‘I’m happier. Now. Medicine was such a nightmare. Incompatible with normal life.’
He nodded once, bringing a hand to touch his beard, which bristled. ‘And Jack?’
‘What about Jack?’ I said.
‘Well, clearly all is not well. In Oban you seemed so sad.’
‘I am sad,’ I said, my voice thick. I hadn’t told him or Kate exactly what had happened. But it was clear they knew something had. ‘You know, I thought Ben was cheating on me.’
The words were out and on the table in front of us.
Dad considered them carefully. ‘And was he?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I ended us – by accusing him.’
Dad sat back, nodding thoughtfully. ‘And then …’
‘And then everything else. But now I’m doing it again. I’m accusing Jack of … things.’
‘Ah. You mustn’t, Rach. You mustn’t think that he’s – that he’s her.’
‘None of us had any idea,’ I said. ‘What Mum was doing.’
‘No. People are complicated. But it doesn’t eclipse how lovely she was.’
‘Doesn’t it? For you?’ I said.
‘No. Not completely. Partially.’
I couldn’t look at him. Instead I looked at the checked tablecloth as my eyes pooled with tears. I could see Kate up at the bar, looking to all the world like a tennis player. I wondered what Dad thought of our stories now. Were we still successes, to him? Me, pregnant by my boyfriend of not even a year?
‘Jack’s fine,’ I said bluntly. ‘We’re fine.’
I picked up a salt cellar and felt it, weighty, in my palm.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
My voice sounded steady, not betraying the doubts I felt inside.
I arrived back at my flat and found myself back on the Internet again. I really should stop soon, I was thinking, as I clicked on a story about Jack Ross, the up-and-coming writer who’d won an award for his article in Time For You Magazine.
I frowned as I read it. Something didn’t quite read correctly. I shook my head. I couldn’t work out why. I traced a finger along the screen. He had been using the byline Jack Ross to write under since 2010. That made sense: he’d changed his name, after all. But there was something else. It was the name. The name of the magazine. Time For You. It sounded generic.
I put it into Google: Time For You Magazine.
Nothing. Nothing substantial, anyway. A magazine owned by a company called AIESEC UK popped up. It had a caption – ‘It’s high time for you to be enlightened’ – but it wasn’t Time For You Magazine.
I googled it with Jack’s name, then googled his articles and the article given as the award-winning one: ‘Michelin-starred Restaurants in the North’.
Nothing. Jack had written no such article.
I scrolled to the bottom of the article about his award and looked at the company name. White Wash, it said. I googled that, and there it was: the thing I sort of knew all along. White Wash: Reputation Cleaners.
He’d paid someone. He’d paid someone to write that article and bump it up Google. I thought of the other one, the charity run: the low-resolution photo that didn’t look like him.
I dialled his number immediately. ‘Did you pay somebody to write fake articles about you?’
‘Yes,’ Jack said, not wondering why I was asking such questions at ten o’clock at night. ‘SEO, yes.’
‘SEO?’
‘Search Engine Optimization. You know, where you rank high on Google?’
‘So you paid someone to write a fake article and bump it up the rankings – because you didn’t want people to think you weren’t who you said you were?’
In hindsight, he was trying to interject. I could hear it: not in any murmurings or interruptions, exactly, but in his bated breath; in his absolute silence.
‘So that you wouldn’t look like a start-up journalist, on your first article?’ My tone sounded hopeful, sad even.
He paused then, for a second.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, in the manner of a patient teacher. ‘But also to push the others down. That was the main reason we paid them. Though I know how you found out,’ he said with a laugh in his voice. ‘Leaving a bloody advert for themselves on the bottom.’
I ignored that. ‘The main reason?’ I said.
‘That article was a bonus, yeah. I wanted Jack Ross to look real. To have a photo, and stuff. To look like a rounded person.’
The running photo. The award-winning writer photo. Staged. Fake.
‘But …’
‘But the main thing I employed them to do was to push the other stuff down. To delete the court articles, if they could. To remove John Douglas. Or at least what he did.’
He. He called himself he.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I still tried to write as John Douglas, for a while. I thought he could get rid of the crime. But he couldn’t. Not entirely. You’ve seen, I guess. It’s hard to delete someone – something – completely. Bits remain. Things get archived, though we tried to stop that as much as we could. But more things go up all the time. You ask someone to pull down an article but someone’s taken a screenshot, and it’s on Twitter before you know it. So I changed my name. It was a last resort.’
‘How could they delete them?’ I said, remembering the countless 404: not found errors I’d received during my searching. ‘Aren’t they … isn’t it just journalism?’ My lip curled involuntarily at the hypocrisy, that Jack was a journalist who was trying to get other journalists censored, but I dampened it. Jack didn’t write feature articles. He didn’t invade people’s privacy. He wrote about restaurants and the best views in Rome and what it was like to walk across the Agios Sostis bridge in Zakynthos. He wasn’t paparazzi.
‘If you’ve not been convicted, you can get some of them removed. Say it’s libel. I don’t know about the law and defamation and everything,’ he said. ‘But if you threaten it, they often do. So Dad hired someone to do that. And, you know. He’s powerful. In Oban. In business.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘And if you can’t get it taken down, you depress it.’
‘Depress?’
‘Pushing the articles down so they don’t rank. So they don’t come up on Google. White Wash knew all about Google’s algorithms. Even now, I’m glad I did it. My journalism can live on. Without all that tainting it.’
He stopped speaking then. He knew he’d said enough. More sinister, somehow, than threatening newspapers was this manipulation of search engines: of the natural order. So people like me – innocent people who wanted to know what had happened – wouldn’t find the articles; would find it hard and give up. Would get confused, and think it was someone else.
It was as though he thought that, in changing his name, somebody else had committed the crime. Maybe that was a necessary part of coming to terms with something so awful. But it seemed wrong to me. Manipulative. Cold.
The articles I’d eventually found didn’t appear until deep into Google’s search results. I’d just been persistent.
This wasn’t only the murky legal world of a non-conviction: it was deliberate. Jack had set out to confuse, to misrepresent. And, again, that made everything just a little bit worse.
‘Rach?’ he said.
‘Yeah. It just seems, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Mucky.’
I sounded like my father. Mucky. But it was mucky. There was no other word for it.
‘I know,’ Jack said softly, and his voice was contrite, quiet, empathetic. Embarrassed, maybe. ‘You think you’d have the integrity to stand in a courtroom and tell the truth. You think you’d say this is who I am: take it or leave it. You think you’d want to let the newspaper articles stand, and use the same name. But some of them, the ones you can’t see …’
I let him believe I hadn’t seen as many as I had. How could I possibly tell him I’d used a bot that crawled the web, archiving it, unknown to the authors, to t
he subjects, of the articles? And the rest: that I’d done a Clare’s Law search against him? That I’d had his trial transcript ordered? And yet – what if there were more? Worse articles?
‘They decimated me. The press. I couldn’t let it continue. I don’t know. It was like I was constantly sweeping up. And then my lawyer’s friend offered to help. And it seemed easier, rather than live with these fires blazing and never work again. Or try to put them out myself. Mum and Dad paid.’
I stared out of the window. It was during that stage of autumn where leaves were constantly drifting down like huge snowflakes, leaving smudges on the pavement like giant handprints. He’d bought himself a new identity. Privacy. Innocence. If that had happened to me, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to do that.
‘I need to go,’ I said.
He sent me a long text after that.
Classic Jack, always preferring to communicate in writing, in verbose language. Instead of in person, by speaking.
I know this all looks mental and shit and shady. I promise I’m not a drugs baron or a member of the Mafia. Just your Jack who was unlucky a few years ago. I promise I will always be your Jack.
I replied immediately. I believed him. I wanted to believe him.
33
‘What was all the target practice for?’ I said. I did this sometimes. Homed in on small details as I processed everything.
It was a Sunday afternoon in mid-November. The trees were at their most glorious, wearing shaggy coats of autumn rust. The leaves would fall away in a few days. We were at a tourist attraction nearby that Jack was reviewing. It was a mock Victorian village, all fitted out with authentic penny farthings and an old mill and real shops staffed with actors in costume.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
A spark of irritation crossed his features. It darkened them, drawing a line underneath his cheekbones. His lips folded in, but when he looked up at me he forced a smile.
‘Were you just practising for nothing? When did you start?’
He swivelled towards me. His eyes looked amber in the sun.
A woman in Victorian petticoats emerged from a building in front of us. ‘Good morning to you,’ she said.
We ignored her. The sky was a bright, high autumn blue. The air was cold and crisp.
‘Did you think I was practising so I could shoot people accurately?’ he said.
He pushed his hair back. It had grown longer. He reached for my hand and we walked into the old schoolhouse. It was empty, the classrooms protected by glass windows, so all we could do was peer in at the rows of old, dark desks, at the strange, preserved, closed-off classrooms. I shivered. It was cool and quiet. It smelt of wood and pencils and old stone. Nobody else was around.
‘No,’ I said.
Jack’s hand was still around mine. You could have drawn a line vertically down my body, that day. One half would have been pleasure, looking at his wavy hair, his tight waist, listening to his funny comments, smelling his light, clean scent. And the other would have been pain; anger at his abruptness, as if I shouldn’t be allowed to muse on his crime, as if I was being annoying.
‘It was a hobby, Rach,’ he said shortly.
I only hoped he didn’t ask how I knew things. That he didn’t ever discover my search history. It was insulting at best, alarming at worst. I could barely type a single letter into the search bar without Google suggesting things to do with John and not proven verdicts and Dominic.
We sat on a bench in the school changing rooms. Victorian satchels were hung up in front of us. A woman in costume drifted by and nodded at us.
‘Y’alright,’ Jack said to her. That was always his greeting to everybody. The letters rolled together in a Scottish drawl.
‘The yelling in the cafe. When Mez saw,’ he volunteered.
I turned to him in surprise. He hardly ever offered up explanations.
‘Yes,’ I murmured.
‘A journo recognized me. Wanted an exclusive.’
‘Recognized you?’ I said. ‘It must have been so high profile. I never knew about it.’
‘He was Scottish. It was a big thing in Scotland.’
‘An exclusive on what?’
‘My side of it,’ he said. ‘Bloody tabloids. I just lost it. They’re like leaches. Feeding on our misery.’
I remembered a journalist outside the boy’s inquest. I understood entirely.
We sat in silence for a few seconds.
‘Tell me something,’ I said to him. ‘A Jack-thing.’
It sounded whimsical; the usual chit-chat of new lovers, but it wasn’t. It was a desperate kind of searching. I wanted to get to know him. I was on that airport escalator again, trying to speed things up, to make the inorganic organic; like a company that had merged five times trying to mesh everyone together and pretend it had happened naturally.
‘What do you want to know?’ he said. ‘How much I love you? Let me count the ways …’
‘Something about you. What would your last meal be?’ I said. ‘Your death row meal?’
‘Pak choi,’ he said immediately. It had become absorbed into our rotation of things we liked to say to each other and giggle about. ‘Fillet steak? I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What are the rules?’
‘Three courses, anything you like.’
‘But I’m about to die. I don’t want anything.’ He sneaked a look at me.
It was true; he was that way inclined. If at all anxious he simply wouldn’t eat.
‘Well, it’s hypothetical,’ I said. ‘You can ignore that bit. Just pretend I’m asking you for your favourite foods.’
Jack paused for a while. Eventually, he said: ‘Forty-eight McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, but I have to have a hangover.’
‘You’re going to have to explain that to me.’
‘My best meal ever was the day after my eighteenth birthday. At school. In Fettes. The next day my mate who could drive took us to McDonald’s when we surfaced at five o’clock in the afternoon. I was ravenous, suddenly. I ordered forty-eight. And I ate every single one.’
I couldn’t help but laugh, and I did my best to ignore that he couldn’t help reminding me where he had gone to school. That we both knew I didn’t know. ‘That’s your best meal? Reconstituted chicken?’
‘Yep. You?’
My phone beeped. It was Amrit. I called up the string of texts that I’d ignored, and Jack saw too.
‘You never respond,’ he said.
I shrugged, and he let it slide. It was too difficult. I couldn’t explain just part of it. I’d have to tell him everything. The boy. My mistake.
‘I don’t think you can have much of a hangover on death row, anyway,’ I said.
‘Maybe not.’
‘You hardly drink now.’
‘No.’
‘Is that because you drank that night?’ I said.
To his credit, Jack understood immediately what I meant, and didn’t try to pretend otherwise. He did, however, raise his eyes heavenwards. ‘I hate talking about it.’
‘I know. Your mum …’
‘What?’
‘Well, she doesn’t want you to discuss it, does she?’ I thought of her sweeping as she told me to leave the subject alone, of his dad’s slick explanation at the loch. Not to mention the rest: footing the bill for reputation cleaning, lawyer’s fees. ‘No matter what your parents think. You can tell me. You don’t have to obey them.’
It was a step too far.
‘My parents?’ he said, and he was properly indignant then. Moody.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But at the loch – he just stepped in.’
‘Yeah, he did. That was Dominic’s gran. As I’m sure you’ve worked out. Do you plan on cross-examining me on every day trip?’
‘No.’
He was silent.
‘Kind of,’ he said eventually. ‘I liked a drink. I’d had a beer that night. I wasn’t drunk.’
‘And?’ I said, softly, not wanting to scare his confession away, li
ke a stray cat I was luring out of a dark alleyway.
‘It’s the taste.’
‘Of?’
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Beer, wine. They taste different, but it’s the alcohol. That fizz. The feeling of unwinding.’
‘What, the nice feeling?’ I said.
I could hardly remember it. It was theoretical now. I wondered what my next drink would be. Prosecco? A toast to Wally?
‘For me, the last time I felt like that, I ended up standing in front of a body,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I saw a woman about it. We did cognitive behavioural stuff. It was really wanky. She said she thought I’d stored the memories in a traumatic place. So now, even a mouthful of alcohol and I just panic. I don’t drive, either. For the same reason. No, not the same reason. Because it’s just a bit risky. What if I hit someone – didn’t see them? I might end up in the same situation again. And I’d do anything to avoid that.’
I nodded. PTSD. Probably. It was a relief, in many ways. That he was traumatized. That the calm explanations were underscored by something else. Chaos, regret. I would be surprised if anybody went through what Jack had gone through without being traumatized. I saw it all the time in cancer patients. They reached remission and then their anxiety spiked. And they could never understand it; how come it seemed to only happen once the crisis was over.
‘What was it like afterwards?’ I said.
He responded immediately. ‘Weird. Like everything was inverted.’
‘Your life?’
‘Well, yeah. Everything. It wasn’t just the body. The law. It was everything. The media. People slamming me on Facebook. Our house looked different. Just – everything changed.’
He reached out and batted a vintage satchel. It swung. The hook it was hanging on creaked as it moved.
‘You weren’t on Facebook then,’ I said automatically, even though it was showing a hand I didn’t really want him to see.
He’d joined late. In 2010. I remember thinking how strange that was.
‘I was, as John Douglas,’ he said. ‘Closed now.’
Everything but the Truth Page 19