by Toby Faber
Jess appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying a mug. ‘I’ve put two sugars in. Should be more, really, but you wouldn’t drink it, so what’s the use?’
‘What about the other one?’ Laurie asked.
‘He’s in here.’
‘And …?’ Almost diffidently, Laurie let the unspoken question hang between them.
‘Dead too.’ There was an edge of defiance to Jess’s reply, as if she were daring Laurie to object. She walked over with the tea, which was trembling slightly in her hand, the whiteness of her knuckles testifying to the effort she was putting into the grip. Perhaps that wasn’t defiance; what kind of strain must she be feeling?
Laurie knew she should sit down and drink it, should hug the cousin who had brought it, but she had to see for herself. With an apologetic smile at her saviour, she went over to the doorway. Another man lay sprawled on the kitchen floor, or rather on some clear plastic sheeting that lay underneath his body. Laurie looked back towards the sofa: yes, that was what she had heard Jess collecting a few minutes earlier; she must have rolled the body onto it already. Why on earth? Then Laurie saw the man’s face. This was where the killing blows had landed: three separate indentations crossing his forehead. She remembered the crunching thwacks that had made them. And beside the man, she could see, covered in blood, the weapon that had killed him. She pictured Jess holding it as she ran back into the kitchen, fresh from doing for the man at the computer, ready to finish off the job in here too.
‘Mum always swore that was the best rolling pin money could buy.’ Had she said that out loud? Suddenly, it was all too much. Conscious of the tears rising up within her, and of the dizziness overcoming her, Laurie sat down at the kitchen table, rested her head in the crook of her elbow, and let the exhaustion take over.
Monday, 10 August – 5 a.m.
Laurie’s ear ached, but no more than that. The stiffness in her neck and the numbness in her arms were some kind of indication of the length of time she’d been asleep; so was the grey light filtering in through the kitchen window. It was very quiet. Shouldn’t the house be crawling with police? Surely a violent break-in merited some sort of attention – especially when there were dead bodies involved. Dead bodies? Laurie looked over to the floor in front of the sink, as horrified by her memory of the burglar’s battered face as she had been by the sight itself only hours before. There was nothing there. Then she saw the note on the table beside her in Dad’s handwriting: DON’T WORRY. BACK SOON. CLEAN UP SOME MORE IF YOU CAN. Beside it, very prominently, were his and Jess’s mobile phones; the implication was clear: they did not want to be called.
Stretching cautiously, Laurie got up and went through to the sitting room. Dad’s computer sat on the table, but there was no sign of the body that she could so vividly recall sprawled across its keyboard. Surely it hadn’t all been a dream? The residual pain in her ear told her no. She looked at the computer. It had gone into hibernation. There were strange brown splotches on its keys, and a smear of something similar on the screen. It wasn’t hard to guess what that was. Laurie recoiled from the thought. Would Dad ever be able to use it again? Then she sat down as she considered the wider implications.
For whatever reason, Dad and Jess had not called the police. That much was clear. Why not? Laurie was sure she would have done, so sure that she really didn’t need to think about it very hard. For all her irritation with the Sergeant Atkinses of this world, it would have been her automatic response. And yet here was Dad behaving in a way totally at odds with everything she thought she knew about him. It made no sense.
So now what was she to do? She could make good the omission and call the police herself. Drop Dad and Jess right in it? No, of course not. She could wait for them to come back, have it out with them. The idea of hanging around aimlessly in a half-cleaned crime scene held little appeal. The way Laurie shuddered at the throught made her realise how close she was to breaking down, for all that a few hours’ sleep had taken the edge off the horror. She needed to keep busy; that meant trusting Dad and doing what he said.
So how did you clean bloodstains off a computer? It sounded like the tag line to a Charles Addams cartoon. You’d have to use something that did not conduct electricity; the last thing Laurie wanted was to short-circuit the keyboard. After a moment’s thought, she went up to the bathroom to fetch her nail-varnish remover and some cotton wool.
Back in the sitting room, Laurie spent the next few minutes meticulously cleaning the laptop. For good measure, she went on to wipe the desk around it. The activity was helping; it kept her from wondering what Dad and Jess were doing, kept her mind off the horror of the night before. Eventually, however, she had to look across to the table, feeling a reflexive twinge in her ear as she did so.
The plastic sheeting had gone. Only a few sticky patches provided any indication of what had taken place. Laurie cleaned them off with more cotton wool and nail-varnish remover. Now what? She could mop the kitchen floor, but that might get blood on the mop head. Laurie eyed her packet of cotton wool: just as well it was a nearly new jumbo pack; she would need it all.
An hour later, the packet was empty and the pungent smell of acetone filled both rooms, but every surface Laurie could think of had been wiped clean: floors, countertop, sink and taps. And it was obvious what she should do with the cotton wool. She opened the door of the wood-burning stove, realising as she did so that it was still warm. Inside she could see a few charred remains and several glowing embers. With a pang of sadness Laurie recognised a piece of turned wood from the rolling pin, and was that part of Jess’s t-shirt? Good idea. Laurie stripped off her own top, added it to the acetone-soaked cotton wool and a few stray strips of tape that she’d found under the sitting-room table, and stuffed it all into the stove. She shut the door just in time. With an impressive whoosh, the whole concoction burst into flame.
The shower that followed was brisk and cleansing: not the long relaxing soak in the bath that Laurie would have preferred, but she wanted to be up and about when Dad and Jess got back. Besides, she had to tackle the computer sooner or later. Why had her passwords been so important?
Monday 10 August – 7 a.m.
The nail-varnish remover had more or less fully evaporated. Only a faint hint remained of the heady smell that had filled the room thirty minutes earlier. Laurie approached the laptop. It had been on for hours. Her first task was to recharge the battery. Carrying the computer over to the kitchen counter, she plugged in the lead and pressed the power button. As usual, it seemed like for ever, but eventually she got onto the usual password-request screen. Dad had never told her his password. She logged on as herself, just as the man had done however many hours before. Nevertheless, she hesitated before typing. What if he had taken the opportunity to lock her out? What had he been up to?
The relief Laurie felt when the computer responded to roxanne1 vanished almost immediately when she saw the screen onto which it opened. She – or rather, her account on Dad’s computer – was logged into a chat room: a suicide forum. Her username was lonelygirl73, and she seemed to be participating in a thread headed My Dad feels the same way. The last comment had been made a couple of hours before by friend-in-need7 and read: Hey Laurie. Getting worried here. Let us know your both ok.
Heart pounding, Laurie scrolled back up to the top of the thread. As she suspected, lonelygirl73 had started it, at 1.30 that morning, with a post that read: Hi all – me again. Id love a chat if anyone’s there. Been talking to my dad and it turns out he feels the same way – has done since mum died. Feeling a bit blue. Laurie xxxx The series of postings that followed from other users were hard to sift out from the emoticons and tag lines that seemed to be almost compulsory (lonelygirl73’s was, Laurie noted, Loving is easy, it’s the living I find hard), but the general gist was of supporting hands being stretched across the ether from one stranger to another.
The last few messages, however, had a worried tone similar to the one Laurie had first read. None of them spelt out e
xactly what their concern was, and every page on the forum carried a firm rule that explicit suicide notes would not be tolerated – for the sake of other users – but the posting she had just read from lonelygirl73 could certainly be construed as one. If at some point in the next few days, her body (and Dad’s) had been discovered somewhere appropriate – hanging from the banisters on the top landing, for example – then anyone examining her computer would have been guided to an obvious conclusion.
Laurie was surprised to realise that her overwhelming emotion was relief – not because she was safe from whatever end those men had been lining up for her – after all, she wasn’t necessarily safe, was she? – but because Jess’s bloody actions had been so absolutely justified. Without them, she and Dad would surely now be dead.
Meanwhile, the message board shone back at Laurie’s face. No more posts had arrived; the thread seemed to have died. Laurie was tempted to log off, to expunge her search history, to forget that lonelygirl73 had ever existed, but something made her hesitate. Should she put up a post that let everyone know she was OK? What if a vulnerable reader followed the apparent example of lonelygirl73? Would that in some way be her responsibility? How come all these people seemed to care about someone who was, in the end, entirely fictional? What was lonelygirl73’s story? Sitting at the computer, Laurie started to investigate.
It was the first thing Laurie discovered that gave her the biggest shock. Lonelygirl73 had been a member of the forum for almost a year. Had someone been planning to kill her for that long? It was almost impossible to comprehend. Forcing herself to remain calm, Laurie clicked through to lonelygirl73’ s profile. It was little help. There was the tag line she had already read, and the choice of a cat as an avatar; all the posts she had seen had something similarly anonymous. The account was registered to the blatantly false ‘Jane Smith’ and an equally unhelpful email address ([email protected]). There was a physical address as well, one that appeared real, but a few minutes’ search on a fresh internet page confirmed her suspicion that while Gauden Road, London SW4 really existed, its numbers did not extend up to 204. Laurie doubted that made lonelygirl73 all that different from many other posters on the forum. In a world where employers googled job applicants, who would use their real name or address on a site like this?
So in the end, lonelygirl73 only really existed as a series of posts. She had begun with a fairly standard opening gambit: Hi, this is my first time, been feeling a bit low and came across this forum. Think it’s just what I need. This had elicited a series of encouraging welcomes and she had subsequently participated sporadically in various threads, with comments along the lines of Hey hun, I know exactly what you mean. Or Hang on in there; you know you’ve got friends here. In short, if she had not become one of the community’s leading lights, she had at least become an accepted member of it. A few months in, she had posted asking for advice, which she had duly got, in spades: Every day I go into work and nobody would know there was anything wrong with me. Does anybody else have trouble keeping up appearances? How do you get thru the day? That, however, was the only point at which lonelygirl73 revealed anything about her personal life – until the previous afternoon.
For Laurie, the change was striking, although she recognised that a more casual reader might not have seen anything particularly different. It was the first time any of the posts contained a proper biographical detail: Hi all. I really need some support right now. My life is collapsing around me. I lost my job last week. It feels like I can’t do anything right. Help! That had initiated a long conversation in which lonelygirl73 had been a full participant, gradually revealing details specific to Laurie: her mother’s death; her panic after the accident on the Underground; the fact she was now staying with her father in the country. The thread came to an end with her accepting the suggestion that perhaps this was something she should talk to her father about. As friend-in-need7 put it, Some things you need family for.
Laurie got up. She needed to clear her head, to think things through. Was it really 11.30 already? Where had Dad and Jess got to? It no longer felt important to be around when they got back. Pausing only to leave an unambiguous note on the keyboard – DO NOT TOUCH – she went outside.
Monday 10 August – 10 a.m.
It was cold on top of the ridge, but not enough for Laurie to regret the impulse that had led her to saddle Roxanne and take her out for a ride. Here, with the wind against her face, she could free herself from the claustrophobia of chat rooms, shake off the lingering smell of nail-varnish remover, and acknowledge her stupidity. It made her so angry – with herself as much as anything. There was only one person who could have known all those details about her: one person, whom she had been preparing herself to love, but who had really wanted her dead. How could she have been so blind? She thought back through the events of the last few weeks, of Dad’s attempts to question her, of her own wilful nonchalance. She’d been so keen to keep Paul to herself that she could have got them all killed. She very nearly had. She’d been an idiot.
It was only when she saw Roxanne’s ears twitch in front of her that Laurie realised she’d said the last word out loud. ‘Idiot!’ She said it again, relishing the ‘D’ and stronger percussion on the ‘T’. It was a good word – cathartic. ‘IDIOT!’ A flock of starlings took off from a nearby rowan. Roxanne shook her head, as if to laugh at this latest antic from the woman on her back.
What the hell? Why not? There was nobody around for miles. ‘IDIOT!!!’ This time Laurie really let rip. Did she imagine the echo coming back to her, or were her ears still ringing from the force of the shout combined with the residual pain from whatever it was that skewer had done? Now Laurie was the one who shook her head. She’d been going to take Roxanne for a gallop, but that was good enough. Why should she take any more risks? With the faintest tug on the reins and nudge of the knee she wheeled the horse back round; they headed for home.
Coming back along the lane proved to be a mistake. Mrs Shilling was out there, apparently weeding the front flower bed, although as far as Laurie could see it was already immaculate.
‘Hello dear! So that was you. I thought it was someone calling a dog, but it sounded like you and I thought, well I said to James in fact, “Lauren hasn’t got a dog, has she?” But he said you’d be back in London by now.’ Mrs Shilling paused in full flow – a rare occurrence – she was clearly waiting for some kind of response.
Laurie really hadn’t the strength for explanations but threw out a titbit that she hoped would prove enough. ‘It’s not very busy at this time of year. I thought I’d take advantage of the weather and make a proper holiday of it.’
‘Lucky you. Well, it must be nice to be here for a bit longer. Your father and Jess are back, by the way. Drove past only a few minutes ago. Just went away for the night, did they? I must say it’s nice to see him with someone at last.’
Another pause: Laurie did not know whether to laugh at Mrs Shilling for getting the wrong end of the stick quite so wonderfully, or object to the way she had so clearly engineered this meeting purely to recharge her gossip banks. Oh well, there was probably no harm in spreading a bit of misinformation, better that than have to explain exactly what Dad and Jess had been doing the previous night. ‘Yes, she’s lovely isn’t she? Early days of course, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.’ Was that enough to satisfy Mrs Shilling’s prurience? Who cared? Laurie squeezed her knees together, gave a cheery wave, and continued towards home.
Forewarned, Laurie was not surprised to see the Fiesta in the yard. She dismounted and tied Roxanne to the grooming ring just as Dad came out from the house. When he saw Laurie he did nothing but smile and spread his arms. God, it was good to be hugged by him.
But Laurie also needed explanations. ‘What’s going on, Dad? Why aren’t the police here? Why did you tell me to clean up the house?’
‘You did a good job, darling.’ Laurie had never thought of Dad as shifty before, but he was clearly uncomfortable as he tried to come u
p with an answer to her question. ‘It seemed the right thing to do. The state those bodies were in: well, that would have required some explaining. Jess …’ Dad was struggling for words now. ‘Well, Jess was quite definite. She told me about those men and what they’d done to her before.’ He paused to compose himself. Laurie had last seen him this close to crying at Mum’s funeral. ‘That was bad enough for her. She really, really didn’t want to tell it to the police. To tell the truth, after what she had just done for us, I thought that helping her – well, that was the least I could do.’
Laurie considered this, remembering the way Jess had already started disposing of the bodies before freeing herself and Dad from the table. She tried to imagine the whispered conversations that must have taken place while she slept – what ‘helping’ Jess had actually entailed. Surely it wasn’t that easy just to dispose of two bodies? A look at Dad’s face, however, convinced her that now was not the time for further questions. Instead, she tried lightening his mood. ‘Where’s Jess?’ Then, smiling, ‘You know Mrs Shilling’s convinced you’re an item?’
‘An item?’ Dad sounded puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean …’ His voice trailed off before continuing, ‘She’s upstairs, having a shower. I’m going to do the same. Then we can talk.’
Monday 10 August – 12 p.m.