‘Wouldn’t want everyone falling asleep now, would we?’ observed Annie, producing a clutch of short silver straws from her handbag, a little glass vial and matt gold Home membership card.
By the time Kurt and Ned returned, the atmosphere had livened up considerably. Annie had called over the waiter – he had remembered something important to do at the far end of the room at around the time the silver straws had come out, and remained there discreetly until summoned back – to order another round of drinks. Freddie was telling the same meandering story about himself for the second time in short succession, Keith was smirking, Jackson chortling loudly well before the punchline.
Nobody seemed to notice the look on Kurt’s face, the way he simply dropped back into his chair, in silence.
And over the course of the next three quarters of an hour, Annie watched as in different ways, Ned discreetly managed to draw each of the remaining three men in the room aside one by one – up to the other end of the library to look at a painting, down the stairs to admire a suit of armour, along to the window at the end of the hall to see the moonlit view down the lawn to the sea.
And one by one, Annie watched as they returned. All night Freddie Hunter had been cracking jokes, pulling faces, clowning around. He was not cracking jokes or pulling faces now. He looked as though he were about to burst into tears.
Keith came back looking absolutely furious.
It was Jackson who got taken aside last, and it was Jackson who seemed to take what Ned had said to him worst. He barely seemed aware of his surroundings as he drifted back into the room alone, whacking straight into the corner of a table with his hip, stumbling over the edge of the carpet, glancing up at Annie – and starting as if he’d seen a ghost.
None of them seemed in the mood to speak much. Nobody seemed inclined to make eye contact with anyone else.
For someone who claimed this was all a necessity he took no pleasure in, Ned looked very much like a man having the time of his life. When he had told Annie how much he was planning to hike the membership fees for this lot, she thought he was joking. Of course she knew how much Island Home had cost the company, but even people as successful as Jackson Crane, Keith Little or Kurt Cox didn’t have that kind of money lying around – and as for Freddie Hunter . . .
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Freddie announced, and made a dash for the corridor, the toilets.
Keith crunched an ice cube between his teeth, and glared into the fire.
Kurt Cox looked as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind.
‘What you’ll find, on your dressers, when you return to your rooms,’ Annie informed them, ‘is a letter about your new membership status, and a statement about the new fees, a contract to sign.’
Jackson slammed down his empty tumbler on the low table next to where he was sitting, hard enough to set the other glasses on it rattling. Kurt jumped. Keith flinched. No one seemed to know quite who to make eye contact with, or how to look.
There was a reason – she realized – Ned was doing this in stages, separating his special guests to spring that first surprise on them, setting them up to wonder whether they were all getting gouged equally, sowing the seeds of mutual suspicion and distrust. Once that had been done, he could bring them all back together, ever the showman, to deliver his next surprise.
‘And by the way,’ Ned told them, face uplit by the flickering flames. ‘Just in case any of you are thinking about leaving the island early, or planning to turn this offer down, there’s one more thing I should mention, about this weekend. At some point over the next three days, each of you is going to have something else delivered to your cabin . . .’
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13
‘I was invited, of course,’ explains Ava Huxley, the British actress, best known to US audiences for her role as Lexi Glass, consulting psychiatrist by day and serial killer by night, in HBO’s Seven Bullets and as Lady Daphne in the BBC’s acclaimed Sunday night period drama Mannersby. ‘The truth is, I just had a sixth sense from the start that I shouldn’t go. And thank God I followed that instinct. I couldn’t have processed it, being so close to . . .’ She trails off, shakes her head and shudders, taking a sip from her cup of orange pekoe tea. ‘I pity my friends who did go – I remember us excitedly talking about what we were going to wear. Even then, I had a really bad feeling about the whole thing.’