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08:30

Thursday 5 November

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Freddie stared at the photo of Sophie Phillips on the front page of
The Family Paper
. She looked different. Her wavy bobbed blonde hair looked like sunshine glowing round her face. She was pale, yes, but apples of red bloomed on her cheeks. She was laughing. Her green eyes sparkling. Behind her, the glass of an office window smudged the bright blue sky. It was like a toothpaste ad. She looked so…alive. ‘I don’t understand how they got a photo before us?’ She looked at Nasreen, sat across from her in the echoing canteen, folding her Marmite toast in half before tearing it into triangles, like she’d done when they were little.

‘Apparently they got it from a work colleague. They had it on their Facebook account and they
forgot
.’ Nasreen bit into the toast.

‘More like they turned it over for a hefty fee. Bloodsuckers,’ she said, only the faint edge of her bristling at her hypocritical words. But
The Family Paper
had turned against her. She was outside again. Journalists were supposed to be on the front page because of their stories, not because they
were
the story. Freddie dropped the paper onto the wipe-clean table and flicked through the pile of newspapers that were next to her. She skimmed the headlines:
Hashtag Murderer Strikes Again.
Fears of a Serial Killer Grow
. She held up a tabloid:
No One Online is Safe Warn Crime Experts
. ‘Just so you know, they didn’t get that from me.’

Nas gave a little laugh. ‘There’s growing alarm. The guv wants this case resolved and closed as soon as possible. Understandably.’

Around them, those coming in from the night shift were getting one more caffeine hit for the road or a bacon bap to help block out the memories of last night. Freddie was beginning to adjust to the rhythms of the station.

‘You getting any sleep?’ Nasreen wiped her fingers with one of the small plasticky napkins the dinner lady handed over with your grub.

‘Not much.’
Not at all.
She shrugged.

‘It gets worse I’m afraid,’ Nas said. She’d come straight from the hospital this morning. Hamlin had been kept in overnight. And now here was a heartbreakingly intimate photo of Sophie Phillips to greet her: no wonder she’d decided to take five, Freddie thought. ‘Hamlin’s been discharged,’ Nas said.

‘You’re bringing him in?’ Freddie watched Nasreen run her tongue over her teeth for stray crumbs, poke between the front two with her nail. It was as if all her barriers had come down. Had she felt it yesterday? Their connection sparking again?

‘No,’ said Nas.

‘What?’ Freddie was momentarily confused. Had she spoken out loud?

‘We can’t hold him for longer than twenty-four hours without charge. We haven’t got enough evidence. The police guard at the hospital puts us in a grey area. We can’t really claim we were protecting
him
.’ Nas’s eyes fell onto the photo of smiling Sophie.

Freddie tried to make all the pieces fit in the puzzle. ‘Do you think he did it? I mean, the coins, and the chat room, and…I don’t know. He seemed so incapable.’
How did you tell who was guilty and who was not?
Surely there was a way. A way to know for sure. Freddie thought about all the guys she thought were cool when she first met them. She thought about Brian.

‘We’ve got a tail on him. We’re looking into him further. I’m not sure. I agree he doesn’t seem
the type
.’ Nas scrunched her napkin onto her paper plate. ‘Ready?’

Freddie took a deep breath. Were they any closer to the truth? ‘Sure.’ As they left the canteen Nas’s phone began to ring.

‘Sergeant Cudmore,’ she answered. Freddie strained to hear the other voice: small, tinny, far away. It sounded like a woman. ‘Mrs Crabtree, thank you for calling me back. I understand you’ve already spoken to one of the Leighton Buzzard force – PC Grigg?’

Freddie raised her eyebrows at her.

Nas pointed at the phone and mouthed ‘Sophie’s work colleague.’

Was she going to rip Mrs Crabtree a new one for giving that photo to the police? Nas continued into her phone: ‘Yes, I understand you told PC Grigg that Twitter and the other social media sites are blocked on your office computers?’ Freddie stopped walking, her shoe squeaking to a halt on the rubberised floor.

Social media sites were blocked on Sophie’s office computers? With no smartphone, no Internet access at home and none in the office, how the hell did Sophie tweet about her cat or message Hamlin in that chat room?

‘Do you know if she had an iPad, a tablet of some sort, something she could have left at work?’ Nasreen was saying. ‘Sophie posted a number of things online, and we’d just like to know from where and when – to help us build up a picture of her last few days.’ Nasreen paused about a metre in front of Freddie. As she spoke she gestured with her free hand and nodded and shook her head as if Mrs Crabtree were in front of her. ‘I see. Yes. Thank you. That’s very helpful. If you remember anything else you think might be relevant, anything out of character, anything Sophie might have been upset about, anything at all, please give me a call.’ Nasreen hung up.

‘Social media sites are blocked on her office computers?’ Freddie said.

‘I wondered,’ said Nas, still staring at her phone. ‘She worked for the local council; public services often ban Twitter and that from their computers. Like they do here.’

‘So, did she have a tablet?’ Freddie’s mind was trying to connect the dots. The chat room messages Mark Hamlin sent to Sophie could be traced to the laptop found at his flat. The IP address of the messages sent from Sophie were traced to Leighton Buzzard, but as of yet they hadn’t found the device.

‘No,’ said Nas. She started to walk again, Freddie kept stride. ‘And more than that, Mrs Crabtree said Sophie was anti-social media.’

‘What – that makes no sense?’

‘Apparently she said more than once that she didn’t trust sites like Facebook.’ Nas was looking ahead, her forehead scrunched in thought.

‘Why would she say that to her friend and then join Twitter? Were they close, Sophie and this woman? I suppose she could’ve changed her mind. My mum was well reluctant to join Twitter.’

‘Your mum’s on Twitter?’ Nas stared at her. ‘I can’t imagine your mum doing that. Remember when we tried to teach her to email?’

Freddie laughed. They’d spent a whole afternoon during one Easter holiday eating chocolate eggs and trying to explain that email addresses weren’t case-sensitive to her mum. ‘God, when was that?’

‘We must’ve been, what, eleven?’ Nasreen smiled.

‘Yeah, everything she sent was in capitals. Do you remember?’ Freddie thought of how she and Nas threw screwed up foil wrappers at each other behind her mum’s back. They were in the lounge, all sat on the tan sofa, her mum squinting through her glasses at the laptop screen in front of her.

‘Yes! It was like she was permanently shouting at us!’ Nas steadied herself on Freddie’s arm as she laughed.

Freddie felt the contact like electricity. Should she pull her in for a hug? Place her hand over hers? She looked at Nas’s warm open face.

‘It can’t have been long after we started at Pendrick High.’ Nas stopped laughing. She let go of Freddie’s arm. An empty feeling washed over Freddie. She wondered for a moment if she’d imagined it. That warmth. That connection. Somehow willed it into being. They walked in silence.

As they neared the incident room, Freddie heard the noise. Too many voices could be heard. ‘What’s happened?’

Nasreen’s face had now hardened into that of the purposeful grown woman. They could hear Moast shouting. ‘What the fuck? How did you manage to lose him? He’s been out for what, twenty fucking minutes?’

Freddie let Nasreen go in first, a deep unease gathering in her stomach. ‘Cudmore!’ Moast threw the papers in his hand up into the air. ‘Have a nice breakfast?’ Tibbsy looked pale behind him.

‘Sir,’ said Nas. Her hands dangling at her side, fingers flexing: ready.

‘Great! ’Cause I’ve got some great news. Fucking constable Slade managed to lose Hamlin.’ Moast slammed his hand down onto the desk, shaking the paper on it and the people around him. ‘Twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes and he shakes him. Our prime fucking suspect. I want all teams out looking for him. I want to know everything we’ve got on him. Where he goes. Where he gets money from. Any known accomplices. Where he gets his drugs from. Do any of his doctors know where he is? I don’t give a fuck about confidentiality. Get a warrant. Get onto the Superintendent. I want this fucker traced.’

Freddie steadied herself against the door frame. How could they lose him? How could a person just disappear? And then she thought of laughing Sophie Phillips on the front of the newspaper. She disappeared. She vanished.

‘Where did they lose him?’ Nas was asking.

The phone in the pocket of Freddie’s denim shorts vibrated against the wood of the door frame.

Nasreen spun to look at her. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ Freddie squeezed it from her jeans. ‘What does it say?’ Nas fired at her. Moast and Tibbsy hovering over her shoulders, like a scowling Greek chorus.

Freddie blinked and looked at the screen. ‘Apollyon says: stay tuned there’s more to come folks!’

‘Ha!’ Tibbsy ran his hand back through his limp hair, the other resting on his hip.

A terrible thought formed in Freddie’s mind. Where once her brain was wired to filter the news, the headlines, television shows, trends, fads, waves of interest, into the essence of the zeitgeist, into a pitch, now it pulled together the threads of Sophie and Mardling’s story. The front pages, the online jokes, the photos, the hashtags, the foreboding clues. ‘It’s the first time he’s tweeted since he said, “Here’s Johnny!”’ Tibbsy was shaking his head, looking away, but Moast and Nas had her locked. She saw it register on their faces. Freddie forced the words out: ‘Apollyon didn’t tweet all the while Mark Hamlin was detained.’
They’d had the Hashtag Murderer and they’d let him slip through their fingers.

‘Go back over all known Internet communication from Hamlin,’ Moast said. ‘I want it cross-referenced with everything that’s been tweeted by Apollyon. Cudmore, get onto the IT lads. Get them to look again at Mardling’s, Phillips’, and Hamlin’s devices. If there is anything they have missed, I want to know about it. Get them to try and trace Apollyon again. He’s got to trip up sooner or later.’ Freddie watched as Moast turned his face away from the room and ground his palms into his eye sockets. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ he said. Freddie couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or the rest of them.

She let her eyes drop to her phone and watched as Apollyon’s latest message spread. Retweeted across Twitter. Reproduced on Facebook. Quoted on newspaper sites. Dissected on blogs. Another clump of tweets uploaded. She sat down at a free chair and pulled her charger from her bag, automatically connecting her phone. Keeping the battery going. Keeping the story alive. Around her the room pulsated with energy.

She borrowed a laptop from a nearby desk and started to research Mark Hamlin. He’d attended a grammar school in Kent. Then gone on to Bristol University. There was a piece he’d written for the university’s student newspaper on ornithology, the face of the man Freddie had seen pulled from the tower block – young, plump, healthy – in his byline photo. His name cropped up on a few birdwatching blogs. An obituary for his late father, Rupert Hamlin, in the
Kent Messenger
, mentioned he was survived by his wife Lillian, and son Mark. Another life before his current desolate one. Blips started to appear. Recorded episodes of mental unrest. A university log of a complaint from a room mate. A research paper by a psychiatrist at Bristol Royal Infirmary contained a reference to an M. Hamlin, but she could only see the Google search result and couldn’t find the correct paragraph in the verbose PDF file. A touching blog by a local birdwatching charity talked of a Lillian Hamlin who had been struck down by Alzheimer’s. Freddie caught snatches of information being fed back around her.

‘He was registered as living with his mother, a Mrs Lillian Hamlin,’ said Jamie. ‘Until he was in his twenties, sir.’

As Lillian Hamlin faded so had Mark’s apparent last connection with reality. Somewhere in the last ten years he’d vanished from the system. With one ear on what was going on around her, Freddie scanned her Twitter timeline: a pattern was emerging. ‘Er…DCI?’
What was she supposed to call him?
Definitely not sir.
Never sir.

‘What?’ Moast looked up from the papers he had spread over his desk, something close to fear on his face.

‘I think there’s a Twitter-storm brewing.’ Her eyes flickered over the tweets.

‘A what?’ Nasreen was sat behind her; Freddie hadn’t noticed her there.

‘It’s like a reaction. A mob. They’re responding to Sophie’s death, or the photo of her.’ Freddie’s updates were coming so quickly she could barely read them before the screen refreshed. Freddie began to read the messages aloud: ‘Dan The Man says, “This is not funny anymore @Apollyon. This is fucked up.” Cary Frome says, “This is outrageous. Shut ‘Apollyon’ down.” Colin Banks says, “Stop tweeting about A******n you’re just giving him what he wants.”’

‘Who are these people?’ Tibbsy was at Moast’s shoulder, his face sagged like he couldn’t hold it up anymore.

‘I don’t know,’ said Freddie. ‘Just people online, but it’s gathering pace. They’re sharing the photo of Sophie.’ Her generous smile spilled like sunlit raindrops over her timeline. ‘Gerry Hedel says: “What the hell is this?! This girl’s been murdered.” He’s hashtagged it: For Sophie.’ #ForSophie trickled through Freddie’s timeline, first the odd drip, then a torrent. ‘Someone called Justified Amy has set up a Change petition online calling for @Apollyon to be blocked from Twitter.’ Freddie’s screen was painfully slow updating…moving between the two. ‘There’s already a few thousand signatures on there. They’re suggesting people report him for spam.’

‘What does that mean?’ Moast said.

‘If enough people do it, Twitter are likely to suspend the account. I think it’s based on a logarithm or something. Like an automatic default.’ Freddie’s screen flickered.
Tweets cannot load right now.
‘Bugger, I’ve lost signal.’