Eventually there was a loud ding and the lift doors slid open to reveal a very angry-looking Lyons.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said to the security guard, flashing his ID.
He motioned me into the lift with a tilt of his head, and didn’t speak to me until the doors closed. He turned to face me with a serious expression. I mean, his face was always serious, but now it was properly stern.
“What the hell are you doing, Gwen?”
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. “You should be back in there doing police stuff, not babysitting me!”
“The guard told me what happened. Going after Parker on your own was incredibly dangerous.”
“If you had believed me in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to,” I replied. “Parker has been catfishing me this whole time. I told you there was something wrong about him, and this proves it.”
“This isn’t the time for ‘I told you so’s.’ And all you’ve ‘proved’ is that Parker is a fake account.”
We stood in silence for a moment, only interrupted by the soft ding of the lift bell as it made its way through the building.
“Dev’s going to make it, by the way,” Lyons said, watching me out of the corner of his eye. “In case you were wondering.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Was he able to tell you anything? Does he know who Parker really is?”
“He didn’t see anyone, Gwen, except for you. All we could get out of him was that he went on a date to the bowling alley, and then someone jumped him in the toilets. Next thing he knew, you were stuffing a gag into his mouth.”
“Back into his mouth!” I said. “I was trying to get him to shut up when Parker—”
“The fact is,” Lyons interrupted me, “you were the only person seen at the crime scene. And not for the first time.”
“Okay, so we should track down whoever he was on the date with, and maybe she can—”
“Gwen, stop. This isn’t Danger Mouse or one of your podcasts.”
“Danger Land,” I corrected him. “Danger Mouse is something completely—”
He gave me a sharp look.
“Anyway,” I went on. “I need to tell you something about Colin, listen—”
“Gwen, please. Just listen to me for a moment.” Lyons put his hand up to stop me talking. “Forrester wants me to bring you in, take a statement, probably read you your rights.”
“What? He still thinks I’ve got something to do with this? How the hell? I literally just saw the killer slice a man’s throat!”
“And you were the only one who did see it,” Lyons said. “When I found you, you were holding a bloody knife. Can you blame Forrester for being suspicious?”
“Yes, I can blame him!” I cried. “He should be giving me a freaking medal, not arresting me! You can check the messages Parker sent me in the alley—he was going to kill Dev! If I hadn’t found him in time, well, God knows what would have happened.”
Lyons considered this for a moment, pursing his lips.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, his voice softer now, “I think he’s wrong.”
“Thank you,” I said. “So let’s—”
“But I’m still taking you in,” Lyons said bluntly as the lift came to an abrupt stop on the ground floor.
I followed Lyons out to his Ford Fiesta, and he held the passenger door open for me. I sat sulkily, fiddling with the glove compartment while he got in the other side and started the car. Suddenly it sprang open, depositing a slew of old Fiesta manuals and paperwork onto my lap.
“What are you doing?” Lyons snapped.
“Looking for snacks!” I said. “Haven’t you got any chips or something in here? Just FYI, this car is full of junk.” I began ordering the contents of the glove compartment neatly into a pile.
“Just leave it alone, will you?” he said.
We both stared out the windscreen saying nothing for a few moments. It had started raining, and the rhythm of the wipers and the warmth of the car heater lulled us into a silence.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Charlie being Facebook friends with Colin. Was that just another coincidence? Colin’s profile wasn’t private, anyone could have nicked his photos. But it was odd. Really odd. Could Charlie really be Parker? It didn’t make sense—he had no reason to hurt any of the men on my list.
The rain picked up, lashing on the windscreen faster than the wipers could whip it off. I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and focused on the white lines of the road, disappearing as quickly as they appeared on the horizon. I looked over at Lyons, who was still staring straight ahead, a look of something in his face that reminded me of a cornered animal. I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets. At the bottom of one, I found a packet of gum. With my fingers, I traced the outline of the wrapper. There were two pieces left.
“Gum?” I offered, and Lyons reached over without taking his eyes off the road. I squeezed a piece out of the crumpled packet into his open palm.
I popped the last piece in my mouth, and let it sit lifelessly on my tongue. The low squeaking of the rubber wipers against wet glass that filled the car only accentuated the awkwardness.
“So…” I said eventually. “If Forrester wants to arrest me, then where is he? Why’d you come after me on your own?”
“Let’s just say I’m working a hunch here.”
I spat out the gum into the empty wrapper and rolled it up into a ball. I dribbled the silver foil ball around my palm with my finger before flicking it at him.
“Forrester doesn’t know, does he?” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re going rogue here, Dandy?”
“Please stop calling me that.” Lyons tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Really?” I said. “You’re telling me you actually prefer Aubrey?”
“Detective Lyons is fine,” he said, still not taking his eyes off the road. “And no, I’m not going rogue. But I’m not convinced you’re guilty of anything. Which means someone else is.”
“Of course I’m not guilty!” I cried. “For God’s sake, Detective Lyons, I’m a twenty-nine-year-old barista with nothing to her name but a worn-out ice cream van, two maxed-out credit cards, and, right now, the beginnings of what feels like the mother of all migraines. Do I seem the sort of person who could be bothered to plot an overly complex killing spree on a whim?”
“Gwen, calm down,” Lyons said.
I slumped back into the seat and crossed my legs. If there was one thing guaranteed to make me not calm down, it was being told to calm down. If anything, it was just gonna make me calm up.
“You’re not doing anything! We need to do something. There are still names on this napkin. Parker is real. And he’s out there somewhere, with a grudge against me. People are dying and it’s my fault.”
He took a deep breath and, without saying a word, swung the car sharply into a side road and pulled on the handbrake.
“Okay, listen,” he said, exhaling through his nose. “I do believe you, Gwen. And I think you may be right. Parker is still out there, and I need your help to figure out who he might be—fast. But if we’re going to do this, you can’t keep running off on your own, okay?”
I nodded.
“All right,” he went on. “We need to work out why anyone would want to kill your dates.”
I thought about Charlie being Facebook friends with Colin. If I told Lyons that, he’d be off on another wild-goose chase. I needed him to stay focused on finding the real killer.
“I think Parker wanted me to find Dev at the bowling alley,” I said. “Like he wanted me to find Josh. He’s trying to frame me for all of this.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. He’s been harassing me for a date and I kept fobbing him off.”
Lyons looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t think that’s quite enough to make him frame you for murder.”
“You don’t know what some of these guys on Connector are like,” I muttered.
“What about the photo? Dev had an ultrasound photo in his hand.”
“It was pinned on him when I found him,” I said. “His wife is pregnant.”
“But why would Parker pin that on him?” Lyons asked.
“To make it look like I’m some insanely jealous murderer,” I said. “He wants it to look like I dated Dev, found out that he was cheating on his wife—his pregnant wife—then sliced his throat.”
“Let me see these new messages Parker sent you,” Lyons said. “Maybe he gave something away, something that tells us who he really is.”
I handed him my phone and he scrolled through the Connector chat between me and Parker.
“Not much to go on,” he said. “But whoever he is, somehow he knows who you’ve been dating.”
“You think he’s been stalking me?” I asked.
Lyons studied the phone screen the way some dogs stare at a washing machine doing a spin cycle.
“Maybe. But I have another theory. If Parker had access to the Connector data, he’d be able to see all your chats on there and know exactly who you’d matched with.”
“You think he hacked the app?” I asked. “Can people do that?”
“It’s possible. I arrested a hacker last year, calls himself Maestro, for some reason. Started off his criminal career by hacking dating apps for kids in his sixth form, then progressed to hacking his head teacher’s dating profile and matching him with half the students’ single parents. By the end of the year, he’d moved on to hacking celebrities’ Twitter profiles, changing the passwords, and holding them at ransom. Got off with a suspended sentence as he was only eighteen. Pretty smart guy, if I’m honest.”
“Aubrey! You’ve totally got yourself an inside man. Just like a real detective. This Maestro guy can hack Connector and find out who Parker really is, right? Or at least help us track down Seb. What are you waiting for? Do you want that promotion to the Met or not?”
He shook his head. “One, we will not be hacking anything. That data is protected and we have to go through the proper channels. Two, Maestro lives ‘off the grid’ in a yacht on the dock now, and I do not want to know how he paid for that. Maybe I should take you back to the station, at least there you’ll be safe.”
“So Forrester can just keep interrogating me until everyone on this list gets murdered?”
Lyons looked at me and sighed deeply. It was all I could do not to grab his shoulders and shake some sense into him.
“Listen, we’re not going to hack anything, The Mysterious Maestro is,” I said. “The docks are five minutes from here, and you’ll need my phone to show him Parker’s profile. There’s no time to go through the proper channels, and you know it. Let’s stop pretending you’re taking me back to the station. You need my help, you said it yourself. So, come on, why don’t you and me go nail this bastard?”
Lyons pulled the handbrake off and started the car. “I’m beginning to see why none of those guys wanted a second date with you,” he muttered.