The Fear. C.L. Taylor

in a pub in Soho. I was at a work leaving party and I’d just managed to spill the best part of a glass of red wine down my top. Ben came out of the men’s toilets as I swerved into the ladies’, dropping my purse in my haste. He waited outside so he could give it back to me. He was a nice-looking bloke, friendly and, because I was drunk, I said yes when he asked if he could buy me a drink.

      One month since we met. Two months until we split up. If that. Thirty-two years old and I haven’t been in a relationship that’s lasted longer than three months. Sooner or later I’ll fuck things up. I always do.

      The sign as we leave the M2 at junction 7 says Canterbury/Dover/Margate/Ramsgate. I can’t imagine he’s taking me to Margate for the weekend, although it could be fun. Canterbury then. It has to be. Maybe I should have packed a white dress.

      ‘Please tell me where we’re going,’ I plead.

      Ben smiles but says nothing. The grin doesn’t leave his face as we exit the roundabout onto the Boughton Bypass and rejoin the A2.

      ‘No peeking,’ he says as I reach for my phone. ‘If you look on Google Maps you’ll spoil the surprise.’

      Which was exactly my plan.

      My grip on the hand rest tightens as we speed past the junction to Canterbury and I spot a sign saying ‘Dover 17 miles’. The only reason we could be going there would be to get a ferry to Calais. But Ben didn’t ask me to bring my passport. He must have discovered some kind of idyll nearby, a picturesque fishing village maybe, out of sight of the ferries and the boats.

      ‘Nearly there,’ he says as we drive through Dover and a grey stretch of sea appears between the buildings. ‘Trust me, you’re going to love it.’

       Trust me. You need to trust me, Lou. I will keep you safe, I promise. I love you. You know that don’t you?

      ‘Ben.’

      We’re only a couple of hundred metres from the ferry terminal now, a slab of grey, slapped up against the sea. We speed along the seafront then Ben slows the car as we approach the customs gates.

      ‘Ben, I—’

      ‘Don’t stress.’ He slows the car to a halt as we join the queue. ‘I’ve got your passport. Don’t kill me but I swiped it from your desk drawer when you were cooking dinner the other—’

      ‘I can’t do this.’

      ‘What?’

      I yank on the door pull but the passenger door doesn’t open.

      ‘Lou?’

      I try again. And again. Pull. Release. Pull. Release. The piece of black plastic flaps back and forth but the door doesn’t open. He’s locked me in.

       It’s going to be okay, Lou. It’s what we wanted. Just you and me. A new life. A new start in a place where no one will judge us. We can be together, forever.

      The window then. If I open it, unclip my seat belt and lean out, I’ll be able to open the door from the outside. I’ll be able to get out.

      ‘Lou?’

      I try and turn the handle on the passenger door but my hand is slick with sweat and it keeps slipping from underneath my fingertips.

      ‘Are you going to be sick or something? I’ve opened the door. Sorry, it’s central locking and—’

      A cold gust of air whips my hair around my face as I leap out of the car. In an instant I am fourteen years old again.

       Mike is the love of my life and I am his. He’s taking me to France for a romantic weekend away. This morning I put on my school uniform as usual but, instead of getting the bus all the way to school, I got off a stop early on the corner of Holy Lane. Mike was waiting with his car. He’d told me to bring toiletries, a change of clothes and my passport in my school bag. He said he’d take care of the rest.

       Chapter 2

       Wendy

       Sunday 8th April 2007

      ‘Monty!’ Wendy Harrison lays down her shovel, dusts the soil from her gardening gloves and stands up. ‘Monty, I’m going in now!’

      At the sound of her voice, her piebald springer spaniel comes bounding out of the bushes and pads across the grass towards her, his pink tongue lolling.

      ‘Hello, Monts.’ Wendy rubs a hand over the top of his head. ‘I think we both deserve a treat, don’t you?’

      The dog’s ears twitch at the sound of the word treat and he trots obediently beside his mistress, his eyes never leaving her face, as she makes her way inside the small terraced house on the edge of Great Malvern.

      Wendy takes a bite of her custard cream, chews, swallows and then pops the other half in her mouth. When that’s gone she sips at her tea and picks up another biscuit. She was only going to have one. She’d even entered it into her Slimming World diary – custard cream, 3 syns – but somehow half of the packet has vanished.

      Sod it, she thinks as she moves her finger over her laptop’s mousepad. I’ll start again tomorrow.

      For the last hour she’s been flicking back and forth between the same three websites – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It’s the fourth time today that she’s logged on and it’s only 2 p.m. She tries to distract herself – with gardening, her part-time bookkeeping job and walking Monty – but her mind always drifts back to those websites. Has something new been posted? An update, photo or location? The panic builds in her stomach. What if the information is deleted before she reads it? What if she misses something important?

      She can’t remember what first prompted her to google Lou Wandsworth. It might have been a passing conversation she’d had with her friend Angela about finding an old school friend on Facebook, an article she read in the paper, or maybe she was having one of those days where she woke up feeling as though a dark cloud had settled in her brain and nothing brought her joy, not even when Monty laid his head on her knee and stared up at her with his searching brown eyes.

      It didn’t take Wendy long to track Lou down. She was the only Louise Wandsworth on Facebook. The trouble was, she could only see her name, an image of a cartoon character as her profile picture and a list of her friends. Nothing else. Angela had shown her how to set up her own Facebook page but she couldn’t use that to try and connect with Lou. She made a new page instead, called herself Saskia Kennedy, and added a few photos of a woman that she’d found online who was about the same age as Lou.

      Wendy’s heart trembled in her chest when she pressed the ‘add friend’ button. But nothing happened. Her request was ignored. Days went by, then weeks. Wendy did some more googling: How do you get someone to accept a Facebook friend request?

      She discovered that it looked suspicious if you didn’t have many friends, or any in common, so she set about adding random people who lived in London and looked about the same age as Louise. Men were easy – the woman in her fake profile picture was attractive – but it took a little longer for women to start accepting her requests. Once she had fifty friends and had filled her wall with silly photos and the same sort of updates as her ‘contemporaries’ she tried adding a few of Lou’s friends. To her surprise they accepted her, at least half a dozen of them. When she tried adding Lou for a second time her friend request was accepted.

      She was in.

      She felt jubilant as she clicked on Lou’s photo albums. All those months of detective work and she’d finally found what she had been looking for. Not just one photo of her but dozens and dozens. Lou had long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. A hint of make-up around the eyes but no lipstick. Skinny.