How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

  I didn’t want to rush back outside, so I lingered in the main living room, nursing my glass. Janine came back out of the kitchen and I felt ready to make eye contact. Her face had such a sour expression – permanent rich-lady dissatisfaction etched into her skin. But she clearly felt obliged to come over, or perhaps she just wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to steal the silver. As she approached me, I had a moment of panic. Sophie often commented on how my face never betrays any emotion. She seems almost offended that I don’t want to give away all my deepest thoughts with a look. But in that split second, I imagined that Janine could see my intentions plastered all over my face. I started talking about her home, using adjectives to describe her style, in a way which didn’t actually convey that I liked it. We had a brief chat about her mantelpiece, the only thing I could think of to focus on. Her posture relaxed a little as I asked questions about the wide array of different marbles in use in the living room, but her smile remained tight. That might have been because of the extensive work she’d had done, freezing her face to a point which made spontaneous expression difficult, but it was hard to say. She talked about how hard it was to style a house of this size, and told me that her most beloved ornaments were kept at her home in Monaco, as though I would understand the trials of losing track of where my best gilt candlesticks were.

  ‘Have you always lived here?’ I asked, as I trailed my hand across the mantelpiece, deliberately leaving a vaguely smudged handprint. Her hand twitched in reaction, and I could tell that it was taking every shred of willpower and breeding not to smack my arm away.

  ‘Yes, we moved in shortly before Bryony was born, since we knew we’d need a bigger place for children.’ It was strange to hear her talking about children plural. Since I assumed she didn’t mean for his illegitimate offspring, of which there could be many, it suggested they expected to have more kids. I weighed up asking about that against the prospect of getting escorted out of the house by one of the many burly security guards dotted around, and decided to hold my tongue.

  ‘Well it was so nice to meet you. I’m sure Simon’s kids are lucky to have a father so able to provide for them,’ I said, as I walked past her and back into the garden. I heard her calling for the housekeeper before I even got to the French doors.

  I left that party feeling like I was finally getting somewhere. I had been in their midst. It wasn’t just a distant dream anymore. Until now, my interactions with Simon had been precisely zero, unless you counted my pathetic trips past his gates once in a while and the one time I saw him in the lobby of the office. And even I, keen as I was to press on, couldn’t really call them encounters.

  The third benefit of working at Artemis Holdings was meeting my beloved informant Tina. Beloved isn’t exactly the right word, since I’d never have given her a second of my time if she’d had nothing to offer me but friendship, but I prized her for her information and that was more valuable to me than any mate. Tina was the PA to the deputy CEO, Graham Linton, a close friend and henchman to Simon. A man who wore grey suits with a slight sheen, like the type you see in those shops which always say they’re having a closing down sale. I got chatting to her accidentally on a fag break one day, several months into my job at head office. The office manager was very strict about people smoking anywhere near the front door of the office. There was a smoking terrace for the top brass on the fourth floor, cigar smoke would waft through the offices for hours when Graham, Simon or his brother Lee decided to indulge, but everyone else had to go around the back to the goods entrance. One day Tina mentioned that she liked my scarf and I gave her a half-hearted smile, which was more than enough for her to come and sit next to me. She was the friendliest woman I’d ever met, and that alone was sufficient reason for me to quit smoking and avoid the area. I would have done too, had she not mentioned who she worked for just as I was hastily stubbing out my cigarette. It’s horrible having to do a U-turn when you realise that you can get something out of someone, isn’t it? Suddenly having to flatter and praise a potential donor who’s been leering at you all night, or laughing at the jokes of a guy who will pay for every round of drinks? You feel slightly dirty. But really, everything in life is a trade. And I thought Tina might tell me things about the family I wouldn’t be able to find out by myself, so I sucked it up and played nice. Super nice. Getting her coffee, messaging her little cheery hellos on our office chat system, having lunch with her and pretending that she was losing weight when she asked. It was a good trade though. Tina was a loyal employee when it came to Graham (who was often called a creep by women in the office and not just because he wore an extremely unconvincing toupee), but she’d sing like a canary when it came to the Artemis family. Nothing she ever told me was itself the silver bullet in my arsenal, but knowing more about these people who I’d watched from afar for so long was endlessly fascinating. And because almost nothing she told me ever painted them in any light other than fucking terrible, it was a reminder that I hadn’t built them up in my head as monsters with nothing to back it up. Yes, Tina was a gift, even if I had to fuck up my lungs even more to spend time with her.

  But working at Artemis Holdings wasn’t actually getting me any closer to my father, despite my naive expectations. I had somehow envisaged working my way up to be his closest aide within a few years, gaining his trust, worming my way into his life before doing a dramatic reveal and killing him as he gasped at the betrayal. But the man employed thousands of people and he was no more going to invite me into his inner sanctum than he was going to read a book which wasn’t about crushing it in business. So, when I was headhunted by another fashion PR and marketing company, I left. My resolve was as strong as ever, but I would be earning nearly double my old salary and, more importantly – I had come to realise that murdering an entire family while working for their firm might not be the smartest of moves. I allow the initial misstep because I was young.

  This was when the fog that I had always felt swirled around me started to lift and my life became clearer. I got to a place where I felt safe and in control, and I was able to look to the future with more focus. In some ways, it meant slowing down and becoming familiar with the art of patience. I’ve worked at the same company ever since. I have stayed in the same flat, which I still rent from the ancient Turkish man who lives above me and has not raised the rent since I first moved in, much to the chagrin of his son. I have saved money, kept a low profile and lived life on a small scale, all the while waiting for the moment when I would kick-start my plan and begin a new chapter. It’s not a time about which great tales will be written, but so many people live like that every day and don’t seek a next chapter at all. They are content with their small and banal lives, their basic requirements met and ‘ooh a nice bottle of prosecco’ as a treat once in a while. So I don’t find it especially odd or disappointing that I spent those years living dull. The best years of your life are said to be those which whizz by in your early twenties when you can drink and party and live spontaneously. Mine were not like that. Instead, those years were followed by a thrilling hurtle through time as I carried out my plan, and now I anticipate many years to come which will be as large and as exciting as I wish them to be.

  I don’t mean to imply that I lived like a puritan. There were little luxuries now and then. I do seem to appreciate the slightly nicer things in life, a predilection which I imagine I inherited from both my mother and father in some ways, and unleashed by living at the Latimers with their penchant for organic wines and exorbitant interiors. It’s why my small flat has one wall dedicated to shoes, the most basic starter drug when women look to treat themselves. As I got a little older, I took wonderful solo holidays to places I could barely have imagined when I was growing up with Marie. And every time I sat and drank a glass of wine on a terrace somewhere, I squashed the thought that perhaps my life had turned out better than it might have had Marie lived. Sure, I suffered a huge trauma in the loss of my mother and the Latimers were never my family, but gaining instant entry to
the affluent upper middle class and harbouring a vicious and long-standing grudge had worked out somewhat well for me. I pushed the thought away most of the time.

  The alarm has gone off again. It’s probably just the weird girl three cells down who won’t stop screaming but I have to go line up. More later.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I felt bouncy as I walked to work that sunny Friday morning. A dull week of slogan brainstorming had slowed time down to a crawl, and I’d been taking late-night runs around the city just to burn off some of the boredom. But that weekend I’d cleared my schedule, I’d made sure I had good wine and nice candles in the flat. I’d booked a massage for Saturday with my favourite masochist masquerading as a masseur and I was going to a sex party in the evening. Spare me any shock. Don’t be horrified, or worse, excited. This isn’t a random swerve into my particular proclivities. I went for research.

  It had been nine months since I’d watched Andrew Artemis float away to be with his beloved frogs and I’d been keeping my head down, working hard and resisting all urges to jump back into my plan. I knew before I started that the pacing had to be strict, despite the constant yearning I had to get rid of them all in a week and take the consequences. The initial, and let’s face it, more irrelevant murders had to be well spaced out so as not to cause suspicion early on. ‘Tragic accidents’ was what I wanted people to say. This could then grow to ‘an unlucky run for the family’, before ramping up to ‘curse on the Artemis clan’. At a push, the last murder might make a few people mutter about foul play, but by then the whole family would be dead and buried and too many others would stand to benefit. I felt confident that nobody would be rushing to avenge them.

  So I’d let the dust settle after Andrew. And I’d felt little joy when I looked back on it, unlike the euphoria I’d had when Kathleen and Jeremy rolled off that cliff, so I’d been happy to step back for a bit. I knew Andrew’s funeral had been well attended, by earnest people in cagoules and red-faced private school chums alike. I had read that his mother Lara had been utterly devastated by her only son’s death, making no public comment but pulling back from her work as Artemis Holdings Vice President and establishing a charity for wildlife preservation in Andrew’s name. I wondered whether the incident had caused her to break from the family as well as the brand. The society pages still constantly featured Lee, but Lara seemed to have retreated from London entirely, staying mostly at their farmhouse in Oxfordshire. I’ve seen the property on Rightmove. The main house is entirely painted in shades of muted grey, and there are a wide variety of tasteful Persian rugs throughout, but then there’s also a driving range in the grounds and it has the biggest hot tub I’ve ever seen overlooking the herb garden. It’s not hard to see who chose what there. If it helps you guess, Lee wears cowboy boots and calls them ‘his signature’.

  From what I had read, Lara seemed totally unsuited to Artemis life. Perhaps that’s why I initially assumed Lee couldn’t be as nightmarish as he came across, despite all the signs pointing to him being exactly that. She was smart, a first from Cambridge and an MBA from an Ivy League college. He was a chancer, steeped in privilege and greed. The Artemis family might be canny, but I was confident that Lara was rarely stimulated by intelligent conversation at the family dinner table. According to Tina, who continued to gossip her head off to me long after I’d left the office, there was still much bafflement about Lara’s choice of partner. ‘He was handsome, everyone thought so. Don’t roll your eyes! That’s not nothing when you’re young. And he was good at adapting his behaviour to mirror those he was around. He’d get these big inspired eyes when she talked, and tell everyone how clever she was. She was shy, but you could tell she was flattered by the attention. This lovely looking young girl, awkward as hell but just so smart. She wasn’t prepared for a man like Lee and by the time she understood who he was, it was too late. Of course, his parents didn’t like that she was mixed race. They didn’t say it explicitly, but it was obvious. And he shut them down completely. He did love her, I think. In his own way.’ It was a weak explanation and it didn’t seem enough for Lara. Aged 18 you might get fooled by a man like that, but you learn. You learn fast or you end up trapped.

  By the time I met Lara’s husband, Tina’s rationale seemed even more flimsy. Lee was Simon’s younger brother by three years. If old copies of Hello! were anything to go by (and I had bought six years’ worth of them on eBay to search for mentions of the Artemis name, which also gave me a good education in the various scandals of minor European royals), then Simon might have been the ultimate playboy back in his Nineties heyday, but Lee was his enthusiastic shadow. He was similarly good looking for the time (in a way that conveyed heartless sociopath – why was that considered attractive back then?), with a permanently bronzed face, and jet-black hair, slicked down. It sort of worked for him, when he was slim and unlined. Photos show him surrounded by women, often with a magnum of champagne in hand. But twenty years later and the same aesthetic was somewhat marred by the tiny white circles around his eyes showing you that the tan was now from a sunbed shop in the suburbs, and the slightly smudgy ring around his collars which appeared when he got sweaty, revealing that he probably didn’t tip his colourist enough.

  Lee was never a complete black sheep. No serious addiction problems, though he definitely dabbled. No bankruptcies, though he’d been listed as CEO of no less than twenty-seven different companies at Companies House, all of which were closed within months. One venture, GoGoGirl Pictures, was shut down in sixty-three days. The name didn’t exactly suggest he’d hoped to make Art House movies. Perhaps his pearl-clutching mother got wind and put her foot down on that one.

  Kathleen and Jeremy had Simon to hold up the family name. He was a success story, the guy who bought his way into royal dinners and pressed the flesh with the Mayor, the Prime Minister, and anyone else who was easily swayed by his money, which was most people. Even decent people go mad when faced with the uber-wealthy. They might have strong views on the wealth imbalance, and think that the rich unfairly run a system in which they accrue even more to the detriment of all others in society, but give them a glass of champagne and ask them to pose with a millionaire who might give them a job or write their organisation a cheque and they simper like the best of them.

  Before the various scandals surrounding the Artemis company, there was even talk of giving Simon an OBE, which was insane since the most he ever did for anyone else was show up at a few annual charity dinners and bid on stupid prizes offered up by other rich people. He once hit the headlines for buying a painting of a horse by a controversial but popular artist who sold his crap for millions. It couldn’t just be a nice lifelike painting though, nothing as simple as a George Stubbs picture which took practice and skill. The horse would have the face of the buyer. It went for 300 grand. And now somewhere in the Artemis mansion proudly hangs a giant centaur. That was one part of the inheritance I would politely decline.

  Anyway, the OBE idea was quietly shelved but Simon remained respectable – held up as an icon of British business. And as a result, Lee got to play the stereotype of the slightly hopeless younger brother with no real ramifications. He was rescued when he fucked up (once sneaking up to the viewing platform at St Paul’s Cathedral after a football match while drunk and making a video of his mates chanting as they mooned over the side of the rails. Someone made a call, and after a fulsome apology to the Church of England, the matter was considered closed) and given jobs by the family which he didn’t need to do much for when his own career ideas went off the rails. In fact, I imagine he was very much encouraged not to take his role in the company too seriously, for fear he might fuck things up.

  Aged 29, he met Lara through her work at Artemis Holdings, and married her eight months later with a three-day wedding extravaganza on a Greek island. One of the Bee Gees played, and one tabloid sent a reporter out who infiltrated the party dressed as a waiter. The write-up gleefully commented on the yobbish behaviour of various glitterati guests, in
cluding one model who got so drunk that she fell into the pool in a pearl-encrusted couture dress that she’d borrowed for the event. As per Tina, who wasn’t there but who always did her homework, Lara had somewhat cold feet before the wedding, but had been assured that the big affair was just a one-off for family and friends before they settled down. He promised that the party days were over, talking about creating a future where she could be the boss in the family. How little men promise. How much we grasp at it.

  His family had bought them a large stuccoed house in Chelsea, just off the Kings Road, and they had Andrew fairly soon after moving in. Lara worked her way up the ladder and seemed to spend the rest of her time either organising charity lunches for worthy groups or lobbying the government on behalf of vulnerable children. The family must have tolerated Lara’s charitable nature, recognising that it lent them an air of respectability, but I imagine that her husband drew the line at ever having these do-gooders step foot in his house. In his own life, Lee clung onto the excesses of his twenties, pictured out at nightclubs in social diaries, cruising the Kings Road in his latest supercar, occasionally being named as a partner in new bars and restaurants which popped up only to shut down six months later when the real owner realised that slim margins and long hours weren’t as glamorous as the opening night may have suggested.

  I suspected that Lee liked more than a couple of drinks and a flirt when he went out. His face, once firm and sharp, was now puffy, and his eyes always looked slightly glazed in paparazzi photos.

  More often than not, he was driven around town in a lurid green Bentley when he went out at night, an early drink-driving charge (tossed out after a good lawyer argued that his cold medication had interfered with another, more private medication – the papers had a lot of fun with that delicate phrasing) had meant that a permanent chauffeur was a prudent investment. This meant it was easy to figure out where he was if you happened to be in town of an evening, the car would double-park on even the narrowest of London streets, starting off at the most upmarket bars that Mayfair could offer, then heading for the private members clubs, and by 3 a.m., when most of the revellers were starting to disperse, weaving down towards Chinatown, towards the slightly seedier venues which weren’t keen on fully advertising what they did exactly.