Oh Keith, she thought to herself. Oh Keith, when the police see this you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.
His bags were gone – the bag with all his cameras, the shoulder bag he’d turned up with that had all his clothes inside.
She checked the sides of the wall-mounted TV in the bedroom, the one in the bathroom, the one in the living room. Nothing. She pulled her sleeves down over her fingers and checked all the drawers again. Nothing.
Then she looked under the bed – and saw bundled up, dark and hard to spot, pushed against the wall, the skinny jeans Keith had been wearing that afternoon. Annie got down on her knees and tried to retrieve them. They were just out of reach. Checking for blood on the floor, she lay down on her front and stretched for them again. This time she managed to get her fingertips on them, to shuffle them across the floorboards just enough to get a proper grip. Kneeling again, she dragged the tangled item out from under the bed. She checked the back pockets, patted the front pocket, peered into the watch pocket.
There was something in there. Grasping it between thumb and forefinger, heart pounding, she extracted it.
It was a memory stick.
Got you now, she thought.
The jeans went back under the bed. The memory stick went into her jacket pocket. As she was pulling her sleeves over her hands to close the front door of Keith’s cabin without touching it, her phone rang.
It was, Annie felt, a tribute to her considerable reserves of self-control that she did not scream.
‘This is Annie,’ she said.
She cleared her throat. She coughed into her hand.
‘This is Annie,’ she repeated at a slightly more natural pitch.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t seen Adam. I haven’t seen him all evening to be honest.’
She was pacing away from Keith’s cabin, now, back towards her own. A golf cart rattled past, its four occupants swaying wildly along with each sway of the vehicle. Someone shouted something. She waved a couple of fingers of the hand that was holding the phone.
She halted, abruptly.
‘I’m sorry. Say that again?’
She checked the time. It was past midnight.
‘Well how long have they been there? How long? How long? Well who are they? What on earth do they want?’
A group of about thirty locals from Littlesea had been standing irritably in The Boathouse for an hour now, insisting that Adam Groom had personally invited them to have a drink and watch the fireworks, and were refusing to leave. The staff behind the desk had tried calling Adam. They had left several messages on Annie’s phone too. Ned was unavailable, Nikki had said. ‘Canapés,’ someone could be heard saying in the background. ‘Tell her we were promised canapés. This is an absolute disgrace.’
And it was at that moment – as Annie tried to resist giving in to the hysteria that had been threatening to bubble up in her for quite some time now, tried to swallow the laugh in case she was unable to stop once it escaped, while the voice at the other end of the line kept asking what she should do – that the very first firework flared overhead.
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43
One of the biggest questions facing Annie Spark in her first seven days as interim CEO of the Home Group was what to do about the other eleven Home clubs around the world. Island Home was a crime scene. The brand itself was a global news story, its founder still missing. Ought the company to close the others too, out of respect for the dead? In the end, Spark reflects, the choice was an instinctive one. ‘To keep the Home fires burning, so to speak,’ she says, ‘was the least we could do for our members. They needed to know that whatever happened, we were still there for them. We needed places where our people could come together, grieve together, be together.’ Her decision may also have been a pragmatic one – according to a junior on Spark’s team who has asked not to be named, they received more applications for membership in that week than they’d had in the entire year preceding it.