Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,43

talk to anyone or think about anything. I would have missed my train – the 2.11 to Marylebone – except it had been three minutes late, so instead I made it with seconds to spare. I was the last passenger to climb aboard, the carriage door sliding shut right behind me. If the 2.11 had been on time, I would have missed it. I would never have met Kathryn. I would have been spared the trauma of the abduction, the pain of my injuries and the terror of the escape, I would have avoided a bruising interrogation by the police and the criminal charges now hanging over me.

But I would never have met Mia either, never held her, never been there to take care of her.

I was glad the train had been late.

21

Leon

He had downloaded the new pictures and blown them up to A4 size. Now they were tacked to the board above his desk alongside the images of the other women. Alongside the two brunettes: the pretty one and the short one. And the blonde, the one with the piercings. Three girls, three victims. He checked his fingers. There was a faint residue of printer ink so he rolled the white latex gloves off his hands with a snap and dropped them into the stainless steel germ-capture pedal bin beside the desk. Plucked a new pair from the large box and eased his long fingers into them, flexing them until the latex was snug against his skin. Then he settled back at his desk and studied the new images. There were three: one in profile as she looked out of the train window, one smiling down at the baby, and one when she was looking straight at the camera, her lips parting, a frown already forming on her face.

She was strange, this one. Tall, athletic, a confidence to the way she walked. Different to the others.

This was his sanctuary, his fortress, his safe space. Fully sound-proofed so no noise could penetrate the walls in either direction, windows painstakingly taped so no light could reach inside. An array of mobile phones lined up and charging on the right side of his big corner desk. This place was what he made it, without any interruptions or intrusions from the outside world. In here, he could find his own truth, make his own reality.

His birth name, his baptism name, was Leonard. But no one called him that anymore. His mother had been the last one, and she was long gone. To the few who knew him now, most of whom he kept at arm’s length, he was Leon. Like the lion. King of the jungle, Panthera Leo, top of the food chain. A keystone predator, zoologists called them, because of their disproportionately large effect on their natural environment. He liked that.

His eyes returned to the two large screens in front of him, arrayed with a selection of google search results, social media accounts and an image-handling programme. A third screen had multiple tabs open using the TOR browser that gave anonymous access to the dark web.

But he wasn’t using the dark web for this; the open web should give him what he needed. The harvesting software on his laptop sought out internet-connected devices looking for unsecured Wi-Fi; most people were never even aware their phones were doing it. On the train he had used it to harvest the details of the Devlin woman’s phone, including her user ID, first name and the networks it had connected to in the last few days, and from there he’d tracked down her social media accounts and gone through the images one by one.

She was on Facebook, posting infrequently until three months ago when her activity dropped to virtually nothing. Before that there had been pictures of her and some predictably handsome drone named Richard Sloane – husband, presumably – together at a restaurant, on a beach, at a back-garden barbecue. But since early June, nothing. Her Twitter account had seen a similar decline in activity, also going back to the same time. Posts on fundraising stuff to do with the Royal Navy and Royal Marines charity. The last post was the second of June. He returned to Facebook and made a note of all the check-ins over the last six months. Then scrolled back through the images posted, clicking on each one and blowing them up to fill the whole of the thirty-seven-inch monitor, studying each carefully for location tags, street signs, menus, landmarks, backgrounds,