Back at home I crossed off all the plans I’d held in my head for him over the years. Some of them were silly, fanciful, unworkable. An early plan to pose as cabin crew on his private plane made me particularly embarrassed. How long would I have had to train to get to that point? Stupid Grace. Some were more realistic and I didn’t disregard the idea to send a condolence parcel to his office which might just happen to contain a substance which just potentially might kill him within seconds. But mainly I felt a sinking feeling, that I’d done it all wrong, that I should have killed him before the rest of his terrible family. I’d made him paranoid and prone to hide away. In my excitement and my insistence on build-up, I’d made the final target almost impossible to reach.
My gloom infected my confidence and made me pull back from every partial plan I had laid out. Then matters were made infinitely worse when Jimmy got engaged to Caro, darkening my mood and causing me to wake up in the night, pulling at the skin at my neck, breathing heavily, sweating through my T-shirt. I felt a looming sense of doom, as if things were rushing ahead of me, already out of my grasp. I could not get a handle on anything.
And I was sadly, horribly right. Did you look back to the beginning of this text and note that I killed six members of my family? Did you see that we seem to have already reached this magic number? Well, there are no prizes for such eagle eyes. Don’t be smug, or think me too much of a fool. I have already spent months dealing with my failure, trying to shake off the feeling that it was all for nothing.
For those with a slower cognitive process, I will spell it out. I did not kill Simon Artemis. My one aim in life and I will never get to achieve it. And why not? Because he’s dead. Dead but from a terrible accident and not by my hand. I’d rather he lived another 50 years in ignominy and sadness than to die by fucking accident. What a cruel joke.
Three days after I was arrested for the murder of Caro Morton, Simon was reported missing by The Times newspaper. It wasn’t front-page news at first, taking up half of page three （my initial arrest only made page six）。 But the next day, his face was on the front of every paper. Why would it not be? The story had everything, money, power, death, scandal, and an intriguing mystery. The media revisited their reporting on the tragic year in the Artemis family. Lee, whose death had been hushed up somewhat successfully at the time, was outed as a sexual deviant. A tabloid reporter managed to get into Janine’s empty apartment and take photos of the sauna, sombrely accompanied by a caption which read ‘Burned alive, did Simon take his own life after tragic wife’s gruesome death?’ Before there was any real certainty that he was dead, friends of Bryony used the story as an excuse to post photos of her with the hashtag #reunitedinheaven. If Heaven welcomed in sleazy moguls and spiteful posers, then something had gone horribly wrong in Elysium’s HR department.
Simon had disappeared at sea. This makes him sound like an ancient mariner when in reality he’d started off on his speedboat while drunk, despite warnings from the crew. He’d fled to his villa in St Tropez, apparently. I didn’t even know he had a house there, given that it’s just round the coast from Monaco, but perhaps Janine wanted a country house for much-needed rest. The rich are slippery. None of these properties are ever in the name of millionaires. That’s what anonymous offshore trusts are for. An assistant went with him, out of concern that he might do himself harm, which was pretty prescient as it happened.
According to the assistant, Simon was driving too fast, pushing the boat up onto its side. Alarmed, the assistant went to take control, and as he pushed past him, my sozzled father tumbled over the edge. The boat was travelling fast, and the assistant took a while to figure out how to get it under control. By the time he’d managed to slow it down and turn back, Simon was under the waves. The other man circled around for thirty minutes, searching in vain for any sign of his employer before returning to the yacht to call for help. The coastguard was called and a search took place but the dark sky and the expanse of water proved too much, and Simon Artemis was presumed dead. Presumed dead just means dead, doesn’t it? They hadn’t found his bloated corpse nibbled on by sea creatures, but perhaps it was only a matter of time. Or maybe his body sank to the bottom, quickly disintegrating, never to reemerge. It all amounted to the same thing. And as I write this, the authorities have yet to find any trace of him. Not even a monogrammed cufflink remains. He is gone. He never got to know what I had done.
I wept. I wept for two full days. The sorrow I felt was worse than when my mother died. Not for Simon but for all I had pinned on killing him myself. That it would make my life mean something. I would avenge Marie and prove that I could rise above my circumstances. I would make things fair. Now all I had for my troubles was the knowledge that I successfully killed some pensioners, drowned a nice boy who wanted to help amphibians, enticed my uncle into a deathly sex club, and bumped off two spoilt women the world would never miss. Not quite the glorious victory I had envisaged for myself.