The House Guest by Mark Edwards(77)

The cops continued to shout at him to leave the gun, to put his hands on his head, and then Gabriel locked eyes with Ruth.

He reached for the gun.





Chapter 43

I took my coffee out on to the front deck and, not for the first time, had to remind myself that this was real. We were actually staying here, in a house on Carbon Beach in Malibu. There were palm trees, a barbecue grill, five bedrooms, a beautiful pool, and every morning, after writing for an hour on the deck, I would take a walk along the white sand, down to the ocean, saying hi to the middle-aged rock star who lived in the next house along. Maybe take a drive, just cruising the canyons and hills of Los Angeles, nowhere to go or be.

I felt relatively safe on the beach and in my car.

The beach house belonged to the head of the network that was making the TV show Ruth was filming. It had a huge budget and ensemble cast of A-list stars, and was being hyped as the next Stranger Things or American Horror Story. It was adapted from a novel called Sweetmeat, by a fellow Brit. I’d met him and his wife at a party thrown by the network. All the cast were there, and the novelist had seemed starstruck. He kept pointing to well-known actors and saying, ‘I can’t believe he’s going to be playing so-and-so.’ He’d seemed a little drunk, while I was sticking to water. I was off alcohol. And so was Ruth.

Then Lucas, that was his name, started telling me how he’d finally finished his second novel after a long, agonising process. It was semi-autobiographical, about a missing child and the legend of a witch who lived in the woods. We talked about writer’s block and the struggle to come up with new ideas.

‘I was going to quit writing,’ I told him.

‘But now you’ve got something to write about?’

‘Exactly.’

I sat at the little table on the deck, sipped my coffee and flipped open my laptop, reading over the pages I’d written the day before. I was working on my own TV show with the provisional title of The Network, a title that would have to change. It was about a shadowy cult that operated among the beautiful people of New York and Los Angeles, led by a reclusive billionaire with a tragic past. It was a high-octane thriller with a Shakespearian cast of characters, and they were currently in the process of hiring a cast to shoot a pilot.

During the days, I worked on the script. At night, I lay beside Ruth, unable to sleep, convinced that every creak was a footstep; that the gentle lap of the ocean beyond the walls was actually the sound of somebody breathing close by.

Because I kept remembering what Gabriel had said to me.

We’re everywhere.

There had been ninety-three people present at the ceremony that night, including me and Ruth. The FBI had turned the entire building upside down, along with Gabriel’s offices and other properties. They had searched his computers, his phones, everything. But there were no records. No list of who belonged to the cult. It appeared he had kept everything in his head. And when he’d reached for that gun and the cop had shot him, that knowledge had died with him. Because every surviving member, all the people who had been there – except Eden – swore there was no cult. No network. They had no idea what the police and the FBI were talking about. They were just associates of Gabriel’s, that was all, and they had been invited to his place for a party.

It was as if they had been given a pre-prepared script. Deny, deny, deny. They didn’t know Eden or Ruth or me. We were lying. Even with all the evidence against them, each one of them stuck to the story. No network. No secret club. No knowledge of murders or kidnappings. They had never heard the phrase ‘Protect one, protect all’. They hadn’t seen that poor boy get branded; it must have happened in a different room.

The day after the ceremony and our escape, I had spent an entire day in an interview room with two FBI agents, going through what I knew, over and over. For a while I wasn’t sure if they believed me. I had to persuade them I wasn’t a member of the cult, that I hadn’t been involved in any criminal activity.

Apart from burying Krugman’s body in the woods. They didn’t like that. And they didn’t like it when I told them I hadn’t gone straight to the police because I didn’t know if I could trust them. They’d had a lot of questions about Callum and how I had really met him. Did I know he had been a cop once, in California? A disgraced cop with a record of domestic violence and a wife who would never testify? I told them I knew some of it.

In the end, they let me go. Krugman was a crooked cop, a murderer, and the DA and the police didn’t want a spotlight being shone on that aspect of the case.

And they were lucky. The press were far more interested in the reclusive billionaire, with his connections to most of the big, household-name tech companies. They unearthed photos of him at fundraising events chatting with prominent politicians and famous CEOs. They tracked down everyone he’d known at school and college and got them to tell all about the ‘loner weirdo who loved Shakespeare and computer games’. The Nerd Who Turned, read one of the headlines.

They focused on Jade Thomson too, the only really famous person who had been there, and wrote various Beauty and the Beast–style exposés in which it was alleged she and Gabriel had had sex in his ‘penthouse lair’ on piles of hundred-dollar bills. She was denying everything else, so why not give her one more thing to refute?

There was also some interest in another survivor: Mona, the rich, privately educated WASP who ran a ‘kooky’ business separating bored and gullible millionaire housewives from their money. TMZ ran a story about how she and Krugman had been sleeping together, apparently leaked by the police. And now she was in custody, awaiting trial for sex trafficking: the trafficked person being Ruth – who, it was alleged, had been procured by Mona for Gabriel as a sex slave. Ruth was reluctant to go along with this at first, but the FBI convinced her it was a charge they could make stick. Mona was also charged with conspiracy to murder Jack. She had shot Eden in the shoulder, too, though that was a more minor offence.