Now You Know

by Nora Valters

  Jenna slowly turns around to face me.

  I point at her. “I know what you did! How could you? You need to put this right!”

  Jenna’s eyes go wide, and all the colour drains from her face. Not even that thick layer of blush can disguise the fact that she’s shocked to see me. She glances at her colleague, who is staring open-mouthed at me, having forgotten about serving the customer, who also watches the scene with undisguised fascination.

  I sense a presence next to me: the security guard is hovering.

  “Jenna!” I repeat, louder this time, and I slap the counter. The make-up rattles and tinkles on the shelves.

  “Madam,” the security guard warns softly.

  Jenna shakes her head slightly at me and then whispers to her colleague, “I just need a minute.”

  Her colleague nods vigorously as if to say: get that crazy woman out of here, she’s scaring the punters.

  Jenna edges out from behind the counter and grabs my arm, directing me towards the doors. She says to the security guard, “I’ve got this, Harry.”

  He nods and stands aside, but follows behind us as Jenna ushers me out of the department store. But I jerk my arm away and plant my feet, refusing to be silenced or pushed around. “Jenna, we need to talk, right now.”

  “We do,” Jenna says gently. “But outside.” She looks around at the staff and shoppers still watching us, at the security guard on high alert and readying to spring into action. “Please,” she begs, appearing close to tears.

  I grab her arm, and we head out the glass doors. She points to a side alley out of the way of the flow of pedestrians. I lead her there.

  We face each other. Now I’m looking straight at her – the woman who has ruined my life – my fury rises from the tips of my toes and up my body ready to boil over and spew from my mouth in a burning torrent. It scares me; I’ve never felt so much rage.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Jenna says before any words pass my teeth.

  “How could you?” I shout.

  “Oh god,” she groans. “I thought I’d got away with it, but then you called me at nearly 5 a.m., and I just knew you’d worked out it was me.”

  “Damn right I worked it out.”

  “I’m so sorry, honestly. As soon as I did it, I felt awful about it. So impulsive and stupid. I totally overreacted to Toby’s leaving me. He was my first long-term boyfriend.”

  “Do you know how much distress you’ve caused me? How much damage you’ve done? You need to put things right, immediately!”

  “Of course. How much will it cost to respray it?”

  Her reply flummoxes me. “What?”

  “I’m guessing that’s what will need to happen?”

  I scowl at her. It’s as if she’s coming out with random words to deliberately trip me up and hoodwink me.

  Jenna looks at me quizzically. “Have you been to a garage yet? Got a quote?”

  “Are you talking about my car?”

  She holds up her hands in a kind of surrender. “Yes, I admit it. I keyed it after I left the funeral reception.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit about my car right now! You need to give me access to my social media and bank accounts, and you need to tell Akshay, Toby, and Dad what you did, and also my boss, Madeline. And you need to tell the police you started that fire.”

  Jenna frowns. “Huh?”

  “For fuck’s sake. I’ve had enough of this bullshit. You wanted to ruin my life. Well done, you did.” I clap for emphasis. “Now, you’ll put it right.”

  Jenna hugs herself, voice small and frightened. “I’ve honestly got no idea what you’re talking about. Are we not talking about me keying ‘bitch’ into the side of your car? What do I need to tell Toby?”

  This feigned ignorance infuriates me. “You told Keith that his son is gay! You blabbed before Toby could say anything, and then flooded Keith’s Facebook page with homophobic comments.”

  For the second time the colour drains from Jenna’s cheeks. Her hand shakily finds her face, and she cups it in front of her mouth.

  “Toby’s gay?” she whispers. With her other hand she reaches out to the wall behind her to steady herself as her legs quiver. “Gay,” she repeats.

  My fury ebbs. It’s obvious this is the first time she’s heard this news. I scrutinise her. She must be acting. I underestimated her before; this has to be a performance.

  But no actor can make the colour drain from their faces, can they? Affect such a look of shock that it even shows in the eyes? Make their entire body quake non-stop?

  “You didn’t know?” I demand.

  She shakes her head, clutches her waist, and doubles over as if in pain. “Toby’s gay,” she says again, but this time it’s a statement, and weeps noisily. I observe her every tremble. It goes on so long that I start to feel ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. Eventually she straightens, still whimpering. “I guess that makes sense,” she snivels.

  A thought comes to me: the fire. “What were you doing last night?”

  She groans. “Ohhhh, how did you know? It must be written all over my face. I feel so bad about it. It was a one-off thing. It’ll never happen again.”

  “You were in Salford?”

  “What? No, it was at mine. He’s my flatmate Cammy’s older brother. He’s a painter decorator and came over to help fix the hole in my bedroom wall. One thing led to another… and he ended up staying over.”

  “You had a one-night stand?”

  “I’m not proud of it. It was just some rebound foolishness.”

  “Prove you were at home last night.”

  Jenna looks confused at this demand and goes to protest, but sees by my clenched jaw and hard glare that I’m deadly serious.

  She pulls out her mobile from her uniform pocket, taps in her pin code and then shows me a text from a ‘Dean’. I take the phone from her and check the time and date it was sent: today at 8.33 a.m.

  It reads:

  - Thanks for last night, sexy, and for letting me stay over. Made it to work on time. We had fun ;-) Let’s do it again sometime xxx

  I hand back her phone and study her face. Her make-up is ruined: mascara running, foundation smeared, lipstick smudged. There’s no way this woman who cares so much for her outward appearance is putting this on. She’s clearly devastated by the news that Toby’s gay. And has an alibi for last night, so couldn’t have started the fire. A cold numbness permeates under my skin. It alarms me more than the fury. A stillness. An emptiness I can’t fathom.

  “So you keyed my car?” I ask in a flat monotone.

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I stare at her for a long time until she wipes her tears away.

  She continues, “I’ll give you the money to fix it. Whatever it costs.”

  It begins to rain. A splatter at first, then big fat drops. I pull up my hood, but Jenna shivers in her store uniform, her perfectly tousled hair sticking to her face.

  She rubs her hands together against the cold. “How long has he been gay for? When did he know?”

  “If Toby wants to tell you about it, he will,” I snap.

  She nods, then gazes at me. “So, what’s all this that’s been happening to you?”

  A few moments ago, I believed this woman was my arch nemesis, and now she’s showing me concern. I consider her expression. She genuinely looks like she wants to help me and is ready to listen. But I just can’t tell and, as the hustle and bustle of the busy shopping district suddenly begins to close in on me, I have an overwhelming urge to be anywhere other than here.

  I walk away.

  26

  Completely deflated, I arrive on my road without even remembering the journey, my body taking over with familiar movements while my brain shut down.

  OPNN’s tattoo guy and scarf guy are on the pavement outside my house. But so are a number of other bystanders; I estimate about twenty. A few with professional cameras. Urgh. Media photographers. I proba
bly know most of them from organising numerous photocalls over the years for clients. They’re congregating outside my house in the hopes of getting a photo of the most hated woman in the world right now. At least with this many people milling about, no one will attempt to throw acid at me or harm me in any way. I hope. Be grateful for small mercies, as they say.

  Thankfully I see the crowd before they spot me and park a little way up the road. I wrap my scarf around my head so that only my eyes are peeping through, and pull my hood up over my head. This will deter the photographers – because if they can’t identify my face in a shot, I could be anyone, and no newspaper will use it. I get out of the car and hurry towards my front door.

  There’s a flurry of activity as cameras are raised, and everyone huddles forward in an attempt to get closer to me. People shout my name and throw out questions. Tattoo guy steps in my path, but I sidestep him and mumble, “No comment.”

  As I let myself into my house, I notice the blackened, charred patch on my doorframe and front door, where the acid is eating away the wood. It shocks me for the second time that someone would do that.

  I double lock the door and head straight to the lounge, peeling off my coat and scarf and dropping them on the floor as I walk. I collapse on the sofa and cry and cry and cry.

  When my eyes finally dry, I shuffle through to the front room to peek out the window. It’s dark now, early evening, and raining heavily. I can’t see anyone. All the rubberneckers are gone. There’s nothing to see here. Exhausted, I drag my legs back through to the lounge, but I can’t bring myself to sit. Instead, I stand, swaying slightly, and hug myself.

  The same questions circle:

  Who is doing this to me?

  Why?

  What have I done to them?

  I desperately want to talk to Mum, and the thought of her no longer on the end of a telephone, no longer a short drive away, makes me weep again.

  I think about calling Kemi, but I don’t want to talk to anyone right now apart from my mum.

  Oh, Mum.

  I’ve tried to live my life kindly, openly, non-judgmentally. I’ve always tried to tell the truth and be honest with others, to live by a code of personal values that I thought had integrity.

  So what has gone so wrong?

  Who have I upset along the way so spectacularly that they would want to rip me apart?

  I have a yearning to hear Mum’s voice and remember I have a video of her saved on my laptop, along with numerous photos that I collated for the funeral. At least I still have some digital copies left, with the physical printouts, old film, and memory cards from her camera all destroyed in the fire.

  I grab my work laptop and put it on the dining room table. I sit on a dining chair and log on, navigating immediately to the right folder. I click through the photos, and grief strikes at me again and again as I see Mum’s smile. Chubby baby photos on my grandma’s knees; a photo of her as a child in the sixties, propped on the bonnet of a retro Mini Mark 1 by my great-uncle Bob; and a grinning photo of her and Dad on their wedding day.

  I finally get to the video of Mum on her sixtieth birthday, from a couple of years ago. A video that I took on my phone of her blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. Auntie Joyce is waiting in the wings for her turn, my mum being the eldest by seven minutes. It’s a perfect video of Mum smiling, laughing, whooping and talking.

  A notification pops up and distracts me. I angrily move the cursor over the X to close it, but something jumps out at me.

  A word: spy.

  I move the cursor away and read the notification carefully. It’s a reminder that my SPYR KEYLOGGR software needs updating with the latest updates.

  It takes a moment or two for my grief-stricken brain to click into gear. Slowly, slowly the mush clears, and the clarity sharpens.

  What is SPYR KEYLOGGR software?

  The notification fades away as they often do when you take no action, and I immediately open Google. I search for SPYR KEYLOGGR software and find what I’m looking for on the first page.

  It’s a keystroke logger. A type of monitoring software that records every key that is pressed on a keyboard. An ‘insidious form of spyware’, according to one article.

  “What is this doing on my laptop?” I ask out loud. Someone must’ve put it there. That same someone who has been targeting me? It has to be.

  Along the taskbar on my desktop, next to the Start button is a box that says ‘Type here to search’. I click it, and a screen pops up asking where I’d like to search. Software isn’t listed, so I select ‘Folder’, as the software must be saved somewhere on my laptop. I type in SPYR and press return.

  The results tell me that the software is saved in a folder called LC Program Drivers, which is saved within four other folders. It’s so buried that I would never ever have found it unless I’d seen that pop-up.

  I open the folder. There is a file called SPYR-RUN, which must be the keystroke software. There are also perhaps twenty other files, all with weird names. One catches my eye.

  I search in Google for ‘Cam-Record’. Finally, on the third page of results, I find it. It’s a piece of webcam-hacking software that allows someone to remotely take over your webcam, to watch you and hear you and take photos or video footage.

  Shit.

  Who has put this stuff on my laptop? I close the browser and look at the folder again. There’s a column that says ‘Last Modified’ with a date and time. All the files have exactly the same date in November. Almost four weeks ago.

  What happened on that day?

  I pull out my diary from my handbag. I always have a paper one which I jot down personal appointments and birthdays. A pang of sorrow hits as I realise Mum gave this one to me last Christmas. She could always be relied upon to gift me a diary and a pair of wholesome Marks & Spencer pyjamas. But I can’t think about that now – I have to remain strong. I look up the date: 4 November. It’s a Monday. And I have absolutely nothing noted.

  A workday. Did I click on an email that downloaded all this stuff? Is this the virus that I had on my laptop that only reared its ugly head on Friday a few hours before my pitch meeting?

  I open my work emails, which also has my work calendar. I’m a stickler for adding everything to my public calendar to stop colleagues from sending me meeting requests for times I’m unavailable. I click back to the first week of November and see I’ve got a few things listed for the fourth. I open the day to see the list in full.

  And there it is – staring me in the face.

  From 9 a.m. until 10 a.m. I was without my laptop. The calendar note says ‘Laptop and Phone to IT’.

  I’d given my work devices to Rob to sync due to an upgrade to our systems. Everyone at MBW had to do it, not just me. He’d given us all hour-long slots over the course of a couple of weeks, for some reason starting with the PR team on that Monday.

  But had that been a ploy just to get my laptop? Or had someone grabbed my laptop while it was meant to be in his care when he wasn’t working on it? No. That was impossible. He’d sat right next to me when he’d done it, at Finn’s desk because Finn was out at a meeting. Rob had asked me to put in my password before he started.

  And asked me to put in my pin code on my mobile phone too.

  My mobile phone sits next to the laptop on the table. I pick it up. Did he do something to that too? Is it even possible to hack a mobile phone?

  I turn to Google for the answers. Yes, it’s possible to install spyware on mobile phones that lets the hackers remotely watch your phone activities. A person can do this by getting direct access to a device and installing an app. It’s also possible to take over a mobile phone’s camera.

  Whoa.

  I open my phone and search through the Settings app to see if I can find something there that I don’t recognise. Nothing seems amiss, so I go through every folder on my home screen. It takes me a while, but then I spot it. An app called SpyDEM.

  I immediately turn to my laptop and search for it. I
t’s actually a parental control app that allows parents to ‘spy’ on their children’s phones. It includes a GPS tracker, the ability to read all messages as well as look at what phone calls have been made and received. It tracks the internet browser history and can see all the photos and videos in the photo app. If you upgrade, you can even listen to phone calls happening in real time.

  Did Rob do this? The geeky IT guy? It takes a while to sink in.

  Rob. The IT guy. WTF.

  He’s been watching me through my laptop and phone, tracking everything I type and look at, reading all my messages and emails. Following my every movement through the GPS tracker on my phone – which I take everywhere. Seeing all my passwords, viewing all my photos.

  My whole life has been monitored. Literally everything. For the last month.

  Mentally I tick off everything that has happened over the past few days and whether Rob could be responsible:

  My laptop dying hours before my big pitch and losing my presentation from the cloud – tick.

  The emails sent from my work account to Madeline and supermarket Stephanie – tick.

  The porn added to the CozMoz Paints presentation – tick.

  The dirty text messages, the delivery of the lingerie and sex toy. He knew my address, as I’d sent it to him on Friday so he could deliver my laptop back on the Sunday, and he had my number from work – tick.

  The letters and USB planted in my garden. This one gives me pause. When did he come to my house? He came to deliver back my laptop, but never went outside. But he would’ve seen my fence panel was down and the easy access from the row of garages behind. And the USB with the home movie of me and another man – he most definitely has the tech skills to find deepfake software and edit that. And he could’ve easily found a photo or video of me off my phone to use.

  Taking over my social media accounts and flooding them with racist, sexist, homophobic, and other outrageous offensive content, as well as freezing my bank accounts – tick. This would’ve been simple for him to do, as he would’ve been able to find out my master password for PW-Protekt by just watching me type it in with the keyword logger.