have contacted her privately after that because he hasn’t posted anything on her page.’
‘What about boyfriends – blokes her own age – anything standing out?’
Baxter shakes his head. ‘Most of Sasha’s feed is about the four of them – the girls, I mean. They call themselves the “LIPS”. Lots of kiss emojis and stuff. As far as I can see those four are all but joined at the hip. Can’t see blokes getting much of a look-in.’
Ev looks across at him. ‘Just because it’s not there doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Kids know their parents stalk them online. They’d put stuff like that on WhatsApp or Snapchat – somewhere like that. Somewhere private.’
Gis sighs. ‘I’ve got that coming too, have I?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Ev with a smile. ‘Your Billy’s only two – I reckon you’ve got a good ten years yet.’
Gis walks round and stands behind Baxter’s chair, looking at his screen. Then he bends down, as if to take a closer look. ‘What about the Parrie stuff?’ he asks in an undertone.
Baxter glances up. ‘There’s Wikipedia for starters, but that doesn’t have much on the MO. But you can find that too if you’re prepared to dig a bit – the usual true crime sites and bloggers who think they know better than we do. And a whole bunch of conspiracy theorist tossers, of course – Parrie’s very popular with them.’
Gislingham makes a face. ‘Now there’s a surprise. What about the trial transcripts?’
‘Just come through. Though I’ve not found much yet. I’ve had to drop it pro tem, with all this about Sasha Blake.’
‘Fair enough, but keep on it, yeah? I’ve got a bad feeling about this, and the last thing we need right now is Gavin Parrie coming back to bite us on the arse.’
* * *
At Windermere Avenue, Somer is still working her way through Sasha’s bedroom. She’s trying to leave everything as she found it, so that if Sasha comes home she won’t feel her space has been violated. And all the more – and it’s a thought that ices her spine – if she’s already been violated in a far worse way. But however carefully she searches, she’s still prying, still an intruder, still betraying this girl she’s started to like. The clothes in the wardrobe are the same things she wore once – things she could easily see Faith Appleford wearing or talking about on one of her vlogs: the clean lines, the preference for plains over patterns, the one or two retro pieces that must have been shrewd selections from charity shops, the more expensive things carefully chosen to have as many different uses as possible. Every object in the room says something about this girl – a postcard from her grandparents in the Algarve, a picture of a little boy with a bucket and spade tucked into one of the paperbacks, a handwritten note on the back, faded to sepia, Weston-Super-Mare 1976. There are annotations in the books, too – Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ is ‘unbelievable’, ‘glorious’, but Endymion only gets ‘flabby’, underlined twice. And there are six gleeful exclamation marks alongside a passage describing how a phrenologist who examined Thomas Hardy’s head declared he would come ‘to no good’. All this brings a smile, but it’s not what Somer is looking for. There’s no notebook, no diary, no secret stash of sexy underwear, no pictures on the board of anyone who might be her boyfriend, and after an hour of searching, Somer is tempted to wonder if such a boyfriend even exists. But as she knows full well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They haven’t got Sasha’s phone, and they haven’t even started on her laptop. And those are fine and private places to hide a love that dare not tweet its name.
She takes one more look under the bed, then goes to stand up but her bracelet snags on the carpet and she has to kneel down again to untangle it. And it’s only then that she realizes there’s something under the bed after all – what looks like a lipstick, rolled over to the far corner. There’s no reason to retrieve it – it can’t possibly be relevant to anything at all – but something makes her lie down on her back and reach out an arm.
And that’s when she sees it.
* * *
Adam Fawley
4 April 2018
14.55
Isabel Parker’s house is unexpected. One of those impossibly gorgeous stone houses in Old Headington, a colour-supplement enclave you