She stood playing with the hem of her too-heavy shirt, then sat down next to Robin on the bench. Robin judged her to be sixteen at most.
‘I used to meet my cousin on this bench, before she moved away. We used to live on opposite sides of the park.’
‘Where did your cousin move to?’
‘Bradford,’ said Rachel.
‘Not too far away,’ said Robin.
‘No,’ said Rachel.
The stream chattered on past them, and a Labrador barked merrily as he dashed after a ball thrown by his owner on the opposite bank. Rachel took a deep breath, then said,
‘You’re Buffypaws, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘I knew you must be,’ said Rachel. ‘It was too much of a coincidence, me saying I wanted to find someone to stop Anomie and you direct messaging me right after. So what are you, if you’re not police or a journalist?’
Reaching into her pocket, Robin pulled out her purse and handed Rachel a business card.
‘That’s me. I’m a private detective. My partner and I have been hired to try and find out who Anomie is.’
She could tell the name of the agency on the card didn’t mean anything to Rachel, and deduced that Grant hadn’t told his daughter about their hiring. Sure enough, Rachel’s next question was,
‘Who’s paying you?’
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid,’ said Robin. ‘But they’re good people. They want to stop Anomie, and they care about The Ink Black Heart.’
When Rachel continued to look apprehensive, Robin added,
‘As I told you last night, Rachel, nobody ever needs know you’ve spoken to me. This is completely off the record. I’m not even going to take notes.’
‘D’you know my surname too?’ said Rachel in barely more than a whisper.
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
Rachel’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Do you think I’m disgusting?’
‘Of course not,’ said Robin, no longer smiling. ‘Why would I?’
‘Because she was my aunt and…’
Tears spilled down Rachel’s face, her shoulders slumped and she began to sob. Robin rummaged in her bag for a tissue and slid it into Rachel’s hand.
‘Thanks,’ sobbed Rachel.
‘Why are you crying?’ asked Robin quietly.
‘Because I was one of them,’ sobbed Rachel. ‘I was in Drek’s Game and she probably thought we all hated her, but we didn’t, not all of us… I just wish I hadn’t ever got involved with Anomie… I wish I’d written to her or something and told her how much I loved the cartoon, so she knew one p-person in her family was…’
Rachel’s voice now became incomprehensible, because she’d pressed both hands and the tissue over her face.
‘… and I went to her funeral,’ sobbed Rachel, lowering her hands, ‘and I logged into Twitter on the train coming home, and people were joking about digging her up, and when I got home I drank, like, half a bottle of vodka and I wish… I wish I’d never… and I haven’t got anyone to talk to about all this, because if my mum knew I was in that game – she thinks the fans are to blame, and she says my dad’s benefiting from murder and…’
Her voice disintegrated into hiccups and sobs.
‘Rachel,’ said Robin gently, ‘I never saw you being mean inside the game, or bullying anyone, least of all Edie. It’s not a crime to be a fan.’
‘I should’ve spoken up more,’ sobbed Rachel. ‘On the n-night we heard she was dead, all Anomie cared about was how many p-people were coming into the bloody game. Why did I stay?’
‘Because they were your friends,’ Robin said. ‘Because you had fun with them.’
‘You’re being nice,’ said Rachel, mopping her eyes, ‘but you don’t know everything that’s gone on. Anomie kept joking about the stabbings and we all just kind of let it go, and then there were some other people in the game and I knew they were bad news, and so did Morehouse, but he wasn’t talking to me any more, so I couldn’t ever discuss it with him. You don’t know everything that’s gone on,’ repeated Rachel. ‘If you knew, you would be disgusted with me.’
‘Let me tell you what I think went on,’ said Robin. ‘I think LordDrek and Vilepechora claimed that Edie herself was Anomie, and they gave some of the moderators a dossier of evidence that supposedly proved it.’
Rachel’s start was almost comic, but Robin pretended not to have noticed it.
‘I think Hartella said she’d take the dossier to Josh, which she did, and I think she told you Josh was going to meet Edie and confront her about being Anomie – but the day after they were supposed to meet, you heard they’d both been stabbed.’
‘How d’you know all that?’ said Rachel, looking terrified.
‘I pieced it together,’ said Robin, worried by the fear on Rachel’s face; she didn’t want the girl running for it. ‘But Rachel, you were at best a bystander. You didn’t cause any of it. None of it was your fault.’
‘I could’ve told Edie what was going on, I could’ve warned her where that dossier came from—’
‘How?’ said Robin reasonably. ‘You’d never met each other. I doubt her agent would have passed on your call. He might not even have believed you were her niece. Well-known people get all kinds of strange messages from people who’ve never met them.’
‘I should’ve tried,’ said Rachel passionately, tears leaking out of her eyes again.
‘You didn’t know what that dossier was going to lead to, and you’d have been putting yourself in a lot of danger if LordDrek and Vilepechora found out you’d tried to interfere with their plans. You need to cut yourself some slack, Rachel. None of this is your fault.’
Rachel sniffed, the stream chattered on and children shrieked out in the main park, running around and playing with balls. Robin suspected that pressing Rachel for Morehouse’s name would be unwise until she’d built more trust, so she asked,
‘How did you come across The Ink Black Heart? Did you just find it on YouTube and start following it, or—?’
‘No,’ said Rachel, looking down at the tissue she was twisting between her hands. ‘I heard about it from this guy I used to talk to on Club Penguin – the social media site for kids? It was kind of sweet. We were all cartoon penguins, talking to each other.’
She gave a shaky little laugh.
‘Yeah, so, there was this boy called Zoltan in there, and we became Club Penguin friends. He used to tell me about his dad, who was really abusive, and my dad had just dumped my mum when she was really ill and run off with a woman at work, and Mum and I had moved up to Leeds from London and I didn’t know anyone yet, so I used to go on Club Penguin all the time to talk to Zoltan and we’d kind of try and support each other.
‘And Zoltan found the first episode of The Ink Black Heart on YouTube and he told me I had to go and watch it, that it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, so I did and I absolutely loved it. We were both obsessed with it.
‘And then I found out it was my aunt who’d made it,’ said Edie quietly, ‘and I was so psyched, I couldn’t believe it. I told Zoltan I was Edie Ledwell’s niece and… he got weird. He started claiming to actually know her and then he said she’d flirted with him. I don’t think he was much older than me. It was all just crap, total crap. I told him I knew he was lying and we had a row, but I kind of backed down because he was my friend and I thought he was so unhappy at home maybe he needed to make things up, you know, to feel better about himself, or impress me back, or whatever.
‘But then,’ said Rachel with a sigh, ‘he changed. He started to, you know, try and get together with me. He’d never come on to me before, we were never like that, we were just really good mates who used to talk about the cartoon and our problems…