Follow Me: A chilling, thrilling, addictive crime novel

by Angela Clarke

  07:50

  Tuesday 3 November

  1 FOLLOWING 83,245 FOLLOWERS

  Classic FM’s Hall of Fame album evened out the sounds of early morning London in Nasreen’s headphones. The volume low, so if anyone approached her from behind she’d hear. It didn’t happen often, but occasionally she’d be recognised by someone in the street. An acquaintance of a criminal she’d given evidence against in court. They sat in the gallery, watching you, the faces: press, family, friends of both the victim (if there was one) and the perpetrator. You couldn’t remember them all. But they remembered her. It was like a spotlight shining on you: taking the witness stand. She’d lived in Hackney for a while, but had had to move house when a man had blocked her flat front door one night, threatening her with a knife, for doing over his mate. She was cool and calm. Like usual. But the other residents didn’t like it.

  Always better to talk your way out of a situation than let it escalate. She moved shortly after: back to the town she and Freddie were from. Back to Pendrick in Hertfordshire. She liked being close to her parents, and enough time had passed that she’d found new places to visit as an adult. She liked the farmers’ market on the first Sunday of every month, the family-run Italian down by the medieval clock tower, the way the older streets tapered into narrow car-free cobbles, the way the sun set across the open sky of the common. There was a new sports complex and a cinema, and she was careful not to walk past her and Freddie’s old school. She couldn’t deal with the memories that flooded through her if she strayed near their old haunts. The commute was longer, but the distance helped her switch off. Reading classic novels on the train. Great Expectations had taken weeks, Pride and Prejudice mere days. She’d seen Freddie’s mum one day in the library above the new shopping mall, and to her shame had ducked behind some shelves and hid. She didn’t want the past to rear up and bite her. Her home was in her parents’ name, she booked restaurants and holidays in her mum’s maiden name. She’d grown used to hiding. Keeping her head down. She didn’t want anyone to recognise her, to work out who she was, to know what she and Freddie had done. It was almost second nature. She didn’t have any friends from back then. From school. She’d been careful to limit socialising to work colleagues, or those who’d moved to Pendrick recently: Sarah from spinning class, Claire at the pottery course she’d taken but only made one session of. Nasreen worked nights, weekends, whenever the case demanded it. Friends had to be flexible, tolerant, close. But no matter how close she was with the girls, no matter how many glasses of wine they drank, no matter how much they cried over broken hearts or raged over career frustrations, she never told them the secret only she and Freddie knew. It could never come out. She imagined the look of shock and disgust on Sarah and Claire’s faces if they knew the truth. She’d be disowned. Everything would be ripped apart. Again. Nasreen had carefully pieced her life back together in the last eight years, but she knew it was bound with secrecy, and held together by silence. She moved in the shadows, where she could hide. How could Freddie put so much of herself online? She was exposed. She threatened both of them.

  The concerto changed from string to piano music. Freddie would take the micky out of her for listening to something so mundane. She remembered her excitedly thrusting Ramones vinyls at her from Mr Venton’s collection when they were ten. Nasreen liked music with no lyrics; it helped her order her thoughts. She hadn’t slept well last night and her bag, heavy with files from gang cases, dug into the soft shoulder of her black wool coat. Her heels clicked along the pavement of the tree-lined street of Victorian terraces that ran between the railway station and the Jubilee. She’d found nothing in the files that tied Alun Mardling to any gang. She couldn’t help but feel Freddie was right: they were looking in the wrong place. Would DCI Moast listen to Nasreen though? Freddie had hardly made the best impression so far, but beneath her disruptive behaviour Nasreen recognised she’d made some sound points. She sidestepped a woman and a small girl on a bright red scooter wending their way along the path.

  But Freddie’s presence made Nasreen doubt her own logic. Was she being played? Of course not. She was a grown woman now, not an impressionable teen. Yet each time she saw Freddie’s face – those joking eyes, that curly hair – she was flung back to that awful night eight years ago. The terror. The pain. The guilt. It muddied her thoughts. For years she’d fought it back: the overwhelming desire to collapse, fold, break. Freddie wouldn’t understand. Nothing touched her. Nasreen had battled to get this far. Each day she’d buttoned up her police uniform she’d felt a hypocrite. Each step she took was to atone for the past. With Freddie here, the truth was so close she could feel it pressing on her – how long before it came out? And that journalist – the one who knew she and Freddie had gone to school together – how long before they unearthed it? Put two and two together with the local paper report at the time? It was unimaginable. Her colleagues could never know. Nobody could know. Nasreen summoned up all her control: she had to keep acting normal.

  Not for the first time, Nasreen wondered if Freddie’s involvement in the Mardling case wasn’t an accident. The one person in the world who knew her darkest secret reappearing like this – it seemed unlikely. Was Freddie back to punish Nasreen? Was that her motive? Nasreen had seen crimes committed for far less. This Twitter stuff was so theatrical, as if whoever was doing it wanted a big audience. And Freddie seemed so keen for them all to take the tweets seriously. So convinced she’d worked out every riddle. Was it just bravado? Had she manufactured the whole Apollyon thing to stay close to the case? To get a story for her newspaper?

  The Freddie who’d taught her to stand up to her older cousins wouldn’t hurt anyone. The Freddie who’d once fed an injured bird with honey and seed until it was fit to fly again couldn’t be a criminal. Nasreen thought of that soft bird, Queenie, tucked under a blanket in a box in Freddie’s parents’ garage. How Freddie had cried when her dad had threatened to put Queenie down. She’d cried again the day they let Queenie fly free from the common. But that girl was gone, replaced with this angry, shouting young woman. Nasreen didn’t know what this Freddie was capable of. She’d alibied out for the murder, but was it possible she was behind the Apollyon tweets? Was this Freddie’s revenge? Again she chided herself for letting her thoughts run away with themselves: everything wasn’t all about Freddie, she thought wryly.

  As the road widened into the shop-lined street that led to the station, Nasreen passed workers rolling up security screens and placing tubs of £1 cleaning products in front of their premises. She took her headphones out and pushed her phone into the woolly pocket of her coat. Frost-covered leaves crunched and slid under her feet. Her morning commute was increasingly dark. Even within the Jubilee – a place she’d always felt she belonged – Nasreen now felt the chill. She was being frozen out. The team had already decided she couldn’t be trusted, following the Freddie debacle at Blackbird Road. So what difference did it make if she went against DCI Moast? If she sided with Freddie? As she pushed open the door of the station and nodded to Charlie on the desk, Nasreen made a decision. She’d found no evidence of gang links to the case. She would tell DCI Moast she too thought they should look for anyone called Sophie (with a potential cat), who was linked to Mardling.

  Nasreen’s footsteps echoed down the Jubilee corridor. In the distance she could hear phones ringing. The hum of those on the overnight shift handing over to the day team over coffee in the canteen. The small perforation in the rubberised grey floor halfway down the hall. This was still her station. She knew it and it knew her. She wasn’t out yet. Pushing open the door of the incident room, she was surprised to see Freddie bent over some papers on a table in the back of the otherwise empty room. ‘What are you doing here so early?’

  Freddie looked up, her brown frizzy hair half flattened against one side of her face, ridiculous thick-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose, dressed in a wholly unsuitable holey black jumper, through which you could see flashes of a red top she had o
n underneath. ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Thinking ’bout all this. I spent half the night trawling the Internet for any sign of a link between Alun Mardling and a Sophie. All I found was an online review our good friend Alun had left on a porn site. He gave Rammers Revenge four dildos, and logged it under his home email address, the tool. Looking up Apollyon proved equally futile, unless you happen to be particularly interested in bad demon fan art. There’s nothing in those emails either, just a load of Amazon receipts for action DVDs, and two-for-one offers at his local pizza joint. Our boy liked a meat feast with extra barbecue sauce.’

  Nasreen was about to ask Freddie if she’d seen anything else relevant on Twitter, when the door opened behind her. DCI Moast, his navy blue puffa jacket still on over his suit, a green scarf wound round his neck, stormed into the room.

  ‘You!’ He pointed at Freddie. ‘I heard you were here. Waiting to gloat?’ He strode past Nas and stood over Freddie.

  ‘Good morning to you too.’ Freddie leant back in her chair. Nasreen felt her stomach drop away.

  ‘Don’t give me that. What the hell do you call this?’ Moast slammed a newspaper down onto the desk. Nasreen’s teeth clenched as she stepped forward to read over his shoulder. It was The Post – Undercover Reporter Cracks Open Hashtag Murderer Case – Are You the Sophie She’s Looking For? – emblazoned across the front page.

  ‘Oh, Freddie,’ Nasreen said.

  ‘Did you know about this, Cudmore?’ DCI Moast twisted to look at her, his face drawn, tired, and now angry.

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t…’

  ‘Are you deliberately trying to undermine me, Venton?’ He spun back to Freddie.

  ‘You didn’t give me any choice,’ Freddie was saying.

  Nasreen picked up the paper. Hashtag Murderer, Alun Mardling, cat woman, Sophie, Baker Street, DCI Moast, Sergeant Cudmore, Flagship East End Jubilee Police Station. The whole case was in here. What the hell was she playing at?

  Freddie hadn’t anticipated the photo. Neil must have lifted it from her Facebook page. It was from a fancy dress party. She’d gone as an 80s power bitch in a grey shoulder-pad suit she’d found in the charity store. He’d cropped it so you couldn’t see where she’d ripped the pencil skirt.

  ‘That’s it. I’m taking this to the Superintendent. You’ve gone too far this time, you’ve given confidential case details to the hacks. You’ve deliberately disobeyed my orders.’ Moast virtually frothed at the mouth. ‘Once we’ve sorted this mess out I’m pushing for charges. Again.’

  ‘You wouldn’t listen. I don’t think this is about drugs.’ She wasn’t doing this for a laugh.

  ‘You don’t think it’s about drugs? Who cares what you think!’ Moast wrestled his jacket off and flung it at a chair. ‘Cudmore, don’t just stand there, round the team up. I want everyone in here now. We need to contain this.’

  Nasreen looked straight at Freddie.

  Freddie stared back: well you wouldn’t help. She couldn’t just sit twiddling her thumbs while some poor woman was butchered by this hashtag psycho. Nasreen shook her head and walked off.

  Tibbsy in his suit and with bloodshot eyes, and Jamie in his uniform, twitching nervously, appeared shortly after. Nasreen came back in with a gaggle of excitable PCs.

  ‘Guv, it seems the phones have been going crazy,’ Tibbsy said. ‘The night sergeant said it started after the article appeared online,’ he muttered into his mug of coffee.

  No one made eye contact with Freddie. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Do?’ Moast looked up from the pile of phone messages he was reading. ‘I want you to do nothing. Which is what I wanted you to do yesterday. Have you gone through those emails I gave you?’

  ‘Yes, there was nothing odd in them.’ She stared at him. ‘Unless you count Alun Mardling’s fascination with Steven Seagal movies as odd.’

  ‘Fine. Sit there where I can keep an eye on you until we’ve got this under control. Then someone can take you to meet the tech team. I’m sure they’ll have lots of work to keep a Social Media Advisor busy.’

  ‘The public have a right to know if they’re in danger,’ you patronising git. Freddie stood resting her fingers on the table in front of her. He didn’t frighten her. Not compared to @Apollyon. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Nasreen looking at the floor. You do agree with me then! ‘This could help save the target.’

  ‘Save the target?’ Moast snapped. ‘This isn’t a Hollywood bloody film. This is real life. Thanks to your vigilante media turn I’ve got hundreds of hysterical women on the phones thinking they’re going to be murdered in their sleep. This is a massive waste of time and resources.’

  ‘How many of those live on Baker Street?’ Freddie asked. There couldn’t be hundreds?

  ‘This is what you media types fail to understand about the general public, they panic.’ Moast picked up a wedge of papers. ‘The paperwork for this will take weeks to get through. Every man, woman and sodding cat is calling in claiming they’re in danger. I’ve got half the Home Counties demanding police protection for their kids because they’re called Sophie!’

  There was a knock at the door. A young Asian police constable poked his head nervously round. ‘DCI Moast, sir,’ he said.

  ‘What now?’ Moast glared at the lad.

  Freddie felt sorry for him. Moast was just a jumped-up red-faced bully. Getting out of here couldn’t happen fast enough.

  ‘I…er…sir…I…’ said the lad.

  ‘Spit it out, Constable!’ Moast said. Someone’s chair scraped along the floor. It was as if the whole room was holding their breath.

  ‘We’ve had a call from a woman in Leighton Buzzard. Her employee, a Sophie Phillips, who lives on Baker Street, didn’t show up at work yesterday. And she’s not answering her phone.’

  Chapter 19

  SITD – Still In The Dark

  08:41

  Tuesday 3 November

  1 FOLLOWING 86,012 FOLLOWERS

  Freddie felt as if she’d been slapped.

  ‘Cudmore, get on the phone to the Leighton Buzzard station and have them check it out,’ Moast’s voice cut through the silent room.

  ‘No.’ The word fell out of Freddie’s mouth. She tried to stuff it back in with her hands. This wasn’t really happening. It couldn’t be. Not again. Every time she blinked, bloody bodies swam in front of her eyes: Alun Mardling’s corpse laughing; Paige Klinger in a blood-splattered white studio. Freddie moved in slow motion as the room sped up around her. Voices, bodies, phone calls and words flew past in a blur. She was too late. The front page. The gamble. It wasn’t enough. She didn’t show up at work yesterday.

  She forced herself back online. Searching for any mention of Sophie Phillips and Leighton Buzzard. It hadn’t broken on Twitter and there was nothing on the news. There was no mention of a Sophie Phillips in Leighton Buzzard at all. She checked the electoral register. She checked Yell.com. Facebook. LinkedIn. Nothing. Perhaps it was a mistake? A hoax call? Oh please let it be that. Everyone was busy, heads down. Checking phone records, bank statements, cross-checking friends’ and family statements. A timeline of Mardling’s uneventful last twenty-four hours had been put up on the whiteboard. Alongside it, the more glamorous timeline of Paige Klinger detailed photoshoots, breakfast at The Dorchester, a flight in from New York. There was no feasible overlap or meeting between the two. Everyone was studiously trying to move the case forward, trying to ignore the question mark that hung over the room: why hadn’t Sophie Phillips of Baker Street, Leighton Buzzard, arrived at work?

  Freddie watched Nasreen come back into the room; at some point she’d removed her coat. Nasreen bent to speak to Moast. Freddie saw the colour drain from his cheeks. His head dropped into his hands. She was shaking again. Moast stood, straightened his tie, and cleared his throat. Everyone looked up, and the weight of expectation crushed down on Freddie.

  ‘I’m sorry to announce the Bedfordshire Police Force have found the body of a young woman, believe
d to be that of Sophie Phillips, age twenty-seven, an administrative assistant at Leighton Linslade Town Council, in suspicious circumstances at her flat in Baker Street, Leighton Buzzard.’

  ‘No,’ whispered Freddie. Her voice lost in the sighs, shuffles and swear words of those gathered in the room.

  ‘As of yet there is no firm evidence to suggest this death is linked to that of Alun Mardling, apart from the coincidental tweets of the suspect known as Apollyon,’ Moast said.

  All the tweets, all the clues hinting at a cat lover called Sophie who lived on Baker Street, the photo Apollyon posted of Mardling’s body: it felt linked to Freddie. Otherwise it was one hell of a coincidence.

  ‘However,’ Moast continued, ‘as we have yet to trace the device used to both take and post the photo of the Mardling crime scene, and the source of the tweets by the suspect known as Apollyon, we will now be exploring the possibility that this latest murder and the murder of Alun Mardling are linked.’

  Freddie expected to feel relief; finally Moast was listening to her. But she felt nothing but sadness. She couldn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘We are waiting for the preliminary forensic reports,’ Moast continued, ‘and I will be putting together a team to visit the crime scene. Sergeant Cudmore will be assigning new tasks in line with the investigation by the Bedfordshire force. If this does turn out to be linked to the Alun Mardling case, then we will take full control of the investigation.’ Moast’s voice was void of emotion: just doing his job. But Freddie could see it. The pain etched across his taut face. There was no victory in her being right about the tweets and him being wrong. Sophie Phillips lost. They all lost.