It was only after a week – when one of them asked her if she thought it possible that Jackson Crane or Keith Little had murdered Ned and disposed of the body – that she’d realized the police did not have a clue where to even start. After a brief flurry of interest in his helicopter, they had seemed to forget about Freddie Hunter as a suspect entirely.
She’d been very lucky. Keith leaving the memory stick in his cabin, rather than taking it with him for the police to find on his body. Freddie keeping his mouth shut. Ned murdered – she did not for one second believe it had been an accident – without a single drop of blood staining her own hands.
It really did feel as though, if you wanted something enough, the universe arranged it.
How strange it had felt, at first, walking into Home and feeling the atmosphere change and realizing she was the person changing it. After all those years second-guessing Ned, trying to read the weather, now she was the weather. Acting CEO of the Home Group, only awaiting a few formalities before the final rubber stamp made the position permanent.
She resisted the temptation to retrieve the magazine and read the article again. News is what someone, somewhere, wants suppressed – isn’t that what they said? Everything else is just PR. And really, she couldn’t have hoped for a better puff piece – mostly because she had all but written it herself. Ned had always teased her about that: ‘You writers,’ he would say, scanning his daily press cuttings, ‘must be the laziest people in the whole bloody world.’
He wasn’t wrong.
The Vanity Fair journalist, in his bobbly V-neck, with his thinning hair, his rheumy eyes, about a decade older than his byline picture would have suggested, had turned up with the air of a man determined to get to the bottom of things, ready to investigate and judge, dissect and pontificate. Instead he’d just soaked up every word she told him, believed it, transcribed it, then paraphrased it in print.
Two weeks after the interview he had emailed asking about the possibility of free membership.
As she watched the countryside skim bleakly past the car window, she wondered if there would be any journalists there today, hovering ghoulishly outside the church. A fieldful of crows rose and scattered. Where was this place? When she had agreed to come to Adam’s funeral – after some careful consideration of how it might look had she not – Annie had known it would be nothing like on the same scale as Ned’s, but she had at least assumed it would be in London. My God. Was this where they had grown up, Ned and Adam? No wonder they never talked about it. What would they have said? There was literally nothing here – miles and miles of flat brownish fields.
She steeled herself, knowing she would have to talk to everyone, look sad, sound sad. And it was sad, she supposed, for Laura and for Mr and Mrs Groom. But nobody else missed him much – Adam with his banter, Adam with his wandering hands, Adam with his casual sexism and his everyday laziness. It was a shame he was dead, she supposed, but it was not her fault. Not really. Not exactly. And overall, it was better for the business. What would Home have been like with Ned’s brother in charge?
‘Nearly there,’ her driver noted, pointing out the road sign they were passing.
As for Island Home itself, it was still closed to members, operating on a skeleton staff, everyone else laid off. The police had given them the all-clear to reopen months ago, and bookings had gone through the roof when they’d started to take them again for the following year. But Annie wanted to at least appear respectful and, more importantly, to attempt to get into the bunker beneath Ned’s cottage. There had to be thousands of hours of footage down there. Filmed over decades. Ned had ensured that the door was so well disguised, the police hadn’t even realized it was there – why would they even think to look? – just as he’d ensured the cameras wired into every cabin went completely undetected. It was not just the members under threat if they’d been spotted.
Because somewhere in that bunker there was footage of her too, from the weekend Jackson Crane had invited her to a cottage at Country Home. Footage of them fucking. Footage of the glossy black old-fashioned phone beside the bed ringing and Jackson breaking off to have a conversation with Georgia, in Tahiti, and Annie lying very still and very quiet. Footage of them discussing where to go for dinner, and Jackson insisting he wanted to drive over to a local village and have a pint in a real English pub. Footage of them drinking another bottle of wine in bed. Of him downing a whiskey chaser. Footage of Jackson indignant at the suggestion they should call the idea off, or get a cab. Footage of them returning later that evening, stumbling in, the full horror of the situation just starting to sink in. Footage of her on the phone, nodding along as Ned talked her through what to do – where to drive Jackson’s four-by-four to, which part of the lake in the grounds of Country Home was deep enough to drive it into, what route to take to get there, what to do with the handbrake and the windows, how to wedge the pedal down with a brick. Footage she did not know at the time was being captured – that, once she had realized, she then spent years wishing he would delete. Footage that would destroy what was left of the late Jackson Crane’s reputation and everything she had worked for in one fell swoop.