Chapter 15
She’d tried to turn over her pillow to the cool side. She’d sipped water and been to the loo. Nothing worked. The images of dead people remained steadfastly inside her brain. Stubborn like a nasty stain.
Eventually she gave up and her wide eyes stared at the curtains, where a tiny crack allowed the moon to taunt her further. She threw the covers off and reached for her phone. The blue light hurt her eyes so she switched to dark mode.
But it had its advantages.
She googled Jamie Robbins and settled in for the read.
Like so many people who underestimated the horrors of global connections, Jamie Robbins’ life was easy to find.
Jamie’s professional profile at Hampton-Dent had been updated to acknowledge his passing, but there was nothing about his cause of death. Nothing about suicide or accident, or homicide. Died 15 July, 2025. It was final and brutal. If Wiki said it then there was no going back.
Jamie Robbins had been raised in UK care homes.
His was a rags-to-riches story. One of those feel-good memoirs to teach the younger generation not to scrounge.
‘If he can do it, anyone can!’ Jamie was the young Richard Branson of wellbeing.
His game was supplements. His name was attached to some of the most famous food substitutes on the market and his personal wealth was valued at seventeen million pounds.
Not bad for a twenty-nine-year-old orphan from the wrong side of the tracks.
As she dug further, she got sidetracked with peripheral data.
Paul Burlington, his partner, for example, was twenty-eight years old, and had a similar upbringing.
The two young hotshots had been taken on by Hampton-Dent via their internship for kids from underprivileged backgrounds.
Kelly raised a weary and cynical eye at the forced philanthropy of these big companies.
Instead, she wondered what the company received in return, what control they held over these gifted kids who came from nothing.
The answer was always money.
Profit, growth, control.
Powerful people could get anything they wanted.
Her wider search of Hampton-Dent threw up more fascination for Kelly as somebody who never mixed in such circles. She’d only seen it, like most people, from afar, when they announced a scientific breakthrough, or a huge philanthropic vaccine programme for some developing country.
Hampton-Dent had been founded after the Wall Street Crash by two savvy New Yorkers who’d bet on the crash and made a killing.
Waldo Dent inherited from his father and so a billionaire was born.
The current CEO was his great-granddaughter, Tilda Dent, and Kelly examined her photo.
It reminded her of those niche graduation books where the subject sat slightly to the side and attempted their best smile.
Except if they turned out to be serial killers, then their college profile pictures turned out to be unusual, moody, or disagreeable in some way.
Tilda’s was an image of a classic homecoming queen, as Kelly imagined one.
Big smile, excellent skin, and blonde shiny hair.
She looked the picture of American wealth and status.
She found Hank Hampton’s bio elsewhere on the website.
The Hamptons had bought out Whalley Holdings in 1958 and they’d merged with the Dents in 1971.
The company owned 10 per cent of the world’s food suppliers and 15 per cent of farmland in the USA, as well as 12 per cent of the pharmaceutical industry.
Jamie Robbins had some power behind him and it begged the question why such a huge corporation would choose a small Lake District setting like Rydal Water for a conference attended by two of their most senior executives.
Then Kelly googled YouthBlast and a brightly coloured image of a plastic sachet filled her screen; above it was the FairGro logo.
It was clever marketing. It looked fresh, vibrant and youthful.
She wondered how much the design and marketing team had been paid for coming up with it.
As a brand it gained permission to trade last year.
The FDA in the USA and the Food Standards Agency in the UK passed the supplement for general consumption eight months ago.
But she couldn’t find any testing in the public domain previous to 2023.
There was an article on the benefits of the supplement written by Doctor Sandy Cooper. There were few links beyond that.
The ingredients list included the usual words which Kelly couldn’t pronounce: synthetic vitamins, colours, ‘natural flavourings’, as well as some compounds which were trademarked.
Deciding she was already down a rabbit hole, she googled them and found vague references to diuretics, hormones and organic plants grown in Peru.
A tiny asterisk accompanied one of the chemicals and she squinted her eyes to search for the note.
It took a while. She found it at the very bottom of the page, tucked away inside a minute footer with the Ts and Cs.
Neurohydroxy-14 performance compound. It came with a warning attached but for that you had to download an app.
She was none the wiser and got up to make a cup of tea.