Freddie once more pauses, to take another sip of water.
‘I had no idea,’ he says, shaking his head.
The news that two bodies had been recovered from the submerged Land Rover had been circulating online for forty-eight hours before the police confirmed their identity. Until that point, the persistent rumour had been that one of those bodies was that of Freddie Hunter. ‘I should have just gone on social media and told everyone immediately, but I felt paralysed,’ he explains. ‘It was always something I used to imagine, actually. Looking down at my own funeral, seeing how upset everyone was, how much they regretted every unkind thing they had ever done to me, hearing all the nice things they had to say. Instead, I look on social media and it’s all people laughing. Cracking Freddie Hunter jokes. Cutting and pasting my face into the poster for Finding Nemo.’
In the end, it was his agent that released a statement. ‘I asked her to tell people I wasn’t dead. That I had left on the chopper well before anyone knew anything was even amiss. She says it was one of the weirdest things she’s ever had to draft.’ The internet reacted quickly to the confirmation. ‘About eight hundred people immediately tweeted something like “You’re not dead, but your career is”。 And then it went from bad to worse, because then word got out that Ned Groom had disappeared too, and all the online conspiracy theories started: that I killed Ned and disposed of his body out at sea, or that Ned killed someone else and I helped smuggle him off the island. People were posting memes of me behind bars.’ He looks wide-eyed at the idea.
By this stage, he explains, he was in his Surrey mansion, wondering if he would even have a job to go back to in the US. ‘I remember sitting in my kitchen, due on a flight back to LAX in six hours’ time, supposed to be on TV interviewing Jennifer Lopez the next night, and thinking what the hell are the network going to make of all this, half expecting a call telling me not to bother coming back, that I was somehow tainted, could no longer front a primetime show. And then I turn on the news and they’re saying they’ve found another body on the island.’
Freddie takes a moment, glances at something offscreen again, adjusts the hem of his shirt. ‘Three people dead, three people I knew, three people with friends and families and people who loved them,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘And someone else I know is missing. And still all these keyboard detectives are treating it like it’s a game of bloody Cluedo.’
Chapter Five
Friday Evening
Jess
It was one of those afternoons when time seems not just to be moving quicker than usual, but vanishing in great unexplained leaps and jumps.
When Jess had returned to the staff block from Jackson Crane’s cabin, Bex and Ella were still there, waiting outside the building for one of the housekeeping vans to pick them up for the next round of cleans and turndowns.
‘Everything okay?’ Ella had asked.
Jess gave them a double thumbs up, her biggest smile. She was not sure she quite trusted herself to speak.
She could still save him, probably, perhaps. Pick up the phone and call reception and tell them she was a bit worried about Jackson Crane, or send one of her girls over to knock and check if he needed anything. Even if he had managed to finish that bottle of whiskey, there might still be time – assuming the causeway was passable – to send for an ambulance, have his stomach pumped. Even now she could change her mind. Even now this might not work anyway.
Which was exactly what she had been telling herself every step of the way, of course. Ever since that night a few years back, listening to her old school friend talking about Jackson Crane and telling her about Country Home, when the whole thing had first occurred to her – and her horrified brain had dismissed it immediately as impossible. All the times she had thought about it since, turning over the practicalities, telling herself it was just a sort of weird mental exercise she was doing, a way of dealing with her hurt, her anger, her trauma. The number of jobs she’d applied for at Home, in the almost complete confidence that she was never even going to receive a response, that the universe would ensure she was unable to test her resolve. All this week, in a slight state of shock, as she had been packing hastily for the island. Even as she had been grinding those sleeping pills up this morning, the ones she had brought and the ones she had stolen. Even now.