How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

  Then there was just total supposition based on all of this information. I suspected that Simon and Janine had lived completely separate lives, probably for a long time. This wasn’t just because of the Monaco situation (though it obviously bolstered the theory – who spends most of the year away from their partner if they don’t need to?), the gossip had long been that Janine had grown tired of Simon’s constant infidelities and had finally taken action to protect herself and her stake in the business. The rumour (backed up by Tina, who reiterated it in an excited whisper one day when I met her for a drink after work) was that the kicker came when Simon was discovered to have kept another yacht for his mistress and had been using a speed-boat to ferry him between the two when the family were on holiday. Threatening to divorce him and take half his money, Janine played a blinder and somehow managed (with the help of a truckload of accountants who she must’ve been paying handsomely) to persuade Simon that there was another option. No divorce or loss of assets, but he had to sign the business over to her. Simon must’ve done the maths, realised that this deal kept him Janine’s prisoner, and still signed the papers. Better to be a rich prisoner than suffer the indignity of the tabloids raking over your private life and having to hand over a hefty chunk of cash to boot. There was an upside – Janine living in Monaco meant that he would no longer pay tax. Rich people see tax the way some people see climate change – it’s a social justice issue worth taking to the streets for. The very rich mainly live under the impression that they earned their money. They have no time for any theoretical argument about whether it’s truly possible for anyone to deserve such an individual accumulation of wealth – once they have it, they turn Gollum-like, ferocious in their protection of their goods and wealth.

  So Janine had lived a nice life in Monaco, where lunches took weeks of planning and there was much complaining to be done about the responsibilities of staff, and Simon was free to do whatever he wanted back in London. Bryony wasn’t involved in the equation at all really. She was their daughter, in that she held the family name and provided the bridge between her parents, but it didn’t seem like she was playing Monopoly round the fire at Christmas with them. It didn’t feel like the kind of family you would recognise – either functional or dysfunctional. Instead their unit felt like one which had all the bearings of something enviable, with none of the emotions which would actually make it so.

  Maybe I was wrong. The problem with doing all of this from a distance was that I could never really know these people and their innermost thoughts. Then again, I thought I understood Jimmy inside and out and he’d surprised me. His betrayal made him 5 per cent more interesting at least. Maybe Janine and Simon really did love Bryony in a very deep and real sense. I could only go on what I glimpsed. Not that it mattered, I wasn’t trying to absolve myself or hope that it wouldn’t hurt Simon to lose his daughter. I’d have killed him first if I wanted to spare him that pain. No, obviously the sequence in which I murdered his loved ones was crucial. That’s why he came last. He had to experience it all. The reveal would be the thing that broke him.

  * * *

  I knew it was a long shot – I couldn’t rely on such a sloppy approach – and yet something in me couldn’t shut it down without even trying it out, albeit from a slightly different tack. I wouldn’t waste any time on it – it was a one-time attempt and it had to be done fast, without too much thought. I took myself off at lunchtime to buy six luxury beauty products in cash from a few different department stores. I bought a range of face creams, one with peach seed extract. When I got back to the office, I locked myself in the disabled toilet, spread them out on the floor and got to work. The most expensive bottle contained a facemask made from pearls (is there anything now that brands won’t add to a beauty product to make it more desirable? At some point, a clever marketing manager will suggest using antimatter in a night serum and the rich women of London, Moscow and New York will lap it up) and I hazarded a guess that Bryony would, if she bothered even to open the box, have an eye for the most high-end product. This was the bottle I was staking it all on. It was a tree to be hidden in a forest – hence the other products ready to be packed beside it in a fancy box. All nice stuff, but she’d have tried most of it already. And there’s nothing as alluring to a vain Instagrammer as a new product promising a level of luminosity not seen before.

  The facemask and the cream which contained the peach-seed extract were made by the same company. That was important for any future investigation. The other products were a mishmash of brands. I decanted four drops of the cream into the facemask bottle using a pipette I’d bought at a veterinary surgery a few weeks back (for my poor dog’s eye condition. Animal lovers are always mad to talk about ailments, and I had to work hard on my feet to explain the fictitious dog’s weepy eye to the weedy-looking nurse who seemed to find this condition completely fascinating) and shook the bottle vigorously. Opening it again, I sniffed the liquid. If it smelt like peach I’d be in trouble. It pretty much smelt like any generic face lotion. Sweet, but not identifiably fruity. I needed a little more reassurance though, and added one drop of the almond essence you add to cakes to be certain. That stuff overpowers anything else in a recipe. One more shake and I sniffed it again. Success. The liquid now reminded me of a bakery, warm and reassuring, which, given my intent, felt pleasingly inappropriate.

  I carefully cleaned the bottle with a baby wipe, and threw the peach extract cream in the bin. The products then went into a plain white cardboard box lined with tissue paper. A card attached simply read ‘Bryony, we hope you enjoy these goodies – the pearl facemask is a dream! XX.’ I desperately wanted to say it was to DIE for but I couldn’t allow myself to be quite so on the nose. All wrapped up, I stashed the box in a bag under my desk and tried to forget about it as the working day dragged on.

  I wasn’t normally someone to leave on the dot of 5.30 p.m., people who do that are usually the dullest and most aggravating colleagues – the kind that go on and on in inconsequential meetings and insist on a proper system for the communal fridge but refuse to engage in meaningful work. They are also the least fireable employees, since they have normally read their contract requirements thoroughly and know exactly what they can get away with. And not that it matters, but this particular kind of colleague is never the attractive charismatic one. They’re not leaving in order to go and get changed for an exciting party.

  But bang on 5.30 p.m., I packed up my stuff and headed out, vaguely mentioning a doctor’s appointment in case anyone raised an eyebrow. Nobody did. People swanned in and out for appointments all the time, and it wasn’t uncommon for some members of staff to take ‘pamper hours’ where they’d duck out of the office for a teeth-whitening session or an eyebrow tint. ‘It’s great for customer interface,’ my boss would say, which meant nothing but let her go and get Botox on company time.

  I managed to get to the parcel shop five minutes before closing. I sent it recorded delivery, assuming the Artemis housekeeper would sign for it, and gave no sender details. She wouldn’t look for them – people like Bryony receive a hundred gift boxes a week. As I stepped out into the fading autumn light, the shop bell tinkled as the door slammed shut. I took it as a sign. I would not check Bryony’s social media accounts in the hope that she’d succumbed. I’d given it a shot, and it was out of my hands now.

  * * *

  I spent the next month busy at work. Sale season was approaching, and I was organising the social media campaigns and making sure that discount emails were sent out to customers who’d signed up to receive them. I knew from research that 95 per cent of these went unread, dropped in spam boxes the moment they landed. It was a pointless exercise, but data was invaluable, we were told. The tone of the messages we sent out was enough to make even the most ardent shopper a card-carrying anti-consumerist. The word ‘Fri-yay’ was used in one email before I shut it down. When I wasn’t trying to preserve the English language and my own dignity in the office, I was looking at new ways to kill Bryon
y.

  As with all the previous deaths, it felt important that this one should take place while Bryony was doing something normal for her. It lent more credibility to the accident scenario and required less elaborate planning. I want these killings done – done well, yes, but I’m not an enthusiastic fan of homicide, researching the most fascinating and gruesome ways to kill. There’s a certain art to a good murder. I will admit to being impressed by the lengths that some people will go to, but I don’t want to get caught up in more and more extreme plans which eventually result in me hanging off a zip line through central London, decapitating someone with a samurai sword just for theatrics.

  After a lot of false starts, I came across a potential opportunity. There is a man, some of you might know of him, who has become a mainstay in the wellbeing industry. His name is Russell Chan, and he has made millions off a nutrition programme called ‘Manifest and Maintain’. If you’ve not heard of this nonsense, then you could spend a thousand years trying to guess what his company does from the name alone, so I’ll break it down. His brand, or ‘innovation’ as he called it in his TED talk which I watched three minutes of before deciding that death was preferable, consists of two main elements. The first is making you copy down positive affirmations that you stick around the house on special pastel-coloured Post-it notes that he sends you once you’ve signed up. The second is telling you to exercise for eighty-five minutes a day and giving you juicing recipes every morning. The creativity that goes into coming up with different blends of fruit and vegetables 365 days a year (you absolutely do not get Christmas Day off) is stunning. And by stunning I mean a waste of some poor nutritionist’s degree. The Post-it notes conceal the fact that this is a diet plan. The MM app is £8.99 to download and costs a further £4 a month for the rest of your life. People have tried to cancel their subscriptions but I’ve never met anyone who’s managed it. But most people don’t, because idiots LOVE Russell Chan. They seem incredulous when they lose weight, as though it were a secret science they’ve discovered and not a meal replacement offering which cuts out all calorific options. They bang on about the confidence they’ve got from (I assume) computer-generated inspirational quotes that they stick around their bookless homes, where they presumably fight for space between the reclaimed wooden sign that says ‘Love’ and the rose gold plant baskets.

  I admire Chan. He’s a terrible monster but he’s only rinsing the willing. He got out of finance before the huge crash a few years ago, and he tapped straight into the wellness market – using that banker’s brain to speculate on what the masses would want in a time of financial insecurity. And he has made millions from it – correctly guessing that the herd would want to treat themselves in small but comforting ways, find peace of mind in platitudes and crucially, look better. You can’t get a mortgage anymore, but you can wear shiny leggings with that new-found confidence.

  So the MM ideology is available to the masses, but it relies on looking exclusive. Chan knew from the beginning that the scheme would only work if the beautiful people repped it for him. Every year around May, he invites 100 of the most influential ‘movers and shakers’ to come to his private retreat in Ibiza where he hosts a weekend of exercise classes, juice workshops, and positivity seminars. Every year without fail, the Daily Mail and other celeb sniffing publications breathlessly scour the Instagram accounts of said movers, grabbing screenshots of the beautiful people doing sun salutations by an infinity pool, hugging each other in a tangled mass of undernourished bronzed limbs and generally gushing about how much they’ve learnt about their soul from the three-day trip. There is a party on the last night, where, according to a girl I know who works in beauty PR, copious amounts of alcohol and drugs get mixed into the fruit smoothies, everyone gets completely off their faces and all phones are banned. I suppose this last-night blow-out acts as an apology for all the dull hikes they’ve been forced to do over the previous two days.

  Guess who was going on the next retreat?

  I found out about Bryony’s plans because my boring mum Instagram account follows nearly everyone that she does and I keep tabs. Months ahead and Chan was already busy teasing his 8 million followers with photos of the planned Ibiza weekend, using the dubious hashtag #cleanhedonism below photos of yoga mats neatly aligned on the sundeck and video clips of white linen clad staff mowing lawns. Below an image of neon balloons tied to a tree, Bryony had posted a comment. Can’t wait to join my soul tribe.

  I got busy. The weekend itself would be off limits but the party sounded like something I could work with. I looked around to find out who organised the last-night party – not an impossible task, since everyone tags everyone on social media as a way of getting discounts for genuine work. Sure enough, the event was run by a company based in Watford called Bespoke Bangers. Such genuine Balearic vibes. I’d wait-staffed many events in my early twenties and felt confident that I’d be in with a shot at serving a bunch of coked-up models. There was an application form on their website and I filled it out, emphasising the many exclusive (and imagined) parties I’d worked at. I stressed that I’d be working in Ibiza around the dates of the party, and explained that I’d heard that they had clients on the island and I was looking for extra shifts. Someone called Sasha emailed back within twenty-four hours, asking for a video chat which I assumed was to make sure that I looked attractive enough for the gig. It was fine by me – a fake name covered me, and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to send over a photo which could be easily retrieved.

  I slapped on make-up for the chat, darkening my brows and applying red lipstick, two things which change the face subtly but effectively. Sasha called ninety minutes later than suggested, which meant I had to hop off a bus and dash into a coffee shop to take the call. She was brusque and decisive, asking me to do some London shifts over the next week to ensure that I was going to be a good match for the company. The whole call took less than five minutes, I’d been right about appearance being the main purpose of it. We agreed that I’d work an event at the Shard the following Tuesday. Details were vague but it was an event for a well-known YouTuber who was launching a self-tanning product. I was to get there at 5 p.m. and wear black trousers – a shirt would be provided.

  ‘Don’t look at the guests unless you’re offering them a top-up – nobody wants a creepy waitress getting starry-eyed,’ Sasha said as she typed on her keyboard, taking her own advice about eye contact.

  The event went smoothly. I had to rush from work, another day knocking off early but what else could I do? The room was bathed in peachy light, with flower arrangements dotted about the space and goody bags stacked under tables weighed down with biscuits iced with the brand logo. It was far from packed, but everyone was eagerly taking selfies with the host, who seemed pleased with the guests busy livestreaming the wall of balloons. I poured champagne and kept my head suitably bowed. Not that I recognised a single one of these people. The Warhol prediction about the future of fame has been completely gazumped by the rise of online personalities. Fifteen minutes seems oddly quaint when you see these empty-headed kids desperately trying to make a video go viral every single day.

  The feedback obviously satisfied Sasha, and I was booked for three more London events. They were cash in hand, which was a relief, and usually over within two hours – the youth of London don’t large it up much, preferring to get home and apply a sheet mask while watching the latest Netflix drop.

  A month later, I got a text from Sasha telling me that she had three events lined up in Ibiza that I could work. She enclosed the dates, and one of them landed on the last night of the wellness retreat. There was no further information, but I felt pretty confident that there wouldn’t be two parties happening on the same night both covered by Bespoke Bangers. I replied immediately, confirming my availability, and booked flights and accommodation for my Ibiza stay that night. I wasn’t going to veer too far from the original germ of an idea. Bryony liked her booze, and a party as hedonistic as the MM one would likely get messy fairly quic
kly. Nothing like a three-day juice fast to get you drunk after one cocktail. A few drops of peach purée in a glass and she’d be done on the dancefloor within minutes. A bunch of health obsessives surrounding her and yet I’d bet my life on none of them having any proper medical training to help her. I had six weeks to wait.

  Except I didn’t in the end. Because Bryony died later that very night.

  * * *

  I didn’t even know about it until the next evening. For all we’re bombarded with news all day long, it’s remarkably easy to opt out of it all if you do something as basic as to forget to charge your phone. I was out of the office that Wednesday, on a training day designed to ‘empower women in business’. It was mandatory, which suggested that it was more to do with ameliorating the recent sexual harassment allegations against a team leader than it was about promoting women in the business. After eight hours spent in workshops where fourteen of us sat around in a circle and role-played challenging office scenarios with each other, I ducked out of the coffee and cake option at the end and speedwalked for the Tube. My phone was dead, so I spent the journey watching a young couple having a fight about whether their success in keeping a houseplant alive meant that they were ready to get a dog yet. She rolled her eyes a lot, he looked away even more. I worried for this imaginary dog. I even felt a pang for the houseplant.

  As I exited the Tube station, I grabbed an Evening Standard and rolled it up, stashing it in my bag. Twenty minutes later I was home, and I set about unpacking the food I’d grabbed from the local health food store and turning on the heating. It was only then that I took the paper and sat down at my kitchen table. The main story was something typically dull about a council house shortage which I skimmed over because everyone knows the Standard only lead with that stuff so that the rest of the paper can be filled with coverage of a new ten-quid ice cream shop in Kensington or a puff piece on a fitness class where you use gold weights. To the side was a small photo of a girl, a selfie taken from an angle, 75 per cent mouth. The familiar whoosh of adrenaline began snaking through my veins. Adrenaline punches your energy levels up to 100 while also freezing time. Everything slows down, becomes woolly, reactions get blunted. I knew instinctively who I was looking at, but the fog which had enveloped my brain prevented me from fully registering what was happening for a split second. ‘Heiress dead at 27.’ I opened the paper, and there, on page three, was another photo of her, this time much younger, standing between her parents at an event.