I expressed my utter （and genuine） shock that Caro had fallen in the middle of our cosy chat. ‘I’d only been to their flat twice and I’d not clocked the balcony before. I don’t really do heights so I wasn’t too clear on how high the drop was or how precarious her position was, but I certainly don’t remember thinking that she was in any danger. It’s just … so awful.’
It was their turn to say something now. I put my hands over my face and breathed in through my nose, shuddering slightly as I exhaled. Suitably traumatised, I imagine, even for these women who’ve seen it all. The older blonde nodded, clearly warming to me. I was a sympathetic figure here, a shaken, tired girl worried about her friend, finding it all overwhelming. And some of that was true. Adebayo smiled quickly, but didn’t rush to reassure.
‘Thank you, Grace, I know you must be tired. I’m just going to run through some questions and then we’ll let you go. You must be longing to get home.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bryony died before Caro’s accident. Looking back, it’s funny to think of Caro’s family gossiping about Bryony’s tragic demise, just weeks before her own unhappy end. I wonder if Caro’s death hit them as hard as Bryony’s hit Simon. I suspected （correctly） that Bryony would be the kicker for him. You could always marry again, and a man like my father, well, he wouldn’t wait long. A new squeeze half his age would emerge before the headstone had time to be engraved, I was sure of that. But Bryony was his only child and, unlike his wife who spent her time shuffling between plastic surgery offices and stuffy restaurants in Monaco, Bryony actually chose to live with Simon. I thought her death might well tip him into some kind of action. So Janine would go first.
I’d decided how to kill Janine before I’d even thought about anyone else in the family. That seems ridiculous really, but there it is. A lot of these plans have come down to luck, despite the constant plotting I did as a teenager, coming up with meticulous and ingenious ways to kill these people. It turns out that as with everything, the reality is always slightly more given over to chance, or an idea that pops into your head at 3 a.m. Janine’s murder was a bit of both. I read an article in some Sunday supplement three years ago about the rise in ‘the internet of things’， a term which gets bandied around a lot by excited nerds but basically means a bunch of devices connected to the internet which can communicate with each other. They have automated systems and can gather information and carry out tasks – collate a shopping list when you run out of cleaning products for example, or turn on your heating when you’re set to come back from holiday. It’s hardly the vision we had of the near future, this isn’t The Jetsons and we still don’t have flying skateboards – but we can now expect our houses to do more of the work. No keys needed for the front door when it just takes a fingerprint, no time spent vacuuming when a robot can do it for you while you’re out. At the moment, the most normal people come to having a smart house is by buying an Alexa or something like it, which they smugly instruct to play music or google something. Mainly in front of bored friends who dread coming over. But for the uber-wealthy, it can mean linking up your entire house and everything in it.
Guess what Janine had done with her penthouse in Monaco? That’s what I mean about chance. I read that piece with a slight hangover and only a vague interest one morning, and three weeks later, Janine was featured in the magazine Lifestyle!, a monthly glossy which mainly featured interviews with very rich women photographed on plump sofas and let them talk about whatever they wanted. Normally that was a charity lunch or a renovation project which involved a lot of glass and marble and an overuse of the word ‘authentic’。 I think the only people that actually bought this magazine were other rich women who wanted to hate-read pieces about their society rivals, but they ran a lot of adverts for exclusive interior design companies and craftsmen and so the serpent ate the tail and the magazine stayed in business.
Janine’s feature focused on her new terrace, something she’d added on a whim when she realised that she wanted somewhere to do yoga in the morning sun. The roof garden was at a slightly tilted angle, she explained, and was much better suited to the evening light. I wondered how the interviewer reacted to this, presumably with genuine sympathy for such a terrible burden. But she didn’t stop at the terrace, which seemed to have been modelled on some kind of Grecian vision, with large terracotta pots and an honest-to-God white marble fountain twice the size of anything else in the space. There was a tour of the rest of the penthouse, which spanned three floors and housed nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a, wait for it, ‘serenity room’ which seemed serene only in that it didn’t contain any furniture apart from one cream sofa and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Janine explained that she retreated to it when ‘life gets overwhelming and I need to recentre’， which didn’t explain the mirror but perhaps sometimes it’s better not to ask. The reason she moved to Monaco, she explained, was for her health. A heart scare made her ‘reassess how she lived’。 There must be an awful lot of health benefits in the principality. The tax loopholes? Not mentioned.