Home Cinema, Ned called it. There was one of them in every club, somewhere only accessible via Ned’s private accommodation, but this was the largest, their most ambitious to date. No need ever, really, to turn on the lights in here, thanks to the constant glow of the bank of screens – twenty screens by twenty, each at least as big as the TV in the living room overhead – a TV that covered an entire wall of the place. How far they had come, since the early days, technologically, from the time when the thought of bugging the suites had first occurred to Ned, back when Covent Garden had been their only club, back before the refurb, when it was just a single microphone in each room, stuck behind a big mirror or the rear of a heavy wardrobe, when the whole thing had seemed more of a weird voyeuristic prank for Ned’s personal amusement than anything else, and at the end of the week he and Ned would sit and listen to some of it with a drink and it would be hours and hours of Keith Little taking coke, and farting, and telling someone out of a minor Britpop band the same anecdote on repeat until the tape ran out.
Now you could sit here with your little remote and look into any room in any suite in any Home club anywhere in the world, and zoom in if you wanted, or rewind, choose your angle from the multiple options, all strategically placed. That was always a strange rush, a peculiar feeling. Being able to check instantly on the booking system who was in, where they were staying, who they had signed into the club that night and at what time, what they’d ordered in the bar even, and then just call the suite up instantly. Being able to scroll back through the day and watch as Freddie Hunter – say – carefully rubbed himself wet with a damp towel, winked at himself in the bathroom mirror and then hopped backwards into the shower. To be able to flick the sound up on cabin twenty and hear Kyra Highway’s raspy snoring. In cabin seventy-nine – the name of the single occupant appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen – there were movements under the blankets and immediately in the same corner of the screen the little indicator came on to note that this was being flagged and filed, automatically, because the system had identified one of its key words or detected a certain pattern of activity, and that this was footage that would find its way somehow along one of these bundles of wires into one of the banks and banks of servers that filled the other rooms of the temperature-controlled bunker; footage that would join, in the annals of Home, the decades of carefully labelled memory sticks and disks stored in the other rooms down here, all those other rooms, down all those long, pipe-lined corridors.
How many hours of footage were there down here, all in all? Thousands, probably. Enough footage to end hundreds of careers, at least. To ruin hundreds of lives, end hundreds of marriages.
Among them, according to Ned, Adam’s own.
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29
How could Home’s security have let it happen? That was the question people kept asking, shocked members, the media. How could the eighty-strong team tasked with safeguarding guests allow a car to be driven onto a waterlogged causeway? To fail to prevent a murder? To have no explanation for the fact a man had vanished, seemingly, into thin air?
The explanation, according to John McBride, former Head of Security for Island Home, is simple: ‘We were far more concerned about people trying to get onto the island than about anyone leaving it. There had been an incident on the Thursday night, on the mainland, so we had more guys than usual over there, and we were prepped to respond if anyone caused more trouble.’ Asked if he thinks anyone did manage to get past his team in that direction, McBride says he thinks it highly unlikely. ‘And I mean highly unlikely. We had security patrols circling on foot and two boats regularly circling the island’s circumference. But you simply can’t be everywhere at once, no matter how many of you there are.’ Under the circumstances, he believes his team did all they could.
‘Members expect to feel safe, but they also expect discretion,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to see a load of big blokes in Puffa coats standing around muttering into walkie-talkies. It makes for a challenging set-up. And just for the record, when you see members interviewed, talking about how upset they were that Sunday? In reality, all those people, those same people, were outraged that their weekend was being curtailed. Ringing and ringing reception to order room service, furious no one was answering. Hammering on the spa door for the massage they’d booked, outraged the clay pigeon shoot had been cancelled. Kicking off. Making a fuss. Home members are used to getting what they want, the second they want it.’