Erin Erin Erin.
I grab a pen. Get out get out get out of my head, I need these thoughts out of my head.
The coloring book. I fill it, page after page after page of words, they’re all connected, everything is connected, Andrijo and the fortress and the bangle and the gelato and the drunken clock and the sheep skulls and the storm and Erin.
What does it mean? Paper runs out. I can’t find the hotel notepad. No no no no no. Yes! My arms, my legs, I can write on myself, notes notes notes. My thighs are maps of Petrovaradin and my forearm is Erin’s final words.
“Wait here for me?”
It’s all connected. It has to be.
But how?
I FIND A half-full packet of beta-blockers in my wash bag. They bring my heart rate down enough that I can catch my breath, fill my lungs, stop feeling my blood pump through my veins like it’s acid.
Limbs akimbo, I lie flat on my back atop the duvet covers, eyes glued to the ceiling fan. I’ve scrubbed the ink from my limbs in the lukewarm shower. Got myself a glass of water; it’s not cold enough, but it’ll do.
I pull myself into the present. Feel the hard mattress on my spine, the steady beat of my heart. Flutter my eyes closed against the pink sunrise peeking through the curtains. The room smells of hotel chain soap and foreign detergent from the launderette. I’m so tired my bones hurt.
But I made it through. I made it through.
I think I’m in a half-dreaming state, like when you’re falling asleep on public transport and are kind of still aware of your surroundings, but you’re starting to hallucinate, too.
Except what I’m hallucinating is real.
It’s a memory, really. A memory of Erin—one of our very first.
We’d interned together for three weeks. Up close and personal in the fashion cupboard, sorting through endless packages from endless PR companies for endless magazine shoots, and we fucked up all the time. Got yelled at all the time. It was like some Devil Wears Prada hellhole. I upped my meds dose in the first week, and again in the second.
Thing is, we were both the same combination of excited and terrified when we first started. Me, because I’m a lunatic, and because my mum didn’t approve—the arts are no way to make money, don’t you know?—Erin, because she’d dropped out of the law program at a prestigious London university—after spending her undergraduate years studying history—to pursue her dream of working in fashion. She was stone broke. Student finance needed her loan back since she was no longer attending school, but she’d already spent it on rent and a shiny new domain name to start up her shiny new fashion blog.
It was mainly exciting, though. We shared the giggly terror, the surreal “how are we here?” feelings, the panic over getting Lowe’s coffee order wrong. I was in awe of her then, though that never really went away. I didn’t find her draining to be around, which is saying something considering I’m more socially anxious than your average house elf. She glowed, but not in a way that made you feel dull. She brought you up to her level, helped you shine with her. She was the sun.
The physical beauty was one thing. But it was her intoxicating personality I found the most enthralling—dark sarcasm, a deep drive, a steely glare when it was needed. Take-no-shit badassery. I loved it. All I wanted to do was watch her in action.
So like I say, it was three weeks after we first started. I was miserable in the work, constantly on edge, but a little part of me woke up every morning looking forward to seeing her. People talk about the high when you meet someone romantically and they change everything, but sometimes you get that in a friendship, too.
She brought me a coffee that morning. Went to Starbucks early. It was the run-up to Christmas, and we’d been talking for ages about those syrupy lattes that give you more of a high than a gram of cocaine. Gingerbread, extra whipped cream. I still remember how it tasted—warm and sweet and spicy, like my new friend.
I went out on my lunch at noon. Nowhere in particular, just to grab a sandwich, get some fresh air and pick up some gloves, because it was freezing out. I came back, desperate for the toilet, so I dashed into the restrooms. One of the two cubicles was locked. And even though I’d never heard her cry before, I knew the sobbing was hers.
Smith, her high-school sweetheart and long-term boyfriend, had given her hell for borrowing money from her uncle. Told her he no longer respected her after she dropped out of law school, how he used to see her as an equal, but now she’s just some dumb fashion bimbo like the rest of them. He’s a newly qualified architect. Dreams of a big house and a fancy car and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. And she’d taken that dream from him by following hers.
I hated him, in that moment. Watching her mascara dribble down her cheeks, her eyeliner smudged along her brow line, I fucking hated him. In the months afterward, when he came to meet us on work nights out, I couldn’t hide my resentment.
She clawed the cubicle walls like an animal. I wished she’d claw his face like that. The worst part was, her hurt and anger were directed at herself. She blamed herself. Blamed herself for putting her happiness above his.
She was back to burning brightly by the next morning. But it scared me, that moment in the toilets. Because her sadness was so raw, so deep, it was like she wasn’t her anymore.
Chapter Eight
July 22, England
FLYING HOME FEELS like a betrayal.
Boarding the plane feels like a betrayal.
Ordering a grilled cheese sandwich feels like a betrayal.
Laughing at a joke feels like a betrayal.
Breathing feels like a betrayal.
How dare I carry on living as normal when my friend is gone? How dare I get to go home to my family when my friend does not? How dare I walk back into that magazine office and write features and design pages and interview public figures when my friend cannot?
The seat belt around my waist and the rattle of the catering trolley and the emergency exit signs and the smell of duty-free perfume . . . they’re all lies. None of it is real. It’s all a nightmare. And I can’t believe the details or I’ll start to believe the tragedy.
So I stay detached.
I sit next to Tim on the plane. I go through phases of barely being able to move or speak or breathe. I feel like someone has locked me inside my mind and thrown away the key, and I have to get out or I’m going to explode. So I do something perfectly ordinary, like order peanuts, and then I’m crippled by the sheer ordinariness of it, which was the whole point of doing the thing to begin with but it sets my mind off-kilter once again.
It’s exhausting.
Tim’s saying something, but it’s like he’s underwater so I have to ask him to repeat himself.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I hear myself lie.
But there are things I want to ask him. I take a drink of water, stuff some peanuts in my mouth and swallow hard. I once read a book on how to be present. Mindfulness, I think the concept’s called. You have to focus on your five senses, on how everything around you feels. So I try. Salty peanuts, cool air-conditioning, citrusy sweet perfume, roaring engines and all-gray everything. I haul myself back into reality like I’m pulling my body back from a cliff edge.
After three more days of police interviews, in which it became very clear they are not interested in Andrijo in any way, we were given the okay to fly home. Neither of us are suspects. I’m a SigWit, but they’ve got all they can out of me. “All they can” mostly comprising panic attacks and the occasional nugget of genuine information.
It scares me, how the time’s passed. Nine days. It’s been nine days. Surely she can’t still be alive and well? Wouldn’t we have heard from her by now if she was?
When I first considered the option, trafficking seemed to be the worst possible explanation. But now it feels like the
only one in which she could still be breathing.
“Tim . . . I want to ask you about Andrijo. Don’t you think he’s a little . . . intense?” I ask. I know I’ve phrased it poorly, and my old journalism lecturer would be horrified at the inherent bias in the question, but what can I say. I’m traumatized. I’m off my game.
“Mmm. Maybe. A lot of Serbs are like that, though. They’re very passionate people.”
Passionate doesn’t seem like the right word. It was more like he was trying to be soft and smooth when really he’s all sharp and fierce. Like a lion dressed as a sheep. He didn’t fit.
He was calculated.
But the police spoke to him, Tim told me. He’s clear. Looking back, it’s easy to overthink Andrijo’s importance in events. I guess it’s easy to overthink anything in retrospect. You have enough distance from the situation to weigh up explanations and make judgments, but sometimes that’s not a good thing because you lose that natural instinct somewhere along the way. You attach your own bias.
Like right now, I get the sense that Tim is weighing his words carefully. Maybe tomorrow I’ll look back and find that odd, and noteworthy, or maybe I’ll look back and think it’s just a result of the surreal situation we’re in. It’s impossible to tell what perspective the distance will give me.
“He and Erin seemed to be getting on well,” I muse aloud. I’m trying to sound natural but there’s nothing natural about it.
“True. Though he gets on well with a lot of women.” Tim tries for a laugh. “A real ladies’ man. And Erin is . . . beautiful.”
“Do you know if he came to JUMP that night? The night Erin disappeared?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No, he didn’t. Like I say, his boss accounted for his whereabouts. He never even mentioned the possibility of making the trip to me.”
“Huh,” I say, leaning back in my chair. My knee is bouncing up and down spasmodically and keeps bashing against the folded-down plastic table. “I’m sure I overheard him tell Erin he might see her later that night. But he didn’t say that to you?”
Tim furrows his brows. “No. I don’t think so.”
Strange. Unless Tim’s the liar, in which case . . .
And Andrijo’s boss could be lying. People do that.
Scenarios rattle through my brain. Andrijo arriving at JUMP, texting her while she’s at the bathroom and asking if she’ll come and meet him. Kind, unsuspecting, beautiful Erin seeking him out in an empty nook of the fortress.
You have a boyfriend you have a boyfriend you have a boyfriend, I try and tell past Erin, as if I can transcend the space-time continuum and somehow stop this from happening.
Him taking her.
I picture the fortress in my mind. Is there a side entrance he could have used to sneak her out? The main gates are always packed with guards and festival-goers. If he was trying to abduct her, there’s no way he could have done it inconspicuously. But if he and Borko have been coming to JUMP since 2005, there’s every chance they could know about another way in and out.
I dig around in my backpack for a pen and paper. My hands find the coloring book, but I shove it farther down into the bottom. I don’t want Tim to see my crazy firsthand. Pulling out a tattered Sudoku book, I turn to one of the easy pages, already filled in with my scrawly biro handwriting, and start jotting down some notes.
Find layout/blueprint of fortress.
“What’s Andrijo’s surname?” I ask Tim.
He looks over his shoulder at my notes. Frowns. “I’m not sure. Sorry.”
Look up Andrijo using Facebook networks, e.g., Novi Sad, JUMP.
“What about Borko’s?”
“Zoric.”
Look up Borko Zoric (and check his Facebook friends for Andrijo).
Feeling like I’m being proactive helps calm my mind, so I keep scribbling until I run out of ideas. I want to investigate other disappearances in the area, especially at JUMP, and whether those people were ever found again. I want to know everything about the people we met that day. I want to write down every single little damn detail I can remember yet again because who knows what’s relevant or not in a situation like this?
Then I complete four fiendish difficult Sudoku puzzles, eat the rest of my peanuts and promptly fall asleep. I’m emotionally, physically and mentally exhausted.
I dream of sheep skulls, inky black eyes and Erin’s murder victim smile.
MY MUM MEETS me at airport arrivals, which she would never normally do, and throws her arms around me. I picture the alternate universe in which Erin’s mum does the same, but it’s so painful I feel like someone’s digging a knife into every pressure point in my body. I can feel in the desperation of my mother’s embrace that she’s thanking the universe for sparing her daughter and taking someone else’s instead.
Our relationship is tumultuous at the best of times. My workaholic father died when I was eleven, and my mum has never recovered. He left behind a newborn baby boy—my brother, Jake, who’s now fourteen—and a woman who was so depressed she quit her job, sold my father’s business and let her world fall apart.
Not that Erin’s family life was any easier. Money was always tight, even though her father worked offshore—still does. When Erin left high school at eighteen, her parents both assumed she’d get a full-time job and money wouldn’t be so tight for once, but after a year of slogging away for sixty hours a week as a health-care assistant, she secretly sent off an application to Northumbria University. She got accepted onto the History program, took out a student loan and didn’t tell her mum until the day before the first semester started. She changed to night shifts at the hospital, gave up sleep for three years and graduated with first-class honors. All her family cared about was her getting back to work full-time. Erin didn’t even go to her own graduation ceremony.
So you can imagine how well it went down when she left law school and took on an unpaid internship at a glossy lifestyle magazine.
“Following your dreams is for rich kids and retired old folk,” her mum told her. “Reality doesn’t work like that. Write when you’re sixty-five and have a government pension to pay your bills.”
Erin almost listened.
When I arrived on my first day at Northern Heart, I expected to be making tea and doing a lot of photocopying, at least in the first few weeks. My heart sank when I saw the fashion cupboard, where all the new season clothes sent by PR companies are stored. Fashion is not my forte. I nearly quit after a week, but two things kept me there: the fact interns could pitch and write features . . . and Erin.
“Oh, love,” my mother coos in my ear. “I’m so sorry. I know you and Erin were great friends.”
“Not were, Mum,” I mumble, but the sound is muffled as my face presses into her shoulder. Her wild afro tickles my nose. “Are. She’s not dead.”
At least, that’s what I keep trying to tell myself.
People go missing all the time. A quarter of a million Brits are reported missing each year, and ninety-nine percent of those cases are solved. The odds are in Erin’s favor.
Right?
THE BURNT-RED BRICKS of Northumbria Police Station on Newcastle’s Forth Banks are vivid in the July sun. Sheets of sleek glass and polished chrome insistently convince the public that this building is something other than a center based around crime and violence and tragedy and suffering. It’s not just a police station—it’s modern design blended with traditional northern architecture. It’s a work of art.
An officer stands outside, puffing desperately on a cigarette. A train thuds down the railway line right next to the station, wheels clanking on tracks and brakes squealing against the friction. I get caught in the juxtaposition. To my left is a building full of interrogation rooms and cells and criminals and detectives, and on my right are eight train carriages full of people who are probably wondering what kin
d of sandwich they fancy for lunch and which shop they should go to first on their shopping trips.
I know which world I’d rather be a part of, but I’m way past the stage of having a choice. Erin is the ball and chain tying me to the one on the left, and I feel guilty for complaining because God only knows what she’s been through in the last week and a half.
I’ll probably have a BLT for lunch. I try the thought out, wondering if I can still fit into the world of the train carriages.
Nope. The thought feels foreign in my brain. Like the smell of someone else’s house on your clothes.
It’s too weird being home. Being in Serbia was like being stuck in a nightmare, an endless time vacuum where everything slowed down and sped up and warped before my eyes. I was there forever and just for a second. My world ended in that vacuum. And now here I am, out of the nightmare, back to my normal life in my normal city.
But Erin is not. She’s still there.
I pop a Xanax and a beta-blocker just to be sure. My pharmacist was the first place I visited this afternoon. I feel deliciously numb.
Focus. Back to the police station.
I’m here to meet Paige Tierney, the family liaison officer who’s handling Erin’s case through Interpol. The Serbian police force are responsible for the search in Novi Sad, but there’s an FLO here to deal with Erin’s nearest and dearest, plus a charity trust that’s going to help with publicity and media coverage. The word publicity tastes vulgar, like this is some PR campaign for a new cosmetics line.
The FLO has been communicating with Erin’s family, my mum says, making sure they’re kept well-informed and supported. They keep people up to date with the police investigation, introduce them to Victim Support and inform them about other resources. If an inquest or court case is likely, the liaison officer also prepares them for that. They also help with practical matters, such as recovering relatives’ belongings.
And as I am a SigWit and Erin’s closest friend, Officer Tierney is extending her umbrella of compassion and care out to me, too.
Perfect Prey Page 7