by S. E. Lynes
Bridget slouches against the chair back. ‘Oh, Rosie darling.’
It is a little under half an hour since Toni left. Bridget has no idea now where she is. She could be in the café, in the park, talking things through with Rosie; or, God forbid, driving frantically around the streets, searching for her daughter, the only person in the world deemed missing before they are due to return home.
Rosie’s phone has faded to black. Bridget picks it up and swipes it, looks again at the laptop screen in front of her.
Show me yours. A toe. Who would send an image of a toe? She glances at Ollie’s Facebook profile, flicks through his pictures. There’s no denying that the boy is a honey, a beauty, the stuff of Renaissance art. His hair is slicked here, falling over his eye there, his gaze is sure and his teeth are even and white. A toe, a shoulder, a belly button, descending, teasing, like a stripper in a club… When does persuasion become coercion? When does coercion become manipulation? The manipulation of an expert?
Sexy Lady.
She shivers, shakes her head against the chills on her skin. She calls Toni. Toni doesn’t reply. She must be out of the car by now – perhaps she’s left her phone behind as she often does. Will she bother going through the rigmarole of getting out of the car and going into the café, or will she just slow down and peer in through the window as she drives past, maybe park outside and wait for a confrontation? They will be back soon and the atmosphere in the flat will be appalling. It would be better to be out.
But Bridget doesn’t move. She can’t move. Something is keeping her in her chair, laptop in front of her on the table, Rosie’s phone in her hand.
It started with a toe. At his suggestion. And if he is a normal young guy, a teenager as innocently out for kicks as any teenager that has ever lived, then why, why does this feeling of unease fill her chest, make her hair follicles tingle?
She flips back to his Facebook profile. It is like trying to figure out a crossword clue, staring at the swirling letters of an anagram, hoping for enlightenment. She goes through his photos again: him on holiday, by the pool, showing off his physique like any cocksure lad his age; as a cute kid; in black and white, pouting, but again, there’s no law against that. A poseur, a narcissist, a chancer with a taste for redheads and the risqué. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of it, but something, something, something…
Think, Bridget. Why does your scalp itch? What is it that doesn’t fit, here in this profile of this beautiful boy, this Michelangelo’s David, this Adonis? She casts her mind back to the boys at school. Peter Fisher, he was a blond bombshell, and Nick Fitzgerald, Fitzy, yes, it was Fitzy who all the girls in her year went for. Fit Fitzy, the name scrawled on the cubicle walls, on the back of the prefabs at the far end of the schoolyard. Left Bridget cold, though at the time she didn’t dare to think about why, and why quite the opposite was true of Eleanor Green. Fitz, with his cold blue eyes and his fishtail parka, his button-collar shirts and his way of smoking Silk Cuts outside the chippy and later at the weekly disco in the grim community centre at the end of their road. The girls went to pieces around him, but he kept his smiles to himself like a miser keeps coppers, sparing one only occasionally, when there was something for him in exchange.
According to his profile, this Ollie Thomas is nineteen years old. A gorgeous-looking guy in the prime of his life, probably has girls fawning over him all day long, just as adults did when he was a little boy. That kind of beauty shapes a person. A person just like Fitz.
She holds the phone close to her face and scrutinises his brown eyes. You could drink those eyes like melted chocolate, spend years waiting for them to land on you, see you.
‘Why would someone like you,’ she whispers, there in the tense silence of the kitchen, ‘be pestering fifteen-year-old girls for pictures of their toes?’ Fourteen-year-olds. Rosie was fourteen when this started.
Something else about Fit Fitz – girls would do anything for him: smoke, steal, offer themselves. Nick Fitzgerald never had to ask. For anything.
So why, why would this boy offer his toe to a shy, nervous girl like Rosie and say, Show me yours, when surely there must be many girls willing to show him anything of theirs, in the flesh, for nothing more than a flash of those brown eyes, for the promise of a kiss from those plump lips, a smile from those even white teeth?
And in asking herself this final question, the niggling doubt, that troublesome piece of grit in the wound, rises to the surface, ready to be tweezed out.
If the question is: Why would he stoop to such a thing? the answer might well be: He would not.
And if He would not is the answer, then the new question is: Why did he do it?
And finding no reason, other questions form…
Who?
Who would cajole a child to show herself in this way, in secret?
Who, if not this boy?
Who is Ollie Thomas?
Bridget leans forward and opens another browser.
‘Let’s see who you are, mate,’ she whispers.
She types in: Google Reverse Image Search. In another tab, she brings up Facebook, finds Ollie Thomas and copies the clearest photo she can find into the browser: he is poolside, wearing pale blue shorts, bare chest. The search, she knows, will only find him if this exact image exists somewhere else online.
Searching…
Bridget pours her forgotten coffee, stirs in a spoon of sugar and takes a sip. It is tepid but sweet.
Searching…
Does this photo exist elsewhere?
It does. A match. She clicks and clicks, finds a Facebook page that looks terribly familiar, pictures she has only just seen: the childhood snaps, the party pictures with girls, cigarette dangling from his lips like James Dean. But this man’s name is Raoul Mendez: Spanish by birth, model, resident of Chelsea, actor.
Not Ollie Thomas.
Ollie Thomas, if that is even his name, has stolen this profile in its entirety and used it like cheese to trap a mouse. Or a maggot on a hook; yes, this is fishing, catfishing. She’s heard about it.
‘Jesus.’ She is reaching for her phone to try Toni again when Toni calls.
‘She’s not here, Bridge.’ Her sister’s voice breaks. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Tones,’ Bridget says, every cell of her being focused on keeping her voice steady. ‘You need to come home.’
Forty-Eight
Toni
‘Tones.’ Your auntie Bridge’s voice came down the line. ‘You need to come home.’
‘Come home?’ I said. ‘Why? What’s happened? Is she there?’
‘Nothing’s happened.’
But I could tell. I could tell something was wrong. ‘What, Bridge? Tell me.’
‘I’ve found some stuff, I’ve—’
‘What stuff?’ I was shouting down the phone. ‘She was here. She was here, Bridge. I asked the girl at the till, and she said she saw her. She did come here. She had a hot chocolate. It took me ages to find a parking space. I had to park four roads away – it took me ages, Bridge. I couldn’t get here any quicker and now she’s not here.’
I broke down, Rosie. Right there on the street. I couldn’t help it, didn’t care.
‘Tones.’ Your auntie was using her calm voice, the one she uses to talk me down from whichever ledge I happen to be on.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘There was a girl taken from a café in Putney. No one has seen her since. So don’t. Don’t handle me.’
‘I’m not.’ A sigh.
‘Look,’ I said. I was trying to get a hold of myself, trying to appear rational. ‘I’m getting in the car. I’m on Holly Road.’
‘Did the girl in the café see Rosie leave with anyone?’
‘No. She didn’t see her leave. Said she left her hot chocolate though. She didn’t drink it. Oh God. She’s been taken, Bridge. Someone’s taken her.’
‘Toni, try and stay calm for me, babe. Breathe. She left her hot chocolate last week too, remember? Maybe she doesn’t like hot cho
colate.’
‘Stop it! Stop trying to calm me down! I can’t calm down! I can’t breathe. How can I breathe? She’s missing, Bridge. Someone’s taken her! I’m… I’m going to drive around, see if—’
‘No, Tones,’ Bridget insists. ‘You’ll be pissing in the wind. She could be anywhere. We’re better off working together here. Come home.’
‘I’m calling the police, Bridge.’
‘No! No police.’
I put my key in the ignition and closed my eyes, made myself breathe. Down the line, silence.
I could picture your auntie Bridge, there in the kitchen, her hand gripped tight around the phone. She had her eyes closed too – I could feel it. Tears came. I sniffed.
‘Listen to me,’ she said softly. ‘She’s a teenager and she’s not even late coming home yet. If you call the police now, they won’t take any notice. They’re fucking useless. You know that, I know that.’
A sob escaped me.
‘Tones? Toni? Come home, babe. We’ll find her. Together.’
‘They’ve probably gone for a walk, haven’t they?’ I said. ‘It’s a nice day. They’ve probably gone for a walk.’
‘They might have. But, Toni, listen to me. We need a proper plan. You need to drive calmly and carefully back home, yeah? Driving around hoping to spot her is no use at all. To anyone.’
‘OK.’ I started the car. ‘I’ll come home.’
I drove back to our flat as fast as I could, Rosie. I could barely see to drive I was crying so much. Everything I’d ever feared was coming to pass, and even though I’d lived with the conviction that one day something terrible would happen to you, I could not believe that it had. I felt and did not feel the gearstick in my hand; saw and did not see the blink of red to green at the lights; heard and did not hear the bleep bleep bleep of the crossing. I found myself parked behind the flat, clutching the leather sleeve of the steering wheel. I had no idea how I’d got there.
Bridget must have heard the car on the gravel because she ran out to meet me, her face grave. It was so horrible, Rosie, seeing her expression and just knowing that something bad lay behind it.
I threw open the car door. ‘Have you had news?’ I was grabbing my stuff from the passenger seat. Bridget didn’t say anything. She helped me organise myself out of the car – I was shaking from head to toe, Rosie. I couldn’t coordinate; my eyes crowded with blackening stars.
‘I’m nearly there,’ Bridget said.
‘What do you mean “there”?’ I looked up at her. ‘Where? Do you know something?’
‘Yes,’ Bridget said. ‘Let’s get inside.’ She tried to push me towards the house, but I stopped.
‘Don’t push me. Why can’t you talk to me as we go, for God’s sake?’ I said. ‘Don’t make me wait.’
And so she began to talk as we made our way together across the backyard.
‘This boyfriend of hers was fake, Tones,’ she said.
‘What? Fake? Oh my God.’ I began to cry. ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me on the phone?’
‘I didn’t want you to get pulled over for speeding or… worse,’ she said. ‘I had to get you here safely, and I couldn’t come for you. Come on, Tones. Calm down. Let’s work together, yeah?’
We went inside. Bridget walked over to the stove and stood with her back against it. She looked so serious, Rosie. Not a trace of her usual mischief. I barely recognised her. I slumped against the tabletop.
‘How can he be fake?’ I wailed.
Your auntie Bridge must have dashed towards me, because the next thing I knew she was holding me in her arms and I could feel her mouth pressed to the top of my head.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. We’ll find him.’
‘This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. It can’t. It can’t, it can’t. We need to call the police right now.’
‘No we don’t. I’m nearly there. I’ve nearly found the bastard.’
She sat down next to me, in front of her laptop. I pressed my cheek against her arm, peered while she showed me what she’d been doing, how she’d found out that this Ollie was not who he said he was.
‘I know his fake identity,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know who he actually is, not yet.’
‘So she met him on Facebook?’ My heart was pounding. I felt sick.
‘On Instagram, I think. It’s hard to tell. I’ve yet to check if they have mutual friends. It could be that he got to her by being friends with a girlfriend of hers. Some of these girls, and boys too, they have thousands and thousands of friends and followers. I remember Rosie saying – they don’t care who friends them, it’s a numbers game.’
‘So I must have seen him on her Facebook page? But I’ve checked through her friends so many times, and there was no one dodgy-looking, no one much older or anything. Oh my God.’
‘That’s who she thinks he is.’ Auntie Bridge handed me your phone. It was open at Oliver Thomas’s profile. I stared into it, scrolling through the pictures.
‘He’s beautiful,’ I said.
Oh, Rosie, you poor, poor girl. He was a honey, wasn’t he, this boy you thought you were meeting? How would you say it, a babe? I get it. I bet you’d never think I would, but I do, baby girl, I do. I can remember.
‘That’s what I thought,’ your auntie Bridge said. ‘It’s what made me wonder why he’d send a fourteen-year-old girl pictures of…’
The air filled with unspoken words.
‘Of what?’ I made myself say, my voice tentative as a hello called into a dark, empty house. ‘Of what, Bridge?’
She sighed. She looked like she was going to be sick. She couldn’t look at me, Rosie. She could not look at me.
‘Well, of his toe, actually, at first,’ she said.
‘His toe?’
‘Yes. And then… other parts.’
‘Oh God. Oh my God.’ I was pulling at my hair until it hurt. ‘And why did you say fourteen? Rosie is fifteen, Bridge, she’s fifteen.’
‘She was fourteen when he first made contact.’
‘Oh my God, what? I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him, Bridge.’
‘But it’s not him, Toni. This boy is not the man we’re looking for. These pictures don’t belong to that man – you see that, don’t you? The boy in that photo is called Raoul. He’s a Spanish model, from Toledo, living in Chelsea. You couldn’t get more exotic. He’s young, he’s rich and he’s a god. But someone stole his profile and used it to lure her. It’s called catfishing, Tones. I’m so sorry.’
My face was burning, my neck, my chest. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came.
‘Oh my God, Bridge. My Rosie, my baby girl. We have to call the police. We have to.’
Your auntie Bridge reached for my hands and squeezed them.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When have the police ever done anything for us? Never. When did they ever help Mum when Dad was knocking seven bells out of her? Never. When have our family ever relied on them? Eh? Never. And Eric? I sorted Eric out, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but this is Rosie, Bridge. She’s my daughter.’
‘I know. I know that. But I sorted Eric and I’ll sort this bastard in a way the pigs never could. I’ll kill him. The police won’t do that, will they?’
‘No, Bridget! I have to call them. You don’t even know where he is.’
‘No, but I will. A few minutes and I’ll have him, trust me.’
I faltered. ‘Did she… did she send pictures, Bridge?’
‘That’s not important now. A lot of kids do this picture stuff. Rosie told me herself, but she said she’d never do it.’
‘Why you? Why did she tell you?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not important. The fact is, it’s happened, kids make stupid mistakes, and what we have to do now is find this bastard and find Rosie. But we can’t do that if we’re hysterical and worrying about what she has and hasn’t done, and if we call the police, they’ll slow us down. They’ll have to take a statement, there’ll be s
ome idiot plod on the phones… The thing I need to figure out now is how to find the postal address of whoever is behind this profile from the metadata, and then we can go and kill the motherfucker.’
‘But how does she know him? Is he from drama? How old is he?’
Your auntie Bridge groaned. ‘She doesn’t know him, Tones! That’s the point. That’s all irrelevant now. You need to forget him. He doesn’t exist, not for us!’
I felt so stupid, Rosie. But I was scared. My mind was all over the place. I know we should have called the police there and then, but the thing is, our family never have, only once, when your auntie Bridge called them to try and save Mum, your granny Casement. She was only six, she didn’t know any better, and of course my dad answered the door and sent them on their way. Growing up, no one I knew ever called the police – the pigs, as we called them. They were the enemy. It’s hardwired into us; it’s part of our DNA. And then of course, there’s the pact.
Your auntie was already at the computer, mumbling to herself. I picked out swear words mostly.
‘So if we… gpsfortoday.com… hmm… fuck… but if I… ah.’
‘You’ve found him?’ I was at her side, heart still pounding, sweat trailing down my back.
‘No. Not yet. Just let me concentrate, OK? Let’s see… metadata… which social networks protect your EXIF…’
I was looking over her shoulder. She was skim-reading the screen, reading aloud for herself as much as for me – not that I could understand a word.
‘EXIF… GPS location data from other users… blah blah… how to check a photo for EXIF location information… Here we go, right… what’s this… blah blah… ah, Facebook, here we go… fuck.’ She threw herself back in her chair.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Facebook, in all cases, wipes all EXIF data from a photo.’
‘Is that good?’
‘No,’ your auntie Bridge replied. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
‘Can you find him?’
‘I don’t know.’ Bridget stared at the screen. ‘I can’t get his location from where he uploaded his fake profile. Facebook wipes that info. Instagram will be the same, then, I imagine. I can try. But there must be a way to find out who this bastard is and where he lives. There must be.’ She studied the computer screen, eyes flicking over the documents. She picked up your phone and shouted into it: ‘Who are you? Where are you?’