Green handed her another wad of paper churned out from the printer. Freddie saw the comments broken by the odd photo. This was going to take time. She looked at her phone. They had just under sixteen hours left until Lottie would be killed. She didn’t doubt it now. Not after seeing her hair. Each time she closed her eyes the video replayed in her mind, the girl’s frantic yanks to get away. How scared must she be? Chips’s puffy face was puckered into a series of frowns; he’d told her and Green what to get on with. It’d taken all this time to get the reams of threads on Are You Awake printed. Time they didn’t have. There was no sign of Nas. Saunders had barely looked at her.
‘Is this Nas’s desk?’ She pointed at the only one with a box of tissues on it. ‘Can I sit here?’
‘Sure.’ Chips’s face relaxed into a smile, all the creases now pointing up. He seemed sound.
‘You okay with half?’ Green asked.
‘I’m fast.’
Green raised her eyebrows in amusement.
Had she called her girlfriend to say she’d be late home? Freddie had texted her mum, said she’d gone to visit Nas. It wasn’t a lie as such. Perhaps that’s where Nas was – speaking to her parents. Or Lottie’s brother. This place was a warren. Thank god they’d only been on the ground floor when the evacuation happened.
Nas’s desk was spotless, obvs. Freddie opened a drawer, looking for a highlighter, and found one compartment of blue pens, one of red pens, one of pencils. Where were the screwed-up receipts? The chewed pens? The tights? The empty cans of deodorant? Chips’s desk was piled high with papers, coffee mugs balanced like a totem pole. That was more like it. She selected two red pens from Nas’s drawer, put one on the desk to use on the printouts, and one in the blue pen compartment. Saunders’s desk was as regimented as Nas’s, the only personal touch a framed photo of him with two other guys, his arm across the shoulder of one. They were all in lycra, gold medals round their necks, sweaty and grinning from whatever sporting event they’d just triumphed at. She shut the drawer as Nas entered.
‘How many pages are there in total?’ Freddie leafed through the pile of printouts.
Green’s computer screen displayed Are You Awake in all its lurid glory, a photo of a woman in what looked like her early twenties, on all fours, naked, was visible from here. ‘167.’
She was grinding her teeth: still furious at the idiots who felt it was totally fine to share photos of women like this. Nas was crouched next to Chips, their conversation audible.
‘The Are You Awake site is being run through Tor software, which allows for anonymous communication,’ Chips said. ‘It’s rerouting the site’s internet traffic through multiple networks, so the tech lads have no way to find the real location or source of the site, or who’s using it.’
‘I thought that’d be too much to hope for.’
‘Whoever hosts that site knows what they’re doing. They’re also using end-to-end encryption, something like SSL or TLS.’
‘Can you say that again in English?’ Nas asked.
‘Transport Layer Security protocol,’ DI Saunders said without looking up. ‘They protect privacy between communication apps – it means we can’t eavesdrop on any of their messages.’
He knew his stuff. It sounded like 4chan.
‘There’s nothing we can do to trace any of these posters?’ Nas asked.
‘Unlikely.’ Chips pursed his lips. ‘Even if we could, it isn’t a job that’ll be done in a few hours.’
This couldn’t be a dead end. Scanning the printouts Freddie saw that each time someone posted on a thread, that thread would be moved to the top of the bulletin board. Putting the threads, and therefore the victims of Are You Awake, into chronological order would take time. She seemed to have all of the comments and photos that were dedicated to Chloe. Flicking back, she went to the first thread Liam had posted, and read the first comment:
[-] Liam 17/01 (Sun) 17:55:09.
Does anyone kno the cute blonde who worked in the Pepper Pot? Chloe was her name. I’d love to see pics of that specimen.
Freddie shuddered. Specimen? What a nasty freak: acting as if he was entitled to see photos of Chloe just because he liked her. Posts jumped out as she skimmed the rest of the thread:
[-] Nostradamuspoo 17/01 (Sun) 17:55:59.
Shes at my school. Romeland. I’d hit it.
[-] Dudeman23 17/01 (Sun) 18:09:09.
I got one in her bikini from her Facebook page.
[-] Anonymous 17/01 (Sun) 18:09:42.
MOAR!
[-] AlexBlack 17/01 (Sun) 19:09:00
I got better than that, dude. I’ll message you.
[-] Ratmanking 17/01 (Sun) 19:11:57
Tight booty. Innocent face. Top marks. Yum.
It was infuriating that these guys were hidden behind the anonymity of the message board, while openly calling for photos that should have been private. And they got what they wanted: the photos started to appear. First one of Chloe in a bikini at an outside swimming pool with Melisha, smiling at the camera. Then a selfie in a vest top. Each one accompanied by an applause of sexual innuendo. And calls for MOAR. Freddie was fairly clued up on internet acronyms, but she’d had to Google MOAR. It was slang: a mash up of more and roar, used for screaming for more sexy stuff. It made sense she didn’t recognise it: she couldn’t think of a single situation where she’d use such a dickish term. It was like they were trading Top Trumps cards. Each raising the stakes with what photo they could get hold of, their language growing more gross as they did. When the nip slip picture appeared (posted by Liam, the scumbag) the tone changed:
[-] Ratmanking 19/01 (Tue) 17:09:13
Show some self-respect.
[-] Anonymous 19/01 (Tue) 17:10:21
She posing. Ho.
[-] SmackMaBitchUpz 19/01 (Tue) 17:10:27
It takes a whore world of slutz.
So it was totally fine for them to wank off over private pictures of Chloe that they stole, but god forbid the girl posed in a sexual way herself? A mist of rage came over her. She wanted to tear these printouts to shreds and ram them down the throats of the spoilt man-babies who’d contrived to make Chloe first an angel, and then a whore. They put their own narrative on her, probably without the girl even knowing. A girl can’t even get a goddam holiday job and be left alone! Wait… She flicked back. He mentioned the cafe by name – the Pepper Pot. He must have been there. He must have seen Chloe. He knew her in real life. At least from a distance. She shuddered, skimming quickly through the pages: more hate, Chloe’s telephone number, the messages where she asked them to remove her photos. There were screenshots of text exchanges between Chloe and these bullies:
Freddie wanted to reach into the messages and pull Chloe out. To block these numbers. Find these men and make them answer for what they’d done. Chloe was fifteen. She must have been terrified. They had come at her from every angle. There was nowhere she could hide. Freddie blinked back tears. Swallowed the lump in her throat. Don’t let this spiteful hate get to you: stay focused. She was doing this for Chloe. And for Lottie: there was still time to save her. Freddie kept reading. And there it was – a clue!
[-] Liam 25/02 (Thurs) 11:10:35
BORED. Stuk in waitin for a dam microwave from argos. Need some new frapping fun.
Freddie’s lip curled in distaste at his crude pun on the word frap: he could barely write and yet he knew how to make wank jokes. ‘I’ve got something,’ she said.
Nas was at her side straight away. ‘What is it?’
‘Look.’ She pointed at the two comments she’d circled. ‘Liam mentions seeing Chloe at the cafe she worked at.’
‘He’s local?’ Chips swivelled his seat round to face them. Even Green had looked up from her own stack of papers.
‘Possibly,’ Nas said. ‘Or he’s certainly spent time in the area.’
‘And here …’ Freddie felt the adrenaline rise in her. ‘On February the twenty-fifth at 11:10 the idiot says he’s waiting in for a new microwave from Argos.’
‘There must be a limited number of microwaves delivered that day, after that time,’ Nas said.
‘Exactly,’ Freddie smiled.
‘I’m on it.’ Nas reached across for her handset, shooing Freddie out of her chair.
‘Green,’ Saunders said. ‘Cross-reference any addresses with the names listed on the electoral register, see if it looks like our guy is using a real or fake name on this site.’
‘Sir.’ Green’s fingers started tapping at her keyboard.
Saunders was staring at her, an impenetrable look on his face. She gave him her best smile. ‘Chips,’ he said, ‘any updates from the Greenwich lads on whether any of Lottie’s friends recognise the name Liam?’
‘Nothing so far. And we’ve still got teams out going door to door.’
‘I’m guessing it’s too much to hope for that someone saw a woman in exercise kit being pulled into a vehicle this morning?’ Freddie looked at the incident board: there was a printed photo that looked like it was from a catalogue, and another taken from Lottie’s Instagram feed in which she was wearing the same outfit. So that’s what she’d had on when she disappeared. The old saying about serial killers always targeting joggers popped into her head.
‘No one’s come forward,’ Chips said.
Saunders rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Okay. Well they’ll have to keep knocking: someone might remember something.’
‘Aye,’ said Chips. Quietly, he added, ‘It’s just if it’s in time.’ He turned back to his own computer. Without looking up he said, ‘I’ve requested the lads at St Albans send us over all the CCTV they’ve got on wee Chloe Strofton’s last twenty-four hours. See if we see anyone we recognise.’
They were taking it seriously that the two cases were linked. Nas must have shared her suspicions about Chloe’s ability to source heroin. What did they call that? Reasonable doubt?
Nas appeared to be on hold. Now seemed like a good time to go for a wee. ‘Here, Green. Where’s the ladies’?’
‘Two floors down.’ She didn’t look up. ‘The one on the eighth floor is only for senior officers.’ Handy, thought Freddie. She wondered at which point the police detectives had detected there were only two sets of ladies’ loos in the twelve-storey building?
Waiting for the lift, she took out her mobile phone and went back into the Are You Awake Chloe thread. The lift doors opened and she stepped in. Pressed the button. Scrolled through her phone. Things had escalated fast. There were calls for Chloe to be taught a lesson. For what, she wasn’t sure. Taking a pic where her boob was on show? That seemed to be the gist of it. Calls for her to be raped. Freddie looked up as the doors opened. The toilets were opposite. As she walked in, a hand-soap-scented, cream marble cocoon enveloped her. This was better than a standard police station bog. She didn’t bother to look in the mirror over the sinks. Inside a cubicle she pulled her jeans down with one hand and sat on the seat. Resting her elbow on her knee, she kept reading her phone. She’d got to the part where Chloe had started to ask for her photos to be removed from the site. And the image of her in her yellow underwear, which someone called ‘AB’ had immediately posted. They were like a pack of dogs then, falling on her with vitriol and bile. She found circulated instructions on how to hack into accounts: they called it ‘the magic key’. And even though they’d tricked a fifteen-year-old girl into sending them an underwear shot, they were the ones condemning her. She paused to tear off some toilet roll.
[-] Liam 08/03 (Tue) 16:10:23
I’ll cut your tits off and stuff them up your snatch.
[-] DuneBuggi 08/03 (Tue) 16:10:49
Bitch be begging to take her nastypics down? Bitch I make you beg. Shove my cock in your mouth so you can’t breathe.
No wonder Chloe felt hopeless. Even if you suspected these were just sad bastards at home spanking the monkey while they fantasised about mutilating her, it was undoubtedly scary. And Freddie was an adult. Chloe was a kid. The door to the ladies’ opened and she jumped. The sound of heels clicked on the floor: not Nas. She stood up, flushed. Standing in front of the mirror was the receptionist, Lorna. She looked surprised to see her. Freddie smiled, focusing on washing her hands. Her phone was tucked in her waistband, gently pressing against her skin. She washed her hands again. She felt dirty after reading the messages aimed at Chloe, seeing the photos they’d stolen and tricked from her. Like she too had been violated. Lorna stood two sinks down, carefully applying baby-pink lipgloss. She couldn’t believe some people wasted their time coming to the bathroom just to reapply make-up.
Taking her phone out of her jeans, she resumed her walk and read. They had to get the bastards who’d done this. They were hounding the girl. You could see it building. Press call for lift. Get into lift. Step out lift. Walk back to office. The name on the thread hit her as if it were physical. She felt her chest concave, forcing the air out of her. Her hand was shaking. She stumbled. Stopped. Never taking her eyes from the screen. There was no mistake. It was the same pseudonym used by the Hashtag Murderer. The serial killer she and Nas had put away. Dread spread over her like heat rash. She read the post again:
[-] ApollyonsRevenge 08/03 (Tue) 16:15:00
Who wants to play?