by TM Logan
Mel crossed her arms.
‘A hamster, eh?’
I shrugged. ‘I said we’d think about it.’
She nodded, turned in the doorway.
‘I’m going to get a quick shower.’
‘Listen, Mel?’
She turned back to me.
‘What’s up?’
‘You sure you’re OK?’
‘’Course. Why?’
‘I saw you earlier and you seemed upset. Left you some messages.’
She frowned, cocked her head to one side.
‘My phone’s out of charge. When did you see me earlier?’
‘About five, at this hotel on the North Circular.’
She took a sip of water from her bottle, swallowed slowly. Then another.
And that was when everything I knew started to fall apart.
7
‘A hotel?’ she said.
‘Near Brent Cross. I was worried about you.’
She shook her head.
‘I wasn’t at a hotel, Joe, I was at tennis. Thursday night social, same as always.’
‘But I saw you.’
‘You can’t have, Joe, I wasn’t anywhere near Brent Cross.’
I tried to make sense of what she was saying.
‘You weren’t?’
She laughed quickly.
‘Couldn’t very well have lost 6–1 6–0 to Hilary Paine if I was, could I?’
‘But we saw you. Your car.’
‘That beer’s gone to your head, darling. I’m going to grab a quick shower before tea.’
She turned and left.
I stared at the empty doorway for a long moment, then started to dry William’s fine brown hair with the towel. The sound of the shower starting up in the en suite reached me from across the landing.
A lie.
I felt dizzy, disoriented, like I’d suddenly started walking up a down escalator.
A lie. Why did she lie?
Why do people usually lie?
She was trying to protect me from something, or protect William, or both of us.
Do you really believe that?
No. Do you believe the alternative?
No, definitely no.
I didn’t know what to believe. Because what was the alternative?
Ben.
I married Mel knowing that she was independent, and I respected that, liked it about her, liked the fact that she wanted her own time, her own hobbies and friends. The same way that she respected me, and knew that I was different to most of her friends’ husbands in that I loved being home with William, loved spending time with the little guy. I had never regretted going down to three days a week for a couple of years after he was born, so I could be there for him more before he went to school. Mel had gone back to work full-time after four months’ maternity leave but that was her choice and I totally understood it. She brought in more than my teacher’s salary anyway, she liked her job and she was bloody good at it. We fit together perfectly, like interlocking pieces of a puzzle.
We didn’t lie to each other.
But now it felt like everything familiar was sliding away out of reach. Twelve years we had been together, nine of them married.
She was there with him, and she had lied about it.
Thinking about Ben again brought me up short. I’d been so focused on Mel and William that I had not thought about him. I had to talk to him, ask him, find out what he had to say before I broached it with Mel again.
Assuming he was OK.
You left him there. Bleeding.
‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ William’s head emerged from the towel.
‘Nothing, big man.’
‘You look sad.’
‘Not sad, Wills, just a bit tired.’
He yawned, his half-dry hair sticking up in every direction.
‘I’m not tired.’
‘You are a little bit, aren’t you? Do you want a strawberry milk before your story?’
‘Yes!’ He began bouncing on the spot. ‘Milkshakemilkshake!’
He drank it sitting at the kitchen table with his Cars colouring book and felt-tip pens. Next I mixed up a strong Bloody Mary for Mel – she always had one on a Thursday, gin and tonic on a Friday – the routine of hundreds of nights. While my hands worked, my mind kept returning to it. Over and over.
A meeting. A fight. A lie.
Mel appeared in the kitchen, towel in one hand, iPhone in the other. I handed her the Bloody Mary, kissed her on the cheek.
‘Have you seen my phone? I think I’ve lost it.’
‘When?’
‘This evening.’
She shook her head, taking a long drink of the Bloody Mary.
‘Not seen it since it was charging on the kitchen counter this morning.’
It wasn’t on the kitchen table, or the dining table, or next to the landline where my charger lived. It wasn’t anywhere in the lounge. I ran up the stairs two at a time, checked the bedroom, bathroom, even – in desperation – checking William’s bedroom to see if he’d scooped it up with his cars.
Nothing.
Mel found me rooting through the washing basket, checking the pockets of my work trousers from earlier.
‘No joy?’
‘It’s gone. Vanished.’
She crossed her arms, leaned against the bathroom doorframe.
‘What else is the matter, Joe? Is that all?’
‘Not sure yet.’
‘What does that mean?’
I squeezed past her in the doorway and went back downstairs to the house phone in the lounge. The iPad had a backup of all my phone contacts, so I grabbed that too. My heart was thumping hard in my chest.
Mel’s voice came down the stairs to me, high and tense.
‘Are you going to tell me, Joe? Let me help you, at least.’
My iPad was showing nineteen notifications on Facebook. That was weird.
Having that many notifications in one go was new to me. I was not a prolific user of Facebook in any case – my life’s not even half interesting enough, I’d once told Mel, which she’d said was missing the point of social media entirely. My posts were few and far between and wouldn’t normally generate that many comments in a month, never mind one night. The picture of William with his school award must have hit the spot.
I ignored Facebook for the moment and went to the address book back up, found Ben’s home number and punched it in on the landline. As it connected, I went back to the iPad’s home screen and hit the Facebook icon. The familiar blue and white of my timeline appeared, all the usual stuff. People going out for the night, or staying in, eating this or that, watching this or that TV show; who was already halfway gone and who was sober, who was going for an early night and who was just getting started. As the dial tone sounded in my ear, I pressed on the notification icon to find out what people had been saying that involved me. The screen filled with a list of new updates. Paul Coffey, Tanya Payne and Tom Parish commented on your status. I clicked on the top notification.
Felt the ground shifting beneath my feet.
I hung up the phone and stared at the screen.
What?
There was a status update from me. Or rather, from my account, more recent than my post about William’s school award. My profile picture alongside the update.
The update was just a few words, a hashtag and a picture.
Joe Lynch – 2 hours ago
We never know how little we deserve what we have until it is taken away from us #ClassicUnderAchiever #LostAndFound
The picture was a low-angle shot, the camera virtually on the ground. Taken in an underground car park, Ben’s car registration plate visible on the right-hand side. A sign said: Car Park for use by patrons of Premier Inn only.
My phone. My Facebook account was synced to my smartphone.
Oh, crap.
I clicked on the picture to enlarge it. There was something in the foreground, flared out with flash – but you could see clearly what it was. A black lea
ther bracelet. Looks like mine. I dumbly looked at my wrist. Gone. #LostAndFound. Must have come off when I was grappling with Ben, and now it was in a photo posted on a social network with a billion users.
Next to a dark red pool of what looked like blood.
8
My throat was dry. I felt helpless, like I was toppling over and couldn’t reach out to break my fall.
A message implicating me in an assault, a fight, a crime – an incident that could mean swapping my job for a prison sentence – had been seen by other people on one of the biggest social media networks in the world. It had been read, acknowledged, responded to.
My Thursday night was out there, for the whole world to see and comment on.
And there was another one, another status update from me – but not from me. From my account.
Joe Lynch – 1 hour ago
I must say that the facilities at the Premier Inn NW2 are excellent. Particularly the underground car park. Always nice to bump into friends.
I read it, then read it again, trying to process the words. Eight likes and five comments. A message flagged to 251 people who knew me well enough to be in my extended circle of Facebook friends and acquaintances. Mates I had known since school. Colleagues at Haddon Park Academy, the school where I worked. People who knew me, respected me. Family too. My sister, cousins, uncles, aunts. Christ, my mother was my friend on Facebook.
And my profile was public. I had been meaning to sort out the privacy settings for a while but had never got around to it, so pretty much anyone could see what was posted from my account. I scrolled down so the first comments appeared.
Tom Parish
What is this Joe, TripAdvisor for car parks? Tell me more
1 hour ago
Karen Clarke
Eh?? Not sure what to make of this!!! You OK? xx
54 minutes ago
Andy Stamford
A bit more tonic, a bit less gin, old bean
41 minutes ago
Paul Coffey
Mel finally thrown you out mate? Knew she’d see sense lol
39 minutes ago
Tanya Payne
Who’d you bump into then? Very cryptic!! x
15 minutes ago
Now they all knew. They had seen my post, they knew where I’d been. Damn. It was like suddenly realising you lived in a goldfish bowl.
Think.
Both updates had been posted this evening. I had driven out of the Premier Inn around 5.10 p.m., and both Facebook posts had followed inside the next ninety minutes. The replies had come in the hour following that. I selected ‘Settings’ from the Facebook menu, saying a silent prayer as I typed.
Please let my password work. Please don’t lock me out of my account.
I held my breath.
It worked. I was in. The password was unchanged. I breathed out, and went straight to my timeline, deleted the posts from earlier in the evening and changed my password. Maybe the smart thing to do here was delete my account altogether. You couldn’t hack an account that didn’t exist, right? But what if posts started to appear on other accounts – about me, or Mel, or both of us?
Give it twenty-four hours, then delete the account. In the meantime, I would stay on it so I could at least see what was being said.
Next I rang my mobile provider to report my phone lost and get a block put on it. I poured a glass of red wine as the call handler told me a replacement should be with me by Saturday morning. My hand, holding the wine bottle, was shaking.
Life had taken another turn for the surreal.
Think. Just think for a minute.
What does it all mean?
Today had been a car crash of a day. But it was slowly dawning on me that the latest turn of events at least – the hijacking of my life on social media – had at least one upside. I didn’t know Ben that well but I knew he was the kind of guy who didn’t like to be challenged, and couldn’t bear to be beaten. In business, at home, driving in traffic, even playing bloody Pictionary, he had to win. More than that – everybody else had to lose. The fact that the messages had been posted using my phone, from the scene of this evening’s altercation, could only mean one thing.
Ben was very much alive – and up to no good.
9
The possibility of Mel lying to me – about anything – had never crossed my mind. It had never troubled me for a second before. But now I couldn’t think about anything else. My wife had lied. Did that mean she had chosen Ben over me? What did he have that I didn’t have? Money, obviously. Plenty of it. A big house. Various expensive cars.
Is that it? Is that what it comes down to?
And now I had found them out, surprised him, got the better of him. Not really a surprise, considering I was that much bigger than him. At school I had been bigger, stronger, faster than most of my classmates without even really trying. I was six feet tall and thirteen stone by the age of thirteen – a man, while most of my peers were still boys – and had a blast for the next five years as everyone else tried to catch up. A lot of them, guys like Ben, never did – at least not physically. And what was his response to being on the losing end of a confrontation? To set me up, get me in trouble. To drop me right in the shit in a very public way.
That was Ben, through and through.
Ben, the technology entrepreneur, the smartphone app developer, the school-geek-turned-millionaire – that would be right up his street. He was the kind of guy who would roll his eyes at people who left their mobiles unlocked or didn’t have the latest iPhone or who used the same password for everything. His favourite trick was picking up your mobile when you weren’t looking and changing the language to Korean, or Arabic, or Russian. Leaving you to navigate the settings in a foreign language to get it back to English. Your fault for leaving it unlocked, he’d say, grinning. User error.
Or maybe his messages on my Facebook account were a warning of some kind.
Mel appeared in her dressing gown, took a new bottle of red from the rack and refilled her glass. She certainly wasn’t wasting any time tonight. She pulled up a chair and sat opposite me at the kitchen table.
There was silence between us for a moment.
Finally she said: ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Joe?’
I took a sip of my wine and placed the glass carefully back on the table. Looked her straight in the eyes.
‘I think you need to tell me that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You were at that hotel this evening, with Ben. I saw you.’ I hated saying it, hated hearing the words come out of my mouth, but it had to be said. ‘You weren’t at tennis, at least not for the whole time.’
She opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, closed it again, shook her head. Sighed and looked away from me.
‘Tell me,’ I said, my heart sinking.
Please don’t let it be true.
‘I knew this would happen, I told him it would.’
‘You knew what would happen?’
She looked down at the table, blushing.
‘Oh God, you know me, Joe. I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets.’
For a moment I just stared at her, feeling the blood thrumming in my chest. It felt like all the air had been sucked from the room. When was the last time we had all been together, the Delaneys and us? A Sunday afternoon at their house at the tail end of the summer holidays, Ben showing off with his brand-new gas barbecue, Mel lingering around him, drink in hand, smiling and talking to him as if he was the most interesting man in the world.
Or was that just my imagination?
‘So tell me,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level.
‘You were right. I was there tonight.’
10
‘You were there, with Ben,’ I said.
‘Yes. But it’s not what you’re thinking.’
‘And what do you think that is?’
‘By the look on your face, I’d say you think I’ve been naughty.’
&
nbsp; ‘And have you?’
‘No, you silly sausage.’ She smiled and patted my hand. Her touch was warm, reassuring. It meant everything. ‘We had a meeting, that’s all.’
‘A meeting about what?’
‘He rang me this morning, said it was urgent. He wanted to meet face-to-face about something work-related.’
‘But about what?’ I said again.
‘Well . . . the point is, he told me it was super-confidential. He made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even you. But I suppose I could give you a bit of the background, as long as none of it leaves this room.’ She held her hands up in mock surrender. ‘Since you caught us red-handed.’
I smiled, a warm glow of relief starting to move outwards from my chest.
‘Go on.’
She picked up her glass of wine, took a drink, set it back down between us.
‘Ben thinks . . . he might have a problem inside his company. A mole. Various key bits of code have turned up in other people’s apps and he thinks someone inside is selling it on. He’s narrowed it down to three possible culprits on the development team, and wanted some advice on employment law. About how fast he could get rid of them and make sure the dismissal is watertight. He’s also on the point of getting the police involved and wanted advice on that.’
‘Hasn’t he got an HR adviser he can use internally?’
‘She’s married to one of the guys under suspicion.’
‘So he turned to you instead?’
‘He wanted someone on the outside. Someone he trusted.’
Mel had worked in human resources for a number of large companies since I’d known her, and was currently with one of the big high street chains. She was often used as a troubleshooter, dealing with issues quickly and quietly before they escalated. ‘Dealing with’, in the sense of ‘paying off or firing’. At her previous employer she had acquired the nickname ‘Machete Mel’ for her style of chopping people off – figuratively – at the knees. She didn’t take many prisoners.
‘He couldn’t wait till tomorrow?’
‘He rang me this afternoon – three times – said it was urgent and wouldn’t wait. You know how he is.’ She gave me a little smile. ‘Everything has to be now now now. And he insisted on face-to-face, off-site, because he’s paranoid about phone conversations being recorded and didn’t want to risk tipping off his guy who’s selling code on. He said he learned a lesson three years ago when he dismissed an employee for gross misconduct. Do you remember that?’
