The Girlfriend: A Josie Cloverfield Detective Novel

by Jack Carteret

  Rich Richard had said there was no Trixie in Hannah’s circle of friends that he knew of. In fact, he’d said that it sounded like something an elderly lady would call her Pomeranian. I chuckled as I took a swig of me tea. I thought of Rich Richard. He actually was a pretty decent sort of a guy and I had a sudden urge to send him a thank you text for trying to offer me some assistance the previous night.

  I checked my watch; it was only just coming up to eight o’clock. Maybe it was a bit early yet, even for heartfelt gratitude. I fully determined to be nicer to Rich Richard from that point onwards; after all, he’d shown me nothing but kindness and respect from the moment I had met him, even when it meant being turned on by his own pack. I knew I had repaid him with wary cynicism, and he’d done nothing to deserve it.

  If my Facebook research came to nothing, I would go into uni and spend a few hours on the photocopy. And if I did that, I would give Rich Richard a call and see if he wanted a cup of tea before I got started. Anyway, that was for later. I needed to knuckle down. Something about Trixie and the Pomeranian was picking at me, and I didn’t know why.

  Trixie did kind of sound like a name for a pet. In truth, it also sounded like the name of a stripper. A stripper! Like a Sunday afternoon stripper in a grotty little pub?

  I sat up straighter, like you do when you think you’re onto something. Thankfully the tea was all finished, or it might well have ended up all over the duvet.

  I opened my emails again on my phone. I stared for a moment, wondering what the point of sending an email to Trixie1234@hotmail.com actually was. If it was a secret email address for Hannah, would she even see an email from me? Even if I sent her a desperate plea to return home. Hannah Come Home.

  I was being ridiculous. If the Police ever got wind of this Trixie email address, if they hadn’t already, then an email from yours truly would look so suspicious. What I really needed was a peek inside the Trixie inbox; see who she had been in contact with, or was even still in contact with.

  I closed the email and opened my browser. Once I was on the Hotmail login screen, I already knew what my one and only attempt at a password would be. Rebellion. It just had to be. I mean, I used the same thing over and over again for my passwords and my locker combination. Just about anything I had that needed a password had the same one. Mine was my postcode. Not very imaginative, I know, but usually acceptable as a strong-ish password on most applications. But so many other people had passwords that meant something to them. Liam, for instance, used Montecristo for everything.

  He just loved the Count. I could break into Liam’s email accounts and stuff easy-peasy. I never did, though.

  Not once. Not even a little bit. I ordinarily know how to respect other people’s privacy. But would Hannah have really minded in this instance? Probably she would, because she didn’t like me one little bit. However, there was just too much else at stake for me to be so floored by my own conscience.

  It had to be Rebellion. If it wasn’t, I had nowhere else to go.

  And so it was, with slightly sweaty palms, I began to type it all in. I knew there would be some issue or other with upper and lower case letters, so I wrote down each attempt, so as not to foolishly repeat myself and get locked-out unnecessarily.

  My first attempt was all lower case. Nope. My second attempt was all upper case. Nope again. My third attempt was a capital R with everything else in lower case. Bingo.

  As the inbox opened, I kind of gasped a little bit.

  My heart was thundering away like the hooves of a cantering stallion. However, as inboxes went, it was kind of scant. There were no friends or even sales emails. Every one of the six emails were Facebook notifications.

  I began to groan, feeling like I had enjoyed a great big a-ha moment, only to end up right back where I started. But then I stopped, mid-groan. It wasn’t for Hannah Davenport’s Facebook account. The title of the very first of the emails made me sit up again. Trixie Sunday, you have three new notifications.

  Trixie Sunday! Oh my word! So, not only did Hannah have a spare email address, but she also had a spare Facebook account.

  Ok, if it was Hannah. At that stage, Trixie could still have been anybody. But with the whole Rebellion thing and the Sunday thing! Trixie Sunday!

  Anyway, I sat there for a few moments wondering what I could do next without getting into serious trouble. The emails were all unopened, so I had a very strong feeling that I should not open them.

  If the Police looked at this lot later, maybe they would see that someone had opened them. But would they know who? And also, the same probably applied to the Facebook account. And anyway, I would need to open one of the emails to get the link to Trixie’s page on Facebook. Unless I wanted to start searching randomly.

  In the end, I just kind of came to a conclusion. I had already kept back the diary and was most likely to be in enormous trouble if the Police ever found out, so what the hell. I just clicked open the first of the emails. I clicked on the link to open her Facebook page.

  When the page sprang to life, asking me for a password, I just smiled at it.

  “You can’t thwart me with a little password.” I whispered, all cocky as I typed Rebellion in again.

  Well, Trixie Sunday’s Facebook page was not exactly a hive of activity. Her profile picture was a kind of cheesy silhouette stock photo from a web store or something. There were no photographs at all on her profile, and no posts or likes or anything.

  There were the usual stock things from Facebook; sponsored posts and what-not. The stuff you generally ignore. Still, there was nothing personal.

  Just as I was about to wonder what the point of the page actually was, I realised that Trixie had one friend. Just one friend. Finally, my twenty-first century Miss Marple-ing had come to fruition. I was no longer hiding behind lamp posts and spying pointlessly on Police searches. I was really doing the investigation thing; no turning back now.

  I clicked on the friends list, and there he was. Dirty Harry.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” I wheezed at the total lack of imagination. So, anyway, I opened his profile.

  Once again, there was a barely-there profile. The profile picture consisted of nothing more than a silhouette of a smoking gun. Seriously, what was with all the silhouette stuff? It seemed a bit eighties to me.

  Again, no posts or likes or shares. Nothing. And Dirty Harry had just one friend. Trixie Sunday.

  I don’t know why, but something about the two profiles kind of gave me the creeps. I felt like I’d stepped into a place I was not qualified to be in, and had the horrible notion that this was definitely Police territory.

  I sat for a little while and wondered at the purpose of two such empty profiles. Even as a means of secret communication, they seemed unused. No posts to each other or anything.

  Then I slapped myself hard on the head. Messages! PMs, of course. In a furious rush, which totally superseded all my Police-related misgivings, I returned to Trixie’s page. Having no password for Dirty Harry, I could not access his messages, but I had full control over the Trixie Sunday Facebook page.

  When I finally got there, I knew I had come close to mastering my new craft. There was a small message stream between the pair, and I read it greedily.

  Trixie: So, did you like the show?

  Dirty Harry: Of course (winking emoji).

  Trixie: So, you wanna get together? (red-cheeked, embarrassed little emoji).

  Dirty Harry: Of course I do. Anything to help you in your little rebellion.

  This little stream was all on Sunday evening; the day before Hannah went missing. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I read the next stream.

  Dirty Harry: So, are you busy tonight? (again with the winking emoji – yuk, right?).

  Trixie: Not yet! (laughing emoji).

  Dirty Harry: Good.

  Trixie: So, where and when? (embarrassed emoji again).

  Dirty Harry: There’s an old disused building just a few hundred yards back from the bus-st
op on Weatherby Lane. It’s fenced off, but there’s a gap in the wire. You’ll need to poke about in the bushes a bit, but the gap is there.

  Trixie: Seriously? Sounds a bit manky??

  Dirty Harry: Not manky, just totally secret.

  Trixie: Oh, right.

  Dirty Harry: Come on! Are you rebelling or not? Make your mind up, little girl.

  Trixie: Oh, I’ll be there!

  Dirty Harry: Good, I’m really glad. (smiling emoji – like he wasn’t a creep!).

  Trixie: What time?

  Dirty Harry: Say about half six? It’ll be dark by then, so you can slip in through the fence without being seen.

  Trixie: Cool. See you there. (smiling emoji).

  And there the conversation ended. At three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday; the very day Hannah disappeared. At three o’clock in the afternoon, she would have been at uni, checking her phone every few seconds for another message from Dirty Harry. Then she had cancelled her date with Liam.

  And yet, despite it all, I couldn’t find the old fighting spirit with which to hate her. I had a horrible feeling that somehow Hannah had got more than she bargained for with Dirty Harry, and I felt sick to my stomach about it.

  Chapter Twelve

  After much internal wrangling, I finally decided to go to the bus-stop on Weatherby Road and sneak through the hole in the fence, if there really was one. I knew Weatherby Road in a vague sort of a way.

  It was half-way along my second bus route on the way to uni. It was not a place I ever got out and walked around, but I knew the bus-stop well enough.

  And yet, despite knowing the stop, I could barely bring the surrounding area to mind. Was it a bit leafy and overgrown? I really couldn’t remember.

  Anyway, by the time I’d taken a hasty shower and dressed, I had thought the whole thing through.

  My original instinct was to simply tell the police what I had found out. I thought I could ring Dale and hope that he and Betty would tell CID on my behalf. Even as I started to think about that one, I knew it would never pan out the way I wanted.

  Dale and Betty would have to call it in, and I would be wheeled before the appalling Detective Inspector Malcolm Thorn in no time at all.

  I played the whole sorry interview through in my mind. Thorn would want to know how I had come to find the Trixie email address, then the Facebook account, not to mention the Rebellion password.

  As I had stood in the shower, wondering how long I would need to be under the trickle of water before I could declare myself washed, I realised that there would only be one explanation for all of the above. Hannah’s diary.

  The diary I had picked up on the canal side. The diary that was stolen from me just hours later. The diary I had photocopied and kept from the Police. The same diary which had led me to Matty Jameson and the nude painting and the whole stripper thing. Everything, in fact, which would give Thorn a mind-boggling array of motives with which to saddle Liam Attwood.

  If it were anyone other than DI Malcolm Thorn I would be dealing with, I would have totally caved in that moment, called the Police, and handed it all over, throwing myself upon their mercy. I’d even be hoping that they would find my involvement naïve yet helpful. Of course, that was not going to happen with Malcolm Thorn.

  He’d already made his feelings about me very plain, even before I had tied him in knots and publicly handed him his ass on a platter. Malcolm Thorn had suspected Liam immediately, and he seemed determined to make whatever evidence came his way fit my friend like a glove.

  Not only that, but he had decided I was either an accomplice or had full knowledge of Liam’s supposed crimes, even before he had met me.

  So, I decided to go over to Weatherby Road and have a look. I don’t know what I thought I would find, although it’s fair to say that my imagination was running riot. My rationale, in the moment I made that decision, was that if I went there and found nothing, I would reassess my investigative activities and come to some kind of conclusion then regarding speaking to the Police.

  But I really had to go before I decided. If I simply called DI Thorn and told him everything I had without going to Weatherby Road to see for myself, there might very well be nothing of note to find, and I would be putting Liam at risk for no good reason.

  Once downstairs, I made myself a final cup of tea before setting off. I considered another bowl of Euro-Saver clusters, but felt way too fragile for that.

  If I stopped to contemplate for too long, I actually felt pretty scared about my little mission. I really didn’t want to go alone, and was desperate to call Liam and wake him from his beauty sleep.

  However, I could think of no-end of ways in which taking Liam with me might eventually incriminate him in some way.

  Rich Richard also popped into my brain, only to be dismissed again. As much as I liked Richard, my sensible self told me that I couldn’t quite rule him out as a suspect. I hated myself for it, but I had to be pragmatic.

  Richard was in the diary; he’d had a fling with Hannah, albeit a very short one. And he’d seemed horrified at the idea of his name being found in the pages of Hannah’s diary. Still, that was probably quite natural. Who really wanted to be dragged up as a suspect? Whatever way I looked at it, I knew I had to just go it alone, and the very thought of it was making me queasy again.

  There was, of course, another part of me shouting as loud as it could, trying to make itself heard. It was the part of me which was urging me to do nothing. Stay at home, stay in bed, stay under the duvet. Nobody had to know what I had found out about the email address and the Facebook account.

  Nobody had to know about the messages I had read. The Police would get there on their own, sooner or later, without my interference.

  I’ve got to be honest; it was tempting. As I sat on the first bus, gently rumbling my way into town, I knew that I could just turn right around and go home again at any point. I was fighting nothing and nobody. Not Liam, not Richard, not DI Thorn. Nobody knew except my own conscience; the one thing I couldn’t hide from.

  Hannah was out there somewhere, by choice or otherwise. If it was by choice, I needed to find her for Liam’s sake. If it was not by choice, then Hannah needed to be found, plain and simple. I tried to imagine myself in her place.

  What if some dopey girl on a bus had the key to finding me, but didn’t put it in the lock for fear of getting herself into trouble?

  And there it was; the decider. I got onto bus number two with the certain knowledge that I was going to do this, no ifs or buts.

  The Weatherby Road bus stop came up far too quickly for my liking. As decided as I was, I really wasn’t ready to take my investigations to the next level.

  I got off the bus and began to walk away up Weatherby Road, for appearances sake only. I really couldn’t see this gap in the foliage and fencing, as reported by the slimy Dirty Harry.

  To climb down from the bus and immediately start poking around in the bushes would very likely have drawn attention to me. Especially from the woman behind me who had been almost breathing the same air as me as the bus had begun to slow for the Weatherby Road drop.

  She was so close, in fact, that if I had stopped abruptly to look around, she would have unwittingly rammed me. To be honest, it would have been something I would have sought to avoid on a good day, never mind a day when I needed to be as stealthy as all get out.

  Taking an immediate right as I got off the bus, I had rather hoped Mrs Hot-breath would have gone left. It was a total gamble, and one which I lost. As I strode with seeming purpose along Weatherby Road, Mrs Hot-breath was right behind me. I was already sick of her.

  Anyway, I kept going, keen not to draw any sort of attention; I don’t know why, but I kept imagining one of those Crimewatch reconstructions on the telly.

  Some gangly fool of an actor who had been forced into a duffle coat would be walking along Weatherby Road, with the presenter urging the public or, indeed, the duffle wearer herself, to make urgent contact with the Po
lice on the following number.

  I realise that it was far-fetched, and that there would be no reason for anybody to be looking for the gangly fool sporting the duffle coat, but I was suffering from a hugely guilty conscience at that moment in time.

  Not to mention the fact that I had the fear. Not just any old fear, but big, stinky, relentless fear. I was also wishing that I wasn’t the only person in the bright, shiny twenty-first century who still wore a duffle coat. From an identification point of view, it rather singled me out.

  Finally, I came to a junction. I was fairly certain that if I took a left, followed by two more lefts, I would be heading back towards the bus stop and the fated gap in the fence. Perhaps it would be a good thing after all; everyone who’d got off the bus, or been in the area when the bus had stopped, would have cleared out by now, and there would be nobody left to wonder why the duffle coat was making a reappearance.

  Unless, of course, old Hot-breath was going my way. If she did, I had more or less made up my mind to challenge her about it all. She was ruining my day.

  Happily, Mrs Hot-breath and I parted company as I turned left down Carter Street and she continued on along Weatherby Road. I picked up the pace a little, keen to get on with it. However, as I strode along, I couldn’t help but worry about being seen.

  There were houses on the opposite side of Weatherby Road, not to mention the fact that it was a busy street for traffic.

  As predicted, my continual left-turn-taking brought me within a few yards of the bus stop once more. I looked around, pleased to see that there was nobody about on foot. I looked over to the houses opposite.

  There really was no sign of anyone in the gardens or windows, and I tried to bolster my flagging confidence with the idea that it was a weekday and everyone would surely be at work. Whatever keeps you sane, right?

  When I reached the bus stop, I did a fair job of nonchalantly leaning against the bus shelter, as if waiting for a bus. I turned to look back into the foliage and, after a good few seconds, could see the gap. I could only see the gap in the foliage; I couldn’t actually see the fencing behind it.