by T. M. Logan
How long will it take before this is forgotten? Weeks? Months?
Never?
Back in my car, I synced my cell phone to my Facebook account and found the picture of me being led into Kilburn Police Station. I couldn’t delete it—or the copies that had been made by others who had shared it—but by untagging myself I could at least reduce its visibility just a little. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
A thought came to me. I clicked on David Bramley’s account and checked through his profile. His avatar picture was Hulk’s snarling face from the latest Avengers movie. No information about school, or hometown, or relationship status. He had eleven friends, a few of whom I recognized, and had set up his account this year. He had only ever posted once: the picture of me being led into the police station. There was almost nothing that looked genuine about the account, but I needed to know who my enemies were—even though I had a pretty good idea who “David Bramley” would turn out to be. I sent him a friend request.
I drove home and sat in the kitchen, talking on the phone to my union representative. It turned out there wasn’t much that could be done, in the short term, about being suspended. An appeal would take several weeks before the process even got going, for appointments to be made, meetings to be had, second opinions to be given on whether my suspension was legitimate in the circumstances. If there was no further action taken on the suspension, it would be expunged from my record and would not count against me. But that was the best I could hope for.
For the time being at least, I was suspended, and that was that. It felt weird to be sitting at home on a Tuesday morning during term time, the house quiet, watching the clock tick by. First period, second period. It was just after 10:00 A.M. and I should have been discussing The Coral Island with the children of 7D. Instead I was sitting at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, drinking tea, wondering how everything had gotten messed up so badly.
A few days ago, my life had been pretty good. I just hadn’t realized it. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It was a cliché for a good reason: because it was true. Now I had to put my family back together again, and it seemed that meeting Ben might not be a bad place to start. Not only to tell him to stay away from Mel—and ensure he got the message loud and clear—but to get a picture of him. Give the picture to the police, get them off my back.
My phone buzzed twice on the kitchen table: two notifications. David Bramley had accepted my friend request, and then messaged me straight away.
How’s work, big fella?
I stared at the message. Could he be so brazen about it? Wondering how he had found out so fast about my suspension, I hit Reply.
Who is this?
The reply was almost instant.
Who do you think?
There was only one person it could be. Ben, you bastard.
You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?
The reply was a single emoticon.
☺
He had been two steps ahead of me since the beginning, and it seemed he still was. It was time to end this. He had made his point, had his fun with me. Now it was time to get on with our lives: him with his wife, and me with mine. Frankly if I never saw him again after that, it would be just fine with me.
I typed another message.
Let’s meet up. Properly this time.
The reply was just three letters.
Lol
The anger came again then, the blood pounding in my ears. He was enjoying tormenting me, dropping me in it with the police and with school. He was doing what he said he’d do—ruining my life—and laughing at me while I squirmed on the hook.
The phone rang in my hand before I could send another reply.
A cell phone number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Joe, it’s Peter Larssen. Can you talk?”
“Sure.”
“I was going to leave a message. Didn’t think you’d be free before lunch.”
I told him about the Facebook picture and my suspension from school.
“Surely that’s harassment?” I said. “We can do something about it legally, right?”
“We could look into that, yes. Take a screenshot of the post and email it to me.”
“It’s proof that he’s hounding me, trying to sabotage my career.”
“Hmm.” Larssen didn’t sound convinced. “The truth is, Joe, things have been moving rather fast on the police side. That was actually why I was calling.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things may be more serious than we previously thought.”
My stomach lurched. “More serious?”
“They’re starting to focus on the theory that something bad may have happened to Ben Delaney.”
I sat down in a kitchen chair. “That’s exactly what he wants them to think. But I thought the police were finding proof that he was alive? Proof-of-life investigation, Naylor said?”
“They’re looking, but if they can’t find proof—and soon—they’ll start to go down different avenues. Like an accident, or the possibility that foul play might be involved.”
“Foul play,” I repeated. It was a phrase from the TV news, from newspapers, but not one that was supposed to feature in your day-to-day life. “Involving me?”
“Possibly.”
“But that’s crazy! He’s harassing me on social media, he’s posting things trying to get me in trouble, trying to drive a wedge between me and Mel. I saw him yesterday. We spoke to him on the phone the day before that. I was talking to him literally a minute before you called.”
“You spoke to him?”
“On Messenger.”
“Ah. From his account?”
“No, he’s using a fake account under the name David Bramley. The point is, he’s taking potshots at me, so he’s obviously alive and well and hiding away somewhere.”
“Why would he have disappeared?”
“He hasn’t disappeared; he just doesn’t want to go back to his wife. He wants mine instead. That’s why we need to find him, put a stop to this.”
Larssen paused for a moment, his voice slow and measured. “You could have posted those updates yourself.”
“That’s insane.”
“You could be posting as Ben, or David Bramley, or whatever his name is. Harassing yourself, in effect. Stranger things have been known.”
My chest felt tight, as if there were something pressing down on it. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“Of course not. But Naylor might. It doesn’t help that Ben’s not been seen for several days.”
“I’ve seen him.”
“You don’t count, Joe.”
“What, so I’m a suspect?”
“That’s one of their lines of inquiry.”
I thought for a moment, trying to take all of it in. This had to stop.
“What are you doing in the next hour?” I said.
“My diary’s clear until 1:30 P.M.”
“Good. Meet me at Kilburn Police Station in twenty minutes.”
39
“I’m being set up,” I said.
Naylor looked at me across the pockmarked table, frowning slightly.
“Explain,” he said.
And so I did. About the Facebook post, my suspension at work, my conversations on Messenger with David Bramley. About his message on my computer at home and his obsession with Mel.
“He already hacked my Facebook account on Thursday night, like I told you yesterday. He’s hacked my home PC, he’s basically trying to wreck my career, and he’s taunting me on social media using a pseudonym. I just want all of it to stop now. Enough’s enough.”
We were back in interview room 3 at the station, Larssen by my side. Naylor had given me the standard police caution at the start of our conversation, and now he scrolled up the exchange of messages between me and Bramley, studying a few longer than others, before handing the phone back to me.
“Well?” I said.
The
detective shrugged. “You could have sent those messages yourself.”
“What possible reason would I have to do that?”
“To put a different slant on things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“So it looks like you’re the victim, not him.”
“The victim of what?”
“A smear campaign. Or whatever it is you claim Mr. Delaney is doing.” He crossed his arms. “We’ll run down this Bramley account on Facebook anyway. That should tell us one way or another.”
“There’s no way I could have taken that picture, and anyway why would I post something that would get me in trouble at work? With handcuffs Photoshopped onto a picture so it looks like I got arrested?”
“I don’t know, Joe. Why would you do that?”
“You must be able to see that Ben is behind this, surely? The spurned lover? He’s trying to break me down, get me out of the picture so he can have Mel for himself. He has to win at everything; that’s just who he is. Whatever the cost.” I leaned forward, fists on the table. “He’s trying to destroy my family.”
Larssen put a hand on my arm. “Calm down, Joe.”
Naylor sat back in his chair. “My problem with all of this, Joe, is that you’re the only one who’s allegedly seen Mr. Delaney. Corresponded with him. Spoken to him.”
“Mel was there too when we spoke to him. She can back that up.”
“OK, we’ll talk to your wife again. But it’s all coming through you, Joe. Do you see? Everything seems to revolve around you. Why is that?”
“Because Ben is a very clever guy. Smarter than I am. Smarter than most.”
“That may well be true. But the proof-of-life investigation has come back with absolutely zero for the last twenty-four hours, and unless that changes soon and we get a sniff that he’s safe and well, we’ll have to start working on the basis that he might not be.”
“Proof? What about Beth Delaney? She was there when her husband came home on Thursday night, hours after I supposedly beat him up in that hotel parking lot.”
Naylor shook his head. “She didn’t see him. She heard someone moving about in her house. Through a closed door, a floor below her. She heard someone.”
“What about the texts he sent me? The post on Facebook? The meeting at the country park? Surely that’s all proof?”
Naylor looked from me to DS Redford by his side and back to me again.
“I wasn’t planning on doing this just yet, but since you’re here, we might as well.” He opened a black ring binder in front of him on the table and flipped a few sheets until he found what he was looking for.
“So you have found something?” I said.
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
Larssen shifted uncomfortably in his seat next to me. “My client would certainly appreciate it if you can give us a heads-up, Marcus.”
“Sure, OK. So the texts first. We pulled the records from your network provider and from Ben’s. You received three texts from Ben Delaney’s cell phone on Sunday evening, two on Monday morning. Correct?”
“Yes. The first ones arranging the meeting, then when we were at the country park in the morning.”
“When we interrogate cell phone records, we can establish which cell phone mast your phone was ‘talking to’ at any point during a call. Which means we can work out with a high degree of accuracy where you were—or at least where your phone was—when a call was made or a text was sent.”
“I was at home on Sunday evening and at Fryent Country Park on Monday morning. So that’s what my phone records will tell you. Or they should do.”
“Here’s the thing, Joe.” He turned another page in his file, ran his finger down a column of figures. “When you sent those texts on Sunday, the records show they went via a cell phone mast at the end of your road. It’s the nearest transmitter to your house.”
“Well … that’s right, isn’t it?”
“The texts sent from Ben Delaney’s phone went via the same mast.”
I looked from one detective to the other. “I’m confused. What does that mean?”
Naylor frowned as if he were having to explain something very simple to someone very slow.
“Rachel, can you elaborate for Mr. Lynch?”
DS Redford took up the explanation. “Both phones—yours and his—were within the narrowly defined range of the same phone mast when those texts were sent and received. It means both phones were very close to each other.”
“How close?” Larssen said.
“Very close,” Redford replied.
Naylor said, “As if the same person was holding both phones, for example.”
“Or if he was right outside my house! What the hell?”
Redford held a hand up, cutting me off. “I’m not finished,” she said, her soft northern vowels a counterpoint to the hard knot of fear growing in my stomach. “On Monday morning, we get the exact same thing happening, the same pattern, in a different location. Again, both handsets within the very narrow range of the same cell phone tower.”
“But he was near to me, maybe fifty or sixty meters away.”
“Witnessed by you and no one else,” Naylor said quietly.
“So what are you saying, that I sent those messages from Ben’s cell phone? Why would I do that?”
Larssen put a hand on my arm. “Joe, take it easy.” He turned to the detectives. “There was a Facebook post on Saturday evening. Mr. Delaney said he was fine and that he’d been away to think about things.”
Naylor flipped to another page in his black ring binder. “OK. The Facebook post next.”
Something in the way he said it made the knot of fear in my guts grow heavier, but I said nothing.
“Facebook always take bloody ages to turn over location data, so we don’t have much on that front yet. What we do have is a quick and dirty forensic authorship analysis, done by academics at Goldsmiths of the Facebook post and those text messages. They can do an initial analysis in a matter of hours, and they’re always eager to help.”
He snapped the ring binder open and removed two sheets, laying them side by side on the table in front of me. The page on the right was a screenshot of Ben’s message from Saturday:
Needed to get my head sorted; it’s been good to get away. And I’ve always loved it when everything starts falling into place.
“The truth of the battle is whatever the victor deems it to be…”
The page on the left contained multiple screenshots of previous Facebook status updates.
“These are all Ben’s as well, are they?”
Naylor nodded. “They’re all from his account. So our pointy-headed friends at Goldsmiths did a comparison of grammar and punctuation in Saturday’s Facebook post to his previous stuff. Here’s an example: their analysis showed Mr. Delaney had never used a semicolon or a period in a Facebook update—until Saturday, when he posted to say he was all right.”
“OK.” I scanned the printouts on the desk, hoping to find something to prove the detective wrong. But there was nothing.
“The language analysis shows that he’s not a big fan of punctuation on social media. Never has been. Until this Saturday just past, when he seems to have had something of a grammar revelation and he’s used a semicolon, an apostrophe, and two full stops in the same post. The text messages also include discrepancies in the use of apostrophes, capital letters, and the spelling of certain common words where he’s previously used textspeak abbreviations, but this time types them out in full.”
Larssen’s face was impassive, his unblinking eyes on the detectives.
“And what preliminary conclusions have your college people drawn?” he said calmly.
“Their considered opinion is that Saturday’s Facebook post”—Naylor tapped a thick index finger on the right-hand page—“is very unlikely to have been written by the same person who wrote these previous posts. Likewise, these five text messages were very unlikely to have been written by
the person who was previously sending texts from this number. In other words, not Ben Delaney.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“How about you, Joe? You’re a history teacher, right?”
“English.”
“Bet you could teach Mr. Delaney a thing or two about grammar and punctuation, couldn’t you?”
I said nothing, not wanting to dignify his tacit accusation with a response.
“Spelling and full stops, apostrophes and semicolons,” Naylor said. “You must know all the rules back to front and inside out.”
“Ben could have written them that way deliberately, to throw you off the scent.”
It didn’t sound convincing, even to me.
Naylor said, “Some sort of criminal mastermind, is he?”
“He’s a very, very clever guy. I wouldn’t underestimate him.”
“Proof of life, Joe. That’s what we’re about right now. That’s the name of the game. And I’ll be honest with you: this latest stuff is giving me real cause for concern.”
“What about the message that appeared on my computer at home yesterday? He blames me for everything.”
“No one saw that apart from you. Ditto your ‘close encounter’ with Mr. Delaney at the country park yesterday morning. You’re the only witness. How’s your hand, by the way? Your knuckles all right?”
He indicated the dark bruises and scabbed-over scratches across my right knuckles, where I had stumbled in the woods.
“Fine.” I put my hands in my lap. My mouth was dry, and my head was starting to ache. I wanted more than anything to be out of this room, out of here, away from this place.
“Is there anything else, Joe? Anything else you want to tell us?”
Larssen was about to speak, but I cut him off.
“I’ve told you everything.”
“Like I said, Joe, the name of the game is proof of life. But it might not be for very much longer.”
I stared at him across the table, my jaw rigid.
