by Nicci French
‘I don’t often read the papers.’
‘On the morning of September the fourteenth, she was discovered by a woman walking her dog. Her body was found behind a bus shelter outside the village. Strangled. Bicycle chain.’
‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t at all.
‘What do you see?’
I had to pause for a moment. Think.
‘It sounds like a message.’
‘Yes. But what kind of message?’
‘I mean, a bicycle chain isn’t the first weapon that comes to hand. Why would someone … ?’ I stopped. I thought again of Jo’s face, her smile.
‘Leave that to us,’ said McMahon. ‘The fact is, these women don’t know each other. They live in the same vicinity, but not especially near to each other. They don’t do similar jobs or have similar interests. They are fairly close in age – twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-six – but that doesn’t seem very significant. To our eyes they don’t even look much alike. But they all follow you on Twitter.’
For a moment I felt a lurching sensation of vertigo. I found it difficult to think clearly.
‘But people follow lots of people on Twitter. There are probably other people they all follow as well.’
‘They don’t,’ said Webster. ‘I’ve checked. They don’t even all follow Stephen Fry. But they all follow you. That’s the only thing we’ve got and we don’t understand it.’
‘We want you to be absolutely clear,’ said McMahon. ‘Did any of them approach you about something? Is there a connection with one or all of them that you’d rather keep hidden?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be discreet. We just need to find this monster.’
‘I’ll be as clear as you want,’ I said. ‘Jo was my friend. I know it makes no sense, but I know nothing about the others. Nothing at all.’
The two detectives looked at each other and stood up. As I led them outside, McMahon turned to me.
‘You’re the focus of this somehow,’ he said, ‘and that’s not a safe place to be.’ He took a card from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘So if you think of anything or notice anything, anything at all.’
‘What do you mean, not safe?’
‘We don’t know,’ he said.
The two detectives looked round at the newly cut field on the other side of the road.
‘When I see a haystack,’ said Webster, ‘I think of needles.’
‘What?’ said McMahon.
‘Needles. Needles in haystacks.’
‘With a good metal detector’, I said, ‘you’d find a needle in two minutes. Straw.’
‘What?’ said McMahon again.
‘A haystack would be a good place to hide a piece of straw.’
He looked baffled.
‘Call us,’ he said, ‘if you think of anything, anything at all.’
They left and I was alone, standing in the middle of the room with an ache in my chest, as if the floor was suddenly a choppy sea beneath me. I sat down and put my head in my hands. Three women had been killed with a bicycle chain. They had all followed me on Twitter. It was both ominous and senseless. And then the words of the police officers returned to me: ‘Not a safe place.’
Sitting there, it seemed as though a stain was spreading through me. I concentrated on the stark, incomprehensible facts: women have been murdered and they follow you on Twitter. And then, like letting in the inky darkness, I felt the question form in my mind and clarify. Or is it that women have been murdered because they follow you? If what they all had in common was me – even the ones I didn’t know and had never heard of – then somehow I was the cause. I could almost feel the thoughts hissing inside me, useless and urgent. What had I done or said or thought or photographed that could have set this off? If Jo had been alive, I would have picked up the phone right then to talk to her and ask her advice. I tried to imagine what she would have said, but all I could think about was that she wasn’t there to say it. She was dead. Had she died because of me?
I heard Connor’s footsteps on the stairs. He was a lecturer at the university. Politics. Term hadn’t started yet. I’d said that I thought the vacation was when academics did research and wrote books, and he had looked evasive. I had met him at a gig I’d gone to with a group of friends. He had stood next to me, and once or twice we’d bumped against each other in the jostle of the crowd. He had smiled at me, had steadied me when someone pushed violently from behind. And then had said into my ear, as if we were a couple already, ‘This isn’t much good, is it? Let’s go and get a drink.’ Although I don’t do that sort of thing, I went, just like that. And although I never have one-night stands, I took him home later that night and let him kiss me, undress me slowly, lay me on the bed, looking at me as if I was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Usually I am the one who does the looking, watching the world through a lens, perhaps hiding behind it – that’s what Jo used to say anyway – but Connor gazed at me, gazed into me, appraised me. There seemed no place to hide. I didn’t know if I liked or hated this. Certainly it scared me.
He came into the room, pulling a T-shirt over his torso. I looked at his flat white stomach disappearing, his head emerging, damp dark hair and hooded dark eyes.
‘Hello, my gorgeous,’ he said, putting his hand on my cheek, sending that familiar shiver of pleasure through me. ‘I’ll make a big pot of coffee and you can tell me what they wanted. What crime have you committed?’
I told him and watched the way his eyes seemed to grow darker. He seemed – what was the word? – impressed. He let out a low whistle. He took my hand and held it between his own, twisting my thumb ring.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think,’ he said slowly. ‘I think it’s quite extraordinary.’
‘What should I do? What does it all mean? You see, I don’t even know what the question is. It’s just …’ I searched for a word. ‘Ghastly.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘I don’t even know. Churned up. I feel dizzy and unreal.’
He took me in his arms. I smelt the shampoo on him and felt his stubble scrape my cheek. He was my stranger. I knew he loved the same kind of music as me and that he liked to cook and to drink red wine and walk along the cliff tops when it was windy. But I didn’t know his family; I didn’t know his friends; I knew almost nothing about his past.
I broke away from him and went to stand by the window, feeling cold and shivery, even though the day was mild and the morning sun slanted across the fields and hedgerows.
‘Let’s start by looking at your Twitter account,’ he said.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that. I fetched my laptop and went to Twitter, which I never use even though all my friends tell me I should, and then to ‘Connect’ so that I could see the activity on my page.
As I had told McMahon, and McMahon had told me, I don’t have many followers. Twenty-three, including him, and three of them were dead, although their names were still there. I scrolled down. I knew Jo, of course, and, vaguely, Lynne Grainger, née Wells. A few minutes ago I had heard of Michelle Horne and Catherine Calder. The other names were unfamiliar, some of them obviously weren’t real names at all. I stared at them. I stared at the images beside their tags: thumb-sized faces or sometimes logos or cartoons. I saw that a refuge for stray dogs was following me, and a local restaurant. They were safe enough. There was even someone from New Zealand.
‘This isn’t …’ I began, and then a message pinged onto the screen, sent by a Geraldine Finch, whose photo showed her to be middle-aged, plump and smiling.
‘Scarifying visit from police,’ it read. ‘Anyone else?’
Connor looked pleased.
‘This is interesting.’
‘What?’
‘The police are visiting your followers. They’ve gone from you to this woman. We can keep track of it.’
We did keep track of it, all through that s
trange day. It was like seeing a virus take hold. Messages came slowly at first, then in a strengthening stream of exclamations and alarms that fed off each other. I could almost feel the panic mounting. Questions whirred: Who knew each other? Who knew the women who had been murdered? Where were they based? How did the killer find out where they lived? Was it significant that they had all been local to me? Many of the tweets were addressed to me directly. I had no answer.
‘What shall I do?’
‘Reply,’ said Connor.
‘And say what?’
‘What do you want to say?’
I stood up and paced the room. I’d been inside most of the day and felt stifled, itchy with inaction and a sense that something was coming.
‘I think I should suggest that we all meet.’
‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows at me, approving.
‘There’s got to be a reason,’ I said. ‘Something we know or share. If we all get together, then maybe something will emerge, some pattern. Not the woman in New Zealand, obviously, or the dog refuge or the restaurant.’
Of my nineteen living followers, thirteen were actual individuals. Three of them lived a long way off, in Wellington, Vienna and Ghent. Nine out of the ten remaining said that they would like to meet up as soon as possible. The tenth – a doctor living in Newcastle who, it turned out in a message broken up into multiple tweets, had once seen a picture of mine in a magazine – said he wouldn’t come because he was a man and therefore assumed that he wasn’t in danger. He wished everyone luck and added that the photograph he had seen by me was of a rainforest in Costa Rica – somewhere he had always wanted to go. The three other men then also dropped out.
By just before midnight, it was arranged. In two days’ time – a Sunday – five strangers and an old acquaintance of mine from school would come to my house at midday. One of them was driving from Wales and another from near Sheffield. I’d also invited Catherine Calder’s husband, and the brother of Michelle Horne, as representatives of the dead.
‘I’d better make lunch,’ I said dubiously.
‘Let me do that.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Luce, really. I want to be here to see them all.’
I scowled at him. ‘You’re enjoying this.’
He handed me a glass of whisky. The rawness of it caught me in the back of the throat.
‘I’m riveted,’ he acknowledged. ‘But also …’
‘Also?’
‘I’m not going to let you die.’
For some reason, my eyes stung; perhaps it was the whisky. I tried to smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘What would I do without you?’
I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic or sincere. I could never tell. Even in bed, even when his hand was in my hair and he was leaning over me, staring into me, I couldn’t.
‘That sounds like a line from a song. I don’t know, Connor, what would you do?’
‘I’m not going to find out.’
He made a large Mediterranean tart and salads and bought wine and apple juice as well. He wore an apron and sang loudly as he cooked, every so often breaking off to go into the garden for a cigarette. It was as if we were having a party, a reunion of people who had never met. I felt tired because I’d been sleeping badly and, ridiculously, I worried about what to wear. I didn’t want to look too weird, and all the clothes in my wardrobe suddenly seemed like garments for a fancy dress party: the fake python-skin cowboy boots for a Western theme, the leather trousers straight out of Grease, and a red satin shirt like a vamp’s outfit in a film noir, where no one is entirely innocent, and everyone has a guilty secret and shady past. I pulled a pair of jeans from the back of my cupboard and a grey canvas top I often wear on shoots because it has lots of pockets. I tied my hair back and didn’t wear make-up. I took out my nose stud. If I’d owned any, I would have put on glasses to make me seem more respectable, more serious. Because I had a horrible feeling that everyone, however unconsciously, would be blaming me. I was obscurely blaming myself. I looked into the mirror and saw my pale face, my dark hair, my heavy brow and the fierceness of my gaze. I didn’t look sweet and pure at all.
At first it was a bit like a party – one of those parties where the people you barely know, and were dubious about inviting, arrive first and stand around in awkward clusters making small talk, eyes darting round to look at new arrivals. I examined them: different ages, colours, heights, types, accents, clothes, laughs, backgrounds. It seemed evident that what we had in common was nothing.
By twenty minutes past midday we were all crammed into my tiny sitting room, perched on chairs and sitting on cushions on the floor in an approximate circle. I pinged a knife onto my glass and everyone instantly fell silent, an ominous hush thick in the room.
‘I think’, I said, ‘that we should start by saying who we are and a bit about ourselves.’
I took out a pen and a notebook. I needed to keep some sort of record of this because I already felt lost. So it began:
Jane Wentworth, forty-eight, living in Leicester, divorced, mother of three teenage sons, nursery teacher, cancer survivor.
Lynne Grainger, twenty-eight, married, pregnant (she beamed at me and patted her belly), working in PR, living in London.
Vivian Morgan, thirty-one, married with a young daughter, living in Cambridge and unemployed.
Fiona Carr, twenty-two, a student studying events management, no regular boyfriend (she cast her eyes sideways at Connor, who was leaning in the doorway, still in his apron).
Geraldine Finch, sixty-three, from Norfolk, no husband or partner and no children, but three dogs and a parrot, and a keen amateur photographer.
Tania Fisk, twenty-seven, living in Weymouth with her partner, working as a speech therapist and, as she said, shit-scared by all of this.
Then there was Michelle’s brother, Dan Horne, who was slender, wan, his brown hair tied back in a ponytail. He was coming instead of his sister, Claire. She had meant to come because she was the closest to Michelle, but she was still too distraught. And there was Catherine Calder’s husband, Bobby, who worked in a bookshop and whose voice cracked when he introduced himself, so that he had to begin again. A hum of sympathy went round the circle, sympathy mixed with a kind of collective flinching. These two represented the women who had already been picked off.
‘And I am here for Jo as well as for myself,’ I said. ‘She’s a close friend.’ We all heard the present tense. I put my hand on Filby’s coarse back and he lifted his sad brown eyes to me and thumped his tail gently.
I don’t know exactly what I expected, and after it was all over I wasn’t sure what had really happened. Geraldine was the last to go. She had booked herself on a specific train back to London on her way to Norfolk and she had allowed herself much too much time. When the door finally closed behind her, I was left with a sink full of coffee mugs and plates, a pile of scrawled notes and Connor.
‘So what do you think?’ he said.
‘Wait.’
While Connor checked his phone and did something online that he said was preparation for the beginning of term, I tried to restore the house to the way it had been three hours earlier. I did the washing up. I pushed the chairs back into their proper places. I found a grey cardigan that Vivian Morgan had been wearing when she arrived and folded it. It had moth holes in its sleeves. I picked up the reading glasses that Bobby Calder had left on the side table and put them in the drawer of my desk, promising myself I’d take them back the following day. Someone, I had no idea who, had left a brightly patterned scarf behind. A few of the visitors had gone outside for a cigarette. Only just outside. Cigarette ends and matches are not like compost; they don’t melt into the soil. I had to pick them up one by one.
When I was finished, I put the kettle on for coffee and then decided that caffeine wasn’t enough. I opened the fridge and there was half a bottle of white wine left over from lunch. I poured myself and Connor a glass each. We walked outside and Filby followed us.
It was a beautiful evening, almost hot, as the sun shone against the rear of the cottage. But there was a chill beneath it. You could feel that this was autumn now, not summer, and that winter was somewhere in the distance.
‘So?’ I said.
Connor took a sip of wine and grinned.
‘I think he killed the wrong women,’ he said.
It suddenly felt like the sun had gone away. I shivered.
‘You think all this is funny?’ I said. ‘Well, fuck you. I’ll do this on my own.’
I walked back inside, sat down at the table and started to look at the notes I’d taken. Connor sat down beside me. His face looked flushed.
‘That came out wrong,’ he said.
‘There is no way it could possibly have come out right.’
‘I’m just a guy. When I try to deal with serious emotions, I end up making a joke.’
‘You sound proud of it,’ I said.
‘I’m so not.’
I gestured at my notes.
‘Are we going to do this?’
‘I want to help you,’ he said. ‘I want to be part of this.’
‘So where do we start?’
Connor found a fresh piece of paper. He looked at my notes and wrote the names of everyone who had been at the meeting.
‘They followed you for different reasons,’ he said. ‘Geraldine just follows any photographer she comes across. Lynne remembered you from school. Tania saw a picture of yours on a website and clicked on the link. Fiona said she was following anyone who could be a potential contact. Vivian follows more than a thousand people and couldn’t remember why she had followed you. Jane was following people in the hope that they would follow her for a charity. You didn’t follow any of them, not even your old friend, Lynne. Or Jo, when she was alive. Michelle’s brother didn’t know why she followed you. Catherine’s husband didn’t know why she followed you.’
‘Lynne’s not exactly an old friend.’
‘All of them have been interviewed by the police. None of them knew any of the victims.’
‘None of them have anything in common.’
