The House Guest by Mark Edwards(79)

I led her into the kitchen, which was huge and shiny, with a central island.

‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked. ‘We don’t have any booze in the house, I’m afraid.’

‘Water’s fine. Thanks.’

I pulled out a stool on one side and gestured for her to sit opposite me.

She looked around. ‘What a place,’ she said. Beyond the kitchen window, we could see the ocean shining in the moonlight.

‘I know. I always thought of myself as an East Coast kind of person. Now I’m not so sure.’

‘Planning on staying here?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s where the work is. I guess we’ll go back to the UK at some point.’ Despite the luxury of my surroundings, I missed London. I missed our cat, who was still being looked after by a neighbour. She had undoubtedly forgotten us. I’d been back at Christmas to see my family and pick up some stuff, shocked to feel cold for the first time in months. Then I’d returned to the never-ending sunshine.

‘Is that where Ruth is now?’ Eden asked, sipping her water. ‘At work?’

‘Yeah. She’ll be another hour or so.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That gives us plenty of time to talk.’

‘What, do you want to reminisce about the good times? When you took my girlfriend into the clutches of a death cult and almost got us both killed?’

That brought a faint smile. ‘I’m sorry, Adam. But if it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else. And that person wouldn’t have got you both out of there.’

I paused. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

‘Did Gabriel tell you how it all started? It was him and Mona together, right? At Columbia?’ I said.

‘You know how many times I’ve had to go through this with the Feds? But yeah, they started it – only it was a year or so after they left college. Mona had already given Gabriel the cash he needed to start playing the stock markets, and apparently they went out one night to celebrate his first big success. That’s when they came up with the idea.’

She traced a pattern on the island with her finger as she continued.

‘We all knew the origin story. It was part of our central mythology. One night, Mona got mugged, was convinced she was going to be murdered, except some passers-by happened to scare them off. That got her thinking about how even being wealthy couldn’t protect her from all the bad shit in the world. At the same time, Jack was doing some study into the psychology of gangs and criminal networks. How people in those kinds of groups feel safe because they have the protection of their fellow gang members. That’s what started it all. So they set out to recruit people. Gabriel and Mona had money and were starting to get influence. They needed muscle. It all grew from there.’ She stared into space. ‘It was simple, and seductive, you know? Being told no one will ever be able to hurt you again – and at the same time, they would teach you how to be confident, how to make money, how to walk through the world with your head held high.’

‘What about Jack?’ I asked. ‘Was he never part of it?’

‘No. Too wimpish, Mona said. We had a long, drunken chat about him one afternoon in a bar near their house.’

That must have been where Jack had seen Eden, when he was spying on Mona to look for evidence of her affair. An encounter that had led to his death.

‘She told me Jack was happy with his life, mostly. Too busy having tawdry affairs with students to worry too much about what Mona was up to. I asked her if Jack had any suspicions and she told me she thought he knew something, but preferred to stick his head in the sand. I could tell Mona got a kick out of it – having this massive secret from her husband. A much bigger secret than the affair she was having.’

I rubbed my face. ‘It’s my fault Jack’s dead.’

‘Mine too. But if it makes you feel any better, I think they were planning to kill him anyway. Mona knew Jack suspected she was cheating on him. If he’d found out it was Krugman – that would have posed a risk to the group. Gabriel was putting pressure on her to do something about it, and then when you turned up with my picture on your phone she was forced to act.’

‘Wait. Did Mona kill Jack herself?’

‘Um, hello? Didn’t you realise that?’

‘No, Krugman told me it was him.’ But that, of course, had been before I knew Mona was part of the cult.

She had murdered her own husband. I should have been shocked, but my capacity for surprise had taken a severe beating lately. And knowing they had been planning to kill Jack anyway didn’t make me feel any better about my role in it.

I decided to move on. ‘The stuff with Callum. Did you plan it all along?’

‘Yeah. Well . . . I hated him. I joined up to get away from him and everything he did to me and my mom. He was an asshole. And I didn’t go looking for him, but when I saw him at the convention, once I’d recovered from the shock, I made a decision. I let him follow me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I was already disillusioned. Let’s just say the scales had fallen away from my eyes. It was the way Gabriel treated women. His obsession with young actresses. You know Ruth wasn’t the first, right?’

Emilio had said something about that, and the police were trying to link the disappearances of two young actresses to Gabriel.