‘And between band members and their fans?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the vampires?’

‘Oh, in a lot of the stories, Shawn and Blake and co happen to be immortal blood-suckers with a thirst for the blood of virgins.’

‘Well, I know what I’ll be reading tonight.’

They walked towards the front door. ‘I’m guessing you weren’t able to find anything that Rose and Jess had co-written?’

‘No. Either it’s buried so deep that I missed it or it was deleted.’ He paused for a moment, fixing his strategy in his mind. ‘It might be nothing. But if I’m right and Mervyn Hammond does turn out to be another false lead, this is all we’ve got.’

Chapter 47

Day 14 – Kai

Kai had only slept for two hours in the previous twenty-four since the party at Mervyn Hammond’s house – which was extra-annoying, because he was truly worn out. Never again, he thought, would he be persuaded to dress up in a stupid bow tie and an apron so long that it had come down to his shins, making his legs look even shorter, working his arse off for six quid an hour. Slave labour, that’s what it was! Not to mention the ingratitude of everyone involved. As far as he was concerned, it totally had not been worth it just for the sake of being in the same room as OnTarget and all those other D-list celebs. Hell, he got to be in the same room as OnTarget at the book signing just days before, and all that had involved was queuing in Piccadilly for an hour or two. The only thing that really made the whole thing worthwhile was what he’d left at the house. Now that had been funny.

His hands were still bright red and chapped from loading and unloading the dishwasher, and once he’d forked out for a solo cab home – that took two hours to arrive – he only had £23 wages left. He had assumed that he and Jade would be splitting the cab fare, but oh no, she had ‘sorted herself out’, as she’d informed him at the end of the party, the chill in her voice almost frightening. She had refused to tell him how she was getting home – but he could guess. That frigging bodyguard, doubtless.

Since then he had rung her numerous times, and been round to her house twice, but her phone just rang out, then went to voicemail, and nobody had come to the door despite him leaning his finger on the bell for ages. He remembered Jade telling him that her mum, Alison, was going away for a couple of days. He’d been excited at the prospect of having Jade and her small council house to himself for a while, without having to make small talk with Alison, who scared him, with her wrinkly lips from decades of sucking on fags and God knows what else, and her enormous arse. Jade hated her too, although she pretended that they were ‘bezzies’ when she wanted to ponce twenty quid off her.

Now, with a pang, Kai realised that Jade might well be taking advantage of her mum’s absence by temporarily shacking up with Kerry the bodyguard. The thought of it gave him such pain that he felt murderously angry. If there had been a kitten nearby, he’d have twisted its head right off, no question.

Shame he couldn’t do the same to Kerry. As if.

‘Where are you, bae?’ he cried in an anguished voice, addressing the bathroom mirror in his house and noticing another new crop of zits as he did so. Kerry the frigging bodyguard didn’t have zits.

A sudden inspiration occurred, and he slapped the side of his head at his stupidity in not remembering before: the tracking app!

A couple of weeks back they had both installed a phone-tracking app on their phones so that if they got separated at the OnTarget gig at Twickenham, they’d be able to find each other by identifying where the other one’s phone was. Jade had once got really upset when she lost him in Guildford Spectrum, and he’d been well pleased at his resourcefulness when he found and installed the app. She had twined her arm around his neck and cooed into his ear what a genius he was, and how much she loved him . . . Mind you, he thought, she wouldn’t be so chuffed with him if she knew what he’d done afterwards, when he’d told her he was un-installing the app so that she needn’t worry about him keeping tabs on her. Instead, he’d slid the app into a folder on Jade’s iPhone screen, buried among a load of other apps she never, ever used. The folder was labelled ‘Health’, so she’d never notice that the phone-tracking app was in there.

Holding his breath, he clicked on to the app on his own phone. A green pulsing circle on a map indicated that Kai’s phone had found Jade’s.

Kai punched the air and zoomed in on the map. To his puzzlement – and then anger – Jade appeared to be very close to the Thames, near Hampton Court, in a place called Platt’s Eyot. It looked like there was a little wood nearby and he immediately imagined her leaning against a tree with the bodyguard, her legs purple with cold and her skirt up around her waist.

Fuck him, thought Kai, sliding a carving knife out of the knife drawer in the kitchen – making sure his mum, who was watching afternoon telly in the next room, didn’t hear him – then grabbing his parka and calling out a goodbye on his way past the living room.

He could get the train from Wimbledon to Hampton Court, he knew; he’d seen the station stops. On the map, the river and wood didn’t seem very far from the station. He didn’t even hurry, particularly – with the app working, there was no rush. He’d be able to find her. And when he did, the bodyguard’s muscles would be of no use to him. All the muscles in the world couldn’t stop you from getting stabbed in the back, could they?

Chapter 48

Day 14 – Patrick

Patrick and Carmella sat in one of StoryPad’s meeting rooms, all of which were named after famous writers. This was the Orwell room and Patrick wondered if the CCTV camera that pointed at them from the ceiling was functional or a wry joke.

After initial reluctance, mutterings about privacy and confidentiality, and lots of whispered conversations between various members of staff, a young woman called Dawn Latuske had ushered Patrick and Carmella into this room and sat down with them, placing an iPad on the desk. Latuske was a black woman in her late twenties with trendy, thick-framed glasses.

‘I could come back with a court order—’ Patrick began, but Latuske stopped him.

‘It’s OK, Detective. We’re going to cooperate. The thought that two of our users have been murdered, that more might be in danger . . .’ She shuddered. Patrick had used the line about others being in danger to prompt StoryPad’s staff to help. ‘We’ve been in touch with Seattle and they’ve given us the go-ahead. So . . .’

She pressed a few buttons and a screen flickered to life at one end of the room. Patrick realised that the iPad was connected to the screen so they could see what Dawn was doing as she flicked and scrolled.

‘This is MissTargetHeart profile.’

‘Rose,’ said Patrick.

‘Yes, sorry. Rose. And this is Jess’s.’ The girls’ profile pages appeared side by side on the screen. ‘This shows a full list of the stories both girls submitted or contributed to, including any that were deleted. I’m basically showing you an admin view. Nothing is ever fully deleted – it stays on the back end until it’s a year old, at which point it gets archived. But this is everything both girls wrote over the last year.’ She flicked down the page. ‘There weren’t many – a dozen or so each. We can also see all their comments on other people’s stories, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of those.’

‘We might come back to that later,’ Patrick said.