‘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.
The man grunted in response, avoiding eye contact.
Tomek pulled the chair out from beneath the table and crossed one leg over the other. Confidence bubbled beneath his surface, and he was unable to stifle the smirk on his face.
‘How are you doing today, Shawn?’ he asked, excitement lacing his tone.
‘Why am I here?’
‘We just have some more questions for you.’
‘Why’d you have to come down and bring me in here?’ he asked, sounding like a petulant teenager. ‘Now everyone at work’s gonna know I’m being questioned about this shit.’
That sounded like a Shawn problem, nothing to do with him.
‘I hope you didn’t cause a scene,’ Tomek said. ‘Otherwise that would only add to the speculation.’
Shawn turned his nose up at Tomek, pulling a face. ‘You still ain’t told me why I’m here.’
‘All in good time,’ Tomek replied as he prodded the folder on the table. ‘All in good time.’ Tomek dragged the folder slowly towards him and opened it on his knee, keeping it out of Shawn’s eyeline. Then he looked at the first page. There, in front of him, was the homepage of Angelica’s blog. Tomek removed it from the folder and slid it across the table. ‘Do you recognise this, Shawn?’
