Still holding the whiskey, with a slightly stagey flourish of his free hand, Jackson Crane allowed himself to fall backwards onto the bed. Jess put the glass down and headed for the door. Having reached it she paused, turned to look back at him.
Sitting up against the head of the bed, still wearing his shoes, although his jacket was now in a tangle on the floor, several shirt buttons were undone and the bottom of his shirt untucked on one side, Jackson Crane glowered at her, and then with an air of somewhat vague defiance lifted the decanter to his lips.
Glug glug glug. Glug glug glug.
By the time he lowered it this time, it was almost half empty.
As she was closing the door behind her she could hear him grumbling something to himself about fucking. Whether it was addressed to her, whether it was addressed to himself, whether it was addressed to anyone at all, it was hard to say.
Glug glug glug.
She had already added a note to the cabin ten cleaning rota, making it emphatically clear that Jackson Crane was not to be disturbed until further notice, under any circumstances. That had not felt like murdering someone. But in a way it was. In a way, ticking that box had been as much an act of murder as grinding up those pills, as putting them in that whiskey, as handing it to him.
She hoped the producers of whatever film Jackson Crane was working on at the moment were paid up on their insurance.
Probably the sleeping pills alone would have done for him, the number she had ground up, the amount he had just ingested. Given what else there had been in that plastic sachet, though – all the stuff she had brought with her, everything she had helped herself to from the other cabins – half the contents of that decanter would have been enough to kill an elephant. Just a decent-sized glass of it would have been enough for a human being.
She had done it. She had actually done it. Even now she could not quite believe it.
It was not until she was halfway back to the staff block that she realized she still had Jackson Crane’s memory stick in her pocket.
Nikki
The giant fire pit on the back lawn had been non-negotiable, another one of those ideas Ned was determined to make happen even if everyone else told him it was crazy, or impossible, or actively dangerous. Even Annie, whose enthusiasm for Ned’s plans was usually immediate and absolute, had tried to steer him away from this one. ‘Hmmm,’ was the way she had put it, when he had first floated the thought. ‘Is that wise? Do we really want an enormous permanent bonfire, in a giant metal bowl on legs, spewing three-foot-high flames, within stumbling distance of the bar? Best-case scenario, a member will try to light a fag off it and lose their eyebrows.’
‘Or set their hair on fire,’ Adam had added.
It was a very Adam move, in meetings, to repeat or closely paraphrase what the previous person had said. What the previous woman had said, usually, as if he were translating from the original Oestrogen. For years, Nikki had watched him do it, generally blunting the joke or missing the point or demonstrating he had not understood either the problem or the proposed solution. And for years, Nikki had wondered what was going through his head as he did so. Because she was always taking the minutes, writing his words down and therefore giving them a weight they did not often deserve. She could count on one hand the number of times, in her twenty-five years there, that he had made an insightful comment or useful suggestion. She did not dislike Adam Groom – not especially – but it was hard to see the point of the man, professionally speaking. Nor was it any wonder, in career terms, that he had never left Home.
‘And what do you think?’ Ned had asked her. Nikki checked the minutes she had been typing on autopilot for what he was actually proposing, then waited a beat. She told him she loved the idea.
And sitting here on a bright October afternoon, sunk into one of the circle of low outdoor sofas surrounding the fire pit at a safe-ish distance, watching the sparks spiral upwards, the great logs creak and glow and settle, she had to admit once again that when Ned was right about something, Ned was right about something. And she had always thought herself lucky in life to have the benefit of that, the proximity to it. Little could she have imagined, when she landed a job behind the coat check of Covent Garden Home, where it would take her, how it would end up.