Deadly Intent

by D. S. Butler

  8 April.

  Noah sent me a note today. I was surprised because it was quite emotional, and he’s not really that type of person normally. He likes to be one of the lads and laughs things off. He does not like to talk about feelings, but the letter was really honest and touched me. I hadn’t realised what he was going through. I guess sometimes he has it hard too.

  10 April

  Noah surprised me with a bunch of roses at work today. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. After that letter… I felt like he needed some support. Of course, I couldn’t turn him away in front of Heather and Sadie and a client, so I had to smile and accept the flowers. Then he really pushed his luck by inviting me out for dinner. With everyone watching us with goofy smiles, I felt like I had to say yes. So now we’re meeting at our old favourite restaurant, the Italian in Covent Garden. Sometimes I think I should stop fighting it and just go with the flow. Maybe Noah is the one for me. The only person who didn’t look too happy at work today was Sadie. I don’t think she trusts Noah. It’s strange because she hardly knows him.

  28 April

  I’ve not been feeling well lately. I feel so tired all the time and my muscles ache. I went to the doctors, and they said they’d run a few tests. I’m worried, to be honest. I’m too young to be feeling like this. I’m scared that something really serious is wrong.

  10 May

  Work was a nightmare today. I had a big bust up with Sadie. Luckily Heather wasn’t there to hear it. She’d popped out to meet a friend for lunch. I never realised Sadie could be so vicious. She called me all sorts of names then swore at me. I don’t know what I’ve done to upset her. She’s clearly unhappy about something. I’m starting to suspect she might be jealous of me.

  13 May

  Things are still awkward at work. Sadie is very tense and standoffish and refuses to talk to me. She says it’s because I lied to her when I said things were over with Noah, but I don’t think that’s true. I think she’s actually keen on Noah herself. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. She doesn’t really have any friends, and I’ve never seen her go out on a date. Things are going quite well with Noah this time, so I’m not going to let Sadie spoil things.

  14 May

  I don’t have anyone to talk to. I’m feeling really alone right now. I don’t want to go out or do anything. I just want to sleep. My results came back from the GP. He said everything is fine apart from my CRP levels being a little raised. He doesn’t seem to be worried, but of course, he wouldn’t be. It’s not him who’s feeling ill.

  30 May

  Noah went out with his friends last night. I was staying at his flat, and when he got home, he was in a really strange mood. He grabbed my arm when I tried to walk away from him and it hurt. This morning I’ve got a row of little bruises where his fingers gripped my shoulder. I showed him, and of course, he was full of apologies. I don’t like it when he’s drunk. It’s like he has a whole different personality.

  2 June

  Well, it’s happening again. Inevitable really. Last night, I went to Noah’s. We were supposed to be having a quiet night in and I planned to cook. I made a lasagne. When I was about to put it in the oven, he texted to say that he was going out for a few drinks after work.

  I was a bit cheesed off, but figured we’d still eat together later. He didn’t come home until ten p.m.! And surprise, surprise he was drunk again. History is repeating itself. I should never have taken him back.

  4 June

  My GP clearly thinks I’m a hysterical woman who should be ignored. When I went back today to tell him I still felt ill, he tried to give me antidepressants. I mean, seriously? I’m not depressed. I’m ill!

  5 June

  I joined a forum yesterday. It’s a little bit weird, but it’s full of people like me. People who have been feeling unwell and have been let down by doctors. In fact, some of them have it a lot worse than me. Some people can’t even work or manage to shower every day. I’ve been absolutely shattered recently and had some really weird symptoms. It’s strange, but it feels nice to know I’m not alone in this. At least now I have some people I can talk to.

  10 June

  I had a big argument with Noah last night. He was moaning about the fact I’m always on my laptop. He doesn’t seem to get the fact that I’m on the computer because there are people I can talk to who understand me. I’ve told him how bad I’ve been feeling, but he says if it was something serious the doctors would have found something with their tests. Then he said it’s probably a virus. Don’t you just love the way people become medical experts as soon as you tell them you’ve not been feeling well?

  15 June

  It’s funny. I’m close to my mum and dad, and I still live at home, but I don’t feel like I can talk to them about this. I suppose I don’t want to worry them. And I know they do worry about me. I should be able to talk to my boyfriend, but well, Noah is Noah. I had a nice chat with Melissa last night. It was really good to get together. We haven’t seen much of each other recently and I miss her.

  18 June

  I’ve made a couple of friends online from the forum. It’s strange that I don’t know what they look like, and I’ve never met them in person, but despite that, I feel like I really know them. One of the girls from the forum lives in America, so I doubt we’ll ever meet in person, but a couple of others are in London so maybe one day we could meet up.

  20 June

  Noah and I had a massive row last night. He came back to his flat drunk again and something in me snapped. I was really tearful. My muscles were aching so much. I’d taken paracetamol and had a hot water bottle but nothing was helping. Then he came home tripping over his own feet and singing some stupid football song.

  So I picked up my laptop and tried to leave. He got really angry.

  But I wasn’t going to let him push me around any more. I told him it was over. He was livid. I was scared he might do something really awful. But he didn’t. He stood aside and screamed at me to get out of his flat. I ran out and managed to get a taxi home. This is it this time. It’s over for good. I’m not taking him back.

  25 June

  I can’t believe it. I just found out Noah had been cheating on me. I shouldn’t care now because I want him out of my life, but I have to admit, it really hurts. Especially her. Why? How could he do that when he said he loved me?

  That was the last entry. Mackinnon put down the notes. It was uncomfortable reading.

  Thorne said he took Ashley’s laptop because he suspected her of seeing someone else, yet he was the one who’d been cheating according to Ashley’s diary. The information about Sadie was a surprise, too. Mackinnon made a mental note to look into that further.

  Noah Thorne was their main suspect, but they really needed to identify the people Ashley had been communicating with on the forum.

  Mackinnon put the notes down and stood up, stretching. He needed to get some sleep. With luck, tomorrow, they’d have some answers from Ashley’s laptop.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Early the next morning, Evie Charlesworth rushed along the corridor to the tech department. She’d noticed something odd about Ashley Burrows’s diary and wanted a second opinion. She’d asked her friend, Joan Cuthbert, to take a look at it if she could find a gap in her schedule, and when she woke up she’d seen a missed message from Joan, asking Evie to come to the tech department.

  Did Joan want to rake her over the coals for wasting her time? That wasn’t really like Joan at all. So that must mean Joan had found something unusual about the diary too.

  Joan looked up as Evie burst into the room. She was sitting at a long white bench, a bright lamp illuminating the diary.

  “Did you find something?” Evie asked breathlessly.

  “I think you were right. The diary is missing pages. It’s been done very carefully. Both sides of the paper have been removed, but there are tiny scraps of paper still left in the binding. I’m impressed you noticed. I had to look through the microscope.”r />
  “Which pages were missing? And how many?”

  Joan slid the diary towards Evie so she could see it clearly. “Three pages, and they are missing from this section.”

  Evie scanned the prior entry. The missing pages came directly after the mention of Noah’s relationship with another woman. Had he torn the pages out so the woman couldn’t be identified?

  Evie wasn’t sure but she knew she had to tell someone about this. It could be very important evidence in the investigation.

  Mackinnon had arrived for work at seven thirty, intending to go over the case notes as he waited for DI Tyler to arrive. He was surprised to see Evie waiting at his desk. Unusually flustered, she filled him in about the missing pages in Ashley’s diary.

  “Good work,” Mackinnon said. “It looks like the evidence is starting to pile up at Noah Thorne’s door.”

  Tyler walked through the doors at seven forty-five, and they went straight to the tech unit to talk to the new head of the department, Araminta Dupris.

  Araminta was in her late thirties, a short curvy woman with wavy brown hair and bright blue eyes.

  “Hello, gentlemen. I take it you’re not here on a social call.”

  “Not this time,” Tyler said. “We’re hoping you’ve got a report for us on Ashley Burrows’s laptop.”

  “We have a preliminary report. Todd worked on it last night.” She walked to the long table set against the wall and plucked a file from a stack beside one of the computers.

  “Was it wiped?” Mackinnon asked. Evie found pages had been ripped from Ashley Burrow’s diary, so it looked like someone was trying to cover something up. He was expecting that same someone to have attempted to erase any evidence from the laptop, too. Right now, Thorne seemed the most likely culprit.

  Araminta looked surprised. “No, everything seemed to be intact.”

  “We interviewed her ex-boyfriend last night. He was the one who had the laptop and told us he’d wiped it accidentally.”

  A puzzled frown puckered Araminta’s forehead. “Perhaps he’s not very computer savvy, or not used to Macs. I suspect he tried to log on as a guest. Once he managed to gain access, it would have looked like there was no personal information on the computer. But all the personal files are under Ashley’s username.”

  “Excellent,” Tyler said. “Did anything stand out as unusual?”

  “Todd went through her browser history and reported on that as well as a list of applications installed on the machine. We can go into further detail if you need us to. Particularly social media.”

  “Thanks.” Tyler took the file from Araminta and leafed through the pages. “She visited a lot of sites.”

  Araminta nodded. “She did. Todd noticed a bit of a trend too. She visited a lot of health sites if that’s relevant?”

  “It could well be important. We are looking for a particular forum she visited a lot. Probably a health forum.”

  “I see. Well, let’s take a look on the computer here. I have a digital copy and it’s easier to search on the computer than it is to scan through the paper copy.” Araminta sat in front of one of the large monitors and opened up a file. “As you can see, we can sort by the names of the websites and also the number of hits. This is the most common site she visited in the last six months. It’s called cureityourself, and she visited that site over two thousand times.”

  “Two thousand times?” Tyler let out a low whistle.

  Araminta nodded and quickly tapped on the keyboard bringing up the website. “Here it is. It’s a health forum. There are a lot of posts about alternative medicine and it’s open to the general public.”

  “Can we look at the posts she made on that forum?”

  “Yes, luckily, her parents gave us the password for the laptop, and Ashley used Keychain on her Mac. That means all her passwords are remembered, so we can log in to pretty much everything she used. It certainly makes our job easier.”

  “This is very helpful,” Mackinnon said.

  “She’s made eighteen hundred posts on the forum,” Araminta said, studying the screen.

  “Can you make a copy of them and print them out for us?” Tyler asked.

  “Absolutely. She’s also sent quite a few PMs.”

  “PMs?” Tyler asked as he distractedly looked through the rest of the file.

  “Personal messages,” Araminta explained.

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’ve heard of those. This is really great work, Araminta. Please give our thanks to Todd.”

  “I’ll email you the information and send the printout up to your office when it’s done,” Araminta said.

  “Thank you Araminta,” Mackinnon said as they left the tech department.

  She smiled brightly. “Not a problem. And call me Minty!”

  DI Tyler arranged a briefing for nine a.m. They often held briefings informally in the open-plan office area, but today Tyler had booked a large meeting room to accommodate the extra officers who’d been brought in to help with the investigation.

  Mackinnon glanced at the whiteboard standing at the front of the room. Noah Thorne’s name and photograph were in the upper left-hand corner. Ashley’s photograph was in the centre. He guessed DC Webb had written up the board because he recognised the thin, slanted handwriting.

  Mackinnon slipped into a seat near the front next to Charlotte. “Morning.”

  “Morning. I hear Noah Thorne’s interview didn’t go well yesterday.”

  “It could have gone better.”

  “Is he still our top suspect?”

  “So far. I’m hopeful the information we get from Ashley’s laptop will give us more to go on.”

  DI Tyler called the room to order. “Okay, settle down. We’ve got a lot to get through this morning.”

  He held his notes in front of him for a moment then set them down on the table beside him. Though everyone else in the room was sitting down, Tyler remained standing.

  “You may have heard we made an arrest last night. Noah Thorne was taken into custody after we found Ashley Burrows’s laptop at his flat. He was released late last night after questioning. That doesn’t mean he’s in the clear. We need to know everything about Noah Thorne. I want us to go over every inch of Thorne’s life with a fine-tooth comb. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore other lines of enquiry.”

  Tyler turned to Evie Charlesworth. “Evie. Could you give us a quick update on the details you found in Ashley’s diary please?”

  Evie gave a nervous nod and stood up. She was thorough and conscientious, but she didn’t enjoy talking in front of a large group of people.

  She cleared her throat. “I’ve transcribed sections of the diary I feel could be relevant to the investigation. I’ve made copies. You’ll find them in your briefing notes. My interpretation of the diary is that Noah Thorne and Ashley Burrows didn’t have a healthy relationship. There wasn’t overt physical violence, but Ashley recorded incidents in her diary where she felt threatened.” She paused to take a deep breath. “Another thing of interest is that she mentions visiting her GP, and feeling let down by the support he gave her, she joined an Internet forum. She had made friends with certain individuals on the forum. We’d like to know who those friends were. Even if they weren’t involved in Ashley’s death, they could provide further information that could help the investigation. One further thing that stood out to me was the fact she recorded Noah Thorne had been cheating on her. She didn’t mention the woman by name, but it’s my interpretation that Ashley knew her. Three pages had been removed from the diary. It’s possible they could have been ripped out by Ashley herself, but more likely they were taken by someone with something to hide.”

  Evie gave a brief nod to the room and then sat down.

  “Thank you Evie,” Tyler said.

  Before Tyler could move on, DC Webb spoke up, “We should be careful about assuming he was having an affair with a woman. Could have been a man.”

  “Not in this case,” Evie said. “If you look at the notes I�
�ve made, you’ll see Ashley describes the person Noah was having an affair with as her.”

  Tyler added, “For the record, Thorne denied having an affair. We haven’t told him about the diary. Identifying the woman Ashley believed had a relationship with Thorne is one of our top priorities. Sadie Griffith is a possibility. Those pages were removed by someone. We need to find out who.

  “From Ashley’s laptop we’ve already managed to get a great deal of information thanks to Todd and Araminta from tech. The forum Ashley joined was called cureityourself. She’d visited regularly. Very regularly. There are two thousand forum posts as well as some PM’s to go through.” He looked directly at Charlotte. “Any volunteers?”

  Charlotte accepted her fate with a smile. “Sure. I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you, and DC Webb, I’d like you to go through Ashley’s social media messages and contacts.”

  “Not a problem,” DC Webb said making a note. “Do we have her passwords?”

  Tyler nodded. “We do.” He flipped through his notes. “We initiated a search of Noah Thorne’s flat last night. It’s a difficult situation. We know Ashley had been there in the past so forensics aren’t going to be much help on this occasion. Plus, looking for DNA evidence at the scene probably won’t help us much either —we won’t be expecting to find blood. We have no evidence Thorne kept Ashley at his flat against her will. In fact, because he invited her parents to his flat during the days Ashley was missing, it’s unlikely he held her there.”

  “Plus the bedbug bites. She had to get them from somewhere,” Mackinnon said.

  Tyler nodded. “Right. How far have you got with that?”

  “There were no reports of bedbugs in Noah Thorne’s block of flats within the last six months. No reports anywhere near the Burrows’s home in Limehouse, either. Her work address had no history of an infestation. Working on the premise Ashley was bitten while she was being held in the days before she died, I’ve tracked a few addresses along the number twenty-two bus route.”