The trouble was, only Ned had known the combination to the door. She had tried their birthdays, tried their parents’ birthdays. She had tried the date of the Covent Garden Home relaunch and the date England had last won the World Cup. She had tried 000 000. She had tried 007 007. The tumblers had turned. The locks had not opened. The walls of the vault were ten feet thick. The door itself was the same. You could not get in there with a drill. You could not get in there with a bulldozer. The place was literally designed to resist the blast from a nuclear bomb. She’d briefly considered drafting in some sort of help, but where would she have found it and how would she have been sure she could trust them?
That was what made her heart race out of nowhere, forced her to take deep breaths until it passed. Not memories of that night with Jackson, and what they had done – she had long since developed ways of not thinking about that at all. Not guilt about Adam’s death. Not sorrow about Ned’s. It was the realization, which had only sunk in slowly in the days, the weeks after their deaths, that, with a few exceptions, she had very little idea exactly which of their members Ned had been blackmailing, for what, or for how long. Some she suspected, of course. Some she could guess. But in order for Home to survive, in order for Home to flourish, the truth was that they were going to have to acquire a whole new generation of wealthy members. They would have to let the wankers in – tech millionaires, hedge funders, rich-kid influencers and bullshit wellness gurus – and accumulate a whole new catalogue of dirty secrets, recorded in the hidden little Home Cinemas in every club, which thankfully had been easier to access and understand. Probably a whole new type of secret, given the sort of people she was hoping to attract to Home. It would take months. It could take years.
That was the thought that woke Annie up at night, in Ned’s bed, in one of Ned’s suites, the only rooms in the clubs that were not extensively bugged, and sent her to splash water on her face in Ned’s sink and look at herself in Ned’s mirror and ask herself if she could do this, if she was strong enough to do this. If she was brave enough to do this, if she was merciless enough to do this. And, to harden her resolve, she thought of them, all those members, all those disgusting members, all the things they got up to when they thought no one was looking, all the things they thought would never catch up with them. And she told herself yes, she could do this. She was even going to enjoy doing it because, as Ned always said, all you need to do is present them with something you know they can’t resist, somewhere they think they can get away with it.
All Annie needed to do was give them enough velvet rope to hang themselves with.
Laura
It was going to be a very different funeral from Ned’s, that was for sure. No press, few celebrities, hardly anyone even from Home. Just a few old school friends, two or three colleagues, some mates from uni, one or two of Laura’s friends, for support – and Adam’s parents, of course. Their second funeral in a month. It was typical early March weather: slanting rain and a damp chill in the air. In the doorway of the chapel, Adam’s father Richard was greeting the mourners as they arrived. He looked older, thinner. As they were shaking hands Laura leaned in for a hug and through his jacket she could feel the bones of his shoulders, sense he did not really know what to do with his free arm, whether to put it around her or leave it dangling at his side. Eventually he compromised, resting it briefly, awkwardly, across the small of her back.
‘How are you doing?’ he had asked her, his voice almost catching as he did so.
As well as could be expected, she told him.
Four and a half months. That was how long the police, the coroner, had held on to the bodies. First for the post-mortems, then for the inquests. Four and a half months it had taken for the whole process to be concluded. If you could call what they had reached a conclusion, even then, when it came to her husband. As for the ligature marks around Adam’s neck – discreetly covered up when she had been down to Essex to identify the body – it was apparent immediately that they had been caused by the length of cord discovered wrapped around it, later identified as the belt-rope from Keith Little’s cloak, just as those deep, livid, pale-lipped wounds pictured in her husband’s autopsy report had matched perfectly the ones that had been found on the deceased artist’s hands when the police divers had removed him from the submerged car. As far as who had killed Adam went, it seemed an open-and-shut case. What nobody seemed to be able to explain was why Keith had done it. No one who had attended the party that weekend had seen them argue, heard of any disagreement. Nobody could explain why the toxicology report had shown all that GHB in her husband’s body. Nobody could explain how Keith had even recognized him, with everyone wearing masks and capes. Sometimes, she felt convinced there was some enormous conspiracy going on, with Keith as the fall guy, or Adam, or both of them. Frequently, she cursed herself for not having been there, for having said to Adam years ago that she wasn’t interested in coming along to Home launches and parties, hanging around while he was working, feeling awkward. In her dreams Adam would be there, sitting in their living room or at the kitchen table, and she would ask him what had happened, and he would just smile or shrug, as if to say, don’t you know this is just a dream, your dream, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know, and it would come crashing down on her, even in her dream, that this was a mirage and she was never going to really see him like this and she was never going to be able to talk to him outside her head ever again.