‘I knew he was only trying to make me his girlfriend because I was Edie’s niece,’ said Rachel miserably. ‘We’d both joined Twitter by then and I put up my real picture and he started using all these stupid lines on me that didn’t sound like him at alclass="underline" “If that’s your real photo you’re probably sick to death of men coming on to you,” and stuff. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, had to drive a sick dog to the vet” – he was too young to drive, it was all so sad and stupid.’
Robin’s fingers were currently itching for a notebook, because she found what Rachel was telling her very interesting, but she settled for concentrating hard, so she could relay it all accurately to Strike later.
‘When I told him to stop with the bullshit and the smarmy lines he got really, really angry and horrible. He – he threatened to rape me and kill my mum.’
‘What?’ said Robin.
‘Yeah… and then he deleted his Club Penguin and Twitter accounts and I never heard from him again. But that’s the reason I decided to be a boy when I joined Drek’s Game, because things got so weird and nasty with Zoltan. It’s just easier to be a bloke. You don’t get all that crap.’
‘Are you sure Zoltan disappeared?’ Robin asked her. ‘He sounds like some of the men who still hang around in the Ink Black Heart fandom.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Rachel. ‘There was a guy called Scaramouche who was on Twitter for a bit, hanging round all the Inkheart threads, and I thought he might be Zoltan under another name, because he tried the same kind of lines on Worm28. She told me about it. He said to her, “I’ve reported Lepine’s Disciple for hassling you,” and then, when she didn’t thank him enough, or offer him a hand-job – sorry,’ said Rachel, turning red.
‘That’s OK,’ said Robin, amused to think that she’d reached an age where a teenager might think she was shocked to hear about hand-jobs.
‘So, yeah, when Worm wasn’t all over him with, like, gratitude, and offering to sleep with him, or whatever, he kind of did the same thing Zoltan did to me: called her a bitch and a slag and stuff. There’s a ton of that stuff in the Ink Black Heart fandom. Like, you’re not a proper Ink Black Heart fan till the Pen of Justice has tried to get in your pants.’
‘Does he do that a lot?’
‘All the fucking – sorry,’ said Rachel again.
‘That’s OK,’ Robin said. ‘Swear as much as you like. You should hear my partner when he’s annoyed about something.’
‘Yeah, well, the Pen pervs on young girls all the time,’ said Rachel. ‘He’s such a creep. “Oh, I really like your theory on Magspie – how old are you?” “Wow, that’s such an intelligent point – how old are you?” He does it so often he loses track of who he’s done it to. I’ve had it about three times.
‘The last time he tried it on me I told him I was Anomie by direct message, just to mess with him. I wanted to scare him off, because if Anomie decides you’re the enemy you’re in real trouble. And the Pen believed me, ha ha… but after a bit I had to tell him I’d been joking, because he started saying it on open Twitter and people kind of believed him… I was sort of famous for about three days… well, in the fandom… but then they all got another theory about who Anomie was and they left me alone.
‘I’ve been a proper Inkheart,’ said Rachel, staring at the rushing water. ‘Hardcore. I did everything, all of it… like, you’re not a proper Inkheart until you’ve had a crazy row with someone about whether Paperwhite’s a bitch or not, or debated whether the stone lion’s hiding a clue about Harty’s owner in its tomb.
‘And I did all the things real hardcore Inkhearts do, to try and get inside information and stuff.’
‘Like what?’ said Robin, careful to sound casual.
‘Well, like, we all knew Josh’s agent’s husband ran this website about ME, so we all used to go on there under fake names and try and get stuff out of him. Actually, he’s quite nice. I still talk to him sometimes about my mum. He keeps up with all kinds of medical research and one of the articles he told me about, I printed out so Mum could take it to her specialist… he’s been really nice about Mum’s lupus.
‘I loved it all in the beginning, it was like we were all detectives or something, mining for clues about what was coming next, and whenever a new episode came out we’d all analyse it and it was just a load of fun… and Anomie was cool in the beginning, she honestly was. I liked her.’
‘“She”?’ repeated Robin. ‘“Her”?’
‘Yeah,’ said Rachel quietly. ‘I know it’s a girl. I had this talk with her, really early on, when the game had just started, just the two of us. This was before Edie upset her. Yeah, so, when we were talking, Anomie said to me, “Edie and I are basically the same person.” Like, that’s not something a boy would say, is it? She was going on and on about how alike they were. Anomie really kind of worshipped Edie in the beginning… yeah, I could tell it was a girl. I did think she was a bit… I don’t know… like, I was obsessed with the cartoon, I really was. But she was on another level.
‘Then Edie said she didn’t really like Anomie’s game, and Anomie – her reaction – I know what girls are like when you get on the wrong side of them,’ said Rachel bitterly. ‘If you say one wrong thing, if you don’t toe their stupid line, that’s it, you’re, like, the devil or something. The girls at my school are real bitches,’ said Rachel, turning red again. ‘If you don’t get up at, like, five a.m. to put on your false eyelashes and so much make-up you have to chisel it off at night, and if you like football and gaming and astronomy instead of lip-synching to Ariana Grande on Instagram and posing with your tits out, you’re, like, a subhuman freak and a big lesbian. There’s this one girl, Lucy Wright – my mum wanted to go into school and complain about Lucy bullying me, but there was no point. It’d only make it worse…’
Rachel was now ripping the damp tissue into shreds. A young couple with a cockapoo came walking along the path. The man was carrying a baby in a papoose on his back, and Robin waited until they’d passed out of earshot, the baby’s head nodding in its sunhat, before saying,
‘Tell me about Morehouse.’
Rachel swallowed, and tears sprang into her eyes again.
‘He was… he was, like, my best friend in the game. He thought I was a guy for ages. We’ve got loads in common, we like the same kind of stuff – well, he doesn’t follow football really, but he was crazy about science and space, and we both loved gaming. He was kind of like my new Zoltan, only Morehouse was actually a nice guy. Even after he found out I was a girl he didn’t change the way he spoke to me, and he kind of –’
She took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘– kind of helped me, because I’d started bunking off school because of the bullying,’ said Rachel, wiping her eyes again, ‘and I got into trouble with the police for graffitiing, and he just kept telling me I had to get my act together, because I was too clever not to try and get to uni, and I needed to stop drinking and study, and once I got into uni I wouldn’t have to deal with all the bitches at school any more.’
‘Did you tell Morehouse you thought Anomie was a girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel, ‘and he denied it, but I could tell he was just protecting her. I thought they were together at first – you know, boyfriend and girlfriend, like Josh and Edie. He said, “She’s my sister, not my girlfriend” – like, as a joke, or he said he was joking. But even the way Anomie was, knowing that Morehouse and I were having private-channel chats – she was jealous, I could tell. She was the same when Paperwhite came along as well. She’s possessive of Morehouse.