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His letters were long and wordy. He poured out his heart and spoke of their connection. So far, she’d been lucky enough to get the mail before Devon, just one more pressure on top of all the things running around her mind. A mental checklist of everything she had to do to keep it all secret.
She’d never before kept anything from Devon. Their entire relationship had been founded on honesty, but the whole thing had snowballed. In thinking she could handle it herself, she’d foregone Devon’s input at the beginning. When it had become clear that Terence had seen their confrontation as encouragement, she’d been ashamed to realise she’d made the situation worse. She couldn’t bear the thought of the hurt and reproach she’d see in her wife’s eyes at her secrecy, and with each day that passed, that fear grew worse.
The whole thing had affected her entire life. She wasn’t sleeping, she could barely eat, and she hadn’t gone to bed at the same time as Devon for weeks, choosing instead to sit in the dark silence worrying about what was coming next.
They hadn’t been out in ages. She always made some excuse to stay in, preferring the safety of her own home and avoiding the double fear of leaving the house. The first fear was being followed and the second that Devon would find out what was going on.
Recently, Devon had urged her to accept Alison’s invitation to try rock climbing for a few days in Shropshire. Stacey had flatly refused, knowing she would feel almost as guilty about not sharing her predicament with her best friend as she did with Devon.
And she couldn’t even imagine telling the boss. Her legs trembled at the very thought of it.
There was no question the boss already knew there was something wrong. They all did despite her efforts to hide it. Just the simple task of eating her lunch or Jasper’s delicious offerings had become a lesson in deceit.
She would wait until the office was empty before dumping her lunch in the bin, always making sure that the empty container or wrapper was left on her desk long enough for one or two of them to see it and assume she’d eaten.
The truth was that food held no pleasure for her. The second she put anything in her mouth, the saliva was stolen by anxiety, making every mouthful an effort to chew and swallow. Everything had the taste and texture of cardboard and just wouldn’t travel down her throat.
Workwise she knew she was just about managing to keep her head above water, in itself a miracle seeing as it took every ounce of willpower she had to force herself into the shower in the morning.
Existing was the word that often passed through her mind. She had forgotten what normality was. It was hard to remember a time when the foremost thing on her mind wasn’t Terence Birch and what he had planned for her next.
She functioned; she ate enough to fuel her body for part of the day before she was running on fumes. She knew her clothes felt looser every day, but she took no pleasure from the weight loss. It wasn’t worth it by any means. She’d explained it away to Devon by saying she was trying to drop a little weight, but her partner hadn’t been convinced.
She got herself to work every day, but by mid-afternoon, she could barely keep her eyes open. She was managing to keep her workload under control, but if she hadn’t been able to do that, she was sure the brief welfare chats with the boss would have had a different tone entirely.
With that in mind, she pushed back her chair, grabbed the photo of the victim from the printer and stuck it to the board.
She took a good look and had to agree that Eric Gould had most definitely looked dead.
Next, she went to work on his socials. Profiles on every platform filled her screen.
She viewed his TikTok first and found seven videos, all of him flexing at the gym. He appeared to be in reasonably good shape. He wasn’t body-builder standard, but he had good muscle definition. For some reason, he liked to make short videos of his activity: bench presses, weights, push-ups, nothing out of the ordinary but all set to the ‘Eye of the Tiger’ song. His videos attracted a couple of hundred views and a few comments here and there, some positive, some negative. The good ones came mainly from girls and the negative from guys. She read every comment on every video to check for repeats but saw few people commenting more than once, and while the comments were a bit insulting, there was nothing threatening or suspicious. Eric interacted with none of them. His account had only been live for a couple of months, and it was like he was just trying to work out what to do with it.
She switched to his Twitter account. He followed fewer than five hundred people and only about half of those followed him back.
‘Ooh,’ she said, realising he might have lost a fair few followers after his last tweet hailing Andrew Tate as his hero. Championing raging misogynists didn’t do a lot for your general popularity. Most of the responses were negative, and he’d been called a few foul names. Again, he’d not responded to any of the comments, and that had been his last tweet two weeks earlier.
His Facebook was pretty stagnant with only family and friends, but his Instagram was completely different.
That account was full of photos, personal information, chauvinistic jokes, pictures of food, gym photos and videos. There were a few posts about jobs he’d attended, especially to the homes of lone females, with innuendos about not only the boilers needing servicing.
Amongst the many photos and videos of himself, she found a tag from the account of a woman named Teresa Fox, who was proudly showing off her engagement ring. It took Stacey a minute to realise she’d tagged him because that’s who she’d become engaged to. He’d liked the post but made no comment. Not the overly sentimental type, she thought.
The man had obviously found the forum that suited him. From his posts, she could determine that he was a bit immature, a show-off with a healthy dose of confidence.
Yeah, he might be a bit annoying, but she couldn’t see any reason for someone to want him dead.
She’d report back to the boss that he was just your average typical bloke.
SIX
‘Nothing to see here,’ Kim said, reading the text message from Stacey as Bryant negotiated the many traffic stops through Colley Gate. ‘Eric Gould appears to be clean. A little immature with a hint of misogyny thrown in, but nothing to warrant his death,’ she went on as Bryant finally found the street they wanted.
The home of Eric Gould was situated in a short row of six houses behind the West Midlands private hospital.
Kim was surprised to see a squad car still there. Inspector Plant met her at the door.
‘She’s in a bad way,’ he offered quietly. ‘Didn’t want to leave her. Parents should be here any minute now.’
