‘Oh for fuck’s sake. No – what does it look like? I’m on the forums, aren’t I?’

‘Anything good?’

Jade made a frustrated sort of noise. ‘I mean, look at this, I’m only being realistic and I’m getting a load of abuse!’

Kai came and lay on top of Jade, grinding his pelvis into the small of her back as he looked over her shoulder at her screen.

F-U-Cancer: I’m still totally cut up about MissTargetHeart.

Jade had responded: You need to get over that, seriously. Not like you two were BFFs, FFS!

F-U-Cancer: How can you be so heartless, Jade? I knew I shouldn’t have started talking to you again.

‘How can you be so heartless, Jade?’ mimicked Jade in a high-pitched, whiny voice. ‘God, she’s such a sap. Posh cow.’

Kai fixed his gaze on one of the dozens of Shawn Barrett posters on Jade’s bedroom wall. ‘I’d be proper gutted if you got throttled.’

Jade ignored him. A new message had made her stiffen with outrage. ‘WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK?’

‘Sup, bae?’ Kai tried to playfully straddle her on the bed so he could massage her tense shoulders, but she slapped him away as though he was a particularly irritating bluebottle.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered, scanning the computer screen. ‘She’s bang out of order. No, no. I ain’t having that, no way.’

‘Who – MissTargetHeart?’ Kai was puzzled. Rose Sharp, a.k.a. MissTargetHeart, was in a mortuary somewhere, so it was hard to believe that she could have done anything recently to incur the wrath of Jade – hard to believe, but not impossible. Jade was very easily offended, as he well knew.

‘No, you twat, YOLOSWAG. How dare she?’

‘What’s she said?’

Jade stabbed impatiently at her screen with a long fingernail – each of her gel nails was decorated with a different OnTarget logo.

‘YOLOSWAG – 5 minutes ago – 11,987 times?!’

‘What’s she on about, bae?’

Jade jumped off the bed and paced around the room, furious. ‘Who does she fucking think she is? She’s just jealous, innit, that she didn’t do it, and now I’m getting all the props and she thinks she can have a pop at me? She’s got another think coming.’

‘The tweets?’ Kai asked nervously.

‘Yeah, the tweets!’

Jade was inordinately proud of the fact that the OnTarget website had recently featured her in an article about how she’d tweeted Shawn Barrett 11,897 times in an attempt to get him to follow her back. It called her ‘Shawn’s Biggest Fan?’ She’d printed out the article and it was sellotaped to the wall next to a life-size poster of Shawn:

Of course, we’re all massive Targeters here, but there’s someone out there who’s dedicated weeks to repeatedly spamming Shawn Barrett with almost 12,000 tweets. Now, that’s slightly excessive, but the girl behind the tweets, Jade, insists she has a very good reason for doing so. And that reason is that she’s truly, madly, deeply in love with him.

According to BuzzFeed, Jade began tweeting Shawn telling him how her day was going, but she thought that was ‘useless’, so instead decided to write ‘Before I met you @ShawnBarrett I never knew what it was like to be able to look at someone and smile for no reason, follow me, ily.’

She told the website: ‘I only tweet Shawn, I don’t need anything but his follow.’ Unfortunately for Jade, Shawn Barrett is still yet to follow her on Twitter, but we’re sure she won’t stop there.

‘I love them more than my own life, but Shawn is the one who I love the most,’ Jade told BuzzFeed. ‘I actually love him more than I love my boyfriend.’

 

Kai scowled at the last sentence, as he did every time he looked at the printout or Jade mentioned it – which was about as many times as she’d tweeted Shawn. But he never let Jade see him scowl.

‘Haters gonna hate, babe, she’s totally jealous.’

Why, Kai thought, couldn’t he have thick blond hair and a strong jaw like Shawn’s? Perhaps Jade would be nicer to him if he didn’t have spots on his forehead, skinny legs and wiry black hair that looked like pubes. Secretly he hated Shawn Barrett with a passion and, with his limited imagination, spent a great deal of time planning all sorts of lurid misfortunes for him, preferably humiliating and public ones. Jade was so fit, with her unbelievable boobs and long blonde hair, that he did seriously worry whether all her millions of tweets would eventually attract Shawn’s attention – and then what chance did he, Kai, have? Jade wouldn’t give him a second look.

Now, though, Jade rolled onto her side on the bed and twined her arms around his neck. He breathed in her scent – Friendship perfume, hairspray and the sickly smell of her thick brown foundation. She had a tidemark on her jaw contrasting with the white skin of her neck and throat.

‘Yeah, but what are we gonna do about it?’ she whispered, her words tickling his ear. ‘YOLOSWAG has, like, really upset me.’ She flapped her fingers in front of her eyes – the gesture that meant she was trying to hold back tears.

Kai couldn’t bear the prospect of Jade crying. He wrapped his arms around her waist and hugged her tightly. ‘I’ll do whatever you want, bae. I mean it. Whatever you want.’

She nuzzled into his neck and he felt her cheeks curve up into a sly smile.

‘People who dare diss me don’t deserve—’ She sniffed.

‘To live?’ Kai asked.

She guided his hands to her boobs and Kai thought, just like the last little bitch who dared to mess with Jade, that he’d died and gone to heaven.

Chapter 9

Day 3 – Patrick

DCI Suzanne Laughland stuck her head through the door of her partitioned office and called across to him. ‘A word, please, Pat?’

Heads bent over desks immediately popped up in curiosity, reminding Patrick of meerkats – meerkats in cheap nylon shirts and poorly fitting jackets. Why did so many of his colleagues dress like teenage cashiers in a building society? He pondered this conundrum as he wove around the rows of desks towards Suzanne’s office, mostly to try to quash the tiny lift of excitement he felt whenever she spoke his name.

Patrick could see through the open slats of the blinds that there was someone else sitting in with her, but couldn’t tell who it was until he was almost at her desk. Then he swore softly, although it came as no surprise. Sitting with his back to the door, cleaning under his fingernails with an unfolded paper clip, was Adrian Winkler.

He nodded curtly at them both and Suzanne gestured for him to take a seat next to Winkler. Unfortunately, because her office was quite small, they ended up sitting next to one another opposite Suzanne as if they were naughty schoolboys receiving a telling-off from the Head for fighting. Pat made a conscious effort to relax. He sat back in his seat and tried to stretch out his legs, but the walls of the solid desk were in the way, so he couldn’t. Winkler noticed and smirked. Then he shifted in his chair slightly so that he turned his body away from Patrick, cold-shouldering him.

He’s a cock, thought Pat. Don’t let him make you act like one too.

‘Good afternoon, Patrick. Adrian and I were just discussing Hamlet’s autopsy findings, specifically the new development regarding the cuts on the body of Nancy Marr matching those on Rose Sharp’s. Have you had a chance to read up on the Nancy Marr case yet?’

‘Not in detail, I’m afraid,’ Patrick said.

Winkler tutted and Patrick glared at him.

‘I’ve been going over the interviews Carmella and I did with the Travel Inn personnel, and Rose Sharp’s parents. As I’m sure you appreciate, that’s a lot of material to get through.’ He managed to stop himself adding ‘I’ve been here since 6 a.m.’, because it would sound like a defensive whine. ‘Has Hamlet confirmed that it could have been the same knife?’