In Paige and Shane’s flat
“What the fuck, Paige,” Shane shouts, making me jump. He holds my phone in his hand, the pads of his fingers white from the pressure of his digits on its case. It could crack. Shane’s eyes are locked on mine. He’s breathing in and out through his mouth, like he’s about to pounce.
Shane walks towards me and shoves the phone into my chest, pushing me, sending me careering three steps backwards towards the kitchen counter. I’m nearly knocked off my feet by the controlled movement. This is a fraction of the strength Shane wields. I fall back and reach behind me, to put my hand on the counter to steady me, knocking a glass of water onto the floor.
As Shane steps closer to me amid the commotion, I step back onto glass and I yelp. Slipping on the water, I nearly tumble but Shane catches me with his hands.
“Oh baby, oh no baby,” he says, changing in an instant, as he lifts me and carries me away from the glass and water, and sits me down on the sofa.
“Shane, Shane, the carpet,” I squeal. He picks up a piece of Christmas wrapping and holds it under my foot to catch the blood. My blood is still pounding in my neck, and my foot, apparently.
“Oh baby, okay, hold still. I’ll sort you out.”
My head is spinning. My foot is throbbing. I couldn’t care less. Shane could have cut my foot off. All I’m thinking about is, what has he seen on my phone? Emails and messages from the banks chasing up on me? The blackmailer? Perhaps they’d sent some evidence.
Blood is on the Christmas wrapping, blood and glass by the kitchen counter. It brings back horrible, dark memories, the ones that slip away from me as I take my pills every morning. Convulsing heart in overdrive, the claustrophobic pressure of a panic attack closing in. I’m slipping again. Shane takes a small shard of glass from the bottom of my foot. He looks up at me.
“Paige? Paige.”
My heart pumps so rapidly I could lose all ten pints though my foot. I’m woozy, feeling the room compress in and expand out as my temperature rises and falls. But I can’t lose consciousness. Shane moves manically around me. What has he seen?
Shane puts a cushion under my head and throws a blanket over me. I check my pulsating foot, and his hands are wrapping gauze around it. His personal trainer emergency first-aid kit is emptied on the floor beside him.
“Are you okay?” he asks, bringing his face close to mine. His breath is hot and acidic. I nod. Shane moves back and holds my leg up to stem the flow of blood.
I search his face for signs of anger. It’s not the first time he’s gone through my phone, my accounts. I never know what he’s looking for. I’m not sure he does either. But still he looks. It’s a reflex that comes naturally to hurt people, I suppose. He’s never found anything of interest, till now. He massages my foot with the hand holding it up. With his other hand, he lifts my phone up and holds it a few inches from my face. His thumb trembles, a little firmer. His hand on my foot begins to squeeze.
“What’s this, baby?”
I pull myself up onto my elbows and focus on the text on the screen. There they are, the words that have been haunting me.
I know what you did.
Shane is a deadly still but buzzing ball of energy, a chilling quantum fluctuation. Swallowing, I open my mouth.
“I got this email.”
“I can see that,” he says, still crouching on the sofa in front of me. His voice is so quiet, but his neck is thick, stiff and tense.
“It’s just some mad person, Shane. You know how it is. What those people are like. I used to get them all the time.”
“Yes.” I flinch at his raised voice. He makes a trembling fist, composes himself. He starts again, shaking from the effort it takes to control himself. “Yes, but not recently. And not that you haven’t told me about.”
“I knew you would be angry because you didn’t want to do the documentary, and—”
“You’re fucking right I didn’t. I don’t want to invite all those strangers back into our lives again. I just want to go on living happily, the two of us, with none of—” He gestures with the phone hand, the other one still holding my foot and tightening like a vice, “—this anymore. I wanted to move on. But we always have to do what you want — don’t we?”
He pants, mouth open, eyes wet with panic. His hands shake.
“Well, we can’t move on right now, Shane. And right now, strangers are our livelihood. At least, they are how I pay for things. How I make money.”
His mouth pulls in a straight grimace. It sounds like Zanna’s words in my voice.
“I don’t mean it like that,” I say quickly.
He sighs. Nods. Puts my phone down on the sofa and rubs his temples, moving a large, barbell-calloused hand across his forehead. He realises he is squeezing my foot and lets it go, moving the hand now to run across his eyes.
“I think,” he says, deliberate and quiet, “you should have told me. We should share things like this.”
“I’m sorry,” I breathe. “I was scared.”
He shakes his head and gets up. Within moments his jacket is on and he has his gym bag over his shoulder.
The flat door swings shut behind him, and I’m alone.
*
One last interview with the documentary team before it’s a wrap. I can’t believe how quickly they’ve created this thing. A hivemind of sound engineers, camera operators, script writers, wardrobe and exec buzzes around. There’s a festive mood. The wrapping of the huge project is like a present, the last day of filming. A glass of fizz or two are being enjoyed by some and even Sheryl is smiling. Of course, she would be. She’s had some personal news. On Christmas Day, her boyfriend got down on one knee and presented her with an engagement ring. Interviewees and employees alike coo over it like a baby as she holds it up for them to see. It’s small but perfectly formed, and she glows from within, lit from somewhere else by an antiquated display of a man’s love. There’s that sting and lingering irritation, a mosquito bite of jealousy.
“It’s gorgeous, congratulations.” I smile.
I wish I could enjoy the sequin sparkle of joy, but I’m unable. Emails, worries and bad dreams have sucked at me like Victorian creatures of the night. My appetite, gone. Any semblance of positive feelings between Shane and me, gone. He’s been ignoring me since he found the email. A passive-aggressive ball of coiled energy.
I hardly sleep. I’m rail thin. And I know people are noticing. My followers, and even Tom, are telling me how good I look.
“Did you get fillers? Or Botox, or something?”
Oh no, it’s this new product, it’s called despair.
After wrapping on my last interview, Sheryl hands me a glass of fizz and I take it. It couldn’t possibly hurt. Some of the younger staff members are on their second or third, smiling wide smiles and standing a bit closer. I find Jessica, who is also wrapping up some interviews today, speaking with two employees of the streaming platform.
“I guess there’s some detective-y elements to it,” one is saying. “You know, finding interviewees, researching.”
“So, it’s just like your job,” the other jokes, gesturing at Jessica. She smiles indulgently, despite the tension in her neck and the dark round her eyes. Late nights, crime schemes, taxpayer money. It’s not quite the same.
“I bet you see some wild things, though,” I venture, muscling in besides Jessica.
The girl goes a little red, and her male co-worker says: “Don’t mind her, she’s a fan.”
I smile and turn to her. She blushes, shrinks self-consciously into herself.
“I follow you,” she says, sweetly. I feel a warmth towards her. “I loved Zanna.”
Squeezing out my response is painful. Fighting my face to maintain the smile, wrangling my mouth. “Thank you.”
She beams. I drink my fizz in one gulp and put the glass down before I break it.
“We see some wild stuff, even with this one,” the male co-worker is saying.
“I bet,” I say, rolling my eyes as my stomach does a similar motion. I press my sweaty hands against my jeans. It’s hot in here. So many bodies.
“Oh gosh, all those obsessive true crime fanatics,” the girl says, rolling her eyes too.
“Yeah, or that woman that called up saying she knew you from a while ago.” He gestured at me, face red from sugary booze. “I thought that was kind of interesting, but she kept asking for money and there wasn’t any budget so—”
He’s elbowed by his co-worker, who blushes. Was it confidentiality about budget issues, or his implication there was something “interesting” in it?
“Trust me,” Jessica says in her police voice, now thick with authority. “There is nothing ‘interesting’ about this case.”
His voice is tinny through my ringing ears.
*
Jessica grabs me on the way out.
“Fucking get a load of that guy, Mr Honorary Detective. God, I hate people like that. Every member of the public thinks they can do my job better than me.” She’s red in the face with irritation.
“What a dick,” I say. Meaning it. His smarmy little face saying “interesting” lingering in my mind. I wanted to slap it.
“Well, fuck ’em,” she says.
She notices me biting my nails, my chest rising and falling fast, my eyes, dulled by stress, darting in their sleep-deprived, dry sockets. She’s trained to notice.
“Oh Paige.” She puts a comforting hand out and strokes my arm, like she did all those years ago. She’s a stern, upright, solid sort of woman, used to showing curt sympathy while wearing the uniform. She’s got a sure, forthright voice that’s comforted many a victim, or even perpetrator, but it’s still comforting. It’s how I’d imagine a boarding school matron or a kind Second World War army general would be, had I ever experienced anything like that.
“Don’t let them get to you.”
It’s an instruction, and I respond like a student or an officer cadet. I stand up straighter, nod and blink away my despair, for now.
“Paige, I forgot to say last time I saw you. You mentioned getting some malicious messages.”
I nod.
“If you have concerns about any of them, you can always send them to me to take a look. There are things the police can do to find out who is sending them. IP addresses, that kind of thing, technical stuff.”
I thank her and say I’ll think about it.
I turn her words over in my head in the paid-for taxi home, chewing on my lower lip until it bursts, tracking every turn the driver takes, counting down the seconds to get home, as I am afraid to try anything in the taxi. This driver could be anyone; he works for the documentary after all, there could be cameras.
As soon as I’m back in the flat, deserted by Shane who is still performing his act of protest, his daily walkout to the gym, coming home later, drunk and silently fuming. I search it in Google.
Find out email IP address
It’s all there. Instructions on how to do it, and it’s so simple. I pull my hand up to my face, laughing despite myself, tears in my eyes. I’ve been so stupid. Of course I couldn’t ask the police for help, but I could do this. I’d never been good at the technical side of the website. All I ever concerned myself with was how to copy and paste words and pictures into boxes on blogging sites, how to use the simple Instagram interface. Had Zanna not had the cash to outsource the technical stuff, I may have known this all along.
Heart shaking in my chest like a broken tumble dryer, I take the IP address, extracted from the data in the email — a click away all this time — and paste it into a website. I click, and then it’s decoded. Disbelieving, I blink at all the information in front of me. An internet service provider, the town, even the longitude and latitude.
Bordsfield South.
I know exactly who lives here. Now it all makes sense.