Everything moved fast around Freddie. Lottie wasn’t the body in the wood. Lottie wasn’t dead. Lottie was hurt. Lottie was in danger.
They were at the office in what felt like minutes. But time was speeding up. They only had eleven hours to save her. Nas, Chips, and Saunders were all shouting into their phones. The message and the photo of Lottie hadn’t just been sent to them, it had been emailed anonymously to every newsroom in the UK. The same message and photo had also been posted on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google+, Instagram and Vine: all from accounts called Apollyon’s Revenge. Each of them linking back to Are You Awake. The name and link of the site was everywhere. It was trending worldwide. And Lottie’s terrified face was being shared across hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of social media pages. Freddie had trained as a journalist and knew the UK press operated a blackout on reporting on active kidnapping cases, but the internet had smashed straight through that. Lottie’s disappearance, who she was, who Nasreen was, who Freddie was, was public knowledge. Statistics ran through Freddie’s head. Fifteen million Twitter users in the UK. Three hundred and ten million users worldwide in a single month. Thirty-two million Facebook users in the UK, and 1.6 billion Facebook users worldwide per month. All those people. All those screens. All those eyes. It was incomprehensible. Uncontainable. They couldn’t stop the news spreading. They couldn’t catch hold of it. It snaked away from them, exploded, reformed, re-shared, re-tweeted, reborn. The horror of what was happening to Lottie – an Instagram star, an internet sensation – was magnified in devices across the country, across the continent, across the world. The fear in her eyes had become a commodity. It was picked over, passed around, commented on, joked about. Viral. Apollyon’s Revenge had released a virus: Lottie’s terror transmitted from phone to phone. An airborne disease of fear. Wildfire burning through everyone’s hands.
Lottie’s kidnap was now headline news. The photo of her bound and gagged would be reproduced in grainy print on the front pages of the early editions. Breaking news on the ten o’clock show. Her face a permanent fixture on the rolling news channels. Freddie knew the story: attractive blonde kidnapped in sensational social-media-based plot. Possible links to the Hashtag Murderer. Apollyon’s Revenge hadn’t just brought the circus to town, he’d brought every clown on the globe. Everyone’s eyes were on them. Everyone knew what was happening. They’d lost control of the press coverage. They’d lost control of everything. The office was full of police. Ringing phones. Shouting. People were running in and out. And Freddie couldn’t do anything. She was useless.
‘How did he do it?’ Nas was saying.
‘The text message version was only sent to us and the guv,’ Saunders barked. ‘The newspapers and channels got an email instead. The texts were sent from an automated computer account – not another phone. We can’t trace it. It’s bounced between here and – fuck!’ He flung his hand up in frustration.
‘But how did he get our numbers?’ Nas was saying. ‘And Freddie’s?’
‘A hack,’ Chips was saying. ‘Or a leak? He could have someone on the inside.’ They looked around the room with alarm: it was swimming with people. Freddie didn’t know any of these people. She didn’t trust any of them. And there was something else: something Nas had said when she’d appeared out of the dark, ghostly trees. Something was very wrong, but she couldn’t find it among all the noise.
‘We can’t get anything off the email address that sent the message to the media either,’ Chips said. ‘The whole lot’s gone via Tor: it’s anonymous. The Twitter account, Instagram, and all the social media accounts that posted the same message look like they’ve been hacked. They’re all registered to a handful of stupid buggers who had easy-to-guess passwords. It’s simple enough to do and means we’ve got next to no way of finding out who really posted that message.’
‘Dammit!’ Saunders slammed his hand onto the nearest desk.
‘The photo’s not geotagged,’ Nas said. ‘But I’m getting it blown up. There’s something in the background. If we can see what it is it could give us a clue as to where he’s keeping her.’
Freddie put her head in her hands and took a deep breath. It was like the room had no air left. She had to get out. Keep breathing. One, two, three… She stumbled into the corridor. Took the stairs. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Her breath fast now. Too fast. Her heart hammering to get out. Then she was out the ground floor fire escape. Out the back of the building. Gasping. Taking a huge greedy gulp of air. Her chest heaved. Slowed. The noises around her started to come back. A car beeped in the distance. A taxi drove past. Two people walked along the street laughing, a drink after work. She was okay. She was in London. She was okay. She was scratching her wrist again. Fuck it. She’d needed something for her hands to do. Checking her back pocket for her cash card Freddie walked down to the shop with the Lotto sign outside. A man stood behind the till, looking up at a small television on the wall. On the screen was the news. A photo she recognised from Lottie’s Instagram page. Then a stock image of DCI Jack Burgone in uniform – it was difficult to tally the composed, smiling man on screen with the distraught man who’d run into the woods to be with his dead sister. What did it feel like to think a person you loved was dead? Murdered? What did it feel like to then have hope, and then this? She thought of the sickening photo of Lottie. How much could one person take?
On screen a photo of Nasreen appeared. It must have been taken at a crime scene – she was outside a building, walking across camera. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail and she had a look Freddie recognised as ‘pissed off’ on her face. She still looked like she was in a movie. Freddie would’ve looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. And as if to prove the point the image shifted and there she was – a photo from her Facebook page, taken at a 1980s fancy dress party. She was wearing a shoulder-padded jacket that made her look like a Michelin man, and her smile was lopsided, as though she was drunk. Which she had been. It must have been about one in the morning when they took that. The shop assistant turned to glare at her, as if it were her fault she was on the bloody television. He had an excellent monobrow. ‘Ten B&H? Ta.’ Freddie held out her card for contactless. Outside she cupped the cigarette against the wind and inhaled.
As soon as she turned the corner she realised she’d made a mistake. She thought this was a secure building. Didn’t that mean it was a secret? She should have stayed round the back.
A woman on the edge of the scrum, dark hair hanging over one side of her face, her microphone in her hand, smiling at the camera, caught sight of her. Fuck. ‘Freddie! Freddie Venton! Do you know who has Lottie Burgone?’
They surged towards her. Journalists, twenty at least. Lightbulbs flashing. Blinding her. Shouting.
‘Is Lottie Burgone dead?’
‘Is the Hashtag Murderer back?’
‘Has the kidnapper demanded money for Lottie’s return?’
‘Is the message board site Are You Awake involved?’
‘Should these sites be closed?’
‘Is this personal?’
‘Happy Birthday, Freddie!’
It’d be further to turn back. Putting her free arm up in front of her face she pushed on for the building, the rising shouts mirroring the rising dread she felt. Lottie was out there: trapped, tied up, terrified; and the whole world had an opinion on it. A tweet. A share. A thinkpiece. Any illusion that they had control of the investigation had been shattered into thousands of unfixable pieces the moment the photo of Lottie had been sent to the press. There would be crank calls, panic and the general public to deal with. They had eleven hours to find her. Less than half a day. The clock ticking down with each camera flash. How could they possibly reach her in time now?