Jess had checked her watch.
She could still save him, maybe.
Instead she had waved Bex and Ella off and gone inside to double-check that the strict ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the staff instructions relating to Jackson Crane’s cabin was still in place.
She had often wondered what it might feel like, to know you had killed someone. She had often wondered what it would feel like, to have someone’s life in your hands.
It did not feel like she had expected at all.
None of the language people use to talk about death or revenge or regret seemed particularly pertinent to what she was feeling now. In fact, if anything, they all seemed rather abstract and artificial. Perhaps, she thought, it was the fact that nobody else knew about it yet that made the whole thing so hard to process, to take seriously. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the situation itself, the wondering every time she checked her watch what was going on in that cabin, knowing that at some point she was going to have to steel herself to return and confirm, to close the curtains, to wipe down all the surfaces, to make sure everything was in its right place.
Perhaps it might have made a difference if there had been a single moment in the past few hours when she hadn’t been trying to do one thing while simultaneously conducting a conversation with someone – over text, on a walkie-talkie, across the room – about something else. Island Home was now operating at full occupancy and all afternoon the complaints, the queries just kept coming. Was there a seamstress on the island, an acupuncturist available? What time did the spa open? Would it be possible to speak to someone about the hardness of the pillows, the softness of the beds, the water pressure? When the person asking was a member of Home, and the occasion was a weekend such as this, it had been made very clear to Jess that the answer was always yes.
The woman in cabin twenty-three – Jess owned two of her albums – had already called reception to complain that there were pine needles on her balcony. The man in cabin forty-six had rung to complain about the loudness of the birds. The couple in cabin eighty, he a director and she a producer, according to Jess’s notes, wanted to know if there were dry-cleaning facilities on the island – if so, they wished to arrange a collection for two bags of clothes and a pair of curtains they’d brought with them. In all three cases Jess had promised to see what she could do.
The couple in cabin seventy-eight had thrown a fit about their cabin being too gloomy. Jess had popped over personally to show them how to operate the dimmer switch. One she had recognized from the cover of a magazine, the other from an Evian advert on the tube back in London. Despite cabin eighty-four being at exactly the temperature specified in Jess’s notes, the inhabitant hadn’t been in there five minutes before he was complaining it was too cold. Jess had checked the thermostat, and pointed out that the temperature was exactly the one he had specified. He said he was sure that could not be correct and asked her to come back with a thermometer.
And halfway through every conversation, all afternoon, she would remember something else she needed to do or confirm had been done. Had the magazines on the coffee table in cabin fourteen been triple-checked to ensure that none of them featured photographs of the wife from whom the occupant was going through a very messy, extremely public divorce? Had all the alcohol been removed as per instructions from cabin sixty-three?
And then she would remember cabin ten. She would remember the expression – first searching and lecherous, then defiant and contemptuous – on Jackson’s face as he had chugged that whiskey down. And Jess would check the time again, and wonder how another three quarters of an hour had passed so swiftly, and she would wonder: is he dead yet? Are we past the point of no return now? And she would wait for a pang of guilt, a spasm of remorse, some impulse to save the life of the human being lying in that bed. Because he was still a human being, no matter what else he was, no matter what crimes he had committed and got away with, and he was dying, and it was her fault. Jess knew she should be feeling something, feeling bad. But she did not. She could not.
After all, Jackson and Georgia Crane had once done exactly the same thing to her.