It was Bex who had found Adam’s body. She was tidying up with another girl in the upper lounge of The Manor, had noticed the rug was rucked up and had tried to lift the Louis Vuitton coffee-table trunk. Puzzled as to why it was so heavy, she had cleared various glasses off it and located the catch and flipped it and lifted the lid and inside it there he was. Still in his cape from the night before. Still with the rope around his neck.
By ten o’clock, when the first police boat arrived, with at least an hour and a half before the causeway was passable again, people were already queueing at The Boathouse to get off the island, screaming at the reception staff, demanding – in one woman’s words – to be evacuated.
It wasn’t until about eleven that people had started talking about Ned Groom as if he was not just absent but missing. At least that was when Jess became aware of the staff speculating about where he was, calls going back and forth between the different Homes. Annie screaming at people to find Ned and get him on the phone. Annie suddenly the person in charge, the person to whom everyone seemed to be deferring. Annie Spark, the woman who had been in the car with Jackson Crane that night, all those years ago. Annie Spark who had come storming into Jess’s office before his body had even been formally identified, while the emergency services were still working out how they were going to get the Land Rover out of the sea, and had demanded the key for Jackson’s cabin.
It was not hard to guess why she wanted it.
Four memory sticks. That was how many there must have been. One for each of the four members invited to that special dinner on the very first night of the launch party: one for Kurt Cox, one for Jackson Crane, one for Freddie Hunter and one for Keith Little. No wonder they’d been so concerned when Kyra Highway turned up unannounced.
Jess had handed it over, of course, the cabin key. She had even offered to accompany her, to drive her over in a buggy. Annie had dismissed the offer with a swish of her hand, a minutely brief, cold and patronizing smile.
What Annie did not know, of course, was that the footage she was so keen to get her hands on before the police or anyone else did, was also recorded now on Jess’s phone.
What Annie must have thought, when she got to Jackson’s cabin and saw that memory stick there on the bedside table where Jess had left it, was that she had once again got away with it, the murder of Jess’s parents. That she had got her hands on the only piece of hard evidence linking her to their deaths. It was hard even to imagine the relief she must have felt. How could she possibly have envisaged that she was still in so much danger?
For months now Jess had been torn between going to the police straight away or letting something slip anonymously to the press first. It would have been easy enough to do the latter, given the number of journalists who had tried to contact her in the aftermath of what had happened. The Sun had left her voicemails, the Daily Express, the Mail, all of them. Later on, a journalist from Vanity Fair had sent her a series of long emails.
It wasn’t revenge that she wanted. She had already tasted revenge on the island.
In some ways, perhaps, it felt the perfect and appropriate punishment, letting Annie go on with her life, letting her carry on running Home, giving interviews – and knowing that at any moment, practically at the press of a button, you could bring her life, the whole company, tumbling down.
Jess had waited a long time for justice to be served. She could wait a little longer, now.
Because one thing she did not want was for her story – the story of her parents, the truth about Jackson and Annie and what they had done – to get lost in the media cacophony about the deaths on the island, to become some sort of footnote to the deaths of Ned Groom and Jackson Crane and Keith Little, the murder of Adam Groom, part of that whole macabre hullaballoo.
But even a story as big as the deaths on Island Home could not hold the public’s attention forever. Not in the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Not in a world as turbulent as ours.
By the end of the month Freddie Hunter was back on TV, clips of his return circulating on YouTube, his earnest and tearful eulogy for Ned much praised, his smile as broad as ever – even though he didn’t seem to be doing his helicopter karaoke sections any more. His very first guest? Kyra Highway, ‘an old friend’ as he introduced her, promoting her new album of Christmas songs, including a duet with her daughter – and at the end of the show Lyra herself had been beckoned out from the wings and they had all sung it together, all in their Santa hats, beaming merrily, collapsing into seemingly unforced laughter as the credits rolled.