the fuck, Bea?’ Fran’s voice was hoarse. ‘I’m on my way round.’
It took Fran just under fifteen minutes to make the twenty-five-minute journey, and when she arrived, she threw her arms around Bea and held her tightly. For the first time since she’d first seen the email – she could barely believe it had been less than forty minutes since her phone had beeped with the message that had blown her nice normal evening apart – tears sprang to Bea’s eyes.
‘How much did you see?’ she asked when Fran finally let her go.
‘Enough to need a lot of alcohol to erase it from my memory,’ Fran replied. ‘Why couldn’t you just have told me what it was?’
Bea threw herself down on the sofa, the laptop still in the middle of the floor. ‘I didn’t want to spend half an hour listening to you tell me it couldn’t be that bad and it probably wasn’t even me and you probably couldn’t see that much anyway. I wanted you to know how bad this was, exactly what all the other people on the list are going to see if they open that email.’
Fran nodded. ‘And who was the guy?’
Bea closed her eyes in humiliation at the memory. ‘Did I ever tell you about Paul? He was friends with a girl at work. We went on a few dates and I decided to try taking it further. I had a few too many drinks beforehand, as you can see.’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell Fran why she’d had to get so drunk before she had sex with Paul. Despite her bravado and the front she put on to her friends to make them think she was fine, she’d barely slept with anyone since university, and any relationship usually ended soon after she realised that the idea of sex made her skin crawl.
‘Had he been at yours often?’
‘No, we usually went out on dates. I don’t think he’d been there before that night.’
‘So it couldn’t have been him who filmed you.’
Bea’s eyes snapped open. ‘It must have been. Who else could it have been?’
‘Come on, Bea, I know you’ve had a shock, but you have to be a bit smarter than that. That video started before the pair of you came into the room. Unless he had already been into your bedroom and set up a camera, there’s no way it could have been him.’
Bea let this sink in. She was right, of course she was. Paul hadn’t been in the flat five minutes before she’d suggested going to the bedroom to get it over with, although she hadn’t put it quite like that.
But if he hadn’t filmed them, who had? The video had been close up; the camera must have been on her desk, probably right next to her …
She shot upright. ‘The laptop.’
Fran looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’
Bea crossed the room and stepped around her laptop gingerly, as though it was a bomb waiting to explode. Standing behind it, she bent down and lifted it slowly, carried it in her outstretched hands into her bedroom and left it on the bed, closing the door on it softly.
‘The fucking laptop,’ she announced, marching back into the front room. ‘That’s how it was filmed. On my own laptop. It must be bugged.’
Fran’s eyes widened. ‘Do you have any idea how mental you sound?’
‘I know, Fran, but it’s the only way! Like you said, that guy hadn’t been anywhere near the bedroom before we went in together, and we were already being filmed. I sure as hell didn’t set up a camera, and if there had been a tripod in front of my bed, I probably would have noticed.’
‘I don’t know, the amount of alcohol you looked to have had, David Attenborough could have been sitting at the end of the bed narrating the session and you wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘Thanks, Fran, that’s exactly what I need right now, your goddam humour. I’m telling you, it could only be the laptop.‘
Fran shook her head. ‘It just sounds so Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Why would someone bug your computer? It’s not like you’re hiding government secrets. And who exactly? Who would have access to your laptop to do something like that?’
‘I hate to even think this, let alone say it, but …’ Bea closed her eyes as though just the thought caused her physical pain. ‘I think it might be Karen. She had access to my computer whenever she wanted. I think she’s having