LOUISE VOSS AND
MARK EDWARDS
Forward Slash

For Margaret Cutting and

Veronika Jackson

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: Him

Chapter 1: Amy

Chapter 2: Becky

Chapter 3: Amy

Chapter 4: Becky

Chapter 5: Amy

Chapter 6: Becky

Chapter 7: Amy

Chapter 8: Him

Chapter 9: Amy

Chapter 10: Declan

Chapter 11: Amy

Chapter 12

Chapter 13: Amy

Chapter 14: Becky

Chapter 15: Amy

Chapter 16: Declan

Chapter 17: Him

Chapter 18: Amy

Chapter 19: Declan

Chapter 20: Amy

Chapter 21: Amy

Chapter 22: Becky

Chapter 23: Him

Chapter 24: Amy

Chapter 25: Declan

Chapter 26: Amy

Chapter 27: Amy

Chapter 28: Amy

Chapter 29: Him

Chapter 30: Amy

Chapter 31: Amy

Chapter 32: Amy

Chapter 33: Becky

Chapter 34: Amy

Chapter 35: Becky

Chapter 36: Amy

Chapter 37: Becky

Chapter 38: Declan

Chapter 39: Amy

Chapter 40: Declan

Chapter 41: Amy

Chapter 42: Becky

Chapter 43: Declan

Chapter 44: Amy

Chapter 45: Declan

Chapter 46: Amy

Chapter 47: Declan

Chapter 48: Becky

Chapter 49: Amy

Chapter 50: Becky

Chapter 51: Declan

Chapter 52: Amy

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Also by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue
Him

She looked nothing like her profile picture. I mean, it was definitely the same woman but in the flesh she was seven or eight years older, her hair duller, skin pale and wrinkly, with saggy bags under her eyes, bags in which she appeared to be carrying half the world’s woes. When I saw her and realized this was Karen, my date, I almost fled. She so clearly wasn’t The One that there was no point even talking to her. But she had already seen me. Because, although I may be dishonest about everything else, including my name, on my dating profiles, I look as good in the flesh as I do on the screen.

‘I thought you were blonde,’ I said, after enduring a preliminary round of chitchat.

She pinkened. ‘Yes, I know, that photo is a couple of years old.’

And the rest.

‘I prefer to go natural now.’

She had ordered pasta with cheese sauce. As she talked, I could see strings of yellow saliva threaded in her mouth, making my own food inedible. She kept asking me stupid questions about my made-up job. She thought I was a professor of sociology, a subject in which she had a GCSE. She looked at me through her lashes as she went on, putting on that ridiculous sub-Diana coyness that many women believe drives men crazy but just makes me mad.

‘You’re a nurse,’ I said.

She nodded and shovelled more pasta into her cakehole. No wonder she was overweight. She had put on at least a stone since the sunny holiday photo she’d posted on the dating website. This was the big problem with Internet dating. You couldn’t trust anyone.

‘Any interesting accidents at the hospital recently?’ I asked.

‘Accidents?’

‘Yes. Like, I don’t know, I was reading about a woman who fell out of a window and was impaled on railings.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Nothing like that, no. Just people bitten by dogs and chopping their fingers off when they’re cooking.’

I yawned.

‘Am I boring you?’ she said, putting down her fork.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

I leaned closer so the diners around us wouldn’t hear and beckoned for her to come closer, giving me a better view of her jowls.

‘Not only are you boring me, but you disgust me. You eat like a pig and you’re not so much “mutton dressed as lamb” as “tripe dressed as mutton”.’

Her expression made the date worthwhile. For a second I thought she was going to slap me, which would have made the evening lead to more interesting places, but instead she burst into tears.

‘You’re the pig,’ she said, voice wobbling. She’ll probably make a complaint about me to the site, but who cares? It’s a rubbish site and I’m removing my profile later anyway, if this is typical of the calibre of women on it. Plenty more to choose from.

I pushed the tip of my nose to form a snout.

Karen stood up and, after groping around in her brain for a few seconds to find an adequate word, spat, ‘Bastard!’ at me. Pathetic.

I watched her go. She will never know what a lucky escape she had.

After Karen had stormed off into the night, I felt coiled and dissatisfied. My blood itched in my veins. Not wanting to go home, I headed to the bar next door to the restaurant. It was a cool place, all blue lights and shadowy corners, but crowded. That suited me. Nobody would notice me standing alone, watching.

I paid for a bottle of beer and stood against a pillar, phone in hand, and tapped to open the Girls Near Me app. The app works just like Google Maps or the GPS in your car. Geo-location, they call it. After a few seconds it found my location on the South Bank.

Then came the clever part, the feature that makes Girls Near Me such a handy tool. It showed me women who were also in the area by scanning the Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare profiles of women who had ‘checked in’ using their phones to let those and other social networks know they were in the area. Very soon, I was looking at a list of women who had checked in within a hundred yards of where I stood. There were two, in fact, in this very bar. Tara and Charlotte.

A glance told me Tara wasn’t right. Too ugly. Wrong hair colour. Nothing like The One. But Charlotte looked very promising indeed. Long, honey-coloured hair, gorgeous eyes, pretty smile. I clicked on her name and was shown links to her Twitter profile and Facebook page.

I glanced around the bar but couldn’t see her. No matter. According to her Twitter feed she was still in the bar – she had tweeted just five minutes ago about how she and her friend Lucy were drinking cocktails here. I clicked through to her Facebook page for a look through her photos. Jackpot. She hadn’t protected them and there were two dozen pictures of her on holiday on the beach, in a bikini. Great little body. Skinny, boobs not too big and, most importantly, not fake. I can’t bear breast implants. I messed up once and took home a girl with implants. I had to cut them out.

I went back and had a proper look through her tweets, discovering that she went to see Foo Fighters in concert the day before and loved it, but on the way home some woman trod on her foot on the Tube. Lucy also tweeted that she needed to lose weight, that she was sick of her job at Topshop, that she was going to a school reunion soon in Wimbledon. She usually drank white wine spritzers and she had an ancient Siamese cat called Milky.

She also tweeted that she was sick of guys her age and wanted her next boyfriend to be someone older, more sophisticated, more grown-up.

I love technology.

I nudged my way through the crowd, looking for Charlotte. This was where the density of the crowd became irritating. I spilled some shaven-haired moron’s drink accidentally and he started grunting at me so I pressed a tenner into his fat hand to shut him up. But then, as I emerged from a thick knot of bodies, I saw her.

She was sitting on a tall chair by the bar with a girl with curly dark hair. Lucy. Lucy was a serious problem for me, and I directed spears of hatred towards her back. The two of them were huddled together, drinking Sea Breezes, their shoulders shaking with laughter. Best mates, according to Twitter. She would remember me, be able to describe me.

I clenched my fists. There were things I could do to the friend. I could take them both, but that would cause complications, make everything more liable to get messy. I could slip something into her drink, render her sick or unconscious, but the chances were that Charlotte would feel the need to help her get home, and my prey would slip away. Fuck. I might have to accept that Charlotte was a no-go, that fate was telling me she wasn’t right.

Still, no harm in watching the beautiful creature as she drank and chatted and ran her hand through her hair. I nursed my drink and reminisced about a more fortunate encounter, a lone girl I’d met, with the help of my app, in a bar in Soho. After reading up on her interests – scuba diving, Mad Men, reality TV – I had gone up to her and started laying on the charm.

Her name was Jennifer. Jenny. Call me Jen, she had said. I bought her a few drinks then asked her back to my place. That’s one of my rules: never go back to theirs. At my place, I can control everything. Plus, there I have all my props. All my tools.

Call-me-Jen had hesitated for a moment – just a moment – then accepted my invitation.

I was so excited all the way home. Rather overexcited, in fact. I wasn’t careful enough. I think it’s because I’ve been feeling frustrated recently. I’ve been searching for so long now. My patience is running thin, and Jen bore the brunt of that frustration, my loss of control. It was messy. I used my best set of knives. Very expensive and very sharp.

I can picture her now, lying back on the bed, quite drunk. Irritatingly drunk. Her eyes were rolling and she had a sheen of sweat on her body. There were pink marks on her skin where her underwear was too tight. I knew the instant I saw her body I’d made a mistake, that yet again this was the wrong girl. I had to eliminate her.

There was so much blood. I must have hit an artery or something. It was everywhere. Even my hair was soaked with it. I suppose I was in something of a frenzy.

She screamed like crazy. It was incredibly annoying. When I stuck the knife in her mouth she made this horrible gagging sound and spat blood all over my face. She didn’t last long after that. I slashed her throat. She was already dead when I made love to her. It took her a little while to go so cold that I couldn’t bear to touch her any more. It’s called the algor mortis phase – did you know that? The death chill.

I reminisced about all of this as I watched Charlotte; I was churning with frustration and thinking that I was going to have to go to some sleazy pick-up joint, or find some cheap prostitute, a woman no one would miss. But then a stroke of luck, or kismet. I had noticed, absentmindedly, that Lucy kept looking at her watch. Now she stood up and slipped on her jacket. Charlotte flapped a slender hand at her drink. Lucy left – leaving Charlotte alone.

An hour later, after employing the methods I had learned from studying the techniques of the world’s most successful pick-up artists, Charlotte was sitting beside me in my car, heading back to mine. She was sozzled, to an almost irritating degree, but her eyes blazed with lust and she squirmed against my hand as it rested on her thigh between gear changes. She was 23, younger than I usually like them, but she had the look, the attitude, the vivacity. Exactly the right bust size and the perfect colour and length of hair. Her eyes were the most beautiful thing about her. They sparkled like a tropical sea. She had the fresh, open demeanour and easy smile of a girl who had never been through bad shit, whose greatest tragedy had been the death of a decrepit grandparent, who had never suffered or felt pain.

Those are the girls who excite me the most.

As soon as we got inside, she tried to kiss me. A bit forward, but she was young and excited so I could let that go, though others have paid the price for being so sluttish. I sat her down and started asking her about herself, mentally noting her answers, all of which pleased me, enjoying the way she smiled through it. There was that thrumming in my blood. Could she be The One? There was one final test.

I led her through into my special room. Of course, looking back now, I realize it was too soon. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t been prepared. Her mouth dropped open and she stared at me, then around her, then back at me. And she giggled.

‘What the fuck?’ she said.

‘Do you like it?’

‘Are you all right? You look … strange.’

‘I’m great, Charlotte. Are you?’

‘I think I want to go home.’

I shook my head emphatically, before ducking through the doorway and bringing out the item I wanted her to wear.

‘Put this on,’ I said.

She goggled at it. ‘You’re joking. Right? Oh, my days.’

And I realized with a cold shudder that she was not the woman I was looking for. I gritted my teeth, felt my jaw muscles expand and contract. Again. I had wasted my time again. Why can’t any of these stupid sluts be the woman I want them to be? What is wrong with them all?

As I pictured myself ripping her throat out with my teeth, she continued to look around the room. She had gone very pale. Then her eye fell upon an object that made her stagger, as if she were about to faint.

‘What … is that?’ she said, her voice trembling.

‘Oh, that? I must have forgotten to put it away. I was playing with it earlier.’

The look of utter horror in her eyes was delicious – I would get something from tonight after all, especially when she realized that, while she was staring at my plaything, I had taken a knife from the sideboard. When Charlotte saw it she started screaming, ran to the door, tried to yank it open before realizing it was locked. I walked over to her, holding up the knife. She scrambled in her pocket for her phone. Her hand was shaking so much she could barely get it out of her pocket. I smelled something unpleasant and looked down. Liquid ran down the inside of her leg. She had pissed herself. Finally, she produced the phone.

‘There’s no signal in here,’ I said and stepped towards her.

She swung the phone at my head. It was one of those huge beasts, a Samsung, and because I wasn’t expecting this, I failed to block the attack. The phone connected with my head, just above my eyebrow, sending me staggering. It really hurt.

‘You little bitch,’ I spat. I could feel blood trickling down towards my left eye. I was so stunned that I didn’t anticipate the kick, which missed my erection by an inch, sending me staggering backwards. Charlotte lunged for the knife, but as she did I recovered my wits. A flaming ball of anger whooshed through me and, as her hand reached for the knife, I sliced it, the skin of her palm gaping open and blood gushing, making a terrible mess that I was going to have to clear up later. That made me even more furious. As she clutched her bleeding hand I punched her in the face, twice, knocking her to the floor.

I fell on top of her, straddling her and holding her throat with one hand, pointing the knife between her eyes with the other.

‘Please,’ she begged, her voice rasping, barely able to escape from her squeezed throat. ‘Please … my mum …’

I banged her head against the floor until she passed out.

I carried her through to the bedroom and stripped her, bagging her clothes for disposal later. Her body really was something special. It was such a shame. I handcuffed her to the bed and gagged her, then waited for her to wake up. I needed to get some information out of her before she died.

I was furious with myself. The whole night had been a disaster. I had acted impetuously and dangerously. Looking at it rationally, I could see it was a result of my growing frustration. I needed to be more careful, plan things better. I had let things slip.

I took out my anger on Charlotte. Made her suffer more, stay alive longer, than I would normally. So in the end, I suppose the day wasn’t a total waste. It provided me with a sharp reminder that I needed to raise my game, and provided me with a couple of hours of pleasure at the end. I also got a pair of new souvenirs to add to my collection. Those beautiful eyes.

Before going to bed, I checked my emails and had a pleasant surprise. A little fish I had my eye on had nibbled at the bait.

The One may be closer than I thought.

1
Amy
Sunday, 21 July

Amy did not notice her sister’s email straight away. As the Mail program, loaded she was idly listening to the soft drip-drip of coffee through the filter in her mug, and trying to organize her thoughts into a prioritized list for the day ahead. No matter that it was a Sunday – being this busy meant that having the weekend off wasn’t an option.

It was going to be a scorching hot day again. Seven thirty a.m. was the best time to be out in the tiny garden, her laptop resting at an angle on the wobbly, rusting table, dew still clutching the tips of the grass stalks and a blessed silence from houses of the neighbours, sleeping off their Saturday night excesses. The new intake of email scrolled up in bold in the mailbox, one by one, four screens’ worth.

Amy scanned a couple of the subject headings:

Wool Enquiry – Pattern doesn’t state Gauge!

Painless Quilting; Idea for Article

She was going to have to employ someone soon. Upcycle.com – her baby, her passion – had boomed in popularity over recent months and the orders and enquiries kept her busy from dawn till midnight, seven days a week. As someone she had once worked with would have said, it was a quality problem. The site had expanded from a few magazine-type articles about crafts and hobbies to a full-blown ‘vertical portal’, or ‘vortal’, with everything from video clips on different knitting stitches or how to mosaic a garden table, to guest blogs from craft experts, an online shop and a lively forum to which women from around the world contributed.

Then she saw Becky’s email address on the list in her Inbox. There was no subject heading. Her stomach gave a small flip. Becky had not spoken to her in weeks, after the blazing argument they’d had about their parents – whose turn it was to visit them in Spain, why Amy always had to have them staying at her place when they came over, why Becky never paid back any of the loans she got from them when Amy had to … She’d spent years trying to ignore all the little slights but on this occasion had failed, and out they had all come. She and Becky were usually so close. They had always bickered, ever since they were small girls – not uncommon with such a small age gap, not quite two years – but the trouble was, this one had been a full-blown row, so bad that Amy had wondered if her little sister would ever speak to her again. She opened the email, feeling a rush of relief that Becky had contacted her.

Dear Amy

I’m going away, and I’m not coming back. Don’t try to find me. I’m going to Asia, probably. I’ve always wanted to visit Vietnam and Cambodia. Sorry about our row. It’s not your fault. Tell Mum and Dad not to worry. Look after yourself.

Love

B

Amy’s relief immediately turned to puzzlement as she tried to make sense of it. Going away to Asia? Becky had always been more prone to tantrums. She remembered her shouting, ‘I’m running away!’ at their parents, stuffing her make-up and a four-pack of Mars bars into a bag and storming off, but she never made it much further than the end of the village.

She read the email again. Don’t try to find me. That was the line that sent a little shiver up Amy’s spine. And there was something else about the email too, a little niggle that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The time on the email was 11.27 p.m. the previous night, a Saturday. So it had probably been written and sent while drunk. She pictured Becky lying on her sofa with an almost-empty bottle of Merlot on the floor, tapping away at her phone, the TV chattering unwatched in the background. Well, she thought, hangover or not, you can’t expect to send an email like that and not get an early morning call from your sister.

Amy rang Becky’s mobile, which went straight to voicemail, then her landline, which rang out, then her mobile again, this time leaving a message:

‘Rebecca Ann Coltman, you are a pain in the arse. What the fuck is all this about going to Vietnam, eh? Call me as soon as you get this.’ She paused. Don’t try to find me. ‘I love you, though. And I’m sorry about the row too. Call me, OK?’

She put the phone on the table and returned to her emails.

An hour later, Becky hadn’t rung or texted back, and Amy couldn’t concentrate on her work at all. She made herself another cup of coffee and, while she waited, checked Becky’s Facebook page on her phone. It hadn’t been updated for a few days. She checked Twitter too. Ditto. No tweets since Wednesday. ‘End of term. Whoo-hoo! Seven weeks of freedom. #schoolsoutforsummer’

She tried to call both of Becky’s numbers again. Still no reply. She was 90 per cent sure that her sister was enjoying lie-ins for the first week of the school summer holidays, as most childless teachers in the country were probably also doing. But there was still that 10 per cent niggle …

Sod it, she was going to have to go round there. Just to set her mind at rest.

Becky’s flat was in a small boxy fifties block built in the space left by a German bomb, incongruous in a road of Edwardian semis in Denmark Hill, a stone’s throw from Ruskin Park. It took Amy seven minutes to get there on her Triumph when the traffic lights weren’t against her. This morning they were all green, and Amy arrived with the taste of coffee still in her mouth, and the day’s ‘To Do’ list scrolling through her head. This was To Do number one: get her sister out of bed, find out why she’d sent such a crazy email, smooth things over between them.

She parked the bike, dragged off her helmet and buzzed Flat Nine. No answer. After a moment’s hesitation, she tried Flat Eight instead. While she waited she ruffled her hair wildly to make the curls spring back into place – helmet hair was the bane of her life. It was such an automatic reaction now that she wasn’t even aware of doing it. Thirty seconds later, a sleepy male voice came over the intercom: ‘Yerrghello?’

‘Hi, Gary, it’s Amy, Becky’s sister. Sorry it’s early. Can you buzz me in, please?’

The door clicked open in response, and Amy heard another door opening upstairs, the sound bouncing down the concrete stairwell. She strode up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. Gary stood waiting for her, bare-chested in stripy cotton pyjama pants. He wasn’t bad looking, Amy thought. He and Becky were good friends, although Amy suspected this was mostly because Gary was nifty with a screwdriver and willing to unblock Becky’s U-bend at any hour of the day or night. She remembered Becky confessing this to her in a mock-suggestive comedy accent, and grinned. For the first time she felt a real pang of worry about where Becky was.

‘Sorry,’ she repeated, taking in his bed-head hair and sleepy eyes. He smelled of morning breath and slight BO.

‘S’OK,’ he replied, scratching his chest. ‘Becky all right?’

‘Probably. Just had a weird email from her last night, and now she’s not answering her—’

‘Phone,’ interrupted Gary, and Amy instantly remembered the most annoying thing about him was his habit of trying to finish people’s sentences. She wondered if he was aware he was doing it.

‘Her mobile or her landline,’ she corrected. ‘Yeah. Anyway. Do you have a key? Just want to check she hasn’t had an accident.’

‘Accident,’ he agreed, ushering her into his living room and rooting around in a drawer under a black-ash coffee table. ‘I think I’ve still got her keys, they should be in here somewhere.’

While Gary went into his bedroom to fetch a T-shirt, Amy put down her helmet and bike keys on the smoked-glass dining table. Gary was in his bedroom for a good minute, and Amy tapped her foot impatiently. When he came back he didn’t say anything apart from, ‘OK, let’s go.’

They walked from Gary’s flat to Becky’s. He put the Yale key in the top lock and the door swung open.

Amy stared at it, then at Gary. ‘It wasn’t double-locked. She always double-locks the door, even if she’s just going to bloody Sainsbury’s.’

Amy realized she was holding her breath as they stepped inside. The flat was dark and silent, blinds drawn.

‘It looks tidy,’ she said. ‘Well – as tidy as Becky’s flat ever is. Becky?’ she called out, feeling foolish and strangely light-headed. She went straight to her sister’s bedroom, dreading the sight of her spread-eagled face down on the bed. But all was in order. The bed had been made, in a perfunctory sort of way, with a few items – a bra, a T-shirt – hanging from the bedpost. She opened the wardrobe. Clothes were crammed inside, so tightly that Amy wondered how Becky ever found anything to wear. There was no sign that she had packed a suitcase, although it was difficult to tell. Amy kept her own suitcases under her bed, but Becky’s bed was too low to the ground to fit much underneath it.

In the kitchen, a mug stood in the sink, rinsed but unwashed, with no other washing-up in sight. Amy opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a jar of pickles that looked as if they would survive a nuclear holocaust. The freezer was empty too and appeared to have been recently defrosted. Both signs that she had planned to go away. But the boiler, attached to the wall beside the sink, had been left on.

Gary stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching her and scratching his belly.

‘When did you last see her?’ Amy asked.

He pondered a moment. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while. She came over to ask me if I could help her set up her new computer, but that was a couple of weeks ago. What’s going on? What was this weird email all about?’

Amy walked into the living room, Gary following. Everything appeared to be in place in here. The TV wasn’t on standby but a copy of Heat was open on the armchair. ‘She told me she was going away, to Vietnam and Cambodia, and said she might not come back.’

Gary frowned. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have gone without telling me.’

Amy picked up a framed photo from the bookcase, her face creasing with nostalgia at the sight of it. The photo was of her and Becky at Becky’s graduation, ten years ago. Their faces were close to the camera, smiling into the sun, so fresh-faced. They looked so alike in that photo that they could easily have passed for identical twins.

‘She’ll probably walk in the door at any moment and ask what the hell we’re doing—’

‘Here.’

Amy felt cold inside. If Becky really had gone away without discussing it with her beforehand, that would hurt. And what was wrong in Becky’s life that made her feel the need to do such a thing?

‘When did you last talk to her?’ Gary asked.

‘I haven’t seen her for about a month. We had a fight.’

Gary was clearly too English to ask what the fight had been about.

‘I’m really worried,’ she said, pulling out her phone and checking both her texts and emails, just in case something had come in from Becky. But there was nothing – just a load more emails from customers.

With all the contradictory signs in the flat, Amy didn’t know what to think. But it was the email from Becky that jarred the most. Something about it was off, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Either the way it was written or … something else. What was it? Despite the recent row, she and Becky were close. They emailed and texted each other all the time, and left comments on each other’s Facebook updates, so she was familiar with Becky’s written ‘voice’.

She hurried across to the desk where Becky’s new iMac sat. It looked as though Becky had been splashing the cash, she thought. She switched it on and waited for it to boot up.

‘She never told me she’d got a new computer.’

Gary shrugged. ‘But you said you weren’t talking …’

‘Nothing’s password-protected.’

‘She told me she’d do it herself when she could think of a suitably good password. Maybe that was just an excuse, though. I told her she must make sure she did it.’

‘I was always nagging her about that too.’

Amy went straight into her sister’s Mail program, where she checked the sent items. Because of the way the iMac synced with Becky’s phone, emails sent from either would show in the sent items of both.

There was the email. She read it again: Don’t try to find me. It was the last email Becky had sent. She scanned the list of emails sent over previous days. There didn’t seem to be anything else very interesting.

She turned away from the screen, all the energy that had propelled her since receiving Becky’s message ebbing away. At that moment, as if in sympathy, the room dimmed as a cloud passed over the sun. She was out of ideas. She looked up at Gary and was about to tell him that she was going to go home when the computer made a pinging sound.

A new email had arrived. The sender was CupidsWeb. She recognized the name – they were always advertising on TV. How did it go? True love is just a click away.

The subject line read: ‘You have a new message!’

‘What’s this?’ she said. Gary came closer to take a look as Amy opened the short email that was simply informing Becky that she had received a private message and that she needed to log in to read it. Amy clicked the link and CupidsWeb popped up, asking her for a username and password.

Amy clicked back to the email program and did a quick search for CupidsWeb. There were no emails from them other than the one that had just arrived.

‘That’s really weird,’ she said. ‘How long has she had this iMac?’ Without waiting for him to answer, she added, ‘Do you know what she did with her other one? Her laptop?’

Gary shook his head. ‘Sold it, probably. She’s into eBay and Gumtree and all that, isn’t she? In fact, I’m sure she did mention that’s what she was going to do.’

It was true, there were a few emails from various online marketplaces saying that Becky had won or sold different items. Amy had coached her on it a couple of years back and since then her sister had made quite a bit of extra cash from flogging her unwanted items.

Amy got up and started roaming around the flat, looking for Becky’s distinctive stripy laptop case. No sign of it on the bookshelves, in the cupboard, on Becky’s desk …

‘Thinking about it, though, if she’s gone away, she probably took it with her,’ Gary said, pushing his hair off his forehead. ‘Want me to look at those eBay emails for you?’

‘Sure,’ Amy called, walking into Becky’s bedroom and looking around. It was so dusty it looked as though Becky had been gone for months, not a day or two. She wasn’t even sure that her sister possessed a vacuum cleaner. All the pictures on the walls were very slightly crooked, too, and Amy shuddered. She had to straighten them all before she did anything else. No wonder she and Becky never thought of sharing a flat – they’d kill each other.

Amy leaned down and peered into the narrow space under the bed frame. Through all the dust bunnies she spotted a corner of the laptop case. ‘Wait, no need – I’ve found it!’ she said, sliding her hand under and dragging it out. She brought it back into the living room and switched it on.

‘Nice one,’ Gary commented. ‘But it’s not going to have anything on it that’s not on the new one, is it? I mean, she hasn’t changed her email address, has she?’

‘No … but …’ Amy sat on the sofa with the laptop open on her knee, logged in and scanned the numerous folders still on Becky’s desktop. ‘Look – she was very good at backing stuff up. Not good at filing anything – in her flat or on her computer – but I bet it’s all here. She used to get really paranoid that the computer would crash and she’d lose all her school reports and lesson plans.’

‘Good thought,’ Gary said as she clicked on a folder called ‘Old Emails Back-Up’. There they all were, with a sub-folder entitled ‘Personal’. Dozens of messages from CupidsWeb dating back two months.

‘I had no idea Becky was into Internet dating,’ Amy said.

‘Didn’t you? Well, everyone does it these days, don’t they? Every unattached person, anyway.’ Gary snorted. ‘Quite a lot of married ones too.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe you don’t need to.’ He looked her up and down and she resisted telling him that her own love life was so nonexistent that she doubted even Internet dating could help her.

She turned back to the screen. ‘Internet dating. I wonder what other secrets she was keeping from me?’

2
Becky
Friday, 3 May

Once I’d given Shaun my mobile number, we texted continuously. His texts were dry and funny, and I felt increasingly excited as the day of the date wore on, checking my phone after each lesson period – and sometimes during, too. I managed to resist the temptation during assembly, thankfully.

The home bell finally rang and I did the minimum amount of tidying up in my classroom before bombing out to the car, to go and get ready. But then, of course, I had to bloody run into Simon Pinto in the staff car park. I literally bumped into him – I just didn’t see him, I was so busy reading Shaun’s latest. Poor little Simon, his home life is appalling and he’s got the sort of face that cries out, ‘Bully me!’ I think I’m the only one he talks to. I’ve tried to get him to tell me who is behind the campaign that finds him curled up, crying, behind the bins every day, but he’s too scared. He’s been crying now, and so I take him back into school and sit him down with a Coke and a stale digestive from the staff room. After half an hour, I know all about his nan’s Alzheimer’s and his dad’s drink problem, but nothing about who gave him the long scratch on his face. I give him a lift home, making a mental note to talk to the head about him tomorrow, and trying not to look at my watch to ascertain whether I’ve still got time to wash my hair before the date.

I do have time to wash my hair, just about, and I straighten it into a sheet of blonde that I then immediately worry looks too artificial. I wish I had naturally curly hair like Amy does. Our hair is the exact same shade of blonde, but she can get away with towel-drying and leaving it to dry into perfect curls, whereas mine is neither one nor the other and has to be coaxed in either direction. It’s a source of continual irritation to me.

Shaun and I meet later in a nice riverside pub I have chosen, a short bus ride from my flat. I wonder if I will recognize him – the clearest of his photographs on the website featured a very large black Labrador, with him cuddled up to it in the background. I’d probably be able to pick the Labrador out of a line-up, but Shaun himself looked distinctly blurry. I could see from the picture, though, that he appeared to have a strong jaw, and he described himself as in the six to six foot four category. Bald, but most of them are. How bad can it be, I thought?

I do recognize him, as soon as I walk into the bar, but mostly because he is the only man there alone, and he is sitting on a bar stool staring fixedly at the door. He jumps up when he sees me, bears down on me and shakes my hand vigorously. He doesn’t look anything like six foot tall, let alone six foot four.

‘Becky! You must be Becky. Lovely to meet you.’ He pauses and gazes into my eyes, dropping his voice by about an octave. ‘You look even more beautiful in the flesh than your picture.’

I am pleased and surprised – unless of course he’s just trying to flatter me. But I think he means it. The photo I’ve got up on the website is, even by my standards, not bad. I look almost sexy, and it’s not often that I’ll admit to that. It was taken by my ex, Harry, when we were on a weekend away in Bournemouth, and right before he clicked the shutter, he told me what he was planning to do to me in bed later, so I have a sort of ‘cat who’s about to get the cream’ grin.

Shaun isn’t too bad himself. Despite our flirty texts, I don’t feel any spark of attraction, but I tell myself not to be too hasty. I scrutinize him while he’s pouring the wine. I hadn’t planned to drink wine tonight, because I have a tendency to guzzle it when I’m nervous – but never mind. He has a good profile, but a slightly petulant mouth. He keeps his lips tight when he talks, and I wonder if it’s because he’s embarrassed about the gap between his front teeth, which I’ve had flashes of. He probably is quite a good-looking man, but even though I’m trying to keep an open mind, I can’t help my heart sinking.

He hands me a glass of wine, steers me onto a bar stool and starts to tell me all about himself.

Two hours later, he’s still telling me all about himself, his motorbike, his planned trip around Canada with ‘the lads’, how many followers he’s got on Twitter. He hasn’t asked me a single question, apart from what I do for a living, which was on my profile, so he ought to have remembered anyway. When I tell him I’m a French teacher, his face lights up:

‘Oh, yes! I was going to be a teacher, I’m great with kids. But then I realized that my skills really lay in business, so I did an MBA …’ blah blah blah.

I switch off, and study the collection of pottery jugs hanging on hooks around the top of the bar. I’m bored, but I don’t want to go home just yet. I’ve had three glasses of wine and soon the bottle is empty. I hope I have more fun than this on Saturday, with my next date. Shaun is doing me a favour by being so completely tedious. Onwards and upwards, I think. There are always more.

‘I’m just going to the little boys’ room,’ says Shaun, standing up. I notice that the top half of his body is a lot longer than the bottom half, and his hips are quite wide. I bet he looks stupid on a motorbike. ‘Can I leave you to order another bottle; the same as we just had? Do you think you can manage that?’

I look sharply at him to see if he’s joking, but no, it appears that he isn’t.

‘Yes, I think I’m quite capable of ordering a bottle of wine, thank you.’ But my sarcasm appears to be lost on him.

‘Blimey, is he always that patronizing?’ asks the woman next to me at the bar, applying a thick layer of lip gloss.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ve never met him before. But I would imagine so.’

We watch him walking away towards the men’s toilet. ‘And he’s got a big arse,’ she says and, although I know it’s mean, we both laugh.

‘Good luck, anyway,’ says the woman, after she’s paid for her drinks.

‘Thanks. I’ll need it,’ I reply, and she fights her way out of sight through the crush around the bar.

The pub is very full now, and I’m being jostled and bumped by people trying to squeeze around my stool to get to the bar, and Shaun has to speak even louder to be heard. I don’t want to suggest that we go and sit at a table, because that implies more commitment than I’m willing to offer. Plus, if I catch the woman’s eye, I’ll get the giggles. So I allow myself to be jogged and cramped and yammered on at. I notice myself withdraw, like a tortoise, closing down, just nodding occasionally and punctuating his monologue with the odd ‘Really?’ and ‘Oh, right.’

Just when I think I might actually weep with boredom, my mobile phone beeps in my bag. I fish it out and retrieve the text message, while Shaun continues unabated with his life history. I don’t bother to apologize for looking at the message. I get the feeling that he’d continue talking to the empty bar stool if I wasn’t there. The message is from my friend Katherine, and reads:

Hhello iis tthiis tthhe oownnerr off the sshhopp tthatt ssolldd meee tthee vvibrattor? Hhow ddo uu tturn tthhe ffuccckkinngg thingh oofff?

I snort into my wine, accidentally spitting some out. It lands on the leg of Shaun’s beige chinos, leaving a wet splatter mark, and – finally! – halting him in the middle of a diatribe about his appalling neighbours, who apparently play very loud music until two in the morning every night. Probably to drown out the sound of his voice, I think, and it makes me giggle even more. I can feel something give inside me, like snow melting and shifting, the beginnings of an avalanche of pent-up hysteria.

‘Sorry.’

He doesn’t look amused, and I half expect him to say, ‘If it’s all that funny, Becky Coltman, would you care to share it with the class?’ He almost does: ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Um … Just a silly text from my mate.’ I swallow the laughter hard, and it feels as if my nose is going red from the effort of suppressing it.

‘Let’s see?’

Mutely, my shoulders beginning to shake, I hold out the little screen for him to inspect. He looks at it without expression. ‘Very droll,’ he says in a flat voice. Then something changes in his face, and a lascivious glint pops into his eyes. Ewww, I think, he must be thinking about me with a vibrator.

He leans closer, and whispers into my hair. ‘Have you got one of those?’ he murmurs.

‘One of what?’ I ask brightly, feigning innocence. As a matter of fact, I don’t possess a vibrator; I don’t like them. An ex bought me one once in the last gasp of our relationship, but I was never sure whether it was meant to be for us to use together, to try to rejuvenate our sex lives, or whether it was an acknowledgement that things had got so dire between us in that department that I’d be better off going it alone. I gave it a try, because Kath swears by hers, but I didn’t like it at all. I wrapped it in a Tesco carrier bag and threw it in the outside bin.

‘You know what I mean,’ Shaun replies, his lips brushing my ear. ‘You certainly won’t need one of those when we’re—’

I can’t hold it in any more. I burst out laughing, too loudly, but I can’t help myself. I laugh so hard that I almost fall off the bar stool. The crush at the bar has thinned out a bit, and I see the woman who spoke to me earlier looking over at me and laughing too, with me. I can tell she’s guessed that I’ve reached my limit with Mr Dull, and it makes me even worse. I can’t speak for laughing. I wish that woman were a bloke; she and I would get on like a house on fire. Why can’t I meet a man I’m on the same wavelength with?

‘It’s not that bloody funny,’ says Shaun, looking offended. He waves at the barman, who brings over a bill on a silver tray. ‘Well, I’d better be going. I’ve had a great time, it’s been lovely to meet you. Let’s split this, shall we? Thirty-eight pounds each should do it.’

He must have ordered one of the priciest wines on the menu, knowing he was going to make me pay half, the bastard, I think, tears of mirth streaming down my face. I hadn’t even touched any of the second bottle – I was driving, so I changed to tap water.

I’d never normally do this, but for some reason I just don’t care. I stand up, make a show of peering in my bag and say, ‘Gosh, Shaun, I’m terribly sorry, but I seem to have forgotten my purse. Can I leave you to sort this one out? It’ll be on me next time, honest. Give me a call sometime?’

I peck him on the cheek, grab my coat and rush out before he can say anything, waving at my new friend on the way, still heaving and gulping with hysterics.

The text comes when I’m halfway home, so I pull over and open it. It says, ‘You are an insane bitch and I’ve totally wasted my evening and my money on you.’

What happened to, ‘I had a great time, it was lovely to meet you?’ I wonder, roaring with fresh laughter. I pull out my phone to ring my sister and tell her about it – but then remember that I don’t want her to know I’m Internet dating; she’s so paranoid about it after what happened with her and that freak, even though it was years ago. She’ll get too involved and start insisting that she vets all the guys, even though I keep telling her that she was just unlucky. She wouldn’t understand that although I do want a relationship, I also just want some good old uncomplicated sex … I might tell her, at some point. Just not yet.

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