Penny Peacock
‘Bingo,’ said Robin under her breath. She messaged back:
I understand why this is so distressing, Rachel, I really do.
Stop Anomie
You don’t. You can’t.
Penny Peacock
It’s bad enough thinking that Edie and Vikas were killed by the Halvening, but if it was Anomie, I’ve been friends with a murderer. I was helping moderate a murderer’s game.
Penny Peacock
Even if Anomie’s guilty, you couldn’t possibly have known they were capable of murder. If everybody who made a joke about wanting to kill someone actually did it, none of us would be safe to walk down the street.
My number one priority now is to try and get hold of Paperwhite. There’s a possibility she knows who Anomie is. She might also be able to shed light on whether Vikas was planning to go to the police with suspicions about Anomie or the Halvening.
Stop Anomie
I don’t know who Paperwhite is, I never did.
Penny Peacock
We know there was a picture of her circulating on the moderator channel. Anomie shared it with Vilepechora and Vilepechora showed it to Hartella, so I was wondering whether anyone ever showed it to you. I know they all thought you were a man.
Stop Anomie
A pause followed. Robin’s heart was beating almost as fast as it had when she’d thought the letterbox had rattled.
Vilepechora did
Penny Peacock
He and LordDrek always thought I was a gay man
Penny Peacock
He said ‘if you don’t get a hard on at this we’ll know for sure you’re queer’
Penny Peacock
Robin knew she had to phrase her next message sensitively, because she hadn’t forgotten that Rachel’s bullies had called her a lesbian.
Rachel, can you check and see whether you deleted it, please? Because if you forgot to, that photo could help us find her.
Stop Anomie
Robin waited, hardly breathing. The pause went on and on, and it gave her hope, because if Rachel had deleted the image she’d surely have said so at once. Then the three dots appeared, and Rachel answered.
I’ll check. I didn’t mean to keep it, but I’ll see whether I did.
Penny Peacock
She’s got it, thought Robin. She neither knew nor cared whether Rachel had kept the picture out of spite, or to try to find out the identity of the girl who’d stolen away her best friend online: all that mattered was that she’d kept it.
Three minutes passed, which felt to Robin like thirty. Then Rachel returned.
I’ve got it.
Penny Peacock
Sending it now.
Penny Peacock
The picture appeared before Robin had time to type her thanks.
The girl in the picture wasn’t merely pretty: she was beautiful. Twenty at most, she was slim, with long red hair, cream-coloured, lightly freckled skin, high cheekbones and large hazel eyes. Wearing nothing but an unbuttoned light pink shirt, she’d posed pressing her breasts together with her arms, the shirt barely covering her nipples. A stretch of flat stomach was revealed and the picture cut off just below her belly button.
Rachel, thank you SO MUCH. This could help us enormously.
Stop Anomie
Please will you let me know what happens? I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. Anything would be better than this.
Penny Peacock
Of course. I’ll keep in touch. And please go easy on yourself. You’ve been a massive help and none of this is your fault. None of it x
Stop Anomie
x
Penny Peacock
Robin now saved the picture of Paperwhite to her laptop, opened up Google to perform a reverse image search and pasted the picture into it.
The ‘similar images’ found were, as Robin supposed she should have expected, of the cheesecake or soft porn variety. She found herself looking at a multitude of women baring their breasts in open shirts, none of them resembling Paperwhite. However, this told her something useful, which was that Paperwhite had never posted the picture online, which suggested it genuinely was a picture sent privately to a boyfriend, or somebody she considered a boyfriend.
Robin looked closely at the background of the picture. It showed a dimly lit bedroom, possibly a student’s room, as there was a desk in the background. When she enlarged the picture, she saw a shallow box on the desk, which was labelled Faber-Castell Soft Pastels, which Robin recognised as art supplies rather than sweets.
She now cropped the picture to just the girl’s face and pasted that into the app instead.
A range of far more promising images appeared: headshots of young redheads, some of which looked professionally produced, others candid. Robin moved slowly through the pictures, scrutinising each face carefully, until at around picture sixteen she stopped.
It showed the same girclass="underline" same eyes, same cheekbones, same long mane of red hair. Now very excited, she clicked on the picture. It had come from Instagram. Robin navigated to the page and let out a loud ‘Yes!’
The girl’s name was Nicole Crystal. As Robin scrolled down through the pictures on her account, she saw that she was a student at the Glasgow School of Art. The page was littered with examples of her work, which even to Robin’s untrained eye seemed to demonstrate huge talent. However, there were occasional selfies, and one of them caused Robin to pause, slightly disconcerted. A handsome blond young man in a cut-off black T-shirt was embracing Nicole from behind, his lips pressed to her cheek. As Robin moved further down she saw a couple more pictures of the same man, one of which had a heart drawn around it.
Did this man know his girlfriend had been spending hours in the game talking to Vikas Bhardwaj? That she’d been sending him provocative pictures?
Robin clicked on Nicole’s followers, scanned them for Vikas’s name, but couldn’t find it.
She then opened Twitter and searched for Nicole Crystal. Several accounts appeared, but she located the right one without difficulty: Nicole had used her own picture and full name, with her location listed as Glasgow, but she seemed to use Twitter far less frequently than Instagram. Her last post, which had been a retweet of an account called Women’s Art, had been made over ten days previously, before Vikas’s body had been found.
Again, Robin clicked on the followers and after several minutes’ searching found what she was looking for. Vikas Bhardwaj’s real account was following Nicole’s.
So immersed was Robin in her discoveries that the sound of her mobile ringing made her jump. It was the office number, which diverted to Strike or Robin’s mobiles if it went unanswered. Assuming that Strike had got back to Denmark Street rather more quickly than she’d expected, she snatched up the phone and answered it.