‘Also, it’s fucking Ned,’ Keith added. ‘Ned Groom, with our balls in his hands, for the rest of our lives. Squeezing them every time he wants to see us jump. Giving them a twist every time he’s decided he needs a couple of mill more.’
Freddie rubbed his face with his hands and let out a little moan.
‘Listen,’ said Keith. ‘I don’t want to kill anyone either. But if I did have to kill someone, it would be someone I wasn’t going to feel too bad about killing, and if I had to choose the person on this island who best fitted that category, I know who it would be.’
‘We are talking about killing a man, yes. Taking a human life,’ admitted Annie. ‘But when it comes down to it, what other choices do you have?’
It had actually not been all that hard to persuade herself that Ned Groom deserved to die. When you added up all the slights, all the digs, all the hurtful comments she had put up with or tried to brush off or pretended to take as a joke. When you considered every time she had come up with a good idea, and he’d put his fucking brother in charge of actioning it, knowing that Adam did not really understand the idea in the first place, or why it was a good one, why they might be doing it, knowing that he was going to half-arse it and make a hash of the whole thing. When you thought of all the things he had done to other people. Had allowed other people to do. Home, not Ned, was what she loved, and Annie had absolute faith both in her ability to run the business and in his brother’s lack of interest in doing so with Ned gone. She would be the natural choice to take the reins and there was no doubt in her mind that Adam would happily hand them over rather than actually have to do some work.
She imagined it was even easier to persuade yourself that Ned Groom had to die when he had the kind of material on you that he had on Keith Little or poor Freddie Hunter.
Annie looked at Keith with his chin jutting out defiantly, then over to Freddie, whose chin was starting to tremble.
There had been plenty of points over the course of both men’s careers when Ned might have done this, but he liked to bide his time until his mark had everything to lose. He waited for the moment a misdemeanour that may once have felt tenuously excusable, the kind of thing a profile piece might jokingly allude to, a biography could breeze over, became something defining, tarring and utterly unforgivable.
‘So go on then,’ said Keith. ‘What’s this plan? And how are we getting away with it?’
Step by step, practicality by practicality, she told them.
In a sense, it was Ned’s obsession with watching Home’s most private spaces and all but ignoring the rest that made this whole plan a possibility. Cameras might be wired into every single cabin to spy on the members, and trained around the island’s shore to monitor any unwelcome guests, but Annie knew there was no other CCTV. Because unless you were one of the unlucky few, privacy was Home’s main selling point.
Vital to her plan too was the fact that this evening, during the promenade performance around the island, every single guest would be wearing a hooded velvet cloak and blank-faced mask. So how Keith and Freddie would get away with the murder was obvious.
The problem was how they would actually kill him. Ned Groom was a big man, and even with two of them, he would be tricky to overpower without causing a commotion.
That was where Keith came in.
A spiked drink – one of Keith’s little bottles of what she presumed to be GHB – would help to subdue Ned just enough to make him unsteady on his feet, render him unable to fight back. And from what Ned had told her, Keith had a lot of practice when it came to getting the dose right, perfected over decades of spiking drinks.
It turned her stomach even to think about it.
Annie was astonished – and a little ashamed – that she’d never suspected what he was up to. For as long as he’d been a member, Keith had had a habit of rocking up at Home clubs around the world, hanging around in his leather trousers under his own artwork in the bar or the lounge, asking people – beautiful young women, specifically – if they could guess the artist. Asking them if they knew how much it was worth. Singling one woman out. Buying her drinks. Ordering whisky after whisky for himself. Showing her the expensive Leica on a leather strap around his neck. Asking if she’d ever been photographed, been someone’s muse. Buying her more drinks. Getting louder, more arrogant, playing up to his hellraiser image. Striding out to the front desk, slightly unsteady on his feet, asking if there was a suite available because he was too pissed to hail a cab, inviting the girl up there for a nightcap.