‘I’m sorry,’ Sam told the Lost Girl, jerking a thumb over his shoulder with an apologetic grimace, setting off in the direction of Temple station. ‘But I really have to run to get my Tube. My girlfriend’s expecting me. I need to get home.’
Except he didn’t go home. Not right away. And he didn’t have a girlfriend.
Yet.
He just needed to make his excuses and hurry off from the Lost Girl, then take up a position on the other side of the street, in the doorway to an office block, watching the Athlete and the Artist as his anger and frustration roiled in his gut.
They didn’t know he was watching them. They were too preoccupied with one another. And Sam had become an expert at keeping to the shadows.
The Athlete had his thumbs hooked in the shoulder straps of his backpack. He was several inches taller than the Artist, acting chatty and casual, smiling with his perfectly aligned, perfectly expensive teeth.
The Artist smiled coyly back as she reached into her shoulder bag, removed a glossy flyer and passed it to the Athlete, then studied him with an anxious, pensive expression as he held the flyer between his hands, perusing it carefully before pointing to the photograph on the front with a grin.
The acid burn crept up to Sam’s gullet, raging at the back of his throat.
He could see it was a flyer for the Artist’s interior design business. She used the same graphics and font on her website.
That was how Sam had first found her. Surfing the Web. Hunting for someone with the right potential to help him remodel his grandparents’ place, turn the maximum profit, get everything right.
Her website had featured links to her social feeds. A fledgling Facebook page where she had few followers for her business. Twitter, which she posted to rarely. And Instagram, which she used more often but where she almost never interacted with other accounts.
Soon after that he knew almost everything about her.
Her full name.
Her residential address.
The furniture shop where she worked part-time.
The fact she’d moved to London only eight months before.
She appeared to have next to no contact with any family members. Her parents were deceased. If she had close friends from before she’d relocated to London, they didn’t stay in touch with her online, and if she’d made new friends since, there was no evidence to suggest it. Outside of the handful of clients she was beginning to attract, she’d made barely a ripple in the city. He sensed she was lonely.
Like most people, she had a set routine and that made her easy to follow. And once he started, it was difficult to stop.
He didn’t just like watching her.
He craved it.
But, somehow, she picked up his trace.
She started looking over her shoulder, peering out of her front window late at night, posting even less frequently on Instagram, never on Twitter or Facebook at all.
He knew she hadn’t seen him directly.
He was much too wily for that.
But it was obvious she had a sense of him.
A fear.
Which was perfect, when he thought about it.
Because fears and phobias were one of Sam’s specialisms.
And with a few well-targeted ads for his support group on Instagram, plus several flyers of his own put up at the stop for the bus he knew she took home from work, and the cafe she visited alone, he felt confident he could lure her in.
Persuasion 101.
Advertisers had mastered the same skills. Know your audience and give them what they want. Make your subject see what you want them to see, believe what you want them to believe.
And then, when it had all come together and she’d arrived in the seminar room this afternoon . . .
The rush he’d experienced.
It was hard to articulate.
Harder still to contain.
Because watching her was one thing, but when she’d talked about her fear of being stalked, of having this irrational sense of being watched . . .
It had taken all of his self-discipline, everything he’d rehearsed and learned, not to spring up out of his chair, grab her by her shoulders and shake her, let her know it wasn’t irrational at all.
Because there was someone following her.
He was following her.
And now she’d come to him.