by Bella Mackie
‘Bring the money tomorrow – in euros. I won’t do it without the money first.’ Canny. I respected that.
‘Of course,’ I said and wished her a good afternoon. Henry flashed his tiny teeth at me and they took their leave.
I spent the next hour messaging Pete, who had finally woken up, about what device would work best. I’d told him that it had to be something I could plausibly give my dad as a gift, and we worked through things we thought were appropriate. I emphasised that it should be small, so that evil SM didn’t notice it and ask what it was. Really I just wanted it to be easy for Lacey to get into the house without any worries. The cordless hoover was too big, the lightbulb too random. Eventually Pete disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a link to a Wi-Fi controlled power strip. This, in English, was just a double plug socket and would fit easily into a pocket.
You’re a genius! I told him, as I began to google where the hell to find such a thing in Monaco. Pete wanted to talk more, he had a test coming up and he was anxious about it, but I swerved it, saying that my battery was dying, and signed off. No wonder he was worried about never getting a girlfriend if that’s the chat he was offering.
Turns out in Monaco there’s not an Argos to be found, so I ordered the power strip on next-day delivery at considerable expense. Then I checked Janine’s Instagram, which had a new post. It was a photo of two dresses hanging up beside each other. One was a full-length pale gold number with sequinned long sleeves and the other was a similar shape but dark red, and instead of sequins, there was a thin trim of fluff around the bosom. Janine had clearly never met an embellishment she didn’t like. The caption read ‘getting ready for dinner, which beauty do I choose?’ The comments were gushing, all exclaiming that it was hard to pick between them, and assuring her that she would look amazing in either. Dolly Parton would’ve approved. As she famously said: ‘It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.’
I decided to chance it. I threw on a black suit with a white T-shirt and added the neon heels of the night before. A cab took me to Janine’s at 7.30 p.m., and I asked the driver to wait across the road for my friend. At 7.45, Janine stepped out of the front door (she’d plumped for the gold dress), accompanied by a flamboyant man in a silver blazer, and headed down the steps to a waiting Mercedes. As the car pulled out, I gave a theatrical sigh and told the driver that my friend must have forgotten that I would pick her up. We followed the car for about eight minutes, pulling up outside a restaurant with a large red canopy and bouquets of flowers in stands around the door. Janine was helped out of the car by her young friend and they walked into the restaurant, a doorman bowing slightly as they passed him without acknowledgement. I gave it a minute, and followed. A woman in a tight polo neck greeted me without a smile. When people like this try to intimidate you, the only thing to do is mirror their behaviour. Without saying hello, I asked for a table.
‘Have you booked?’ she said, looking me up and down.
‘No? I can’t imagine it’s necessary for just one,’ I replied, making a show of checking my phone. She sniffed and walked over to the maître d’. A few minutes later I was given a seat at the bar and left alone. Janine was sitting in a red velvet booth, the colour and fabric conspiring with her dress to give her an unfortunately festive look. Her gaudy companion sat beside her, and two other women completed the party. I was too far away to hear much of their conversation, but I was content to watch. They were hardly likely to talk of anything interesting, but it was nice to see her up close properly. It would have felt sloppy not to see her in the waxy flesh before I killed her, this way I got to feel like I’d given her a proper send-off.
I had a mildly disgusting chicken dish and two glasses of wine, occasionally watching the young man adjust Janine’s hair or offer her a bite of his food. It was weirdly flirtatious, even though he was obviously gay and at least twenty years younger than her. Perhaps the arrangement was that he accompanied her around town and gave her attention that Simon clearly did not. In return, she paid for his dinner and bought him little gifts? How retro. Occasionally they’d all break into tinkly laughter and Janine would stretch her face into a smile. When I saw her signal for the bill I did the same, and followed them out into the night air. The man lit a cigarette as the women chatted, one of them telling Janine that she’d pop over on Thursday for coffee. Janine shook her head ‘No, come tomorrow. The maid is off Thursdays and I’m going to sleep all day. I’m off to Morocco on Friday and need to relax before the early flight.’
I walked back to my hotel. Could Pete set it all up for Thursday? Perhaps that was a rush job, and I knew that rushing led to mistakes. But the thought of being here when she died appealed to me, it would give me a sense of control I was lacking with this plan. And I had no idea how long she was going away for, which might mean weeks of waiting for the next opportunity – who knew if Lacey would get cold feet in the meantime? At the ATM next door to the hotel, I took out 500 euros, the most my bank would allow me to take out in one go. The residents of Monaco would be appalled by such a rule – the initial options for withdrawal started at 500, the kind of petty cash you need on you to tip waiters on yachts, I guess.
Pete was annoyed I’d been offline all evening, and I had to endure twenty minutes of him complaining about his dad not letting him have a lock on his bedroom door before I could move him back to the business in hand. Teenagers are extraordinarily self-absorbed, all during the stage in their lives when they are at their most uninteresting. It took all the restraint I could muster not to tell him that freedom to masturbate at all hours wasn’t a basic human right and that not being allowed a lock on his door was not privacy violation, no matter how much he talked about the Fourteenth Amendment. I told him about the plug I’d ordered, and said that it would be in the house tomorrow. Then I explained that I wanted to freak out my stepmother before I left on Saturday. I thought a little basic reverse psychology might work well on Pete, and assured him that if he wasn’t up to the technological challenge of it all, then that was fine.
It’s just nice to have made a friend in u, I wrote, I can probs find someone else who can help now.
That got his head back in the game. It was too predictable really. He replied with a broken heart emoji, telling me that he was definitely up to it, and would stay up all night to work on the plan. I’d told him what I wanted to do – up to a point. He knew that I planned to lock Janine in her sauna and turn up the heat, but he didn’t know that I wanted to keep her in there until she was overwhelmed by it. And he didn’t know that she had a heart condition that might speed up that process. For all his teenage bravado, I didn’t think he’d fully embrace my real intentions, no matter how much he wanted to impress me. I figured it was better just to pretend I’d pushed it too far, and then place the burden of responsibility on him later if he panicked.
We need access to the CCTV in order to know her whereabouts, he said, launching into action. It should be on the same network but we’ll only know for sure when the plug is patched in. Then we control the place from our phones – you can tell me what you want to do and I’ll make it happen. You can even speak to her if you like, that would really shit her up huh?
We went back and forth into the small hours, Pete telling me how it would work, and me asking him to speak in plain English over and over. By 3 a.m., he was trying to veer the conversation into a more personal one, sending the dreaded voice notes again, so I turned off the Wi-Fi and went to sleep without saying goodnight.
I woke up to the sun streaming through my windows and lay in bed for a bit, feeling positive about my progress. Janine would be a big scalp to take down. Simon might not be a faithful or devoted husband, but they had been married for decades and she was his gatekeeper in many ways. His parents would have been a loss, his brother probably less so. I doubt he’d registered the death of his nephew in any profound way. But losing his wife would knock him sideways. Would he begin to see a pattern, to question the string of deaths? He didn’t strike me
as someone who’d buy into any idea of a curse, but would he think that he had an enemy somewhere out there, cutting down his family but never making themselves known? I hoped these notions started to seed. Not enough for him to take any action, but enough that they wormed their way into his brain and made it hard for him to think about anything else. He’d made enemies in business, people he’d fucked over on deals, companies he’d bought and restructured – a polite way of saying that he’d fired a lot of people. He’d had mistresses since my mother, the papers hinted as much. Would he look back and wonder whether any of them hated him enough to take such dramatic revenge? Rich people are paranoid at the best of times, with their security systems and their armoured cars. Perhaps he’d beef up security, hire a private investigator to look into possible enemies. Maybe he’d even go to the police. All sensible tactics, but ultimately pointless. Jeremy and Kathleen were long buried, and their car accident would never be shown to be anything but down to their own carelessness. Andrew was a troubled weirdo in the family’s eyes, his death was a tragedy but hardly suspicious. Lee, well, the less the authorities dredged up about his messy end the better. And Janine had long-established heart problems, she really shouldn’t even have been in the sauna. Let the question linger on people’s lips. ‘But wasn’t she supposed to …?’ Always nice to add a little victim-blaming.
I checked my mobile. One message from Jimmy, asking if I wanted a drink tonight, one from my neighbour telling me there was a parcel waiting at her flat for me. Two emails from work that I ignored. Then I turned on the Wi-Fi on my other phone – the one I used for Artemis-related business, and was alerted to new messages with a string of beeps. Nine from Pete. Scrolling down, one was a message telling me that I had to find out what system the hub was on. I could ask Lacey to get that information. The next few were links to articles about smart doorbells which had been hacked and then there was a message asking where I’d gone and a photo, which when I clicked on it, showed Pete in front of a mirror. His head was cropped out of shot, but his tracksuit bottoms were pulled down and I could see his penis, held up to the camera like a special offering. Why do men send unsolicited pictures of their dicks? I am not friendly with many women, but I feel confident that I could answer for most of my sex when I say that nobody wants to wake up to that. Especially from a barely legal teenager with too much pubic hair and a sad case of chest acne. I felt simultaneously depressed by having to see it and sorry for Pete, who obviously thought it was an obligatory rite of passage when talking to a girl. I saved the photo, and sent it to my real phone. Might as well keep it in case Pete had a crisis of conscience. I messaged him back gently asking if we could take this all a bit slower. I hope I struck a note which made him feel more than a little self-conscious, while still giving him hope that there’d be some sort of reciprocation at a later date. He’d never get anything back from me of course, but I wouldn’t feel too bad for the lonely teen. If you strike up a friendship based on hacking, you deserve to get scammed. In fact, you should expect it.
* * *
As soon as my package had arrived, I took it up to my room, unboxed it and read the instructions. I wrote them down in an abbreviated form on a small piece of paper, and then rolled up the plug and put it in a small toiletry bag along with the money. It was pretty compact now, and would fit in Lacey’s pocket without causing any concern if Janine saw her coming back from the walk. Next door, I took out another 500 euros, added it to the bag and walked down to the promenade, seeing Lacey appear in the distance. She was in a better mood today, clearly she’d spent time planning how she’d use the money. Or perhaps Janine had been extra vile that morning and Lacey just wanted to take back some agency. Probably it was a little of both.
I gave her the money and told her what she had to do. ‘There are instructions in the bag too, if you need them. And my number, so please text me when it’s installed and give me the brand of the hub, and the serial number on the side. It’ll be sixteen digits.’ She nodded, and told me that Janine would be going away on Friday. I reassured her that we’d turn off the listening mode while she was gone, and only activate it again on her return. I wondered whether Lacey kicked back when Janine was out of town, painted her toenails in the cushion-stuffed lounge, smoked in the kitchen, had long baths in Janine’s tub. I hoped so, but she was probably too scared in reality.
‘We only need a week or so of audio – that should give us enough examples of this kind of shoddy behaviour. Then you can remove the plug and throw it away OK?’ She nodded again, and bent down to stroke Henry under one ear.
‘I do this for my family, and so that other women don’t suffer like I do with a bad boss. It makes me feel good to help someone.’ Henry was busy trying to bite her fingers, and I suddenly felt a tiny pang of guilt. She wasn’t helping anyone except me. And she’d be out of a job too, soon enough.
‘What’s your surname, Lacey?’ I said suddenly. She looked up at me, deeply suspicious. Henry looked suspicious too, but that was normal for the little fucker. ‘I promise it’s not for anything but my records – I won’t use it anywhere.’ She still looked uncomfortable. ‘If the story gets sold globally, you’d get a cut of it,’ I said, trying to think on my feet. That worked, money usually does.
‘It’s Phan,’ she told me, spelling it out. I thanked her, and made her promise again to send me a text later that day when she’d installed the plug. She looked solemn and told me she would. We parted, and I walked back to my hotel to wait.
Four hours later, after I’d completed an online workout, had a bath and spent an hour going through Bryony’s back catalogue of videos on Instagram, my phone pinged. All done, the message read. It’s installed, blue light blinking. Make on box is Henbarg. Code is 1365448449412564.
I rolled around on the bed, punching the pillows for thirty seconds, before sitting up and breathing deeply. I messaged Pete, who’d been quiet all day. Even with the time difference, it was unlike him. Normally he was awake half the night, bouncing around his playground, the internet. The blue ticks on my last message indicated that he’d read it. Possibly he was embarrassed, or hurt, or angry. Nothing like a polite knock back to make a man angry. I wrote that the plug was installed, and gave him the hub information. I finished up with, Can we make some fuss tomorrow then? It’ll be soooo funny to get her panicking lol.
It was close to 7 p.m., and I was full of adrenaline, despite the punishing jump workout, so I got back into my gym gear and went for another run. I managed 10 km, running through the clean streets, lined with their neat cobbles and well looked after plants. It was like a toy town really, a place you could feel as though the rest of the world was far away and unable to sully you. I bought myself an ice cream and walked back to the hotel, enjoying the sugar hit as I cooled down.
There was still no word from Pete, but he’d seen the last message. Two blue ticks showed on my screen again. Had his dad taken his phone off him? Was he just busy working out how to hack the system? Or was there a darker reason for his silence? Had he used the serial number to find out who Janine was. If so, he’d have done his research, and he’d surely find out that I was lying about who I was and what I wanted from him.
I’d known it was always going to be a possibility. He was the one with the technology expertise, if you can call a 17-year-old boy an expert on anything except disgusting bodily excretions. That meant I was giving up the control here, and not totally knowing how deeply he’d look into what we were doing. I hoped that he’d help me hack Janine’s house, be shocked when she dropped dead and back away from the entire thing. That was the best-case scenario. But I wasn’t naive, and I knew it was completely possible he’d figure out I was pushing for more than ‘a little shock’ and that he’d want answers from me. Or worse, want to go to the authorities.
That was the trouble with asking someone else for help. On balance, I still felt that it was better asking an idiotic kid for help, using some light manipulation to get what I wanted and claiming ignorance about the even
tual outcome than it would have been to hire someone ‘professional’ who would be able to hold it over me forever. That kind of person would have researched everything they could’ve about me, and used it against me forever. Probably to demand an exorbitant amount of money. If Pete was the bored and slightly sad teenager I thought he was, then it shouldn’t be too hard to keep him quiet.
But where the fuck was he? It was 9 p.m. by the time I’d showered and got ready to go and eat and still nothing. I messaged again, asking if I’d upset him, and saying that I missed him. Message me back, I’m sooo bored here and need you xx.
I ate dinner at a touristy bar with photos of the food on the menu. Always a fatal mistake, but I was distracted and in a hurry to get the night over and done with. A wilted salad and two glasses of wine later, I paid the bill and went back to my hotel. On the way, I texted Lacey asking who’d be in the house tomorrow, explaining that it would be good to identify who was speaking so that we could understand the audio we got. She replied quickly, saying that she’d be off from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m., when she’d be back at the flat. When she was off, a girl came in the morning to make Janine’s breakfast and quickly tidy the house, but there shouldn’t be anyone else around until the evening. Madame likes to spend Thursdays at home relaxing. She says it’s nice to have her house to herself. Sometimes she gets her nails done, or her hairdresser comes. I tidy everything up again when I get back.
It didn’t seem like Janine needed to designate a full day every week to relax when her entire life revolved around that singular pursuit, but it kept her at home where I wanted her, so I was glad that she prioritised self-care so rigorously.
I got into bed at 11 p.m., which was ridiculously early for me. The morning people won the battle long ago, but I still resisted their pull, normally going to bed at 2 a.m. and rising no earlier than 11 a.m. whenever possible. But I was keen to get the night over and done with, like a child who is waiting for Santa and forces sleep only so that they can wake up to presents. But I couldn’t sleep. Pete hadn’t sent me a message in sixteen hours, and I lay in bed with the dawning realisation that if he didn’t get in touch soon, I would have no chance to kill Janine tomorrow. And after tomorrow, this particular plan would be unworkable and I’d have to start at the beginning. I tried listening to a calming soundtrack of waves hitting a beach, but it only made me need to pee. I did the breathing exercises I’d taught myself years before, but they couldn’t quash the butterflies bouncing around somewhere below my ribcage. At 2 a.m., I got up and recorded a voice message for Pete. I went up an octave, in order to sound younger than I was, and adopted a suitably shaky tone.