by Alex Caan
‘That’s all she does. She’s a full-time vlogger.’
‘How can that be a full-time occupation?’
‘It’s the new celebrity. The news is always full of how much vloggers are earning. The ones at the top anyway.’
‘How many videos is she posting?’
‘Fortnightly.’
‘That can’t take that much time. Or earn her enough for a Little Venice flat.’
‘Who knows? Vloggers earn from all sorts. Product placements, personal appearances, books. Ruby’s got over two million subscribers.’
‘As in views of her videos?’
‘No, boss, as in people who follow her videos on YouTube. Like fans. They sign up for updates from her. She has over two million of them.’
Kate imagined what that would look like. She couldn’t. It was a ridiculous figure.
‘And any one of them could have been getting off on her, obsessing over her,’ said Harris. ‘It would be so easy – some sad, twisted fuck out there, stalking her. And he could do it without even leaving his room. Ruby came to him, every two weeks.’
‘Why haven’t I heard of her?’ said Kate. She didn’t want to think of disturbed individuals, not just yet.
‘She’s famous online, on YouTube, to her fans, her subscribers. But not really to us mere mortals. She’s not a pop star, or movie star. It’s the same notoriety a dancing cat might get when it goes viral. She’s an odd one, though.’
‘In what way?’
‘You’ll think I’m being harsh. She had these posters on her wall. There was One Direction, of course, but also Five Seconds of Summer. Teenage artists. And her bookshelves – from what I could see, they were all young adult novels. It’s as though, well, like she’s in a time warp, infantilised,’ said Zain. ‘My step sisters are into this stuff. And they’re twelve.’
‘Plenty of people Ruby’s age indulge in all of that,’ said Kate.
‘And her room, it didn’t make any sense, either. She had freakish levels of order – her computers, make-up. Oh, she has over half a dozen computers and devices. Her books, everything – all incredibly neat, and the carpet was super clean.’
‘Sounds ideal.’
‘Yes, until you look in her closet. That was a mess. It looked like somebody had rummaged through it in a burglary.’
‘It’s early, you’re probably tired, maybe you’re being paranoid?’ said Kate.
‘Maybe. And her parents, they were no better. They were terrified for Ruby. I first thought you’d got the details wrong, that she was a child, a two-year-old.’
‘Parents worry, Harris; it’s their job.’
At least, it’s supposed to be, she thought. Normal parents, normal people. Experience told her that normal seemed to be less homogenous than people might believe. She looked again at the baby monitor.
‘When did they last see her?’
‘They said around half seven. The mum, Laura, remembered a soap she was watching. Ruby said she was going out for a walk, wouldn’t be long. Around ten they started worrying. They called her phone, it kept going straight to voicemail. And she has this app, it tracks her location. Her parents have access to it, but it said she was at home still when they checked. It probably stops working when you switch your phone off. Her father, Mike, went out looking for her. When she wasn’t back by about half one, they called the police.’
‘Six hours gone – sure they’re going to worry. Her mobile is still off, I take it?’
‘Yes. It’s an Android operating system, so her apps are pretty much dead with the phone. I’ve requested last location from her network provider, asked them to ping the phone as well. See if we get a hit.’
He didn’t have to explain it would only work if the battery hadn’t been removed.
‘Have her friends been contacted?’ she said.
‘The Days said Ruby doesn’t have many. I’ve got a list.’
‘She has two million people watching her – doesn’t seem as though she’d be short of friends,’ said Kate. ‘What about a boyfriend?’
‘They said there is a boyfriend, Daniel Grant. He’s another vlogger. They aren’t too keen on him, I’d say.’
‘Not keen how? Unsuitable boyfriend or cause for concern?’
‘They didn’t really say much, more the way they said it.’
‘Possibly she’s gone to see him, then? Knows her parents don’t approve, so she didn’t tell them? Can you arrange contact with him, see if she’s with him?’
‘I’ve already tried. It was ringing through to voicemail, so I left him a couple of messages, asked him to contact the office. Ruby’s parents said they tried calling him earlier on, but he didn’t answer. He probably recognised their number.’
‘That might be all it is, then,’ said Kate.
‘Her parents were adamant, though. Kept saying it’s not like her to just go off. They were being weird too, especially in her bedroom. They kept looking around, checking it. You know what it reminds me of? People checking a crime scene, making sure they cleaned up.’
‘What are you saying? They’re involved in their own daughter’s disappearance? They called us in, remember?’
‘It sounds ludicrous, I know. The whole thing is off. And there was all this occult stuff around her room. Pentagrams, just placed randomly.’
‘She might be going through a phase. Did you ask her parents about it?’
‘No. They want to check all the hospitals. I said I’d put an alert out.’
‘How did they get Justin Hope involved?’
‘They don’t have a clue who he is. They said they called 999, asked for the police, and I showed up.’
‘How did this case end up with Justin, then? Routine emergency calls don’t get routed to us.’
The silence was heavy between them, acquiring layers of something unspoken. There would be a logical explanation in the morning, she was sure.
‘How did you leave them?’ she said.
‘I told them we’d put out an e-notice. Circulate Ruby’s picture and particulars, and alert hospital accident and emergency departments. I’ll look into her bank and credit card activity back at the office.’
‘Are you worried at all, by what you saw and heard from them?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. On paper, no, I’m not. She’s a grown woman, in perfect mental and physical health, as far as we know.’
‘Your doubts?’ said Kate, sensing them.
‘Why switch off her phone? And why just go? Her parents keep saying it’s out of character for her. But what if she’s running from them? They think she’s had an accident. I can’t help thinking it might be worse than that. If she was unhappy, thinking of ending it all . . . and we always have to consider the other possibility. Someone else may have taken her.’
Kate told him to call the boyfriend again, then go home and get some rest; they would re-evaluate everything in the office later this afternoon. She heard a cough, followed by her name, coming from the baby monitor.
Kate put on her red towelling robe and was on the landing before she realised, but came back in time. She took the blond wig from her dressing table and adjusted it on her head, checking her appearance in the mirror.
Now she was ready.
Chapter Eight
Zain let the cold water run, dipping his fingers into the spray until the sharpness hurt, until the shower was freezing. He stripped off his shorts and slowly walked into the icy cascade, letting it pelt his body. He smiled through it. It was a trick; it was training he had learned. Fool your mind: smile when it hurts and your brain will think you’re happy; it won’t register the pain. Even when they’re pulling your toenails off. One by one.
He closed his eyes, and the water winded him. Immediately another image filled his brain. He turned the temperature up. The fear he would keep for another day.
Zain lathered his hard body. Skin, muscle, bone. He was taut, always crouched, always waiting. Working for Riley would only be a blip, he was sure of it
. He would be on the frontlines again soon enough.
Riley had told him to come in for the afternoon shift. He had emailed the list of Ruby’s friends, including her boyfriend, to the office. Riley said she would get one of the others to follow them up. Did she think he was weak? One 3 a.m. wake-up call and he would be crushed?
Zain decided to go in earlier. Just because people told you to be one thing, didn’t mean you had to follow through.
He pulled on black trousers, tucking an olive-green shirt into them. His combat boots and black jacket stopped him looking polished, kept him looking casual. Although DCI Riley herself seemed to favour suits. Maybe she had to meet the upper echelons more. Maybe she liked to show she was different. In charge. He let the thought flit through his head, the one telling him how good she looked. She was his boss; she was off limits.
For now.
Zain poured skimmed milk over Weetabix, throwing in a handful of cashew nuts to add flavour. A glass of grapefruit juice to go with it, and green tea. He tried to avoid caffeine.
Maybe the green pills were loaded with it, anyway. Alligator balls, snake venom and caffeine.
He laughed into his empty kitchen. His flat was on the top floor, but the traffic along the main trunk road running past Waterloo sounded a constant background. It was subsidised accommodation, practically opposite the Old Vic Theatre, on the doorstep of the South Bank. Built especially for key workers. His neighbours were other police officers, along with nurses, teachers, ex-armed forces, some civil servants. In London’s jacked-up property market, they couldn’t afford these flats on their wages alone. So the city stepped in. Thank you, Mr Mayor, he thought.
Zain’s phone buzzed, followed by a leopard’s growl. His incoming text message ringtone.
The message was from Riley.
Am at the Days’ apartment. There’s been a development. Get here asap.
Zain felt his heart pounding as he ran out of his flat.
Chapter Nine
Laura’s whole body was shaking as she sobbed, visibly devastated. Mike tried to comfort his wife, handing her a tumbler of something amber. It smelled like liquorice, but the alcohol permeated the air.
Their initial paranoia, their conviction that they knew their daughter and that something was not right, had now been justified. They had seen footage of Ruby running for her life, pleading for help. Only to be captured and imprisoned. A video sent to Mike’s phone, anonymously.
Mike poured himself some of the drink he had used to calm his wife.
Kate breathed in the pungent vapour and felt a touch of nausea. Her stomach was empty, with only black coffee swilling around in it. There had been no time to eat. She’d barely had time to bring Ryan up to speed and race from her home in Highgate to the Days’ flat in Warwick Avenue.
‘I’m sorry, Laura, Mike,’ Kate began. Using their first names was standard police practice, to engender familiarity and openness. It felt clinical in the face of their tragedy to follow textbook procedure, but that rigidity was essential if Kate was to do her job properly. ‘I know you’ve just had a great shock, but we need your help.’
Kate was trying to distract them as much as anything.
Yet all three of them would be thinking the same thing. The reality, the awful truth.
Ruby Day had not disappeared; someone had taken her.
‘Do you recognise the location in the video clip? Is there a rural place you have ever been to? Can you think of anyone that might want to do this to Ruby?’ said Kate.
They shook their heads.
‘What about your work, Mr Day? Anything that might lead to something like this?’
‘I manage projects for the government.’
‘Anything sensitive?’
‘What? No. Projects for the NHS, nothing like that.’
‘Anything in your own personal history? Anyone who might hold a grudge?’
Kate thought of Ruby’s two million subscribers and about what Harris had said about the sicko out there watching Ruby. Had someone got tired of watching her from the privacy of their home, and found out where she lived? Turned their fantasies, in which Ruby spoke to them through her videos, into something else?
Kate was familiar with cases like that. She had studied the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the uncategorised, at Brown University. She knew how sometimes it could be a passing encounter in the street that sparked something. The colour of someone’s hair, eyes, the shape of their mouth, the way they walked, what they wore. One man she had hunted had stalked women based on their footwear, and what it reminded him of.
And from that transient second, that initial spark, that innocent person became the centre of someone’s universe, and they had no idea. No idea until it was too late, until someone else was mining their body, mining their life. With Kate trying to figure out why and how and who. All the time knowing that the victim was arbitrary. A hieroglyph that someone had interpreted.
Is that what had happened to Ruby? Had someone interpreted her, projected their own fantasies onto her, made her into something else? Was Ruby chosen because she reminded her kidnapper of someone else? Or had she been chosen for her own sake?
Kate wanted to mine Ruby’s life, before she was stripped of it. On the video, Ruby was still alive, and she wanted to find her before that changed. Stop her becoming an object, a mere body that was worked on for clues.
Laura stroked Mike’s arm; it was a comforting gesture, although it might have been a signal.
‘Your colleague, Detective Sergeant Harris, he kept asking us why we were so worried when Ruby didn’t come home,’ said Mike. ‘We said it’s natural concern, and he looked at us oddly. I knew what was going through his mind: Ruby is a grown woman, why were we panicking so much. It’s just that Ruby is different from other women her age – she wouldn’t have just gone off. That’s who she is – no trouble, sensitive to our feelings. She wouldn’t make us worry unnecessarily.’
‘Of course, and as it turns out, you were absolutely right to be worried.’
‘Yes. And last night that’s all it was. Parental worry. We assumed something had happened to her. An accident, or she was in a situation where she needed help. We didn’t think it could be something like this . . . not really. But now, the video, seeing that . . . someone has her, and this changes everything. Now it makes sense in a way that is terrifying for us.’
‘You have my complete support, Mike, we will do everything to find her.’
‘No what I mean is, we think we know who might have taken her,’ said Mike.
Chapter Ten
Mike looked embarrassed, unable to meet Kate’s eyes.
‘We think it’s her boyfriend, Daniel Grant,’ he said.
‘That’s a pretty serious accusation, Mr Day. Why do you think he would be involved in this?’
‘He’s not well,’ said Laura.
‘In what way?’ said Kate.
‘Mentally,’ said Laura. ‘He has an unpredictable temper.’
‘Has he ever taken that anger out on Ruby? Has he ever harmed her?’
‘No, not that we know of,’ said Laura.
‘How did it manifest itself in that case? His temper, I mean?’
‘We had arguments with him,’ said Mike. ‘I’m not proud of some of them, but we thought we had Ruby’s best interests at heart. Dan’s bad news, he’s not good for her. And when she started going on about living with him, even marriage . . . the rows escalated. That’s when we saw how ugly he could be.’
‘He’s not good enough for her,’ Laura echoed, ‘and more than that, he’s trouble.’
‘Ruby was so blinded by what she thought was love, she just let him come between us,’ said Mike.
So Ruby the perfect daughter wasn’t so smooth a ride. Come between us. That suggested to Kate there might be a rift. Rather than the breezy, ‘I’m off for a walk, see you in a bit,’ Ruby might have been an, ‘I’m going out and you don’t get to know where or why!’ type of daughter. She might have be
en in a sulk; distant, even.
‘Was he the first boyfriend you had issues with?’ said Kate.
‘Yes,’ said Mike. ‘She’s had boyfriends before, but not like Dan.’
‘The last one, James, he was perfect,’ said Laura. ‘Ideal, so sweet, polite, and he treated Ruby with respect. She ended it with him, though, and went after Dan. It broke my heart. I get it – I was her age, once. I went after the bad boys; it’s why I had her the way I did. They wasted my time, and I was terrified she would do the same.’
‘What do you mean? You had her the way you did?’
‘She’s not mine,’ said Mike. ‘She’s Laura’s daughter. Ruby was six when we married.’
Kate looked at Laura, who was leaning her head against the sofa, looking up at the ceiling. So Mike was Ruby’s step father. Kate wondered at the relationship they might have shared.
‘Her father? Where is he?’ she said.
‘Mike is her father.’ Laura’s voice was harsh, sudden, defiant.
‘Her biological father?’ said Kate.
Laura looked away, colour rising to her face. ‘There was a donor,’ she said.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Kate, understanding perfectly, but wanting to be sure.
‘I was single, chronically single. Kept making the same mistake again and again, the unsuitable boy, the unsuitable father. So I decided to take things into my own hands.’
‘Artificial insemination?’ said Kate.
‘Yes,’ said Laura.
Mike held Laura’s hand, covering it with his own larger one.
‘So you see, Mike is her father. He’s the only father she ever knew, and there was no conflict. No biological father turning up, or Ruby going off to find one.’
Kate knew the law had changed in 2005, long after Ruby’s birth, to allow a child to trace their biological father at the age of eighteen. It was why so many women were heading to Denmark, where anonymity was still guaranteed. That and the fact it was cheaper. More sperm donations, for some reason.
‘Thank you, Laura, I appreciate your honesty,’ said Kate. ‘I want you both to feel comfortable enough to tell me anything. Anything that might possibly help.’