Sitting on an elegant brocade armchair in a quiet corner of the main bar of Manhattan Home, dressed head to toe in black with her dark hair scraped back into a neat ponytail, lipstick an uncharacteristic nude, she cuts a significantly less flamboyant, undoubtedly more serious, figure than she once did. Her task now, she says, is remaining true to Ned’s vision. ‘Ned is irreplaceable, of course. But he would not want Home to die with him. This club has risen from the ashes once. It is my job to make sure – for the members’ sake as well as Ned’s – that we do so again. I think he’d be proud.’
She grows thoughtful. ‘I hope he would, anyway,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I’m sorry.’ She takes a moment, a deep breath. ‘It’s still hard to talk about. I think a lot of us, we’re still coming to terms with it, the idea that he isn’t coming back. There are still times – when we’re sitting here, for instance – when part of you expects him to come walking in through those doors, laughing, cracking jokes. I guess that’s the thing: if you’re a big personality, a larger-than-life human being, you really leave a big hole behind you when you go.’
It is the death of Ned Groom that remains the final tantalizing mystery of that weekend. All eyewitness accounts of Ned at the party describe him as being in good spirits, ebullient, slightly intoxicated at most. He was a man at the height of his success, the peak of his career, in good health, both physical and mental, very comfortable financially. ‘Gone to London,’ he wrote, in that last, cryptic, mystifying email – but all the evidence suggests he never left the island alive. Was there some kind of accident? Did he for some reason enter the water, fully clothed, not a strong swimmer, intentionally? Was he murdered? We may never know. Perhaps, were Keith Little or Adam Groom or Jackson Crane still alive, one of them might be able to shed some light on the loss. There are certainly those who believe that one or more of those men was with Ned at the time of his death, or caused it. Theories abound on the internet, as elaborate as they are ingenious. But the truth is, life is always both more and less complicated than fiction.
The classic murder mystery ends with a neat set of motives, a culprit and a comeuppance. Perhaps that is why we read them. Perhaps that is why we love them. Because real life offers us so few of these consolations, so few of these satisfactions. Maybe one day a clue will be uncovered or a confession will come to light to offer us the sense of closure the books and the movies have taught us to expect, and to believe we deserve.
For now, however, there are still some secrets Island Home insists on keeping.
Epilogue
A Funeral
Annie
It had worked out rather neatly, thought Annie, placing the copy of Vanity Fair into the pocket behind the driver’s seat, checking the clock on the dashboard as she did so and calculating the remaining time to their destination. Ned dead. Adam dead. Keith dead. Jackson dead. It was no wonder so many of the articles about Island Home made references to Shakespearean tragedy.
Not that she recognized it at the time, but all that first week, before Ned’s body had been found, Annie had felt like a sleepwalker. One of the symptoms of shock, after all, is that you don’t realize you are in shock. As acting CEO of Home – who else was going to do it? – she was issuing instructions, managing damage limitation. Taking phone calls from the press, reassuring members, telling the police over and over again what her movements had been, what she had seen, what she had heard. Unpacking how Ned had been acting, the toll the opening of Island Home, delayed and over budget, must have taken on him. Guessing where he might have gone, if he was hiding. Did she think he might have taken his own life? In all honesty, before he was found floating lifeless in the North Sea, she’d had absolutely no idea where he was or what could have happened.
Answering questions about Keith, his state of mind that night. Explaining Jackson’s movements that weekend, as far as she understood them. Describing Adam, what he was like as a person, who could have held a grudge and why.
After a while, she had given her version of events so many times it had started to feel like the truth. She had even thought about starting to introduce some inconsistencies so it would not look like she was sticking strictly to a carefully devised mental script.