He waited a while, to let her know she’d hurt his feelings. Then he gritted his teeth and typed and deleted and typed again, came up with:
–AGE: Well, I’m not a hundred and four. SEX: Male – hence Wolfboy, not Wolfbitch. He didn’t get as far as LOCATION. She replied in a short second, mistyping in her rush to apologise.
–Oh, Wolfboy! Please dont be mad – I dind’t mean to hurt your feelings.
This was good: if she’d taken her time, or come back all snippy – or worse, logged off – he’d’ve de-friended her from his list, dumped her, and moved on. But she was sorry and sweet, and told him that she was just trying to be careful, like the manual said.
–Wait – there’s a manual?
–Haven’t you read it? It’s called Trust No One ;-)
He liked the smiley emoticon – it showed she was trying hard to make amends.
He sent her one in return – the eyeroller, to let her know she didn’t have to be that way with him, and so she’d know they were friends again.
–Anyway… She didn’t type anything else for a few minutes, the teasing, trying to make out she’d gone all shy on him, maybe wanting him to draw her out. He held off, and eventually a fresh message popped up in his inbox. A confession:
–I’m nothing like Bella, either, she said.
He smiled as he typed:
–Oh, I hope not.
She took that as a compliment, but what he meant was, Bella’s seventeen. That’s way too old.
GeekGirl, on the other hand, is fourteen. Likes: the colour purple, science, Fergie, Fyfe Dangerfield, Miley Cyrus and Twilight (of course). Hates: football, vamp wannabes, brussel sprouts and Justin Beiber (–He’s such a boy!).
He lists Scouting for Girls among his likes. She got all excited over that, said she knew they were on the same psychic plane. She thinks I mean the band.
–Their lyrics express what I feel in my heart, she wrote.
Their lyrics express insecurity, ambivalence, fear, anxiety, and rebelliousness – everything an average teen feels in her heart, so he says:
–Yeah, they’re totally real.
It’s a five-minute walk from the bus station. His heart seems to want to race ahead of him, it’s beating so hard against his ribcage. He feels the bottles in his rucksack, jittering against his back, the steadier weight of the digital camcorder. It cost a bit extra for the Sony, but it was worth it, for the full HD, 5.1 surround sound, and superb freeze-frame and still capabilities.
Nine forty-five, and Costa is heaving. He hooks a thumb through the shoulder strap of his rucksack and ruffles his hair a bit before he pushes the door open. He sees a young mum, sharing a fruit smoothie with her toddler, two pensioners feeding gloop to a baby in a pram; a fat girl, staring unhappily at her own reflection in the window; a posse of builders chatting up the barrista, plaster dust on their faces and their steel-capped boots; a skinny woman, all cheekbones and close-cropped hair. She’s got a laptop open in front of her, mobile phone glued to her ear. She stares through him, intent on a discussion of sales figures and spreadsheets, like she was in her own office.
But where is GeekGirl?
He notices the blimp watching him. She looks away quickly, but there’s no mistaking the ache of longing in her eyes.
Fuck, no. He can’t decide if he’s more outraged or angry. Call Trading Standards – I want to sue for false representation. He walks to her table with a deliberate swagger. She fidgets and blushes, looks like she’d like to fly out of the place, or melt like the tub of lard she is and sink through the cracks in the floorboards. He bends, pushing his face so close to hers that she has no choice but to look at him.
‘Not in a million years, darling.’
His phone vibrates in his hand, and with it, the familiar wave of sound that tells him he has a text message. He glances briefly at the screen, keeping his face close enough to smell the fat girl’s perfume: JLo, and triple chocolate muffin.
–Where RU?
It’s from GeekGirl. Where am I? The muffin girl is staring into her coffee, fat tears rolling down her fat cheeks, and feels a tiny spark of hope.
–Coffee shop, like we said. You?
–School.
She’s stood him up. He should be mad, but he looks again at the fat girl and laughs from sheer relief.
He moves toward the door, thinking how he should reply, but a text comes through, faster than he can text, faster – almost – than he can think.
–Mum knows.
Shit.
–How could she know?
–How do mothers know ANYTHING? She’s got X-ray friggin eyes – she just KNOWS when I’m lying. She ALWAYS knows.
Okay… This is just panic, last minute nerves. He knows how to deal with this.
–It just feels like that. You need to relax,
Before he can get to the end of the sentence, she’s sent another text:
–She drove me 2 school. Wdnt leave till I went in. What shd I DO?
–Stay calm.
–Wel, thx for the advice, but I’d have to BE calm 2 STAY calm!
Cheeky bitch. Attitude is something he can do without.
–Okay, we’ll call it off.
–Wolfboy PLS! I don’t know what 2 do!
Worth one last try? If he plays it right, she’ll be so sorry for being a bitch, she’ll be extra nice.
–Look, GeekGirl, it’s your life. How do you want to spend it – your way, or hers?
–But if Im caught…
No apostrophe. I really will have to talk to her about her punctuation.
–Tell them you have a hospital appointment. They’ll never suspect GeekGirl. I mean, how much time have you had off school this year, anyway?
–None.
–Well, there you go.
It takes her five minutes to get back to him. When she does, she’s already on the way. She gives him directions to her school. It has ‘Saint’ in the name. It’s the other side of town, will take him twenty minutes to walk it, but a convent school girl – in school uniform. Oh, boy…
He sees her from across the street; she’s leaning against the school wall, texting on her mobile, the hood of her jacket pulled up. She’s wearing a grey pleated skirt, the hem a modest three inches above the knee, black shoes, knee-length white socks. She’s tiny.
Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
His phone trills in his pocket. He takes his eyes off her for a second, no more, but when he looks again, she’s gone. He feels a stab of alarm, a sick dread that he’s missed his chance.
He looks again at the screen. GeekGirl, thank God. He opens the message, but there’s no text. He frowns, crosses the street at a trot, passes the side gate, almost misses the alley off to the left, behind the school’s boundary wall. She’s up ahead, walking fast, light on her feet. He calls after her, but she keeps on going. He breaks into a jog, the drinks bottles ringing like a klaxon in his rucksack.
At the precise moment that he is ready to give up, she slows her pace and pauses next to a row of dumpsters. He stops for breath, bending to gulp in air.
She reaches behind and gives her skirt a naughty little flick with her fingers and he catches a glimpse of white panties.
He groans, hitches his rucksack higher onto his sweating back and sees her dart out of sight behind the dumpsters.
He moves forward, the soles of his shoes slapping heavily on the cobbles, passing a door in the high brick wall. It must lead to the kitchen courtyard: he hears the clank of metal implements, the air is thick with the smell of over-boiled cabbage and steamed fish. Friday, convent school – one that observes the old traditions.
The dumpsters reek of rotting food – surely she doesn’t want to do it here? But if that’s what rattles her rosary, he’s not the man to deny her. She giggles, and he feels it like she’s run her fingernails down his spine.
She’s going nowhere and he’s in no hurry, so he shrugs off his pack and sets it on the ground, fishes out the camcorder and takes a pann
ing shot.
He walks slowly past the first two dumpsters, his heart pounding. The excitement of anticipation is so fine, he decides to play it out a little longer, using the viewfinder as his eyes, working from her shoes up.
Lord save us – they’re patent leather with a narrow strap across the instep. His heart is pounding in his ears, his hands are slick, and he’s already hard. Baby, I‘m about to rock your world. He’s looking at slim ankles in those dazzling white socks, a band of smooth, tanned flesh between the top of the sock and the hem of the skirt. He focuses for a tantalising second on her thighs, on the sliver of shadow cast by her skirt hem, before continuing his tracking shot. Her jacket is unzipped to the waist, her shirt open to show a hint of white bra lace. He lingers a moment, glad of the Sony’s anti-shake technology. He pans up, but she closes her hand over his. His whole body resonates with desire, pulsing to the rush of blood in his ears.
‘Look at me,’ she says, her voice husky.
He tears his gaze from the image in the viewfinder. Her face is in shadow, and she reaches up to pull the jacket hood back.
This isn‘t right.
He can’t make sense of what he sees. This isn’t GeekGirl.
She smiles at him and he feels sick. This just is not right.
GeekGirl is fourteen years old. This is someone twenty years older. Her hand snakes out, gripping the back of his neck.
He grabs the hand, tries to prise it off his skin, but she’s strong – much stronger than she looks.
‘What’s up, Wolfboy?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you like women your own age?’
Horrified, he stares into her face and sees another – much younger.
‘Misty?’
‘Misty,’ she says, ‘is dead.’
He feels a pressure in his groin, then a rush of wetness and heat. She steps away and for some reason, he crumples to his knees. The camcorder is suddenly too heavy to lift; it records a pool of dark liquid on the ground, spreading in a slow tide around him. She takes the recorder from his hand.
‘Here,’ she says, ‘let me – it’d be a shame to miss this.’
He takes ten minutes to die. She had severed his femoral vein, slicing lengthways to increase the bleed, because this was how her daughter chose to end her life. Within hours of her posting it online, the clip is listed as the top video on YouTube, VirginMedia and MSN. It stays there for twenty-four hours, until a public outcry forces its removal.
Janice Tregarron places her shoulder bag onto the ground. It has rained all morning, but the sun now dazzles on the footpaths, and the pathways and the damp earth of the cemetery are steaming, exhaling a gauzy mist that spills into the hollows and swirls around the gravestones. From the bag Janice takes a metal bowl, lighter fluid, matches, and a diary. Janice is a Catholic; she finds comfort in the order and mystery of its rituals, but this is no religious sacrament. This is a purging.
She sets out the items in front of her daughter’s grave. Janice tears each page out, one by one, twists it and places it into the metal bowl. When every page is accounted for, she squirts some of the lighter fuel onto the mound and drops a lighted match onto it. The diary catalogues ten meetings between Alison, known on the forums as Misty, and Keith Grant, aka Wolfboy. Her daughter, naive, but no fool, discovered and documented his true name. In the earlier entries, Alison believes she is in love, but by the tenth, she is suicidal. Her classmates discovered video recordings of her with Wolfboy online. Neither was named, and Wolfboy hid his face, but Alison was easily identifiable. The images were explicit and distasteful. The girls tormented her. It began with name-calling, but quickly escalated: images of her and Wolfboy taped inside her locker, her desk, condoms stuffed in the pockets of her coat while it hung in the cloakroom, a dildo, left on her seat in the classroom. They spat on her as she ran the gauntlet of the corridors between lessons; they shoved and slapped her as she queued for lunch, tripped her on the stairs, and elbowed and kicked her on the sports field. She received phonecalls, texts and emails, but worst of all – the thing that finally broke her – they posted her email address and mobile phone number, together with one of the most explicit photographs, online, advertising free sex.
Keith Grant had made no attempt to hide the fact that he was recording her. But she’d believed him when he said he wanted to remember always how beautiful she was and how sexy their first days together had been.
Janice found Alison’s diary three months after her daughter’s suicide. She could not believe that she didn’t know her daughter was in such distress. And the moment she thought it, the signs, the moments of almost-revelation, the half-spoken confessions, the unspoken pleas to be understood, crowded into her consciousness and she saw that she had failed as a mother and as a human being. Her business affairs had taken precedence over her daughter’s welfare: she had noticed and discounted Alison’s reluctance to get up for school, had replaced damaged uniform blouses and sports kit without comment, too busy to be bothered with questions, too tired to cope with the arguments that questions inevitably provoked. She had seen the marks on Alison’s arms and legs, and had wilfully allowed herself to be persuaded that they were trophy bruises from hockey and netball.
It was all in the diary, every slap and punch and trip and shove and kick. She could have – should have – taken it to the police, but she chose not to. The justice system would have condemned Grant as a predator, a paedophile preying on young girls, but he would not have been tried for murder – even though he killed Alison just as surely as if he’d wielded the razor blade himself. So she used Alison’s diary to lead her to Wolfboy; she trawled the forums, found him, lured him, and killed him. Janice Tregarron believes in goodness and evil, in virtue and sin, and heaven and hell. Some would say she had sought revenge, and perhaps they would be right: it’s true that evil deeds had been punished, but there was no vengeful feeling in Janice’s heart as she plunged the blade into Grant’s femoral vein, no anger as she watched him die. Rather, it was an act of contrition, a plea for forgiveness.
She opens her purse and takes out the small blue SD card she’d taken from Grant/Wolfboy’s camcorder. About a centimetre square, it is burdened with so much misery that Janice is amazed that it can weigh so little – light enough to balance on the tip of her finger. But encoded in the thin-layer technology of its integrated circuits is a graphic, horrifying record of other girls, some younger than Alison.
She holds the tiny electronic manifest of cruelty and human degradation over the flames until she cannot bear the heat any longer, then tilts her hand and the thin square of blue plastic tumbles into the fire.
Martin Edwards
* * *
The Case of the Musical Butler
* * *
In the months following my marriage, I remained in regular contact with Mr Sherlock Holmes, and ten days after he paid a welcome visit to our home, I took a week’s holiday from my practice, and returned to the lodgings he and I had shared; my wife was visiting her mother, who was suffering from a minor indisposition. During this period, Holmes was consulted by Sir Greville Davidson with regard to his butler, but the circumstances of the case were so delicate that it remains impossible for my account of it to be published whilst the last of the principal characters in the little drama remains alive. Nevertheless, I have decided to write up my notes before memories fade, since the whole affair provides a remarkable insight into an unexpectedly compassionate side to Holmes’ personality, as well as demonstrating his skill as a solver of puzzles.
Sir Greville entered our lives on a cold and blustery October afternoon. As I watched from the bow window as a brisk wind blew leaves across Baker Street, I noticed a tall man, limping along the pavement with the aid of a stout walking stick. I estimated that he was some sixty-five years of age, with craggy features and silver hair, and that he was a man of means, given the smartness of his black frock coat and grey trousers, and the shine of his shoes. As he examined the numbers of the houses, I described him to my friend.
/> ‘I suppose that will be Sir Greville Davidson from Oaklands Hall, on the outskirts of Wallingford,’ Holmes murmured absently, ‘I anticipated that he might wish to seek my advice.’
‘Holmes, you astound me!’ I exclaimed. ‘In London alone, there must be scores of men who match the description I supplied. How can you possibly assert…?’
Holmes yawned. ‘It is of no consequence, Watson. Besides, I may very well be mistaken.’
For Sherlock Holmes to admit a possible flaw in one of his deductions – even when proffered in such casual fashion and on the basis of the slenderest evidence – was a sign that he had become gripped by ennui. This I found disturbing, for I knew, none better, that in order to alleviate boredom, he was apt to reach for the morocco case in which he kept his syringe and cocaine.
The bell clanged, and when Mrs Hudson flourished a card and announced that Sir Greville Davidson wished to see Holmes, I was about to offer my congratulations on the inspired nature of his guesswork – for what else could it have been? – when my friend murmured, ‘Send him away.’
‘Holmes!’ I expostulated. ‘You cannot simply decline to see the man!’
‘Pray, why not?’ Holmes lifted his right eyebrow, as if he lacked the energy to raise both. ‘I crave the stimulation of an unorthodox and knotty problem. I am a consulting detective, not a nursemaid to the gentry.’
‘And how can you be sure that Sir Greville does not wish to seek your advice on a matter of breath-taking complexity?’
Holmes waved a hand at the sheaf of clippings which lay on his roll-top desk. ‘Because bloodstained clothes, apparently belonging to a tramp, have been found in a ditch near the Thames outside Wallingford. Of the hypothesised tramp, there is no sign, and the police’s lack of concern appears to border on lack of interest, but an excitable journalist with nothing better to write about has penned a paragraph raising the spectre of foul play. If my memory of the geography of Oxfordshire does not fail me, the discovery was made adjacent to the boundary of the Oaklands Estate, one of the most notable in the county. If a crime has perchance been committed, Sir Greville is unlikely to be interested in identifying the perpetrator. He withdrew from society some years ago, as I recall, and a man in his position is apt, in such a case, to think only of protecting his reputation and privacy. Assisting the wealthy to keep their names out of the Press is, however, a task for others.’
Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories Page 13