by Bella Mackie
As the manicurist rubbed oil into her hands and signalled that she was all done, Bryony lifted her head as though it were a tremendous effort and inspected her nails. She took an inordinate amount of time checking each individual finger before sitting up straight in her chair and laughing. Not a cheerful laugh, but one meant to signal absolute derision. She crinkled her eyebrows and fixed a stare on the woman sitting across from her.
‘You’ve ripped my cuticles. All. Of. Them. Are you qualified to do this? No really, I mean it, how did you manage to damage every single cuticle? Did you use a crowbar?’ The manicurist frantically gestured to her manager, either stunned into silence, or lacking the right vocabulary to respond in kind. The salon had hushed in seconds, everyone deliberately not looking at Bryony, but staying stock-still in order to hear what was happening. Normally this kind of attention might make someone pull back, but Bryony clearly had very little sense of embarrassment. There’s a theory about Eton, that it doesn’t produce the cleverest boys, but it does produce the most confident. That’s why all these mediocre Pillsbury Doughboys with a nervous system feel as though they’re more than capable of giving being prime minister a shot. That’s what you pay for. Bryony had that kind of confidence. She could behave terribly and not give a flying fuck.
The manager came over, and ushered Bryony to the reception desk, clearly aware that this was a customer ready to make a scene and eager to get her away from other paying clients. But it was no use. Bryony had a voice that carried and she used it to full effect.
‘This is just embarrassing – are you telling me that you’re happy to let customers leave your salon with ragged nails? I was told that this place was good but my friend must have been drunk as per because I’ve never had such a terrible manicure. I have a video to shoot later – am I expected to show my hands on camera like this?’ The manager was making calming sounds, I imagine offers were being made, apologies given. I shouldn’t have to tell you that there was nothing wrong with her nails, now should I? They looked fine, good even. This was just a bored young woman wielding power because dissatisfaction is currency in a way that kindness is not. ‘It goes without saying that I’m not paying for this.’ Bryony wasn’t even looking at the woman, she was browsing the nail varnishes on display. ‘And I’ll take this colour home with me for when my nails inevitably chip within hours. You’re lucky I’m not going to put this all on my social channels,’ and with that she grabbed a bottle of varnish and walked out, the door slamming behind her.
Reader, she did put it on her social media channels.
* * *
I’ve told you that there wasn’t much to know about Bryony. And that’s true. Waters didn’t run deep with that one. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t exactly stupid, she just never had to be smart. She lived a very nice life with everything she ever wanted and as a result, she wasn’t very nice. I’d go further, actually. She appeared to be a total cunt. A great word, it can be enunciated in several different ways to convey varying ferocity and it perfectly encapsulates so many people. I can’t dance around the truth calling people disagreeable or unbecoming. Jane Austen could conjure up a put-down withering enough to leave you breathless without resorting to profanity but then, she didn’t end up in Limehouse. If she had, I imagine Wickham might have been called worse than merely ‘idle and frivolous’.
Perhaps I should’ve got to know her better. Some people might wonder why I judged her almost entirely on her online presence, when it’s pretty universally understood that nobody is their true selves on the internet. This murder, more than the others, might make one feel increasingly uneasy. ‘I understand killing the rotten old grandparents but this girl is so young, they probably have more in common than that which divides them.’ But this is not a story about reconnecting with family. This is not a tale where anyone finds out that they have a whole bunch of relatives waiting to embrace them. And I am not a damaged bird, who desperately wants such shelter. What I want is these people gone. With apologies to Elizabeth I, I have no interest at all in making windows into these people’s souls. Or exploring the lack of them.
* * *
Bryony still lived at home. I guess when you live in a house that has sixteen bedrooms and two staircases you can pretend to yourself that you’re living alone in some way – I assume she occupied a floor, or a wing, if the Artemis McMansion has such pretensions. But still. She lived at home, as an adult. Since she had done a jewellery design course in London and turned down the experience of a true uni life, she never moved out. Not once. Her parents bought her a Chelsea mews house when she turned 21, but she never spent more than a couple of nights there. Instead, she held parties there for the young and beautiful, but always returned to the family enclave. Does that say anything about her character to you? Again, maybe I’m looking for meaning where there is none, but rejecting all the potential that the adult world offers seems like a waste. And staying near your parents when your parents are Janine and Simon Artemis seems like a real personality red flag.
Bryony did not have a partner, or at least, not one that she talked about. I took this to mean she was single, since her previous love interests were featured heavily on her social media and also in the society pages. She referred to herself as pansexual but only seemed to have dated men. Sure.
There was a small dog which featured heavily in her life at one point and then, well, didn’t. Much was made of this, and the hashtag #WHEREISFENDI trended for a while on Twitter, forcing her to admit that she’d given the dog to her personal trainer because of unforeseen anger issues (the dog’s, not hers).
She had a million friends but no friends. There were photographs of her out on the town with other rich, nothing-eyed women – cheek to cheek but never actually touching – but most of her images were of her alone, looking in the mirror, pretending to react to an imaginary photographer.
Bryony didn’t have a job. Sure, she’d dabbled in modelling (I don’t mean high fashion, I mean one season being a brand ambassador for an old British design house grown fusty and desperately looking to get a profile boost on the society pages. The other ambassadors included the son of an ageing rock star and a minor royal – one minor enough not to look anything like Prince Andrew) but she never did a job that would surprise you. That daughter of a multi-millionaire? Oh, she works in her local estate agent, really knuckling down trying to work her way up. No. Of course not. She had a singular low moment when it was announced that she was going to design an exclusive range of embellished headbands for Sassy Girl, and someone in the PR department, clearly desperate not to get fired, took the bold step of describing her as a ‘gemstone artiste’ in the promo material. Do you blame the newspapers for digging up her brief stint (read six weeks) on a jewellery design course and christening her ‘Daddy’s diamanté’?
Still, Bryony is nothing if not completely immune to criticism. You cannot keep an overly privileged white girl down. She might not need a full-time job, but in a world where women are constantly exhorted to be a ‘girl boss’, she had to do something to justify her life of handbags and back to back exercise classes (she briefly went to a members-only studio in Mayfair called The SS Collective, which stood for ‘the slim, strong collective’ but really served to show us all that history is not adequately taught in our schools). So Bryony did what any less than self-respecting person does in the modern age – she became an influencer.
A lot of people might not know what that is. There’s no reason to be smugly proud about such a lack of knowledge. The only thing worse than someone who enthusiastically devours all pop culture and spews it up (wearing a T-shirt that says ‘We should all be feminists’ while queuing up for forty-five minutes to buy the latest trainers made by women in a sweatshop) is someone who takes pride in not understanding new trends. You’re not better than that. You don’t get points for deliberately trying to avoid learning about what’s happening around you. And you’ve almost certainly looked at the Mail Online in the past month, so cut the smug. An infl
uencer is someone who has a large social media presence and uses that to endorse brands for money. No different from the heady days of the Nineties when big name actors would hawk toothpastes in other countries for mega bucks. Well, except that this new group isn’t famous for anything but their influencing. There is no talent that lies behind it, no singing or art or writing that gave them a springboard to start flogging stuff. It’s usually just thin white women (or bulky white men) who have preternaturally bright smiles and unnervingly beige homes (all the better to photograph tat in) and who try to convince the minions that they possess a lifestyle that others should desperately try to emulate. Usually the influencer also bangs on about gratitude, or living in the moment, and pretends they’ve suffered from mild anxiety or struggle with some unspecified hardship in order to present as more relatable. The platitudes that gush from these people could overpower the Thames barrier. Watching some of this stuff will make you wish that it would.
So it was a perfect job for Bryony. Job is possibly a stretch. It was a perfect fit for Bryony. She made video diaries which detailed her day to day activities (one video, with 180,000 views, revolved entirely around a trip to the osteopath) and posted photographs of herself in various bored-looking poses, using a variety of props and backgrounds. By props, I mean her stupidly fluffy carpet, her mirror wall and her walk-in wardrobe. By backgrounds, I’m talking about exclusive holiday locations, often accompanied by hashtags which suggest that she’s desperately in need of a break – #neededthis – as if the carousel of facials, gym classes, and nightclubs was leaving her dangerously close to burn out. I can only imagine that her loyal followers, many of them presumably earning crappy wages and on zero hours contracts, would nod in sympathy and praise her sensible prioritising of self-care.
She interspersed photos of such holidays with sponsored posts which looked just like the rest of her feed. These adverts were supposed to show you how to be a bit more Bryony – tooth-whitening kits, flimsy dresses available for next day delivery, a plated ring with her initials that she described as ‘a must have’. This stuff is gobbled up by the Instagram herd, keen to fit in, desperate to be told what’s good, what works, what will distract them from their lives. But it’s all a trick. Bryony was laughing at them. Or she would have, had she been able to take joy from anything in her life. Perhaps not laughing but sneering. Because if my half-sister wanted her teeth whitened, she’d go to the best dentist on Harley Street. And if she wanted a new dress, she’d put down a grand and have it delivered in a tissue-lined box by courier within the hour. Her jewellery would never leave a green mark on her finger, it’s all from Cartier. The stuff she promotes is photographed, uploaded, and then discarded. I could just about imagine that she gives it to the family housekeeper, but could equally believe that it goes straight in the bin.
Her lifestyle disgusted me and fascinated me in equal measure. Well no, that’s not quite true. It fascinated me more. I have spent hours of my life scrolling through her curated online life, watching her boring makeup videos and logging on for her live Q&A sessions where she spends fifteen minutes at 7 p.m., nightly answering hard-hitting questions from fans like ‘how is your hair so shiny’ which she answers with the intensity and seriousness of someone testifying at a war crimes tribunal. While the internet is a place to get closer to your heroes, it’s also a place to obsessively hate-watch people you would try your best to avoid in real life. I always told myself that it was valuable research, but engaging with it for so long leaves you feeling demoralised and dirty. It’s like repeatedly picking at a scab and wondering why you end up with an ugly scar.
Bryony’s openness on social media had provided me with a lot of options. I had too many – I fell down scenarios of such complexity that at one point I was researching how quickly I could get a helicopter pilot licence. I had to reassess. While not all of my plans had been elegant, they had been effective. Sometimes the lack of style bothered me somewhat. Who doesn’t want to dispatch someone with a bit of wit after all? But it would be the height of vanity to centre all my fragile plans around the visuals of the situation. And vanity can get you caught – just ask the many killers who end up in jail because they hang around the crime scene to admire their handiwork and attract obvious attention.
As it happens, the plan I settled on did have an element of humour to it. There’s one other thing I knew about Bryony, and initially, I almost wrote it off as something she’d exaggerated for effect. All social media influencers try to show some minor vulnerability. It helps the brand. Some pretend they have a palatable mental illness as I mentioned – anxiety often works, never psychosis. Some bang on about ailments like Lyme disease or a chronic pain so vague that nobody can disprove it. Bryony cast her net for something new. A while back, she did a very personal (you knew it was serious because she was wearing a plain black jumper and minimal makeup) video about a recent diagnosis that had shaken her world. Trembling, she spoke directly to camera, explaining that after an evening at Vardo (a restaurant that had recently opened to much fanfare in Chelsea), she’d collapsed and stopped breathing. After extensive tests, the culprit had been revealed and she could never eat a peach again. There were tears, for peaches were her very favourite. When I watched this tale of tragedy, I rolled my eyes and moved on. But she didn’t stop with her PSAs about the dangers of stone fruits. The national food allergy trust got in touch with her, and Bryony found a little cause that would make her look civic-minded and serious. She held a gala evening to raise money for research, roping in fashion designers to donate looks to a catwalk event where she and her friends sashayed through a room in the British Museum, draping themselves around marble statues and posing next to ancient sarcophagi (if there wasn’t a Pharaoh’s curse before there damn well is now). Every so often she’d tell her followers to be mindful of friends with allergies, a service only slightly undermined by the fact that she’d teamed up with a private allergy testing company and recommended their £79 testing kit so that you too could see if a seemingly innocent fruit trifle might kill you. #AD.
Her feed soon filled up with photos of couture and sunsets, and I’d half-forgotten her stone fruit crusade until one night when she live-streamed an A&E visit. To be fair, even with a filter she did look dreadful, eyes swollen up, blotchy skin, rasping as she whispered to camera about how she’d had to have three shots of adrenaline after she’d stopped breathing in a nightclub. Someone had given her a cocktail, blithely assuring her that it was peach-free, and she’d gulped it down, before immediately recognising that tangy taste and running for the exit in a wild panic. Because her friends were idiots, or more tragically, perhaps because they didn’t really know her, nobody put two and two together and realised that she was having a serious allergic reaction. Instead, one bouncer assumed she was having a panic attack and the other suspected she was just drunk. It was only when she turned purple and hit the floor that an ambulance was called. I wonder if the experience of an NHS A&E was almost more traumatic for Bryony than the episode itself. She was on a public ward, with only a curtain for privacy, as she whispered into the camera about how scared she felt. Not because she nearly died, but because a drunk man covered in blood in the bed next to her wouldn’t stop singing a Bowie song. She didn’t know it was a Bowie song, I imagine she’d have written Bowie off as a weirdo. Always with the priorities that one.
You know where I’m going now, don’t you? You should, it’s incredibly obvious. I don’t want to have to be holding your hand as you read this. Fucking inspired, if I do say so. Not that the idea wasn’t handed to me on a plate. God sent me a boat and all that. About ten people a year die from food-induced anaphylaxis each year. Even with all the money and privilege, why wouldn’t she be one of them? And it’s hard to pin a deadly peach intolerance on an unseen enemy.
But why shouldn’t this one be easy? Some of these kills took proper planning – let’s not forget the weeks of frog drudgery, and the deep dive into London’s sex party scene. I spent months figuring out ju
st how much I could manipulate a kid on the internet so I could get to Janine. Hard when you have a full-time job, an increasingly obsessive long-distance running habit (Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, trying to scrub imaginary blood from her hands, I run for miles in any direction away from my crimes, yeah it doesn’t take a therapist thank you) and a dispensation towards anxiety that isn’t so much a character flaw, but doesn’t help when you’re juggling responsibilities.
I never knew quite how close Bryony was to her parents. For all that I studied the family and befriended their staff, they were set apart, living in a world I would never gain access to – no matter how high I climbed or how much I stalked. What I knew for sure – that she was an only child, that she still lived at the family home, that she never mentioned her parents on social media – was mixed in with other titbits. Her mother had spent most of her time in Monaco (nobody does this unless they’re very keen on avoiding tax), living there for at least eight months of the year for five full years. Simon would fly in and out, but seemed to be based here full-time. Bryony, like all the other girls in her world, frequented St Tropez but didn’t seem to show up chez Maman very often. The last official visit (official as in she posted it on Instagram) was two years before Janine had her unfortunate accident. Even after Janine died, there was no direct mention of her on Bryony’s social media. She took a three-week break from posting, and then came back with an image of her silhouette against a disappearing sun, complete with a heart emoji, and was posting sponsored content two days later. Janine was buried in England, and the house she owned in Monaco had sat empty ever since. I don’t imagine that was for any sentimental reasons, but because the house was where the business was registered.