Frank was undergoing the long dark night of the soul. I’d read about such things, people having third-life crises instead of midlife ones. He’d gone bonkers. Academia must do that to you; trying to be a media don must be very wearing.
Poor Frank.
Poor Ivan, that I had doubted him so. Innocent Ivan.
Evil Frank, the misery he had caused me. The death dates. The bastard.
Ivan versus Frank. I knew who I wanted to win.
My phone went.
“I’m innocent and I’ve got proof!” said that now-familiar voice, a slightly squeakier one than is strictly attractive on a man.
“Ivan,” I shrieked in a voice so high that only bats could hear it. “Ivan,” in a lower tone. I had been rocklike with Ivan, but now I was fluttery. He was no longer the enemy, but a boy I had kissed and now fancied and was engaged in the awkwardness of telephone calls with. “Yes, I know.” Innocent Ivan. “Well, at least I think I know. I assume so.”
“How do you know?”
“The Chinese thing.”
“What are you talking about? What Chinese thing?”
“On the site. What are you talking about? How else are you innocent?”
“I’ve found the postcode of whoever registered the site. We know where they live, well, more or less; it’s got to be one of about twenty houses with that postcode. And it’s not my house.”
“What? How?”
“I’ll explain when I see you. I can see you, can’t I?”
“Yes,” I cried. “I suppose so,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘I suppose so’? Won’t your hectic schedule of fashion launches and restaurant openings allow it? Got a hot date with a media type?”
“Ha, ha. I said I suppose so because I still don’t know whether I can trust you.”
He sighed.
“This postcode,” I asked. “Is it in London?”
“Yes.”
I felt the phone receiver tremble against my ear. “Where?”
“West Fourteen. Shepherd’s Bush.”
“Oh,” I said.
Frank didn’t live in Shepherd’s Bush.
“How do we know it’s not a fake one?”
“We don’t, but there’s only one way to find out. Are you free at lunchtime?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.” I was badly dressed and hadn’t washed my hair that morning. If only dry shampoo actually worked but instead it makes you look like you’re wearing a dandruffy old wig. Could I at least wash my fringe in the sink and then fluff it up in the hand dryer? “Yes, let’s meet then, Ivan. Thank you. For everything.”
*
I nipped out midmorning and bought a wildly expensive chiffon top that was just on the right side of see-through: a glimpse of the curves below rather than girl band member about to go solo. It was an appropriate compromise between dressy and casual, perfect for a lunchtime first date slash investigative showdown and a wonderful sage color. I supposed I should be saving my money for potential unemployment, but I had that binge-before-a-diet feeling.
I looked in the mirror and made a pouty face as I admired it. The office toilet’s liquid soap had done a reasonable job on my hair, rendering it no longer greasy, when it actually changes color.
I knew how I wanted to look for Ivan but I wasn’t sure how I was to behave or what we were to do. We had the postcode, or what we assumed was the postcode, who knew whether it wasn’t just another red herring or false clue.
*
Ivan arrived at my offices punctually, ready for lunch. I looked through to the foyer where he stood and reveled in the seconds that I had to examine him. How could I have ever thought him unattractive? Staring at him then, he seemed embarrassingly handsome, out-of-my-league handsome, film-star handsome. If we went out together, jealous girls would think us a mismatch and consider him fair game as I didn’t deserve him. Girls did that. I had done that. They get angry when they see ugly old men with gorgeous young women, but they are even more offended should they see a plain girl with an exceptional male.
I felt his looks almost smite my eyes. I searched his face for imperfection, but instead saw that long, straight aquiline nose, that thick shiny hair, that mouth; I wanted to kiss that mouth. I appraised the broad shoulders and slim body where I had been used to seeing George’s slim shoulders and broad body. He was IT-boy indeed.
I shook my head and stood up tall. He wasn’t innocent yet. I had to try to remember that. I wasn’t sure that I fancied him. I had to stop just getting off with people and then working out whether we were compatible afterward. He was systems administrator man to whom I had never given a second glance, after all; my mind was just addled by kisses, sites and splits. I couldn’t fall for a techie, I had to remember that. I hadn’t slept with him yet. I was enjoying being single, wasn’t I, I didn’t want to meet anybody else right now.
He turned to me and grinned. We did a sort of break-dance around one another as we worked out what greeting to offer. We settled on kissing each other’s cheeks, a compromise we had not made before. Before it was all or nothing. We giggled awkwardly. He wore aftershave, another unfamiliarity. I had doused myself in perfume. I had put on lipstick, blotted so thoroughly with tissue paper that it almost didn’t exist, but left a stain upon my lips that only I could be aware of.
“Nice top,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. We stared at each other and made our way to a restaurant with a terrace. It was one of those rare London days where things go right without trying. The sun was shining and yet we got a table outside. The waiters were efficient and our beers cold. The site and the office receded. We stared at one another again.
“Tell me how you got the postcode. And why I should believe you,” I said.
“And what’s this Chinese thing you’re on about?”
“I asked first.”
“All right.” He drew breath and I felt one of Ivan’s explanations coming on. Oh dear. “I had to lie.”
“You lied? You who have a code of professional conduct, who won’t do anything remotely illegal?”
“Yes, I lied and I gave false information. There, are you proud of yourself? I couldn’t see any other way of disabusing you of the ridiculous idea that I might be behind the site.”
I blushed.
“As if,” he said and I reddened some more. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
I mumbled something that approached an apology.
“I kept on looking at all the information we had gathered and hoping to find some sort of clue. I even went through every line of code to see if there was anything more embedded there.”
“Was there?”
“Only the occasional ‘Izobel rocks’ and other such nonsense, along with more references to Dune. Nothing scandalous or useful. There was nothing else for me to go on, except what we’d gathered already, which was some false names, a false PO box number and the names of a couple of domain name registrars.”
“Remind me.”
“Registrars—the companies that register the domain names and URLs of the sites.”
“Not the person from Dune?”
“No, that’s the registrant.”
“Of course.” I remembered now why I could find him so irritating.
“There was no point pursuing the registrar in the States, but I reckoned that the two-bit company that had registered the co dot uk name in this country might be a little more open.”
“How did you know they were two-bit?”
“I’d never heard of them and their own company Web site looked like it had been done by a myopic teenager in his bedroom. It was rubbish.”
“Not like izobelbrannigan dot com,” I boasted.
“Indeed.” He had finished his beer already and ordered another. “From directory inquiries,” he continued, “I managed to get a telephone number for e-z-webbysolutions…”
“The registrars,” I commented, flaunting the word.
“Yes, the registrars of the izobelbrannigan dot co dot uk
domain name, the British one. So I rang them up and it was my good fortune to talk to a girl in customer services who was both bored and stupid.”
“As is often the case.”
“But unusually, I wanted someone bored and stupid. I said to her that I was the registrant for the domain name izobelbrannigan dot co dot uk and that I was furious that they had been giving out my address to junk mail companies. She of course says, ‘But we don’t give addresses of our customers out to third parties.’”
“Reading this off an answers-to-frequently-asked-questions list she’s got in front of her,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“I get really angry, really apoplectic. It was quite easy, I just thought about how pissed off I was that you should have accused me of making the damned site and I found myself to be enraged.”
“Sorry about that. Then what?”
“‘Well,’ I say to bored stupid girl, ‘if you don’t give out addresses, then why have I received mountains of junk mail since registering the domain name with you?’”
“But she’d just say how can you prove it’s them giving out your details and not a credit card company or some other list. You can’t pin it on them.”
“Which is exactly what she did say. But then I said, ‘I know it must be your company because I made a mistake in the post-code I gave you and this mistake has been replicated in all the junk mail I’ve received ever since. Ergo, it must be you that’s making money out of creating mailing lists.’”
“Cunning. But also a long shot.”
“I know. This wasn’t the first route I tried taking to try to find out who registered the site. I did call the company in the States, I tried the Post Office again...”
I smiled. “So what happened when you told stupid bored woman about the mistake in the postcode?”
“Of course she said, ‘What’s the postcode you gave us,’ to which I said, ‘You tell me the one you’ve got,’ and this ping-ponged for a while until I eventually bullied, or bored, her into submission. She cracked just to get me off the phone. I was demanding to speak to her manager by this point as well as throwing some crap at her about privacy laws and data protection. Just as I was about to give up she told me the postcode that they held for the domain name izobel-brannigan dot co dot uk and I scribbled it down.”
I looked at the postcode. A letter, two numbers, another number and two letters, six characters that could answer the question that had dominated my life for the last month and a half. “Thank you.”
“That’s all right. Do you believe me now?”
I did, I believed him utterly. I doubted that I had ever doubted him. Yet I also believed that we would never find out who was really behind the site. And I couldn’t shake off that residual anger I had felt toward him when I thought he was the perp. “How do we know that it’s not a false postcode?” I asked.
“It’s a real postcode all right, but whether it’s our site person’s real postcode is another matter.”
“And they didn’t give you an address? How can you tell what exact address this is other than somewhere in W Fourteen?”
“Izobel, will you never learn the power of the Internet?”
“I know it all too well.”
“The Post Office has a site and if you input the postcode, it will give you the address, or should I say addresses, that correspond to it. Unlike America or the Continent, where the zip code covers a huge area, British postcodes are absurdly specific. A letter will arrive if you just put the house number and the postcode on the envelope. You don’t even need to put the town or name or anything. It’s amazing really.”
“Indeed. So what’s the address of this one then?”
“It gives us only about fifteen buildings on one street, some single-occupancy, others divided into flats.”
“Quite a lot of people then,” I said ungratefully. “At least thirty or so.”
“True.” He pulled out a printed page from the Internet with a page of the London A to Z on it, with one section of a street highlighted in pink. “Does this mean anything to you? Do you know anyone who lives around there?”
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“And the photo I sent you didn’t mean anything?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Hooded top, not a lot else. Could be Frank.”
“Who’s Frank?”
“He’s taken over from you as our most likely candidate. He’s an ex of mine who wears a hoodie and I told him I was learning Chinese. And I know he remembered that fact as he made some sarky comment about me being fluent in Mandarin later.” I knocked back my beer to catch up with Ivan. “But I’m not learning Chinese. Then today there was this stuff on the site about how I’m a keen student of Chinese.”
“I saw that. I was impressed.”
“But I’m not learning it.”
“Too busy reading Hello! and Heat?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. And researching some courses I’m thinking of doing.”
“So that’s it, this ex of yours must be guilty as nobody else thinks you’re a Mandarin speaker. Or,” he exclaimed, “he’s in league with whoever is behind the site.”
“There’s a team of them?”
“Could be.” We were silenced by the image of a factory full of Izobel obsessives.
“Or, he happened to mention that I speak Chinese to the site perp. He just knows the site perp rather than is site perp.”
“Only one way to find out. Why don’t we confront your boyfriend?”
“Ex. I’m not sure. He doesn’t live at the address you’ve got. And it just seems so unlikely.”
“And yet when I turn out to have been at the same party as you months ago, that’s damning evidence?”
I was about to point out that he was also a geek who admitted to having followed me around the office for months, but refrained. “I’ve learned from that mistake, Ivan, and I am loath to jump to conclusions just because everything seems to add up. This time we’ve got to be sure. I don’t want to blow it. Let’s see what happens if we go to West Fourteen first.”
“So let’s go after work tonight. Westward ho.”
“Who are you calling a ho?” We laughed disproportionately at my feeble quip. “But we can’t. Not after work.”
“Why not? Got a hot date?”
“No. What do we know about the site perp?”
“That they’re not me, that they’re weird, that they take photos of you…”
“And when do they take those photos of me?”
“I don’t know. Whenever.”
“No, not whenever, that’s just it. Let’s think about this. There are photos of me at the supermarket on a Saturday, there are ones in the evening after work and ones at lunchtime. But there aren’t any during the day, there are none of me heading out to meetings, none of me during that three days I had off last week.”
“And your point being?”
“I think site perp’s got a job. A proper job. He doesn’t stalk me full-time, just outside office hours. He’s a boring nine-to-fiver just like the rest of us.”
“Not like me. I work flexible hours. What about your friend Frank?”
I thought. “He’s flexible too. Has a certain number of hours teaching and then the rest of the time is in the library and can do what he wants. But then I don’t think he’s taken the photographs as he’s in a couple of them.”
“So the photographer has a nine-to-five job, but not the per-petrator, this Frank character?”
My head hurt. “Unless it’s not Frank at all.”
“Make up your mind, Izobel.”
“Look, I’m sure the person who follows me has a regular job. In which case, we can’t go after work as then they could follow us following them and we wouldn’t have the benefit of surprising them, would we?”
“So?”
“We have to go now. After lunch. That way we’ve got an afternoon to check out all the addresses and try to pick up some clues, see if any
of the names on the doorbells mean anything to me. And then we can wait for them to get back from their normal job at six.”
“Presuming they come straight home.”
“I’m guessing site photographer doesn’t have a lot else to do. Their only hobby seems to be following me and once they see that I’m not in the office, then hopefully they’ll come straight home.”
“And we just leave this Frank character alone.”
“For the moment, yes.”
“You seem to be treating him a lot more generously than you did me.”
“I’m so sorry, Ivan.” We looked at each other properly. I stared at his mouth. I wanted to kiss him and I wanted to find out who was behind the site. But I wanted to find out who was behind the site first. The site’s mystery was George-era, the site solved could be Ivan-era. My love life was all too bound up with izobelbrannigan.com to be able to move on with Ivan. I looked around. “The photographer’s probably watching us now.”
“And what would the caption to this be?”
I pulled a face. “Izobel enjoys beer and conversation with an unknown man. Exclamation mark.”
“Come on, you can do better than that,” he said. He stroked his chin and I stroked mine, giving silent thanks to the antibiotics that had cleared up my infected stubble burn. I felt a twitching between my thighs and cursed my weakness. Mustn’t get distracted.
“We should go,” I said. “Are you free this afternoon? I could go back to the office in case we’re being trailed and then nip out the back way to the Underground. To schlep over to Shepherd’s Bush. Schlepherd’s Bush as it were.”
“I’m free, but you’re not. As my own boss, I’m often generously giving myself time off. But you work a nine-to-five, remember? Even if it is in PR. And even if it is a Friday afternoon.”
“Sod that. This is more important.”
“Come on, Izobel, you can’t just bunk off work. You’ll get in trouble.” He grimaced.
“What? You know something, don’t you?” I asked.
“I so shouldn’t tell you this.”
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