust the promptings of her own heart. And still the job offers came in. From London. From New York. From LA.