The Pact_A gripping psychological thriller with heart-stopping suspense

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘Too what? Too what, Bridge?’

  Bridget looked at the floor. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Too what, Bridge?’

  There was a splash of tomato sauce from last night’s spaghetti crusted like a scab on the floor tiles. The tips of Bridget’s ears were red. She looked every bit as furious as she used to when she was standing over me in some grimy flat, telling me to put my clothes back on; tipping me onto my own bed after carrying me out of some dive at three o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Nothing,’ she muttered. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘I know she’s not me, Bridget.’ My own voice, thick and low, simmered. ‘I know that very well, thank you very much. I have dedicated my life to making sure she’s not me. So don’t patronise me. You of all people. I’m up to here with being patronised. I’m patronised every day of my life. I’m fully capable of making the distinction between me and my daughter. I know she doesn’t have an uncle raping her night after night, is that what you want to hear? Is it? I know she isn’t fucking guys twice her age behind the leisure centre. But she’s my daughter and it’s my job to look after her, and I’m going to find her, all right? I’m going to go and get her now, so get the fuck out of my way before I—’

  But your poor auntie Bridget had already stepped out of my way. Without even looking at her, I raced towards the car park. I was coming to get you. And no one, not even your beautiful angel of an auntie Bridge was going to stop me.

  Forty-Six

  Bridget

  The dying sound of Toni’s Fiesta fades into the underlying rumble of the suburbs. Bridget sinks into a kitchen chair and puts her head in her hands. Her sister is off, chest full of rage, head full of shadows. In front of Bridget, on the kitchen table, Rosie’s phone buzzes, then buzzes again a second later. A message from Emily, one from Cat Morris, whose name Bridge recognises as one of Rosie’s school friends. She reads Emily’s:

  Will pop notes over in the post-meridian! See you later. E.

  Then Cat’s:

  Hey, hun. Gathering at mine next Sat. Hope you can come.

  Cat has added a thumbs-up emoji, a wine glass and a little yellow face blowing a kiss.

  Thumbs-up. Glasses of wine. Little yellow faces. Bridget picks up the phone, lets it loll in her hand. Little yellow faces, frogs, dancing girls. Do words no longer convey meaning? Can they not express what we want to say? Is it a case of words are not enough? How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… let’s see, an eye emoji, a heart, a ewe – I love you, geddit? How embarrassed I am… a blushing yellow face. Goodnight, I’m going to sleep now, sleeping yellow face, zzZZ.

  In the silent kitchen, Bridget sits with her head in her hands. What does she feel now, her sister crying and desperate and gone, she herself shaking and shocked and fighting back tears? Frowning yellow face, that’s what she feels. Sad yellow face crying blue teardrops, yellow face fuming, tinged with red, yellow face with gritted teeth, yellow face with brow furrowed in sorrow, three monkeys – hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil…

  A red heart, broken in two.

  More than anything, she feels old. When she was young, they wrote letters – everyone did – actual letters on paper with pens. Basildon Bond stationery, a silver Parker ink pen with cartridges for Christmas, her pride and joy, the pen she used to write her first song. There were so many more words, somehow, then. Her best friends, her sister back at home, secret girlfriends… she would take pages to say what she had to say – they all did, if they wanted to – and no one batted an eyelid. Now what do the young and in love have to replace those long letters, those confidences, those risky paper flights? They are living a life beyond letters, beyond even a heartfelt email, maybe even beyond texts in the way that Bridget uses them sometimes when what she has to say is too difficult to express face to face.

  You are the air I breathe, H. I will love you always. B.

  Toni, we will get through this, I promise. I’ve got your back. B

  The words of lovers, of friends who love, have become condensed, so condensed that, she supposes, meaning and intention can be, must be, abbreviated: a small yellow face blowing a kiss, or winking, or crying with apparently uncontrollable laughter. Bridget has seen Rosie put three crying-with-laughter emojis in a row to her friend Naomi, her own face motionless, not even smiling. Meaning is condensed, yes, but inflated.

  Faked.

  And after the customary two sparse words and four emojis, there’s the photographs of private body parts. That’s what kids do now. It’s all the rage. Bridget knows that from talking to her niece. What is private now? What does private mean? A private account is still public. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter: kids’ whole lives are documented from the age of, what? Eleven? Younger now? They know what everyone else is doing, all the time, with or without them; what they look like from every possible angle, wearing every possible facial expression; their thoughts and feelings have been packaged into bumper-sticker philosophies and pictures of baby animals before they’ve had time to work things out for themselves. Everything is recorded – their victories and fuck-ups, their ill-advised public confessions when in the moment it seemed like a good idea, their piercings gone septic, their misspelled tattoos, their drunken gropes and street vomits, their lingerie-clad reflections, their avocado on toast, their flat whites, their illnesses, their nail art, their haircuts.

  And risk? Has emotional risk also been minimised? If there’s an emoji to express it, then everyone must feel it, right? Has baring your soul in a letter become instead the baring of flesh? Is physical nakedness more or less exposing than the stripping away of our public persona, that confident imposter who faces the world on our behalf, revealing what lies beneath?

  If risk has been minimised, why does the world feel so unsafe?

  Oh fuck it. Fuck it all.

  Bridget picks up Rosie’s phone and almost throws it across the kitchen. But it isn’t hers, not any more. She places it back on the table and stares towards the back gate. Toni is long gone; whole minutes have passed since the swing and clank of the back gate, the car door, the pissed-off roar of the engine. Bridget could have gone after her. She could have stopped her, overpowered her. But Toni would never have forgiven her, and already the violence of what has passed between them has left Bridget shaking and near to tears.

  She turns Rosie’s phone over in her hand. The last time Bridget and Toni fought was a couple of years ago, and it was over this phone. Toni had said it was impossible, she couldn’t accept it.

  ‘You spoil her, Bridge,’ she had said finally, capitulating.

  ‘I’m her auntie. I’m allowed to spoil her. And I’ve already paid it off.’

  ‘But I can’t afford an iPhone even for myself.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get one if you were loaded – you hate the buggers. And besides, if you had that kind of money, you’d buy her one first.’

  ‘I can’t afford one.’

  ‘Exactly, because you have to buy her shoes and shit.’ By this time, the crisis had passed and Bridget was already smiling, knowing that the phrase shoes and shit would amuse Toni, which it did. ‘I can pay a piddly little contract because I don’t have to buy her that stuff.’

  ‘But you’re always buying her stuff. You bought her the DMs and they cost a fortune.’

  ‘One pair of biker boots once every five years, and maybe my annual Havaianas. I’ve got money spare, haven’t I? I don’t need to think about extra shoes. I only have one pair of feet to worry about.’

  Toni didn’t say anything to that. She accepted wordlessly what was hidden beneath Bridget’s words, namely that by extra shoes she meant little shoes, shoes that could go on little feet, the little feet of the child that Bridget would never have – not now.

  ‘You should buy more for yourself, Bridge,’ she had said after a moment. By then, they were holding each other’s hands over the kitchen table, idly, out of habit. Toni had not yet agreed to the phone, but they were at peace together, in the moment.


  ‘I like giving her stuff, Tones,’ Bridget said. ‘She’s my Squirt, isn’t she? And her only living grandparents are in the land of the shamrock.’

  All the while, she had known that spoiling wasn’t the issue – that it was more to do with Toni and her relentless, unstoppable paranoia. The driver who had killed Stan had been on his phone; smartphones caused death, smartphones went with social media, social media was responsible for all the world’s problems, another argument they would have periodically, though in general terms. Toni refused to see the miracle of worldwide connection, the wonder of seeing your friends’ children grow up on the other side of the world, as any kind of counterbalance for global anxiety and child porn. Bridget argued that all kids Squirt’s age had smartphones, that this was the world now and they had to learn how to negotiate it whether they liked it or not.

  And then Bridget delivered her ace:

  ‘Thing is,’ she said, ‘there’s this thing called Find My Friends. Me and Helen have it so that we know where each other is. You can turn it off if you don’t want to be found, but I was thinking, if I get Rosie a phone, I can put that on it. And then if we want to know where she is, say if she’s late or whatever, all we have to do is check.’

  ‘All right,’ Toni said. ‘That’d be great.’

  How different that argument had been. How awful this one. Bridget wonders how Toni will be when she gets back, dragging an angry and humiliated teenager behind her. She wonders how long it will take her and Toni to get over the words they have said to one another today.

  The phone buzzes. But it is just Emily’s message re-announcing itself. Idly Bridget picks up the phone. She cannot go back now to a time before she gazed voyeuristically into her niece’s life, so she supposes there is no harm in looking again. Perhaps it is, as she first thought, that her sister’s anxiety is catching, but a worm of unease has begun to wriggle around her insides. Perhaps it is not her sister’s madness at all. Perhaps there is something, something small but real, in what they have seen, a clue of sorts as to why she now feels as she does. She has rationalised it all for Toni, for Toni’s peace of mind, but has she also lied? To herself?

  ‘Something,’ she mutters aloud, accessing the messages first on Facebook, then on Instagram. ‘Something.’

  So.

  Rosie and this Ollie boy agree to message each other on another account because the dreaded mother of doom, Toni, is watching. OK, so far so clear. Snapchat is not used, not even in secret: too high a risk, possibly, of an incriminating photograph or a message popping up in full view of Toni, so they choose Instagram, no notifications, check in through the browser. Right. But over on Instagram, there are only the messages sent this morning. Rosie fled the house in a rage this morning and left her phone in her room without deleting these most recent messages. Which means there must have been others, the nature of which neither Bridget nor Toni knows. But those messages, whatever they were, led to the nickname Sexy Lady.

  Toni is right – that is weird. Hey, Sexy Eyes, possibly, or even Sexy Ass, but what young boy in today’s world calls his girlfriend Sexy Lady? It is, frankly, creepy.

  ‘Something,’ she says again, the wriggling worm burrowing inside her. Perhaps her sister is right; perhaps Toni simply reached the correct conclusion faster, sped along by the wings of acute maternal instinct. ‘Something… something… what?’

  Photos. They must have sent photos. She remembers a conversation she had with Rosie in the van, the last time she came to a gig.

  ‘My friends all send, like, sex pics to their boyfriends,’ she said, her voice calm, matter-of-fact. This was on the way home – the gig had been in the Red Lion in Barnes. ‘Boys do it too. This girl in my year, right, she sent, like, a full-on naked selfie to her boyfriend, but then he, like, just finished with her the next day and then, right, he sent the photo to all his friends. Can you believe that? Savage! Anyway, he was suspended from school but the girl had to take, like, a month off. She had stress.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘I know, right? Then there was this boy who sent, like, a video of himself… you know…’ She made the internationally recognised hand signal.

  ‘Masturbating?’

  ‘Yeah. And he sent it to a girl in the year above.’

  ‘That’s gross.’

  ‘I know. But it was on Snapchat and they didn’t capture it so he got away with it.’

  ‘Snapchat. That’s what they use, is it, to send their naughty bits?’

  She shrugged. ‘Mostly. For dick pics and stuff like that.’

  ‘Dick pics?’

  Rosie laughed, but at least she had the decency to blush. ‘Don’t tell Mum.’

  ‘I won’t. I was just thinking what a great name that would be. Hello, my name’s Richard Pix. Dick for short.’

  ‘You’re so mad.’

  ‘But listen, mate. You’d never send that kind of thing, would you? I mean, that would be on your digital footprint forever – you know that, don’t you? Not to mention the dangers.’

  ‘Oh my God, of course not.’ Rosie had looked horrified.

  ‘Thought not. When in doubt, ask what would Chrissie Hynde do, yeah? And she wouldn’t stoop to that nonsense for anyone, would she?’

  ‘I know. Oh my God, I’m not that stupid.’

  I’m not that stupid. But has she been, potentially? Has someone coerced her into being that stupid? Bridget pushes her thumb to the photo icon. There are seventy-eight photos on there. She goes to albums. There is a deleted album. In the deleted album there is one blurry photo – a pocket shot. Something is amiss. The deleted album has been deleted. This could be completely innocent, a way of preserving storage space so the phone doesn’t clog up.

  Clog up. A few months ago, a client had a phone that had stopped working. Bridget’s pretty sure it was a 5C, like this one. She rigged his phone up to his laptop, reset the date on the phone to two years earlier and rebooted it. And when she did that, all the photos and videos he had ever taken reappeared on his laptop. They’d been hidden in the dark, and floated in like ghosts. It was insane actually.

  She goes into Settings. Sure enough, it shows much more storage usage than currently accounted for. So potentially, whatever photos Rosie has taken are still in there somewhere, in the dark cyber forest, hiding where no one can see them.

  Bridget’s chest tightens. She runs to her room and grabs her laptop, leads and phone. On the way back to the kitchen, she calls Toni. No answer. Toni must be at the café by now, or at least parked somewhere near. She’s either still furious or in the middle of bollocking Rosie or… or worse.

  While the laptop boots up, Bridget puts a pot of coffee on the stove. It is either that or run around the backyard shouting help, help, help.

  The laptop awakes. She plugs in Rosie’s phone and connects to iTunes. With her heart in her mouth, she resets the date and reboots. The screen tells her to wait. Bridget waits. She watches.

  The screen fills. In the images fly, like spirits.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Oh my holy God.’

  Forty-Seven

  Bridget

  Some of the photographs are innocuous enough: the usual failed blurry pictures of pavements and the inside of bags where the camera has been activated by mistake; extras of other saved photos; faces caught at an unflattering angle, eyes mid-blink, gawping mouths; Bridget herself; Toni; Rosie and Naomi, arms around each other. But others are not so innocent, and it is these that make her catch her breath. They spread before her on the screen of her laptop: hands, shoulders, ear lobes; thighs, breasts and buttocks. There is a toe, the nail painted red, a black-and-white photo of a belly button. With a sick feeling in her stomach, Bridget knows that what she is looking at is her beloved niece, her cheeky, funny, clever, nervous, shy, hilarious Rosie. Her naïve and stupid little fifteen-year-old flesh and blood. And that these pictures are the reason for that creepy nickname.

  There are male body parts too. These pictures have messages beneath them. They
look like the messages from Instagram – the format is the same. They must have accompanied the pictures. They must be screenshots, taken by Rosie.

  A washboard stomach. She thinks she recognises it from a Facebook poolside picture of this Ollie boy. He must have cropped it and sent it, vain bastard.

  Check this out, he has written. Thoughts?

  Thoughts? My God, the narcissism of the young these days! No wonder they’re all so fucked up. She scrolls down to a male nipple, deep brown on a tanned chest. How does anyone go for this level of conceit?

  Like what you see? Send me yours.

  ‘Jesus.’

  There are eyes, an ear pierced with a diamond stud. There’s a tattoo of a dragon on a tanned shoulder, the arm toned not from hard work but from a gym; it has that inflated look about it. A male toe. The sight of it, the message underneath, almost make Bridget retch.

  Show me yours?

  A toe. His. It is the last of the images of body parts to load. The first, then, that he sent, or at least that Rosie captured. It is beyond weird. Is that where it all started? With this innocent picture that is anything but? Is that how this creep began his insidious, pervasive campaign? He must have known her by then, must have seen how very shy she was, how vulnerable, how ripe. How well does he know her? What was she thinking?

  And the fact that these images are clearly from Instagram, their captions below them in the shots… Why? So she could read and reread these words, alone at night, in her room, thrilled probably beyond measure by her own illicit fantasy. But why not look at them online? Maybe it was about owning them for a moment, halfway between the cyber and the real worlds, a digital image, downloaded, to hold in her naïve little hands. Whatever, she then deleted them before Toni could check, deleted them even from the deleted album. She has been so careful.

  She has been so very careless.