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‘I ought to go and clear up their empties,’ he said wearily. ‘But he’s such an arsehole that I can’t be bothered. At this time of night, I really don’t need the sort of abuse he’s been dishing out all evening. I told him he was barred, and he just fucking laughed at me. Our bouncer’s not in tonight, otherwise he’d have been out on his ear.’

Amy gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘Thanks again. It was really good of you to call me.’

Olly shrugged. ‘I hope you find your sister and her friend. Can’t help thinking that the little twat might well have something to do with it. Watch out for him, OK, he’s a piece of work. Do you want a drink?’

Gary and Amy shook their heads.

‘Thanks, but we’ll just get this over with,’ Gary said.

They walked over to the group of three and Amy took out one of her A4 appeal sheets. She folded it in half so that the only photo visible was of Katherine and the giraffe.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, standing right in front of them. ‘Can I bother you for a second?’

The man looked her up and down. His pupils were vast and black, his face looked purplish, and his foot jiggled compulsively.
Coke
, thought Amy. No question. He was mean-looking, with a scar bisecting one eyebrow and thin lips, belly bursting out of an expensive-looking suit for which he had grown too fat. He had the appearance of a gone-to-seed boxer, even though he probably wasn’t yet forty.

‘You can bother me for as long as you like, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘As long as you sit on my face while you do it.’ He barked with laughter.

Amy blinked, and felt Gary tense next to her. She put a reassuring hand on his arm. The man slapped the thighs of the two girls with him and they laughed, too, but Amy could tell that at least one of them thought he was a prat. She put the sheet right in front of his face, as he seemed to be having problems focusing anywhere but her breasts.

‘This woman was apparently seen in here recently. Do you know her?’

Without even looking at the photo, his face changed, and he clamped his hand on his leg to stop the jiggling. ‘Are you plainclothes cops or what?’

Amy was tempted to say yes, just to freak him out. ‘No, we aren’t. She’s my sister’s friend and we’re trying to find her.’

He relaxed again. ‘Didn’t think so. You don’t look like cops.’

‘Could you just look at the picture please, Mr … um?’ Amy kept her voice low and calm.

The man took it from her hand and squinted at it. It was immediately apparent that he recognized Katherine, and Amy held her breath, wondering what he’d say.

‘Call me Fraser. Well, well. If it isn’t Little Miss Pricktease? Yeah, as it happens, I have made her acquaintance.’

A cockroach skittered past on the wall. One of the girls spotted it and screamed and jumped up, batting at her hair as if it had somehow flown into it. ‘Ugh! Fucking cockroach! This place is a
dive.
’

‘Can we sit down and talk to you about her, please, Fraser?’ Amy asked, smiling as flirtatiously as she could. He narrowed his eyes in the girls’ direction.

‘Oi, treacles, could you two bugger off for a few minutes while I talk to these nice people? Then we can get back to the part-ay-ing pronto, eh?’ He grabbed at the bottom of the one who’d stood up, and she giggled, her cockroach panic forgotten.

‘If we don’t get out of here soon, I’m going home,’ said the other one, swaying as she stood up. She was the one who looked as if she wasn’t having much fun ‘par-tay-ing’ with Fraser.

‘Come to the bogs with me, Charlotte, I’m bustin’, and I need to talk to you.’ Cockroach Girl grabbed her friend’s hand and they tottered off to the Ladies’ together. Fraser patted the seat next to him, and Amy reluctantly sat down. It was warm with the imprint from Cockroach Girl’s buttocks. Gary sat at the table.

‘Let me get you good folks a drink,’ Fraser said expansively. ‘I’ve been waiting for this useless barman to get his sorry arse over here for hours now and get me some more fizz. The service in this place is utter shite.’

Amy and Gary’s eyes met, both of them without words, saying,
Then why do you drink in here, twat?
Probably, Amy thought, because it was one of the few places that didn’t currently have a bouncer on the door, and from which Fraser hadn’t already been banned.

‘So, how do you know Katherine?’

‘“Katherine”, is it? She told me her name was Kaye. I met her about a month ago … Internet dating.’

‘Internet dating? Which site?’ Gary asked, leaning forward in his chair.

Fraser regarded him like something he’d picked up on his shoe. He pointed at him. ‘Listen, pal, I don’t like your tone. You might think that you’re too good for Internet dating, but I tell you what, it’s THE best way to meet birds. Birds who are up for it, anyway …’

Gary held up his hands. ‘Hey, chill out, I don’t have a
tone
. I just want to know where Katherine is. She’s gone AWOL.’

Fraser’s mood seemed to have plummeted into instant aggression and defensiveness. ‘What – now you’re accusing me of having something to do with it? Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here and making insinuations, telling me to
chill out
? You need to—’

Amy glared at Gary, and turned to Fraser. ‘Please. Gary didn’t mean anything. We’re just really worried about her. Anything you can tell us about her would be massively helpful. How did she seem when you last saw her, on …’

She was about to say, ‘Sunday,’ when she remembered he didn’t know that she knew.

Fraser slumped back in his seat, leaning his head against the wall and glaring at them both. Amy hoped the cockroach would return and scuttle across him. Horrible man, she thought. What the hell was Katherine doing with a psycho like him?
Could
he have something to do with her disappearance? With a chill, Amy thought that she agreed with Olly – at face value, he absolutely could.

‘Um, when did you last see her?’ she asked instead.

He shrugged. ‘She can’t have been missing for long – I went out for a drink with her, just a few days ago. Last Saturday? No – Sunday. We was in here, actually.’

Amy pretended to look surprised. ‘Really? Well, that’s a stroke of luck, meeting you. You’re being so helpful, honestly. Did she say anything about having any more dates lined up? If you could tell me the site, then we can check out who else she’d met on it.’

He frowned again. ‘Have you got the police involved yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Amy said. ‘Would you be willing to talk to them, if she doesn’t turn up?’

Fraser suddenly felt the inside of his top jacket pocket and then sniffed, running his finger under his nose. It was late, and he was probably very drunk as well as high, but his actions couldn’t have screamed
I have cocaine
more clearly than if he’d been playing charades.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘If they do get involved, all they’ll want to know is about you and Katherine – how you met, what you did. They won’t care about anything else.’ She stared meaningfully at his jacket pocket. ‘So – which site was it?’

He drummed his fingers on the table. Amy and Gary exchanged looks again. Why wouldn’t he tell them? At that moment, the other two girls came back from the toilets and stood awkwardly a little way away. The door swung shut behind them, causing Amy’s appeal photo sheet to fly off the table in the sudden draught. It fell onto Fraser’s foot, and he bent to pick it up. He was just handing it back to Amy when he stopped, puzzled and momentarily shocked. Amy and Gary froze. Fraser was staring at the other photo, the one of Becky that had been folded out of sight underneath before.

‘What?’ Amy’s voice came out strangled and high. ‘Do you know her, too?’

Fraser regained his composure, and smirked. ‘As it goes, I do. I’ve had ’em both. Small world, eh?’ He turned to them both. ‘Yeah, what I was about to say was, that site, it’s called Casexual.com. That’s how I know them. They’re mates, aren’t they? Well, I would hope so, since both of their profiles say that they’re into threesomes … I’m not into relationships, but I like sex. No crime in that, is there? And from what little I know of these two, so do they. Gagging for it …’ He stood up.

‘And on that note, ladies and gents, it’s time for me to take my leave – the next part of my evening’s entertainment awaits.’ He gestured to the two girls. ‘Here’s my card, I have nothing to hide, so please feel free to give my details to the police if needs be. There are some very nasty characters out there. I hope they both turn up very soon. Nice girls, they were.’ He handed Amy a business card, and actually bowed, before taking an arm of each of the girls and weaving out, throwing a twenty-pound note on the bar as he went. Olly’s lip curled, but he picked up the note and put it in his pocket.

Amy couldn’t speak, not until Gary had thanked Olly and helped her back into the minicab that had, mercifully, waited outside for them.

‘Casexual.com,’ she managed as the driver pulled away, her voice shaking with rising hysteria. Gary squeezed her arm. ‘You know what that means, don’t you, Gary? Do you know what that is, Gary? I know what that is, I’ve heard of that …’

He didn’t reply, but tried to put his arms around her. She shook him violently off, speaking louder and faster and higher. ‘It’s a hook-up site! Gary – Becky was using a
hook-up site!
Oh, my God. She was advertising herself for sex, like some kind of whore, and so was Katherine! What the fuck were they
thinking
? And she slept with – they probably both slept with – that … that … that—’

‘Arsehole,’ said Gary, in a flat monotone that somehow tipped Amy’s hysteria over into howls of panic and agony so primal that the cab driver pulled over and stared in horror at her, until Gary told him to drive on, to please just get them home.

When they got back to Amy’s flat again, Amy went straight to bed, without bothering to take off her make-up or most of her clothes. Gary made her a cup of tea that went stone cold on her bedside table, and she didn’t speak or move when he took off his own clothes and slid in beside her. She lay like a stone on her back, allowing him to hold her hand but pushing him away when he came closer, until he turned on his side and started gently snoring.

She lay wide awake for hours, her heart pounding with fear and anxiety. Not even listening to Boris’s soft, regular breaths from the floor next to her, or the dawn chorus outside, could relax her. All she could think about was Becky, having sex with that horrible man, and how many others? The sort of people that hook-up sites would inevitably attract. Control freaks like Nathan, sex addicts and perverts.

Murderers?

She was still awake, in a sort of trance of tiredness and stress, when her landline rang at 7 a.m. She leaned across and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Miss Coltman? It’s DC Amristy from Camberwell CID here. We have some news about Katherine Devine. Could you come to the station as soon as possible, please?’

Worst day
ever
at school today. Poor little Simon Pinto has committed suicide. I cried my eyes out in the head’s office when she told me – so unprofessional of me but I just couldn’t help it. She was almost crying, too, though. We tried so hard to help him but it was too late. In his suicide note he said that his tormentors weren’t from this school but from another one, so no wonder we could never get to the bottom of who was bullying him, and he was too scared to tell us. When the head said that his mum and stepdad wanted to invite her and me to his funeral because they knew ‘we were the ones who took such care of him’, I thought my heart was going to shatter into a thousand pieces.

I almost crawl up the stairs to my flat at five, so tired and upset that I can’t do anything for a full half-hour other than lie on my sofa staring at daytime telly, Simon’s anxious white face constantly on my mind, and his nervous habit of rubbing his palms on his knees if I ever asked him to read in class or translate anything.

I feel grimy and sweaty but I’m too exhausted to turn on the shower taps for ages, because it would involve moving. Eventually, I manage to drag myself into the shower, and the tepid water streaming off my head makes me feel a little better. I wash my hair, even though it doesn’t really need it, and walk naked and dripping into my room. I spread the towel on the bed and lie down, enjoying the cool air on my wet skin. Then I put on knickers and my little black sundress and consider my options for the evening ahead. I could ring Katherine but I think she’s out on another date. She didn’t teach Simon and, although of course she was shocked, she wasn’t as upset at the news as I was.

I pour myself a large glass of cold Pinot Grigio and sit down on the sofa with the laptop, logging straight into Casexual.com. It’s becoming a bit of an addiction; so many gorgeous men all lined up for me – skimming over the mediocre/square/overweight ones obviously. It’s like Internet grocery shopping – browse, click, add to basket, proceed to checkout … And today of all days, I feel so strongly that life is just too short not to seize it with both hands, take new experiences when you want them, experiment to find out what you don’t like as much as what – or who – you do. Take risks, be bold …

I think I’ve been hanging out with Katherine too much! She’s always saying things like that. She keeps hinting that she wants a Casexual threesome – her, me and a guy of our choice. The thought both thrills and appals me. She says she’s over CupidsWeb.com – ‘far too vanilla’. I thought it was OK, a few decent men – but she’s right: Casexual’s a whole other kettle of fish. I feel myself getting turned on just logging in; a naughty pleasure that I keep secret from everyone except Katherine. The adrenaline rush from a regular date gets magnified about a thousand times by a Casexual date, and in some ways I think they are more honest. I mean, all Internet dating is basically about sex, isn’t it? So many men dress it all up with flowery stories about their quest for ‘the one’, and really they just want to get laid. Casexual cuts through all that crap.
Look at me – you fancy me? You like me? Let’s do it.

It’s scary, but so liberating. I’m being very choosy, though – I’ve only had one Casexual date so far, with Milo (possibly not his real name), and it was amazing. Such a revelation. He seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, but when I tried to contact him again for another go, he’d vanished off the site, and his mobile was dead. I hope I find another Milo.