Chey finished what he was doing on the computer and looked up at Tomek. ‘Turns out that Xanthia and Angelica had had a little thing going on,’ he explained. ‘A drunken one-night-stand type of thing.’

‘Yeah, I got that.’

‘But it was more like a two-, three-night-stand thing. They’d spent a couple of nights together after they’d gone out for drinks as a group. It was always after a night out, and they never mentioned it to anyone else.’

‘It was their little secret,’ Tomek said, his mind whirring. Could this have been the other individual that Emilia Solveig had been referring to? The welder?

‘It was more than a secret,’ Chey continued. ‘For Angelica, I’m told, it didn’t happen. She always denied it whenever Xanthia tried to bring it up, but then when they later got drunk together, things would happen. And then the next day Angelica wouldn’t remember a thing.’

The cogs began to turn faster now.

‘Could Xanthia have drugged Angelica so she’d forget?’

Chey considered that for a moment. ‘I… I hadn’t thought of that. But we can look into it. I mean, she works in a pharmacy, so she might know how to access that type of thing.’ Realisation flashed across Chey’s face, and Tomek could see the young man making a mental note, a frame of reference for his learning later down the line. At last, Tomek had imparted some wisdom to the constable.

‘Was that everything? Is that what the smile on your face was about, or was there something else?’

The smile returned. Tomek was unable to look the man in the eye.

‘Something else,’ Chey answered.

Pointing to the laptop, Tomek said, ‘Go on, show me. Your face is reminding me of some of the blokes from Friday night, standing on the edge of the room touching themselves.’

That seemed to get rid of it; Chey prodded the Enter button on his keyboard, and after the screen had illuminated, spun the machine round to him. On the screen was Angelica Whitaker’s blog. “My Little Corner of the Internet” was emblazoned at the top of the page, with a small image of a beach to the right. Beneath it was an article dated two weeks before, titled, “Where would I be without you?”

Tomek took control of the laptop and scrolled down the page, his eyes scanning the length of the post.

‘You got the SparkNotes version, or you want me to read it all?’

‘Neither, Sarge,’ Chey said, taking the laptop back. ‘I want you to listen.’

Surprised, and a little offended, Tomek leant back in his chair, folded one leg over his other knee, and waited patiently for the explanation.

‘You asked me to print out all the blog posts, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which I did. And I gave them out to each member of the team, so they could start reading them, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But when I got back from my meeting with Xanthia, I realised there was a slight issue with the printing. Actually, it was a major fucking issue⁠—’

‘What was the issue?’

‘…but I fixed it, and⁠—’

‘What was the issue, Chey?’ Tomek insisted.

The man sighed, turned to the screen, and scrolled to the bottom of the webpage. As he swung the device round, Tomek noticed the mistake. At the bottom of the blog post was a section for comments. A place for random strangers, or close friends and family members, to comment their thoughts on whatever they’d read from Angelica’s Little Corner of the Internet.

‘This was missed out on the blog posts when they printed.’

‘So our lot have been reading through a bunch of shit, basically?’

Chey shrugged. ‘Not entirely. There’s some important stuff in there, but the real juicy part is this here.’ The constable prodded the screen so hard the machine almost toppled backwards. He was pointing to the comment at the bottom of the webpage.

‘So proud of everything you have overcome, my angel. You’ve got your wings back. Always thinking of you.’

Chey’s eyes widened with delight.

‘My angel…’ Tomek continued, his thoughts shooting off on a tangent. ‘My angel…’

‘And there are loads more like that as well, all saying similar things. Sometimes Angelica replies, sometimes she doesn’t.’

Tomek finally came to. ‘She’s communicating with the person?’

Chey nodded.

‘Does that mean she knows who it is?’

A shrug. ‘Possibly. There’s no way to tell. We can’t exactly ask her.’

Tomek pondered this for a moment, letting his thoughts percolate around his head. Then he pointed to the last word on the comment.

‘Can we work out where the messages are coming from?’

The smile returned to Chey’s face. ‘I was hoping you’d ask that. I looked through the last couple of months’ worth of posts, and saw about fifteen different comments, each saying the same thing, so I sent it down to digital, and they were able to trace the IP address.’

Tomek felt himself leaning forward involuntarily.

‘And?’

Just as Chey was about to respond, the door opened. In stepped Rachel. She hovered in the doorframe.

Chey continued, regardless. ‘The posts have been coming from a public computer in Hadleigh library.’

Tomek struggled to stifle his excitement. Now it was his turn to wear a creepy smile. ‘Good work, mate. You remind me more and more of a young Tomek Bowen every day.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Rachel said, still standing in the doorframe. ‘That’s the last thing the world needs.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

In the time that it took uniformed officers to find Shawn Wilkins at Hadleigh library and bring him in, Tomek and the team had only been able to scour and analyse the last eight months of blog posts from Angelica’s Little Corner of the Internet. In total, they found over a hundred comments from their mysterious commenter, all saying the same thing: “My angel’s got her wings back.”. The exact words that Shawn Wilkins had posted under her Instagram posts. Chey had even been able to plug the comments into an online software that turned them into a word cloud: a visual representation of the frequency with which each word appeared. The larger the word, the more times it had been used. Unsurprisingly, “my” and “angel” were at the top of the list, dominating most of the space in the word cloud. Tomek had never seen the software before, and had been dubious about its purpose at the start, but after seeing the results, he’d decided to print them off and take them with him down to the interview room.

Since Tomek had last seen him, Shawn Wilkins’ hair had become messy and unkempt, as though he hadn’t washed it the whole week. Inside the interview room, he was slouched in the chair, leaning against the wall, with his temple resting against the surface . His eyes were bloodshot, a thin line of stubble had started to form on his jaw, and the evidence from his meeting with Johnny Whitaker the other day was still visible on his nose.

‘Good afternoon,’ Tomek said as he entered and dropped a folder on the table.