by Bella Mackie
I have to explain how Simon died. I know that the final death is normally the icing on the cake in novels, the biggest and most dramatic. That’s partly why I’ve been putting off writing it all down. Because this is not a novel. I didn’t arrange it so that his death would be the most shocking. I didn’t push him out of a hot-air balloon or throw him off Waterloo Bridge at sunset. Perhaps I should have tried for a plan like that, just for the added dramatic flair, but I’ve never been one for needless stunts.
Once the final important member of Simon’s family had been dispatched, my need for urgency slackened. Like a marathon runner who knows there’s only a mile to go, I decided to enjoy the route for a little bit. That meant scoping out how Simon was doing. And given the circumstances, Bryony’s funeral felt like the best place to observe him. It was a risky one to try to attend, and I’d mulled it over for several days before deciding that there would be enough weeping women my age there for me to fit in OK. If there was ever a time to see Simon’s grief raw and up close, it was there. I’d just have to make sure I looked the part. The day before the funeral, I raided the company clothing cupboard, which held clothes and accessories that were ready to be loaned out to important clients for events. The array of stuff we kept in this dingy space was eye-watering – designer shoes stuffed on top of each other, bags which cost upwards of two grand forlornly lying on the floor. Above them were sequinned dresses and colourful jumpsuits on a rack, next to a sign which said ‘The higher the heel the closer to God.’ If eyeballs were capable of bleeding, the signs I had to see in this office every day would be the main trigger.
I knew how to dress for this kind of event. I’d spent my adulthood learning how to blend in no matter the situation. At work that means wearing clothes which walk the line of dull but avoid active frump. In the wider world, it means regular trips to Zara like every other woman my age to acquire the regulation armour of jeans, oversized jumpers and chunky boots. But in a crowd of uber-wealthy Instagram airheads, fitting in meant something else entirely. These girls didn’t just spend obscene amounts of money on clothes, anyone rich can do that. Walk down Bond Street and laugh at the idiots who think shearling-lined Gucci loafers and fur-trimmed puffer jackets are the epitome of style and you’ll see what I mean. No, these women were beady-eyed and specific about what they wore, and woe betide you if you got it wrong. It wouldn’t be enough to have just any Prada bag, it would have to be the one that a certain Italian Instagram star was gifted three months prior to it hitting the shops. I didn’t care about their judgement, of course, but I didn’t want to raise eyebrows or provoke any challenge about my presence. So I purloined a brand-new burgundy silk trouser suit made by an up-and-coming Italian designer I knew Vogue were currently championing, and boosted a snakeskin Celine clutch bag whose absence, if noticed, would certainly get me fired. For shoes, I went with a pair of yellow leather mules and spent the rest of the day fervently hoping that Bryony’s funeral wouldn’t be one where everybody wore solemn black.
The actual burial was a private event, and I didn’t even allow myself to entertain gatecrashing that. But the service of remembrance was a free-for-all, trailed in the Evening Standard as though it was the opening of a new bar. Nothing like a sombre event mourning the loss of a young woman for some pap shots. And maybe a performative sob on camera for your followers to see at the end of the day. The venue was a huge old church off the Marylebone Road, but there was nothing holy about this space. Years ago it had been turned into a private members’ space which could be rented out for tens of thousands of pounds and had seen everything from minor celebrity weddings to the twenty-first birthday party of a Ukrainian oligarch’s daughter which had to be shut down after the organisers allowed her to ride into the event on a horse spray-painted a pale blush colour. Even our equine friends cannot escape the proliferation of millennial pink.
I walked into the church sandwiched by throngs of other people, their dark glasses reflecting other dark glasses, their diamonds glinting in the sun and casting jewel-shaped shadows on the stone floor. The service was interminable. Ninety minutes of readings, songs, and even a slideshow of Bryony’s most memorable moments – if a bunch of fucking selfies can count as memories. The true low moment was when a very skinny girl wearing a transparent shift dress displaying her neon underwear walked up to the lectern and began to read an excerpt from Bryony’s favourite book – The Secret. The quivering vocal fry almost sent me over the edge, not helped by the next reading, the poem ‘i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)’ by e e cummings – the patron saint of girls who want to appear to be deep but don’t know any other poets. Thankfully it wrapped up pretty quickly after that. A gospel choir sang ‘Stand By Me’ beautifully, as weeping mourners hugged each other. Not a lot of actual tears, I noticed. Carefully arranged expressions of sadness, dry faces.
Mainly I was looking for Simon. The compère (clearly not the right word for such a solemn occasion but the man was wearing a suit with gold braiding and looked like a bingo caller, so I’m sticking with it) announced at the start of the ceremony that if anyone felt overwhelmed they should feel free to go out into the garden for some air. As a result, there was a stream of people heading for the door throughout the ceremony, only to come back wafting tobacco down the aisle. The constant back and forth meant that Simon was visible only half the time. I got a good view of him during the playing of an Adele song, as he heaved his shoulders and grabbed the neck of a young man sitting next to him in a fairly aggressive way which made the other man look faintly uncomfortable. It’s a huge cliché for sure, but grief is not good for the skin. He really did look ten years older. I can only see Simon in a detached way, there is no true human link between us, but it nearly made me feel a sliver of sympathy for him. Then again, seeing him fall apart over the loss of a loved one also provoked a new sense of fury. Men often say they are feminists only when they have a daughter of their own and are forced to see women as equal human beings. Simon could only experience sadness and vulnerability when someone he loved had been taken from him. My mother died and he knew I had been left alone in the world. For me, there was nothing. He had the luxury to pick and choose who he held close. Well, now he didn’t.
A week later I was sitting at home reading the papers while picking at a Danish pastry. One a week, a stupid rule I initiated to test my limits of self-denial. I opened up the Saturday supplements to find a diary item about Simon, which spoke of worries from friends about his mental health. Ah, mental health. The get-out clause for all bad behaviour. The friends were unnamed of course, but the quotes were revealing. Simon was ‘paranoid and reclusive, muttering about enemies who were out to get him’. Not wrong, but it made him sound satisfyingly unhinged. Apparently he kept telling people that his daughter had definitely been murdered, despite police assurances that they were satisfied it had been a tragic accident. How awful it must be to know in your bones that those around you were being picked off one by one and to realise that you must therefore be next. Even worse, it seemed like nobody was listening to him – a terrible thing for a powerful white man to experience. I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to really savour the prospect that Simon would begin to fear for his own safety. All along, I had only concentrated on the sadness he would face when I killed his loved ones. This panicked paranoia was an added bonus. It made me wonder whether his innate selfishness meant that this fear was actually stronger than any grief he felt. Exploring it further, I decided that it was. A man like my father would feel the loss of his family, but he’d be absolutely shaken by the idea that he might be in danger. A wife and daughter could be replaced – he would hardly be the first 50-something man to start another family in middle age – but his sense of safety was being tested for the first time. I felt so cheered by this realisation that I ate a second pastry in celebration.
* * *
At the time I thought that this moment in my life was glorious. Now I look back and see only how terrible it was all about to get. I ha
d scored six names off my little list. Six down, one to go. The pressure had lifted and I began to cultivate some form of a life. I upped my running, took time to read a few of the books I’d been piling up on my bedside table, and even went on a few dates. Nothing much was doing in that department, because really who wants to carry on seeing a man who has vintage Playboy posters in his living room? People think that buying something and calling it vintage puts them a cut above. But old Playboys are still wank mags, just in faded colour. And men who order dirty martinis are not men who’ll be playboying anywhere near me.
Anyway, the dates were not the highlight of that period. The wonderful thing was the feeling of a load lifting. I am stubborn. It’s good to admit one’s flaws. And that stubbornness meant that a plan I conceived as a child was one I felt sworn to carry out well into adulthood – to the detriment of everything else. If I hadn’t decided that revenge was a path I had to charge down, I know my life would have been unthinkably different. Unthinkable mainly because to really consider what it could have been like is painful. It feels a little weak to admit that, but it’s true nonetheless. As a result, I’ve never thought about it much. I’ve never thought about the career I could have had. I wanted to be a journalist at one point, which I imagine would’ve ultimately meant a life similar to the one I have now – deceit and drinking. I’ve never thought about the possibility that Jimmy and I could’ve built a life together without me holding him at arm’s length while I completed my own private quest. I’ve never thought about how deliberately small I’d made my life, always filled with anger directed at people who never thought of me at all.
Even though I knew this, the anger burned bright. It bubbled out of me every time I walked past Simon’s enormous gated house (and I did it a lot as a teenager, it being just fifteen minutes and a whole world away from the Latimer enclave), every time I saw a Google alert tell me that Bryony was in the Daily Mail sidebar of shame, every time Janine threw a charity gala and one of the society pages featured it. Every time they were projected into my world I felt a new burst of it, like another tendril had suddenly sprung and uncoiled.
But during this interlude I felt the anger wilt. Not entirely, you understand, I wasn’t suddenly going to call it quits and walk away. But Caro had just arrived on the scene, and I was dealing with that spiteful spanner in the works. The drain on my focus made me notice I was spending a lot less time thinking about the Artemis clan (perhaps that’s rubbing it in since there was no clan to speak of anymore) and more time thinking about the wider world and what I might do in it.
The vague plan I’d always carried in my head was one which looked something like this:
Kill my family
Make a claim on said family fortunes (this was pretty blurry in my mind, I didn’t want the whole toxic empire, just a few million quid to be able to live life in any way I chose)
Get together with Jimmy (obviously this was almost stymied by Caro, but her helpful demise and my wrongful conviction meant that this was very much back on the cards)
Buy a house, travel, make some friends, adopt a dog
Get away with all of the above.
It was the scheme of a child, a lofty and ridiculous one, with no specifics or safety nets tacked on. The money was an added extra that I increasingly believed was in reach. But the plan, which formed when I didn’t understand the wealth just beyond my fingertips, was all about revenge. I kept it stoked even when there were moments where I admitted to myself that it was a damaging obsession. But somehow I’d followed it fairly faithfully – grandparents, a breeze. Andrew, painful but well executed. Lee, pfft. Janine and Bryony, a triumph – and I was now tentatively sure I’d be able to follow it to completion. That feeling, after years of adrenaline, was intoxicating. So instead of actually knuckling down and finishing it all, I spent hours on estate agent websites looking at houses. St John’s Wood was too gaudy, full of beautiful houses lived in by greasy people who thought chrome banisters were the height of elegance. Primrose Hill was exactly the same, only the people who lived there bought expensive vintage knick-knacks and thought they were better than chrome. Kensington is a terrible place altogether and I would never consider living in Clapham or Dulwich or anywhere else buggies outnumber adults. It took me three days to settle on Bloomsbury for my fantasy new home and a further two days of teaching myself how to do lino cuts before I realised how fucking slack I’d become.
I’d fallen into the danger zone of complacency and I was gloriously wallowing in it, stretching out and wiggling my toes. I gave myself a stern talking to, deleted dating apps, packed away books, nail varnishes, and anything else which might entice me into distraction, and cleaned my flat until it was all in order. Then I stuck an A3 piece of paper up on my bedroom wall and got back to it.
An hour later, I had written down ten ideas and they were all ridiculous. This part of the plan suddenly felt like the most gruelling, when I’d always thought it would be the best bit. Kill the boring Z-list members of the family to get to Simon. Race through the starters to get to the main course. But instead, I just felt like I was trudging on. So I put on my running kit and set off for Hampstead, taking a route I knew like the back of my hand. I ended up outside the Artemis gates hoping for inspiration. The road was quiet, except for a private security contractor in a yellow bib who wandered past me smoking a cigarette. He barely glanced at me, which confirmed my long-held suspicion that private guards are just there to give a false sense of security to paranoid rich people but could no more disarm a burglar than your grandmother could. Depending on the grandmother, she might actually have a better chance.
I stood just beyond the reach of the CCTV camera attached to the gate and looked up at the house, set back from the road and almost concealed by a garden which wrapped around the property. The blinds were drawn on every window, shutting out the world. The front door, partially obscured by an enormous Range Rover, was firmly shut. It wasn’t just a house in mourning, the homes of the ultra-wealthy often look as though they are uninhabited. Which, a lot of the time they are. When you’ve got four or five houses, you’re not in one place very much. If Simon decided to flee to his Barbadian bolt hole or spend months walking around the Monaco penthouse wailing for Janine, I’d be in trouble. That last option was less likely, since he didn’t seem to have spent too much time grieving for his wife, and I can’t imagine wanting to hang around in the place where she came to a fairly grotesque end. But then the gates whirred into motion, and a soft-top sports car hove into view, being driven by a young guy who I guessed was an assistant. That must mean Simon was at home and that gave me some hope.
Back at home I crossed off all the plans I’d held in my head for him over the years. Some of them were silly, fanciful, unworkable. An early plan to pose as cabin crew on his private plane made me particularly embarrassed. How long would I have had to train to get to that point? Stupid Grace. Some were more realistic and I didn’t disregard the idea to send a condolence parcel to his office which might just happen to contain a substance which just potentially might kill him within seconds. But mainly I felt a sinking feeling, that I’d done it all wrong, that I should have killed him before the rest of his terrible family. I’d made him paranoid and prone to hide away. In my excitement and my insistence on build-up, I’d made the final target almost impossible to reach.
My gloom infected my confidence and made me pull back from every partial plan I had laid out. Then matters were made infinitely worse when Jimmy got engaged to Caro, darkening my mood and causing me to wake up in the night, pulling at the skin at my neck, breathing heavily, sweating through my T-shirt. I felt a looming sense of doom, as if things were rushing ahead of me, already out of my grasp. I could not get a handle on anything.
And I was sadly, horribly right. Did you look back to the beginning of this text and note that I killed six members of my family? Did you see that we seem to have already reached this magic number? Well, there are no prizes for such eagle eyes. Don’t be smug, or
think me too much of a fool. I have already spent months dealing with my failure, trying to shake off the feeling that it was all for nothing.
For those with a slower cognitive process, I will spell it out. I did not kill Simon Artemis. My one aim in life and I will never get to achieve it. And why not? Because he’s dead. Dead but from a terrible accident and not by my hand. I’d rather he lived another 50 years in ignominy and sadness than to die by fucking accident. What a cruel joke.
Three days after I was arrested for the murder of Caro Morton, Simon was reported missing by The Times newspaper. It wasn’t front-page news at first, taking up half of page three (my initial arrest only made page six). But the next day, his face was on the front of every paper. Why would it not be? The story had everything, money, power, death, scandal, and an intriguing mystery. The media revisited their reporting on the tragic year in the Artemis family. Lee, whose death had been hushed up somewhat successfully at the time, was outed as a sexual deviant. A tabloid reporter managed to get into Janine’s empty apartment and take photos of the sauna, sombrely accompanied by a caption which read ‘Burned alive, did Simon take his own life after tragic wife’s gruesome death?’ Before there was any real certainty that he was dead, friends of Bryony used the story as an excuse to post photos of her with the hashtag #reunitedinheaven. If Heaven welcomed in sleazy moguls and spiteful posers, then something had gone horribly wrong in Elysium’s HR department.