I walked back to my hotel. Could Pete set it all up for Thursday? Perhaps that was a rush job, and I knew that rushing led to mistakes. But the thought of being here when she died appealed to me, it would give me a sense of control I was lacking with this plan. And I had no idea how long she was going away for, which might mean weeks of waiting for the next opportunity – who knew if Lacey would get cold feet in the meantime? At the ATM next door to the hotel, I took out 500 euros, the most my bank would allow me to take out in one go. The residents of Monaco would be appalled by such a rule – the initial options for withdrawal started at 500, the kind of petty cash you need on you to tip waiters on yachts, I guess.
Pete was annoyed I’d been offline all evening, and I had to endure twenty minutes of him complaining about his dad not letting him have a lock on his bedroom door before I could move him back to the business in hand. Teenagers are extraordinarily self-absorbed, all during the stage in their lives when they are at their most uninteresting. It took all the restraint I could muster not to tell him that freedom to masturbate at all hours wasn’t a basic human right and that not being allowed a lock on his door was not privacy violation, no matter how much he talked about the Fourteenth Amendment. I told him about the plug I’d ordered, and said that it would be in the house tomorrow. Then I explained that I wanted to freak out my stepmother before I left on Saturday. I thought a little basic reverse psychology might work well on Pete, and assured him that if he wasn’t up to the technological challenge of it all, then that was fine.
It’s just nice to have made a friend in u, I wrote, I can probs find someone else who can help now.
That got his head back in the game. It was too predictable really. He replied with a broken heart emoji, telling me that he was definitely up to it, and would stay up all night to work on the plan. I’d told him what I wanted to do – up to a point. He knew that I planned to lock Janine in her sauna and turn up the heat, but he didn’t know that I wanted to keep her in there until she was overwhelmed by it. And he didn’t know that she had a heart condition that might speed up that process. For all his teenage bravado, I didn’t think he’d fully embrace my real intentions, no matter how much he wanted to impress me. I figured it was better just to pretend I’d pushed it too far, and then place the burden of responsibility on him later if he panicked.
We need access to the CCTV in order to know her whereabouts, he said, launching into action. It should be on the same network but we’ll only know for sure when the plug is patched in. Then we control the place from our phones – you can tell me what you want to do and I’ll make it happen. You can even speak to her if you like, that would really shit her up huh?
We went back and forth into the small hours, Pete telling me how it would work, and me asking him to speak in plain English over and over. By 3 a.m., he was trying to veer the conversation into a more personal one, sending the dreaded voice notes again, so I turned off the Wi-Fi and went to sleep without saying goodnight.
I woke up to the sun streaming through my windows and lay in bed for a bit, feeling positive about my progress. Janine would be a big scalp to take down. Simon might not be a faithful or devoted husband, but they had been married for decades and she was his gatekeeper in many ways. His parents would have been a loss, his brother probably less so. I doubt he’d registered the death of his nephew in any profound way. But losing his wife would knock him sideways. Would he begin to see a pattern, to question the string of deaths? He didn’t strike me as someone who’d buy into any idea of a curse, but would he think that he had an enemy somewhere out there, cutting down his family but never making themselves known? I hoped these notions started to seed. Not enough for him to take any action, but enough that they wormed their way into his brain and made it hard for him to think about anything else. He’d made enemies in business, people he’d fucked over on deals, companies he’d bought and restructured – a polite way of saying that he’d fired a lot of people. He’d had mistresses since my mother, the papers hinted as much. Would he look back and wonder whether any of them hated him enough to take such dramatic revenge? Rich people are paranoid at the best of times, with their security systems and their armoured cars. Perhaps he’d beef up security, hire a private investigator to look into possible enemies. Maybe he’d even go to the police. All sensible tactics, but ultimately pointless. Jeremy and Kathleen were long buried, and their car accident would never be shown to be anything but down to their own carelessness. Andrew was a troubled weirdo in the family’s eyes, his death was a tragedy but hardly suspicious. Lee, well, the less the authorities dredged up about his messy end the better. And Janine had long-established heart problems, she really shouldn’t even have been in the sauna. Let the question linger on people’s lips. ‘But wasn’t she supposed to …？’ Always nice to add a little victim-blaming.