Then she remembered once again the final moments of her father’s life, the final years of her mother’s.
Then she noticed a dent in the wall they had not quite been able to get rid of, a patch of paint that had not fully dried yet.
Then she remembered the memory stick.
Each of the many large wall-mounted flatscreen TVs in the cabin had a USB socket at the side into which such a memory stick could be slotted. On the basis that it was the farthest room on the ground floor from the bedroom, it was into the side of the set in the lounge that she inserted it. What was she expecting? Jess did not know. All she knew was that ever since she had first found it, on the floor of this cabin, it had struck her as being out of place. If it was nothing, some films he had downloaded for the flight home, some audition clips of unknown actresses for his next project, then she could just tuck it into the pocket of a jacket hanging in the hallway and go. Her fingerprints would not matter – she was housekeeping, of course they were everywhere. Still, if it was nothing, there was no sense having it in her possession, just in case when the body was discovered and the police inevitably searched the island, they went through the staff accommodation too.
Jess turned the TV on, and found that whatever was on the stick had already automatically begun playing. She pulled a leather footstool up to the screen and tucked her clasped hands under her chin. Just five minutes, she told herself she would give it, with a glance at her watch – that was all she really had anyway before her absence would be noted.
At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at and listening to at all. The footage, while it appeared to have been edited to a fairly professional standard, had been shot from a strange angle and under far from optimal lighting conditions. It began abruptly, without opening credits, just a black screen with some numbers in the corner, the crunch of a car stopping on gravel, some vague noises like muffled footsteps, distant voices. Then a door could be seen opening. Then a light could be seen coming on. Then two figures could be seen entering what was now clearly a living room, in a hotel perhaps – or at one of the other Homes, Jess guessed, although there was little to offer a definite clue. Some wall. Some carpet. Some curtains. A table. A drinks cabinet. A phone.
The woman – slim, pale, tall, dark-haired, strangely familiar – entered the room first, hugging herself with both arms, and strode across to the windows and closed the curtains. The man leaned out of the door, as if to check they had not been followed. He turned another light on, crossed the room on unsteady legs to a drinks cabinet, dropped awkwardly into a squat and started rifling through it. The woman was now visible only intermittently, pacing up and down the room, still hugging herself, her face obscured by her long dark hair, for the most part only her legs and the lower half of her in shot. She was young – twentysomething? That was what Jess would have guessed from what she was wearing – all black, nondescript. He looked a good dozen years older, at least. Then, in answer to a question that the mic hadn’t quite captured, the man – still squatting in front of the drinks cabinet, a tall glass in one hand now – looked back over his shoulder.
That was when Jess realized she was looking at Jackson Crane. It might have been old and fuzzy footage but there was no mistaking that face. That was when – with a jolt of the heart, her hands instinctively now on her cheeks, her mouth open wide in shock – Jess registered that the numbers in the corner of the screen were a date and a year and a time, that what she was watching was not a movie outtake but real-life time-stamped footage. With another jolt, she realized exactly what date and time she was looking at.
How often, despite the police’s dismissive reaction, had she tried to tell people what really happened that night, what she had seen, who she had seen? Jess had long ago lost count. Her aunt. Her uncle. The nurses at the hospital. Her friends. Her teachers. Every time she had seen him on TV, on a magazine cover, on the side of a bus. ‘That’s him,’ she would tell people. ‘That man is him. The one who was driving the car.’ And they would tell her about shock and how it affected our brains, our memories. They would tell her he was a Hollywood star who lived in America. And she would see the looks her aunt and her uncle gave each other, the way that when she said it to other people, their faces froze a little and they tried to change the subject. And after a while her aunt and uncle had suggested that it was not something she ought to bring up all the time at school, or at least when she first met people.