by Luca Veste
Mark watched her empty her cup and then stay with her back to him. ‘I’ve been told she was doing some odd things lately.’
‘What do you mean?’ Stephanie replied, turning to face him, arms folded across her chest. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘That perhaps she was witnessed doing weird stuff in town, things like that?’
‘Who told you that?’
Mark shook his head. ‘It’s not important right now. I just wondered if you’d heard of her doing anything like that.’
‘Look, we both know she was a little messed up. Doesn’t mean she was losing her mind, or whatever you think it was.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that,’ Mark said, standing up, as Stephanie’s voice began to rise. He heard movement behind him, but didn’t turn. ‘I’m just asking because I need to know everything.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘So, you hadn’t heard of her talking to people in strange ways, or anything of that sort?’
Stephanie shook her head, but Mark could feel something unsaid in the air between them. He hesitated, wondering how to approach this now. ‘If Emily was doing something out of the ordinary, it might be helpful to know now. While we’re still looking for her.’
‘There’s nothing…’
‘Anything, no matter how small, it might be important.’
‘Who told you?’
Mark turned to see Julie Burns standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at him with bloodshot eyes that probably hadn’t been closed in a day or more. He kept himself calm and continued. ‘Told me what, Julie?’
‘There’s nothing to say. She’s missing and needs to be found.This has nothing to do with anything.’
‘It’s just that we’ve had some reports about possible strange events Emily might have been involved in recently.’
Julie shook her head. ‘Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with what’s happened now. She… she was just messing around, that’s all.’
‘How?’
‘There’s nothing. Who told you this?’
Mark opened his mouth to answer, then closed it to consider his words more carefully. ‘What was Emily doing?’
‘It was all just pranks, she told me,’ Julie said, waving her hands as if none of it mattered. ‘Nothing important. It was just silly stuff, that’s all. You know what teenagers are like.’
‘What kind of pranks, Julie?’
There was a huff, hands went to her hips. ‘I don’t really know.’
‘I was told about something that happened while she was in town. Approaching people there and asking personal questions.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘Mum, how many times were there?’
Mark kept his eyes on Julie, even as Stephanie moved away from the countertop and towards her mother.
‘She said it was just some pranks that she was doing with people in college,’ Julie said finally, leaning one shoulder against the doorway. ‘It’s got nothing to do with her going missing.’
‘Unless this is a prank too,’ Stephanie said, before Mark had a chance to.
‘Julie,’ Mark began, then stopped himself, finding the right words. ‘Emily hasn’t been in college this term. At all. She hasn’t attended since last June.’
‘It can’t have been that long…’
‘I spoke to them myself,’ Mark continued, hoping to be believed, if for nothing else than to move the conversation back to what was important. ‘There’s no doubt. She wasn’t there. So, if she was playing pranks, who would it be with? And what were they?’
Julie shrugged her shoulders in response, but didn’t argue with him further. He turned to Stephanie, who was now standing nearer to him. ‘What about you? Do you know who she could be doing this with? You’ve told me she had no friends, but your mum is saying something different. You can’t both be right.’
Stephanie seemed to think for a moment or two, then shook her head. Mark looked from one woman to the other, trying to figure out what wasn’t being said.
‘She said it was just a game,’ Julie said finally, her voice quiet and flat. ‘That it was nothing to worry about. That she was just messing around. I didn’t think it was anything to do with what happened.’
Mark sighed, wondering if he would be so blind in the same position. ‘What else was she doing?’
‘Just silly things. I didn’t really take much notice. She wasn’t getting into trouble, so I just left her to it.’
‘I went to see her dad,’ Mark said, moving away from the pair and sitting down at the table. ‘That’s how I found out about this.’
‘You can’t believe a word that man says,’ Julie spat out, before checking herself with a look at her daughter. Even now, she wanted to be the bigger person, it seemed to Mark. ‘He’s a known liar. Whatever he’s told you, none of it’s true.’
‘He didn’t tell me a lot and I can’t see him rushing back to be involved. He wasn’t the one to tell me anyway. Another source close to him told me that Emily’s… antics were the cause of some discussion. So much, that they made it back to her father.’
‘It was nothing.’
Mark sighed, knowing he wasn’t getting very far, but also that he had to keep pushing. ‘Did you ever hear her talk about the other people involved, any names?’
Julie shook her head. ‘She didn’t talk about it. I had to hear these things from other people. When I asked her about it, she just glossed over it, like it didn’t matter. So I didn’t think it did.’
‘Julie, why didn’t you tell me this?’
She rolled her eyes, looking tired just from that simple action. When she spoke, her voice was quiet enough that Mark had to strain to hear it. ‘I thought you might just think she was mad and not bother trying to find her. She wasn’t mad.’
Mark understood. Slightly. He was worried this was his fault though. That if he’d questioned harder at the beginning, it wouldn’t have taken this long to discover. ‘This could be important. If anything, it says something about her state of mind in the past few months. Were there any other changes in her behaviour you haven’t told me about? Anything else she was involved with, people she was talking to?’
‘No, she was fine,’ Julie replied, but even now Mark could see she was questioning herself. ‘I… I don’t think any of this has anything to do with her going missing.’
‘Okay,’ Mark said, holding his hands up and standing. ‘It’s okay. I’ll look into this a bit further and see if I can find the people who she was doing this with.’
‘You think it might be a prank?’ Stephanie asked, moving towards her mother and placing a hand on her shoulder. Julie shrank back and slipped away silently. Back into the living room, no doubt. Stephanie turned to Mark again. ‘Is that what you’re thinking now? That she might have done this as another weird thing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mark replied, truthfully. He wasn’t sure of anything at that moment. None of it made any sense. ‘There’s obviously been something happening with her. She wasn’t going to college, but no one realised. She doesn’t have any friends, but suddenly she’s playing pranks with people that none of you know. She spent the past year and a half catfishing people online and people knew it was her. Now, she’s missing.’
‘What about the people she was going after then? Maybe they’ve got something to do with it?’
Mark shook his head. ‘I’ve already spoken to them. There’s nothing to suggest they were involved in Emily’s disappearance. We’re keeping an eye on that, but at the moment, none of the people we know of is under suspicion. Can you think of anything else that we may need to know?’
There was a moment of hesitation that Mark didn’t miss. When she was silent for a little longer, he spoke again. ‘It’s important I know everything. I need to know it all, even if you don’t think I or anyone else needs to.’
‘She was talking to someone before I left for uni,’ Stephanie said with a sigh. ‘It was over before I’d even unpacked th
ough, so it’s probably nothing.’
‘A boyfriend?’
‘No,’ Stephanie replied, shaking her head and smiling thinly. ‘Nothing like that. It was an online thing. An anti-bullying group. Like a helpline, but done on the internet. Locally, from what I can gather. I looked it up at the time and it seemed like you spoke to someone on a message board type of thing, then you could see them face-to-face if you wanted to. I saw Emily looking at it one day, but she closed her laptop when she realised I’d seen it. I googled the name of it and found out what it was.’
‘Did you talk to her about it?’
‘I tried to, but she wasn’t having any of it. She never talked to me about anything.’
Mark nodded and pulled out his notepad. ‘What was the name of this company?’
‘The Huddle,’ Stephanie said, then pulled her phone out from her pocket and checked again. ‘Yeah, there it is. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I know she was using it. I tried talking to her about it more, but by that point we weren’t really getting along.’
‘Why was that?’
Stephanie sighed, putting her phone away. ‘I’ve told you. Nothing important. Just silly stuff. I wanted to help her, but she just wasn’t seeing sense. I couldn’t get her away from her screen long enough to have a proper conversation with her and probably didn’t try hard enough. I should have made more of an effort, I suppose.’
‘You did the best you could, I’m sure of it.’ Mark smiled thinly, which turned into a grimace as she looked away. Maybe she could feel the insincerity of his statement as much as he could.
He wasn’t sure of anything. Other than he needed to speak to the people supposedly helping Emily.
Twenty-Nine
PLAYER ONE
Another phone call.
The next level.
Giving her the instructions. Telling her what they wanted.
She had tried to question it, tried to back out and find another way. It had been pointless. There was no reasoning with the voice.
She knew now that they had been watching everything. Checking her old posts, the way she had spoken online, what she’d talked about. Waiting for her to make one last mistake. Take it too far.
Holly lay in bed, waiting for the alarm on her phone to sound one more time before finally moving. She could hear her parents pottering about in the kitchen, directly beneath her bedroom. The sound of the kettle boiling, of plates and mugs being moved about. Every morning was the same. Her mum doing breakfast – cereal in a bowl, some toast on the table, a giant mug of tea – all waiting for her when she went down. They would have been up for an hour already – awake and ready to leave for work. Dad would probably be out the door before Holly made it down. Mum would wait to make sure her daughter had been fed and watered.
Every day the same thing.
Over and over.
Holly hadn’t been able to take it anymore. That’s why she’d taken to lying about her life online. It could have been any group of people. Why did she have to pick that one?
They had made her feel less alone.
She’d tried talking to her mum about the way she felt. About the difficulties she was going through. But she had only tried a few times. Seeing the pain etched across her mum’s face was too much. She didn’t want her mum blaming herself, as if she was the reason Holly’s life sucked so bad.
Her mother had done nothing wrong.
Next to her head, Holly’s phone trilled with an alarm once more. She reached across and slid a finger across its screen, silencing it. Heard her dad shout a muffled farewell and then the front door shut. She lifted the bed covers and got up, getting dressed in silence. She went to the bathroom, gave her face and hands a cursory wash. Ran a hairbrush through her hair.
She could hear her mum singing along to music in the kitchen again. Another old song. She recognised it this time at least.
‘Morning,’ her mum said, a big smile plastered across her face. Holly returned it, but didn’t feel it inside. More fakery.
‘Ran out of Coco Pops yesterday,’ her mum continued, tipping her the wink as she did so. ‘I’ll pick some up today. Sugar Puffs okay?’
Holly nodded and stifled a yawn, as her mum placed a bowl in front of her.
If her mum knew she’d pretended to be dying of cancer to a whole bunch of people, there would be none of this normality. It would forever be tainted.
‘What time are you in college today?’
‘Not sure,’ Holly replied, staring at the bowl in front of her. ‘Need to check my timetable. Might try and get some work done at home if there’s not much on.’
‘Well, make sure you have something to eat. There’s stuff in the cupboards. There’s lasagne in the freezer for tea. You sure you’re going to be okay later? We’ll be home by midnight, I think.’
‘I’m old enough to look after myself now, Mum.’
‘I know, I’m just making sure,’ her mum replied, looking around the kitchen counters for something, then grabbing her keys finally. ‘I’m not sure if I’ll be able to call later on – I’ve got a bunch of meetings before we go over to the place, but I’ll try and ring around lunchtime.’
Holly nodded at her mother, as she picked up a slice of toast smothered in butter and shoved it in her mouth. Her mum was doing the same as she shouted at the speaker to stop, putting her coat on.
‘Speak to you later, love you,’ her mum said, planting a crumbed mouth on Holly’s forehead before leaving. She heard the door close at the front of the house and breathed out.
There was silence then, Holly eating her cereal, her phone on the table in front of her. Inside, her mind continued to tick over. She could almost hear the thoughts as stark words, being shouted into her ear.
You’re going to lose. They’re just messing with you. There is no way to win.
She tried to ignore them. To shut out the fears and doubts that were now beginning to creep in.
To not think about the decision she had made and what it would mean if it didn’t work.
She needed it to work because she couldn’t live like this anymore.
The fear of being found out. She had seen what happened to people on social media, once the drums began to beat and people were castigated. Thousands, millions of voices shouting, all directed at her. The anger that would come her way. Her mum’s way.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Holly finished eating, swallowed what was now lukewarm tea and stared at the mobile phone. For a few minutes, she enjoyed the glowing and airy kitchen. The way the sunlight danced through the windows and settled around her. She had become used to shutting herself away when at home, almost running from the light, the radiance of an autumn day. Barricading herself in her room, shutting the curtains, sitting in near-darkness.
She had forgotten what beauty could be derived from simple everyday occurrences.
Holly closed her eyes for a second or two, breathing in and out slowly, enjoying the quiet and the warmth. The silence. Her thoughts quietened and stilled, allowing her to simply feel calm.
Holly stood up from the kitchen table, clearing away the dishes, and padded back up the stairs.
Entered her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Let the darkness back into her life.
As soon as she’d sat down on the bed, her phone had rung. As if the voice would know her mum had left and she was alone.
‘Hello?’
‘Last chance,’ the voice said, the same flat tone coming through the phone. There was a new background noise on the call though. Wind, or something. ‘Level Four. Are you playing?’
‘I haven’t got a choice,’ Holly said, her breath catching in her throat as she spoke. She stood up, crossing the room and opening the curtains slightly. ‘I want this to be over. Will it be over?’ She looked out onto the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone nearby.
Someone on a phone.
She knew they were out there. Watching her. They had seen her mum leave.
&n
bsp; Holly listened as she was given her instructions. Waiting for the call to end, before standing up and leaving her bedroom. She went downstairs, back into the kitchen. Half an hour earlier, she had been swapping pleasantries with her mum.
Now, she crossed to the knife block next to the microwave, paused to consider each one in turn, then selected the largest. She held it up in the light, searching the blade for a reason to stop playing, and found nothing.
Holly slipped a jacket on, slid the knife up her sleeve and then left the house.
Thirty
The website for whatever the ‘Huddle’ was didn’t really give Mark all that much to go on. A landing page with a few lines of text, stock photographs of sad-looking people being comforted. A ‘Contact us’ box, and a few testimonials on another tab.
He wondered if there was more information to be found if he accessed it from an actual computer, rather than his mobile, but figured it’d be much the same. From the look of the site, the dates on some of the supposed testimonials, it hadn’t been updated in a few years.
A few phone calls later, a name procured and checked, he was pulling up outside a detached home in a leafy cul-de-sac on the outskirts of the city. The echo of his car door closing was the only sound as he made his way up a meticulously well-maintained path, next to a well-kept patch of grass. The stone bordering and hanging baskets further projected an image of normality.
He rang the doorbell and stepped back, one hand on his ID in case it was asked for, which it increasingly was now. People were getting more security conscious by the day, Mark thought, as he spotted a camera affixed to the house above him.
The door opened, a tanned man in his fifties looking him up and down, one hand on the door. ‘Yes?’
‘Hi, I’m Detective Constable Mark Flynn,’ Mark said, trying a disarming smile that didn’t quite land. ‘Are you Kevin Blackhurst?’
A frown and then a slight pause. ‘Yes.’
‘I was wondering if you could spare a few minutes to talk about an ongoing investigation.’
The man hesitated, before giving Mark a broad smile, as if he’d suddenly had a personality transplant. His shirt was open at the neck, dark trousers over polished shoes. He dressed as immaculately as his front visage. ‘Of course. Come in, please. Excuse the mess. You’ve caught me in the middle of a busy time.’