by Louise Voss
‘He’s coming out,’ Gareth hissed.
Winkler snapped out of his daydream and saw that Gareth was correct: Mervyn Hammond had emerged through the front door of the building, another thuggish-looking bloke beside him. Hammond waited while the thug went off round the back of the building. Winkler’s car had tinted windows, so he knew the PR man wouldn’t be able to see inside.
Hammond had a bag of nuts in his hand, the contents of which he daintily popped into his mouth, one by one, until a gorgeous Jag Coupé pulled up and he got in. The car headed towards the end of the quiet street, purring as it passed Winkler’s car.
They followed, Winkler driving.
The side street led onto busy Goswell Road. Hammond’s chauffeur – assuming that was who the thuggish bloke was – indicated right, cutting across the left lane and joining the queue of traffic on the other side.
‘Shit, we’re going to lose him already.’
There was no sign of another break in the traffic. Hammond’s Jag was being held at a red light, but the moment it changed he’d be off and would vanish at the crossroads ahead.
‘Fuck it,’ Winkler said, swinging out into the traffic, gambling that the oncoming car, a red Mini, would see him and brake.
The Mini did brake, but as Winkler attempted to cross the lane he stalled the car. He hurriedly turned the ignition, flushing pink, mortified that Gareth had seen him stall – the shame! – and as he fumbled to get going the Mini driver and all the cars behind beeped their horns. Hammond’s car was still stuck at the red light, and Winkler stalled the car again, at the same time that the driver of the Mini jumped out of his car and strode over, banging on the window of the Audi.
Winkler pushed the button to lower the window, flashing his badge at the irate driver. ‘Police. Piss off.’ The red-faced man retreated to his car.
He finally managed to get into gear, but now the traffic in the far lane was moving, and he had to wait for someone to flash him and let him across. Hammond had gone.
Chapter 36
Day 11 – Patrick
Patrick found Carmella in the canteen, staring into a mug of coffee, a half-eaten Kit Kat beside it, chocolate crumbs scattered across the Formica. There was an old stain on the table that made Patrick visualise the shape of a stricken body. He closed his eyes to clear his head of the image. His ears whistled, his stress tinnitus drilling into his brain. He plonked himself down in the seat opposite Carmella.
‘We need to find out exactly who Wendy was talking to before she went to the Rotunda.’
‘I’m fine, Patrick, thanks for asking. How are you doing?’
He sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just . . .’
‘I know. Me too. What did the boss say?’
Patrick pointed at the remaining half of the chocolate bar. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead. I’ve lost my appetite. Jenny would go nuts if she knew I’d had half a Kit Kat for breakfast. Anyway . . .’
The chocolate made him feel a tiny bit better. ‘Suzanne said that we need to leave the investigation into Wendy’s murder up to DCI Strong and her team.’
‘But we’re not going to do that, are we?’
Their eyes met.
‘I don’t want to get you into any trouble, Carmella. This is down to me. Wendy called me just as you and Jenny were arriving at my place. I cut her off. So this is down to me. My bad, as Wendy would have said.’
Except ‘my bad’ wasn’t a strong enough expression, was it?
‘Pat, Wendy was my colleague too. Whatever you think we need to do to find her killer, I’m in. Besides, we find her murderer and we almost certainly solve our case too, right? It makes sense.’
He nodded, finishing the Kit Kat. The whistling in his ear had dropped to five or six. ‘All right. The first thing we need to do is find out exactly who Wendy had communicated with over the last few days, follow the posts she made on the OnTarget forum, Twitter, et cetera. The problem is, Strong’s team have her computer, and her phone was, presumably, taken by her murderer.’
‘We don’t need her computer to track her online activity. We only need her log-ins – her usernames and passwords. Did she give those to you?’
‘Shit. No.’
‘All right. Well, maybe we can figure it out.’ She looked around and Patrick followed her gaze. The canteen was busy, dozens of potential witnesses, flapping ears and beady eyes. ‘I’ll meet you in the car park in five minutes. We’ll go to mine.’
Carmella’s flat was as immaculate and homely as Patrick had always imagined – the home of a couple who obviously had no children. Patrick took a seat at the small table in the living room where, he imagined, Carmella and Jenny ate dinner together while listening to tasteful music. He didn’t imagine them as the types to scoff dinner in front of the TV with plates on their laps, and certainly not at a table with toddler-flung spaghetti shapes and sausages around their feet, CBeebies blaring in the background.
Carmella grabbed her laptop and sat down beside him. ‘Jenny’s at work. She just texted me to tell me she’s got a raging hangover. Apparently, she, Gill and Suzanne’s husband had a good chat after we left your party.’
‘Oh God.’
Carmella chuckled. ‘Don’t worry. Nobody discussed how you’ve got the hots for the guv.’
‘Carmella! I don’t—’
She held up a hand. ‘It’s all right, Pat. I’m only teasing you. But you’ve gone very pink.’
He fixed his attention on the laptop screen. ‘Can we concentrate on this?’
‘Sure.’ The smile slipped from her face and he felt yet another prick of guilt – a sensation he shook off as he watched Carmella type in the URL of the official OnTarget forum. Wendy had told Patrick she had spent most of her time on this site because, although there were plenty of others, this was the most active. Immediately, Patrick realised this was going to be like searching for the proverbial needle. There were thousands of posts, most of them seemingly nonsensical – a sea of acronyms and bouncing smileys.
‘We need to know what her username was,’ Carmella said. ‘Otherwise we’ve got no chance of figuring out who she was chatting to.’
‘I should have got her to tell me.’
‘What about Strong’s team? They must have figured it out already. Can’t we ask them? We are meant to be working together, after all.’
Patrick shook his head. He knew that would be the sensible thing to do, but he was paranoid about Strong trying to take over the entire investigation, especially if he admitted to any weakness. That weakness being that, so far, they didn’t have a bloody clue who had murdered Rose and Jess, despite having worked on this investigation for a week and a half.
‘No. Let’s try to figure it out ourselves first.’
She looked at him, then nodded. ‘OK. We know Wendy went to the book signing at Waterstones – I saw her there – so maybe she was involved in one of the chats about that.’
Carmella typed ‘waterstones’ into the search box and two dozen forum topics appeared on screen. She sighed and began to click on each one in turn, skimming through the discussions about the event, from the build-up, with all the fizzing excitement about being in the same room as the OnT boys, through to the aftermath, with loads of links to photos of the signing, dozens of selfies with the pop stars behind a desk in the background. Patrick glanced over the photos to see if he could spot Wendy – he couldn’t – but that wouldn’t be helpful anyway.
‘Look,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s a number beneath each name stating how many posts they’ve made.’
Most of them numbered in the hundreds or thousands. Blake7 – 2,356 posts; CroydonChick – 1,398 posts; Jade – 18,467 posts.
‘Good grief!’ Patrick exclaimed. ‘I wonder if I’d have used these forums if they’d been around when I was a teenager.’
‘Yeah, in those days you had to use
smoke signals, didn’t you?’
Patrick smiled but wasn’t in the mood for banter. ‘Look, this one, ShawnsCupcake, has only posted seventy-four times.’ He tapped the screen, indicating a message about the book signing: ShawnsCupcake asking who else was going to be there.
‘Let’s have a look at her profile,’ Carmella said.
Clicking on the username took them to a new screen showing the profile of ShawnsCupcake. The profile picture was, like many of those on the forum, a photo of Shawn, giving nothing away about the real identity of the user. Again, Patrick wished dearly that he’d got more detail from Wendy about what she was doing. He hadn’t realised there would be a time limit. But he still blamed himself, knew he wouldn’t stop beating himself up about it until he’d found her murderer. And even then, he didn’t know if he’d feel better. Because whatever happened, poor Wendy wasn’t coming back. She would never achieve the potential he knew she’d had.
‘ShawnsCupcake joined on the eleventh of February,’ Carmella said, snapping him out of his reverie. ‘Is that the date she started?’
Four days ago. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
The page linked to all of the discussions ShawnsCupcake had taken part in. The first was a joke about Shawn making her feel like a Haribo sweet.
‘Does that sound like something Wendy would write?’ Carmella asked.
‘I think so.’ He thought about the message in the Valentine’s card. You make me melt like chocolate. Carmella didn’t know about the card yet, but he bet it wouldn’t be long before word got around the station.
‘Look,’ Carmella said. ‘There’s a discussion here about football – did you know that Carl from the band is rumoured to be buying his local team, Torquay United?’
In the discussion, most of the users were talking about how they were going to become Torquay fans, that they were going to start going to the matches, despite agreeing that most of them hated football.
ShawnsCupcake had written, Not me! I’ll be Wolves till I die. Even though I live down south in Kingston. ☺.
Wolves. Wolverhampton Wanderers. Wendy’s hometown team. And she’d lived in Kingston.
‘It’s definitely her,’ Patrick said, sitting up straighter.
‘Look at this. She started a thread about the murders: I have a theory about what happened to them but I’m too scared to share it on here. Fuck. Looks like she was trying to flush out anyone with information.’
‘And it worked. Can we access her private messages?’
She gave him the look she used when he said something that made him sound like an old man. ‘Not without her password.’
‘Yeah, I knew that . . .’
‘And we could sit here typing in educated guesses all day, but we’re unlikely to get it right. This isn’t one of those stupid films. We need to talk to Strong’s team. They’ve got her computer – they’re bound to have found all her log-ins.’
‘And I’ll ask Graham Burns. You know, the social media guy. He gave me the messages that Rose and Jess exchanged.’
Patrick stood up and walked away from the table, over towards the window. He looked down at the street, red buses gliding by, a cyclist weaving through the traffic.
‘If it was you . . . if you were the person who’d killed Rose and Jess – assuming of course that you use the forums, which you probably do, to have found them – and you saw that, what would you do?’ he asked. ‘You’d want to know if this theory bore any relation to the truth.’
‘Yes, and I’d private message her. Find out about this theory.’
Patrick stepped away from the window. ‘The way Wendy was killed was completely different to Rose and Jess. Nancy Marr too. No sign of torture, just a swift . . . execution.’ He winced, imagining the shock Wendy must have felt as the knife flashed in the darkness.
‘He was trying to keep her quiet. Stop her exposing him.’
‘Which suggests that Wendy actually did have a theory, and that it was close to the truth. Close enough to worry the killer, anyway. We really need to get into her private messages. Let me call Burns now.’
He had Burns’s number stored on his phone. Burns picked up on the third ring and Patrick explained what he needed. ‘All private messages sent and received by a user called ShawnsCupcake.’
Burns made a groaning noise. ‘You know I could get in a lot of trouble for this . . .’
‘A police officer was murdered and we believe it was by someone using your forum. Now, if you want the whole OnTarget website shut down, your computers impounded, while we—’
‘OK, OK. I’ll help.’
He ended the call and Carmella came over, touching his upper arm. ‘Why don’t you go home, get some rest? You look like you’re about to collapse, Pat. I’ll do it.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Patrick. Boss. I insist. Go home; spend some time with Bonnie and Gill.’
As he was walking out to the car, his phone pinged. A message from Burns. That was quick.
Detective Lennon – I’ve found the messages . . . I’ll copy everything into an email for you – give me an hour. GB.
As he put the car into gear and waited for a gap in the traffic, he had another idea. It was all very well searching the Internet for answers, but perhaps they would find the truth in the real world, where he felt most comfortable. The only problem was, to seek answers in the real world he was going to have to risk his career.
Chapter 37
Day 12 – Chloe
The roar of the engines inside the small twin-propeller plane was deafening. Chloe clung on to the wooden struts lining the interior as though at any moment she could be sucked out of the gaping opening through which the wind already howled and buffeted, trying to make itself heard over the wall of sound. She closed her eyes, as the too-big jumpsuit flapped around her legs and she already felt as though all the air had been squeezed out of her chest. Why the fuck had she agreed to this? Her dad’s joking words from that morning came back to her:
‘That would be a bit ironic, wouldn’t it, love – you survive leukaemia, do a charity skydive, then peg it when your parachute doesn’t—’
‘Dad!’ Chloe and Brandon had shrieked simultaneously, as her mum looked appalled.
‘Sorry, love,’ her dad had said, kissing her loudly on the cheek. ‘It will be fine, I promise you. No-one’s ever died doing a tandem skydive. I wouldn’t have said it if they had. I wouldn’t let you do it if they had.’
‘You don’t have to go through with it, you know, darling,’ Chloe’s mum had added anxiously. All four of them had been – as family tradition decreed – squeezed together in her parents’ bed before breakfast, a heap of brightly coloured presents in front of the birthday girl. Her mum had already been in tears once, and kept hugging her. Her sixteenth birthday – a day that none of them had been sure would ever come, particularly not last year, when Chloe had been in a haze of morphine and terror, cursing her cancerous white blood cells and fully believing that she was going to die without ever even having a snog, let alone any sort of sexual experience.
‘Of course I do!’ Chloe had scoffed, although her heart was already thumping and they weren’t due to leave the house for four hours. ‘Can’t back out now; I’ve raised seventeen hundred quid!’
How the hell would she feel once she was thirteen thousand feet in the sky? She’d tried to swallow the lump of fear lodged in her chest as she ripped the wrapping paper off a small present from her aunt and uncle, barely seeing the ugly necklace before putting it to one side. She had announced months ago she would do the parachute jump on her sixteenth birthday, when she’d been exhilarated with the news that her bone marrow transplant had been a success and she was on the road to recovery.
But in hindsight, it seemed like a stupid idea. A really, really stupid idea.
‘Who’s this one from?’ She’d picked up a present that loo
ked like a short length of piping, with no gift card attached.
Her parents had exchanged worried glances.
‘What?’
Her mother had reached for her hand. ‘We weren’t sure whether to give it to you, love. It’s from Jess. Angelica dropped it round yesterday saying that Jess bought it for you ages ago . . .’
Chloe’s eyes had immediately flooded with tears. ‘Oh my God.’
‘Shall I take it away, darling?’ Her mother had welled up again too.
Chloe’d shaken her head. Wiping her eyes, she’d ripped the paper off to reveal a cardboard tube. Popping the plastic top, she’d fished out its contents, giving a watery smile when she saw what it was.
‘OnTarget tour poster. Cool. That’s so nice of her . . . was so nice of her.’ She’d dropped it on the bed and given a sob, covering her eyes with her forearm like the child she still felt she was.
Nine days had passed since Jess’s death; six since Chloe had run away from the book signing. Looking on the OnT forums now, it was as if the murders had never happened. Everyone had moved on. And because it was too painful to think about, Chloe had – she admitted to herself with a prick of shame – tried to put it from her mind. It was the only way to cope. She needed to stop thinking about the connection between Rose and Jess (and Jade, and her) because she couldn’t bear the shame and fear. She convinced herself that there couldn’t possibly be a connection between what had happened last year and the murders. It was a crazy idea; a coincidence.
Now, in the plane, squashed together with six other terrified people plus six cool-as-cucumber instructors, Chloe was so focused on her fear of jumping that everything else felt unreal. But there was no going back now . . .
Or was there? Surely she could still say she’d changed her mind? Then Chloe thought, Jess would have done this without wimping out.
Chloe clearly wasn’t the only one suffering from nerves. The boy next to her, who looked about nineteen, was so white he was almost yellow. She’d noticed him earlier when they were all sitting on the ground going through the landing procedure, when he’d still been looking cocky. He had a wiggly line shaved into his head, snaking all around the back and up over his other ear. You couldn’t see it now because, like the rest of them, he was wearing a stupid-looking, tight-fitting helmet that looked more like a skullcap. He was kind of cute, actually – weirdly, cuter now that he looked as though he was about to either puke or pass out with fear.