Forward Slash. Mark Edwards
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was Daniel Bentick, and he liked scuba diving, reading, his beloved vintage Jaguar, and experimental theatre. She noted that Becky had claimed to love theatre too, which made her smile. Becky hated theatre, unless it was the most commercial of West End musicals. After a few increasingly flirty emails back and forth, Becky had given him her mobile number – but he hadn’t given out his. Amy cursed. The messages stopped after that, their communications having obviously transferred to the phone. He could definitely be the hot date, she thought.
She went back to Google and carried on reading the search results for Ross Malone. There were literally millions of results, though she knew she would only need the first couple of pages. It would have been more problematic if he was called John Smith, but she knew what he looked like and she knew his profession. There were several men with that name on Facebook, but she quickly spotted him from his profile picture. Unfortunately, he had all his security settings switched on, so she couldn’t find out any more useful details. But he had a page on LinkedIn, the site for professional networking, as she thought he would, and this gave her all the details she needed.
He did indeed run his own business, providing motivational speakers for events, and on LinkedIn, she found the address of his website, which provided his office address. He also kept a blog, which he updated regularly. Most of it was stuff like 17 Ways to Take Control of Your Life, but there was some useful personal information in there too. He blogged about his dog, Wiggins, a cocker spaniel: ‘This afternoon when I was taking Wiggins for his daily walk in the park opposite my office …’
Easy. Thank you, Google. She looked up his office address on a map and immediately found the name of the park – it was called Marble Hill Park, in a place in southwest London called St Margarets.
‘Right, Boris. If Becky hasn’t shown up by the end of today, you and I are going for a walk in a different park tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘Let’s see if you can make friends with a dog called Wiggins, eh?’ Boris’s ears pricked up at the word ‘walk’, but when he realized none was forthcoming, he slumped his nose back down onto crossed front paws and sighed.
Amy moved on to Shaun Blackman. He was harder to track down, but she found him on Twitter and identified him from his avatar. He tweeted several times a day, mostly about his bike adventures. But as she read through his tweets, her heart sank.
He had been in Canada for the last three weeks, on a trip with his ‘buddies’, fishing and riding motorbikes. He’d got a nice bike for the trip, a Harley, much nicer than the Tupperware BMW he drove at home, and she paused for a few moments to admire it. He’d uploaded dozens of photos of his trip: ‘Me with a large fish, me in front of Niagara.’ ‘Me drinking beer in Vancouver.’ ‘Me and some sexy Canadian girls.’
She found him on LinkedIn, too, revealing the company he worked for. She picked up her phone and called the direct number listed for him on their site, which – unsurprisingly at 5.12 a.m. – went straight through to voicemail: ‘Hi, this is Shaun Blackman, leave me a message, but please be aware that I’m away on annual leave until July the thirtieth so won’t be able to—’ Amy hung up.
So she had to rule out Shaun Notthesheep. He couldn’t be the hot date. He’d been tweeting from Toronto all weekend, where he’d met ‘an awesome babe’.
Still, at least that was one less guy to worry about.
Finally, she Googled Daniel Bentick. There were lots of results, as always, but none of them actually seemed to relate to the man she was looking for. She checked Facebook and looked through the profile pictures. He wasn’t on there. Just her luck to be trying to track one of the few people on the planet without a Facebook account. He wasn’t on Twitter either, nor LinkedIn. She scoured a few other social-networking sites but there was no trace of him.
She spent ten minutes clicking through Google’s search results, but it was as if Daniel Bentick didn’t exist – except on CupidsWeb.
She got up and paced the room, patting Boris as he trotted up to her.
‘What to do?’ she said, looking out at the garden, thinking the lawn needed mowing, adding it to yet another list in her head, filing it away for later. She felt calm, almost able to ignore the unease gnawing at her gut. Every few seconds, when she wasn’t absorbed in something else, she felt the urge to check her phone for a message from Becky.
An idea came to her. Sitting back at the laptop, she logged on to CupidsWeb again, checked when DannyBoy had last been online (last week – good, so his membership was probably still current) and spent the next thirty minutes setting up a profile for herself and paying for the minimum membership package – one month. Annoyingly, although you could browse profiles and see when potential matches had emailed you, you couldn’t read the message or send your own message without taking out membership. She felt butterflies as she did it. She needed to use her real picture just in case she had to meet up with Daniel Bentick. But she used a fake name: Sarah Jones. A hard name to check up on. She wrote a description of herself, mixing up real things that she liked, such as dogs and indie music, plus some stuff she thought might appeal to Daniel – the same things he had listed as liking: theatre and scuba diving. She even found a photo of herself on a dive she and Nathan once went on in Kefalonia, cropped Nathan out, and added it to her profile pictures.
Then she clicked on to DannyBoy’s profile. She hit Private Message and pondered for a short while before typing:
Hi
I’ve just been checking out your profile. I love diving and theatre too. My diving photo was taken in Greece – my first ever. Didn’t see many fish, though, but I definitely got the diving bug! Where’s the best place you’ve been diving?
You look really hot in your pic. Seems like we live quite near each other too. Send me a message if you want to connect.
Sarah x
She hesitated for just a moment – was she doing the right thing? – then hit Send.
Thinking about Katherine gives me a strange taste in my mouth – metallic, like blood, and my head throbs when I picture her. She makes me want to defile someone.
She thought she was so special but she was ordinary in every way, from her shoulder-length hair to her size-twelve body, from her average wage to her median IQ. True, her appetites were stronger than most women’s – to an unseemly degree. Cock-hungry, mum would have said. A slut. I’ve trawled the profiles of so many just like her.
All of which made it infuriating when I realized she was going to be a problem. That she could spoil things by poking her pointy nose in where it wasn’t wanted and asking for it to be bitten off.
I decided I had to remove the risk and deal with her.
I kept an eye on her Twitter feed in order to see what she was up to. She was quiet for most of the day, then bingo. Got a big date tonight. V excited. Soho here I come!
It was 19.29. According to the geo-location of the update, she was at Herne Hill station when she updated her status, so I wouldn’t have time to intercept her. But that was fine. I could wait. Patience is a virtue. Another thing Mum used to say.
Who was the date? That’s what I wanted to know. I didn’t know her password to the dating site she used, and had no quick way of finding it. That meant I was going to have to go to Soho and find out for myself.
I took the train, sat in first class so I didn’t have to mingle with any of the scum who frequent the normal carriages: fat-arsed mums with buggies, maggots scoffing fast food with a stench like greased death, slack-trousered teenagers speaking in that fake patois they all use – a noise that makes me wish the knife-crime problem was far, far worse.
Soho was buzzing. I walked past the