Follow Me (15 page)

12:46

Monday 2 November

1 FOLLOWING 69,987 FOLLOWERS

Freddie slammed into her flat and flung her bag and the box files onto her bed. She wanted to help. Wrenching her phone from her pocket, she tapped onto Twitter. Maybe someone had worked out who Sophie was and warned her?

BuzzFeed were running an article:
23 Reasons You Might Be The Next #Murder Victim
. Last week she might have read the piece and laughed at the absurd suggestion. Heck, she might even have written it: a wry take on the news. But clickbait now carried a much darker meaning for Freddie. Things didn’t work out well for bait. She’d seen and smelt a dead body. A metallic taste pricked across her tongue and she swallowed. She didn’t want anyone else to die. What if the intended victim was reading the BuzzFeed piece, unaware this was no joke? Freddie tapped it open:

• 1. Your name is Sophie.
  

• 2. You have a Twitter account.
  
• (Gif of Beyoncé, hair blowing in wind machine, hand on chest singing ‘me!’)
  
• 3. You post cat videos.
  
• (Gif of startled cat falling off a sofa).
  

She knew it: meow you doing? She wasn’t the only one who thought this might be about cat obsessives. BuzzFeed agreed with her! But why was Apollyon doing this? Why would someone want to kill Internet stereotypes? It didn’t make sense. Was it a twisted form of terrorism? No. Some group would have claimed it if that was the case. Freddie thought of Apollyon’s growing number of followers – there were over 69,000 now – would someone do all this for fame? She shuddered at the thought. She opened Google to search ‘online killers’. If the person behind the Apollyon account had killed Mardling, photographed it and posted it online, was he the first person to announce a crime in this way?

The first search result was a Wikipedia article on
Internet Homicide
, which the article described as referring to ‘a killing in which victim and perpetrator met online, in some cases having known each other previously only through the Internet’. As they didn’t know who Apollyon was, they didn’t know if he’d met Mardling online, though if Mardling was selected for being a troll, then he was
sourced
online, Freddie reasoned. She read on: ‘Also
Internet Killer
is an appellation found in media reports for a person who broadcasts the crime of murder online or who murders a victim met through the Internet.’ Again, assuming Apollyon was responsible for Mardling’s murder then he was definitely an Internet Killer. She scrolled and clicked through examples of Internet Homicides: the cannibal who advertised for a victim online before fricasseeing and eating him; several militant extremist groups who’d planned murders in encrypted chat rooms; a guy who sent a pipe bomb through the post to a Craigslist con artist. Nothing suggested there’d ever been an Internet serial killer before. Freddie wasn’t surprised. That was the kind of thing you’d notice: a killer posting photos of murder victims, a killer posting threats and clues to who his next victim would be. That was what everyone was noticing now. Apollyon was sick.

She closed the article and continued to scroll through her timeline. Outraged tweeters were circulating a link to a
Family Paper
online op-ed piece:
Is the Troll Hunter a Working Mother?
Good old Sandra, thought Freddie of her Typical Student column editor, this had all the hallmarks of her usual style: incendiary statements wrapped in the cloak of moral concern. She skim-read the article, which was liberally sprinkled with stock images of exasperated women in 90s suits holding a baby in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. The first commenter on the story had written, in terrible English:

woudn’t Be surprised if the Hashtag Murderer was a Feminazi!!!!

The comment had been liked 567 times. Freddie had to write her own
Family Paper
column in a few days. How was she going to concentrate on writing when she should be trying to prevent a murder? How could she write a deliberately provocative piece about binge drinking or some other student stereotype at a time like this? Freddie wondered if she’d ever stop thinking about Mardling’s dead body. Then, like all good pitches, an idea crystallised in her mind. Swiping between screens, she scrolled through recents on her phone and pressed dial. Neil answered.

Freddie could hear the whir of the newsroom in the background. It sounded alien. She’d forgotten life was still normal for other people. ‘Neil, it’s Freddie. I’ve got a story for you.’
Why I’m Convinced the Hashtag Murderer Will Kill Again.
First-person. Insider info. The personal story behind the murder investigation.
One reporter’s battle to save a life.
She could get her warning direct to the public:
Called Sophie? Own a cat? Then you could be in danger.
They’d bite. She couldn’t stand by and do nothing while Moast and the others were off chasing drug barons. If she hurried, they’d make the evening editions.

07:50

Tuesday 3 November

1 FOLLOWING 83,245 FOLLOWERS

Classic FM’s Hall of Fame album evened out the sounds of early morning London in Nasreen’s headphones. The volume low, so if anyone approached her from behind she’d hear. It didn’t happen often, but occasionally she’d be recognised by someone in the street. An acquaintance of a criminal she’d given evidence against in court. They sat in the gallery, watching you, the faces: press, family, friends of both the victim (if there was one) and the perpetrator. You couldn’t remember them all. But they remembered her. It was like a spotlight shining on you: taking the witness stand. She’d lived in Hackney for a while, but had had to move house when a man had blocked her flat front door one night, threatening her with a knife, for doing over his mate. She was cool and calm. Like usual. But the other residents didn’t like it.

Always better to talk your way out of a situation than let it escalate. She moved shortly after: back to the town she and Freddie were from. Back to Pendrick in Hertfordshire. She liked being close to her parents, and enough time had passed that she’d found new places to visit as an adult. She liked the farmers’ market on the first Sunday of every month, the family-run Italian down by the medieval clock tower, the way the older streets tapered into narrow car-free cobbles, the way the sun set across the open sky of the common. There was a new sports complex and a cinema, and she was careful not to walk past her and Freddie’s old school. She couldn’t deal with the memories that flooded through her if she strayed near their old haunts. The commute was longer, but the distance helped her switch off. Reading classic novels on the train.
Great Expectations
had taken weeks,
Pride and Prejudice
mere days. She’d seen Freddie’s mum one day in the library above the new shopping mall, and to her shame had ducked behind some shelves and hid. She didn’t want the past to rear up and bite her. Her home was in her parents’ name, she booked restaurants and holidays in her mum’s maiden name. She’d grown used to hiding. Keeping her head down. She didn’t want anyone to recognise her, to work out who she was, to know what she and Freddie had done. It was almost second nature. She didn’t have any friends from back then. From school. She’d been careful to limit socialising to work colleagues, or those who’d moved to Pendrick recently: Sarah from spinning class, Claire at the pottery course she’d taken but only made one session of. Nasreen worked nights, weekends, whenever the case demanded it. Friends had to be flexible, tolerant, close. But no matter how close she was with the girls, no matter how many glasses of wine they drank, no matter how much they cried over broken hearts or raged over career frustrations, she never told them the secret only she and Freddie knew. It could never come out. She imagined the look of shock and disgust on Sarah and Claire’s faces if they knew the truth. She’d be disowned. Everything would be ripped apart. Again. Nasreen had carefully pieced her life back together in the last eight years, but she knew it was bound with secrecy, and held together by silence. She moved in the shadows, where she could hide. How could Freddie put so much of herself online? She was exposed. She threatened
both
of them.

The concerto changed from string to piano music. Freddie would take the micky out of her for listening to something so mundane. She remembered her excitedly thrusting Ramones vinyls at her from Mr Venton’s collection when they were ten. Nasreen liked music with no lyrics; it helped her order her thoughts. She hadn’t slept well last night and her bag, heavy with files from gang cases, dug into the soft shoulder of her black wool coat. Her heels clicked along the pavement of the tree-lined street of Victorian terraces that ran between the railway station and the Jubilee. She’d found nothing in the files that tied Alun Mardling to any gang. She couldn’t help but feel Freddie was right: they were looking in the wrong place. Would DCI Moast listen to Nasreen though? Freddie had hardly made the best impression so far, but beneath her disruptive behaviour Nasreen recognised she’d made some sound points. She sidestepped a woman and a small girl on a bright red scooter wending their way along the path.

But Freddie’s presence made Nasreen doubt her own logic. Was she being played? Of course not. She was a grown woman now, not an impressionable teen. Yet each time she saw Freddie’s face – those joking eyes, that curly hair – she was flung back to that awful night eight years ago. The terror. The pain. The guilt. It muddied her thoughts. For years she’d fought it back: the overwhelming desire to collapse, fold, break. Freddie wouldn’t understand. Nothing touched her. Nasreen had battled to get this far. Each day she’d buttoned up her police uniform she’d felt a hypocrite. Each step she took was to atone for the past. With Freddie here, the truth was so close she could feel it pressing on her – how long before it came out? And that journalist – the one who knew she and Freddie had gone to school together – how long before they unearthed it? Put two and two together with the local paper report at the time? It was unimaginable. Her colleagues could never know. Nobody could know. Nasreen summoned up all her control: she had to keep acting normal.

Not for the first time, Nasreen wondered if Freddie’s involvement in the Mardling case wasn’t an accident. The one person in the world who knew her darkest secret reappearing like this – it seemed unlikely. Was Freddie back to punish Nasreen? Was that her motive? Nasreen had seen crimes committed for far less. This Twitter stuff was so theatrical, as if whoever was doing it wanted a big audience. And Freddie seemed so keen for them all to take the tweets seriously. So convinced she’d worked out every riddle. Was it just bravado? Had she manufactured the whole Apollyon thing to stay close to the case? To get a story for her newspaper?

The Freddie who’d taught her to stand up to her older cousins wouldn’t hurt anyone. The Freddie who’d once fed an injured bird with honey and seed until it was fit to fly again couldn’t be a criminal. Nasreen thought of that soft bird, Queenie, tucked under a blanket in a box in Freddie’s parents’ garage. How Freddie had cried when her dad had threatened to put Queenie down. She’d cried again the day they let Queenie fly free from the common. But that girl was gone, replaced with this angry, shouting young woman. Nasreen didn’t know what this Freddie was capable of. She’d alibied out for the murder, but was it possible she was behind the Apollyon tweets? Was this Freddie’s revenge? Again she chided herself for letting her thoughts run away with themselves: everything wasn’t all about Freddie, she thought wryly.

As the road widened into the shop-lined street that led to the station, Nasreen passed workers rolling up security screens and placing tubs of £1 cleaning products in front of their premises. She took her headphones out and pushed her phone into the woolly pocket of her coat. Frost-covered leaves crunched and slid under her feet. Her morning commute was increasingly dark. Even within the Jubilee – a place she’d always felt she belonged – Nasreen now felt the chill. She was being frozen out. The team had already decided she couldn’t be trusted, following the Freddie debacle at Blackbird Road. So what difference did it make if she went against DCI Moast? If she sided with Freddie? As she pushed open the door of the station and nodded to Charlie on the desk, Nasreen made a decision. She’d found no evidence of gang links to the case. She would tell DCI Moast she too thought they should look for anyone called Sophie (with a potential cat), who was linked to Mardling.

Nasreen’s footsteps echoed down the Jubilee corridor. In the distance she could hear phones ringing. The hum of those on the overnight shift handing over to the day team over coffee in the canteen. The small perforation in the rubberised grey floor halfway down the hall. This was still her station. She knew it and it knew her. She wasn’t out yet. Pushing open the door of the incident room, she was surprised to see Freddie bent over some papers on a table in the back of the otherwise empty room. ‘What are you doing here so early?’

Freddie looked up, her brown frizzy hair half flattened against one side of her face, ridiculous thick-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose, dressed in a wholly unsuitable holey black jumper, through which you could see flashes of a red top she had on underneath. ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Thinking ’bout all this. I spent half the night trawling the Internet for any sign of a link between Alun Mardling and a Sophie. All I found was an online review our good friend Alun had left on a porn site. He gave
Rammers Revenge
four dildos, and logged it under his home email address, the tool. Looking up Apollyon proved equally futile, unless you happen to be particularly interested in bad demon fan art. There’s nothing in those emails either, just a load of Amazon receipts for action DVDs, and two-for-one offers at his local pizza joint. Our boy liked a meat feast with extra barbecue sauce.’