Forward Slash. Mark Edwards

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СКАЧАТЬ she repeated, taking in his bed-head hair and sleepy eyes. He smelled of morning breath and slight BO.

      ‘S’OK,’ he replied, scratching his chest. ‘Becky all right?’

      ‘Probably. Just had a weird email from her last night, and now she’s not answering her—’

      ‘Phone,’ interrupted Gary, and Amy instantly remembered the most annoying thing about him was his habit of trying to finish people’s sentences. She wondered if he was aware he was doing it.

      ‘Her mobile or her landline,’ she corrected. ‘Yeah. Anyway. Do you have a key? Just want to check she hasn’t had an accident.’

      ‘Accident,’ he agreed, ushering her into his living room and rooting around in a drawer under a black-ash coffee table. ‘I think I’ve still got her keys, they should be in here somewhere.’

      While Gary went into his bedroom to fetch a T-shirt, Amy put down her helmet and bike keys on the smoked-glass dining table. Gary was in his bedroom for a good minute, and Amy tapped her foot impatiently. When he came back he didn’t say anything apart from, ‘OK, let’s go.’

      They walked from Gary’s flat to Becky’s. He put the Yale key in the top lock and the door swung open.

      Amy stared at it, then at Gary. ‘It wasn’t double-locked. She always double-locks the door, even if she’s just going to bloody Sainsbury’s.’

      Amy realized she was holding her breath as they stepped inside. The flat was dark and silent, blinds drawn.

      ‘It looks tidy,’ she said. ‘Well – as tidy as Becky’s flat ever is. Becky?’ she called out, feeling foolish and strangely light-headed. She went straight to her sister’s bedroom, dreading the sight of her spread-eagled face down on the bed. But all was in order. The bed had been made, in a perfunctory sort of way, with a few items – a bra, a T-shirt – hanging from the bedpost. She opened the wardrobe. Clothes were crammed inside, so tightly that Amy wondered how Becky ever found anything to wear. There was no sign that she had packed a suitcase, although it was difficult to tell. Amy kept her own suitcases under her bed, but Becky’s bed was too low to the ground to fit much underneath it.

      In the kitchen, a mug stood in the sink, rinsed but unwashed, with no other washing-up in sight. Amy opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a jar of pickles that looked as if they would survive a nuclear holocaust. The freezer was empty too and appeared to have been recently defrosted. Both signs that she had planned to go away. But the boiler, attached to the wall beside the sink, had been left on.

      Gary stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching her and scratching his belly.

      ‘When did you last see her?’ Amy asked.

      He pondered a moment. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while. She came over to ask me if I could help her set up her new computer, but that was a couple of weeks ago. What’s going on? What was this weird email all about?’

      Amy walked into the living room, Gary following. Everything appeared to be in place in here. The TV wasn’t on standby but a copy of Heat was open on the armchair. ‘She told me she was going away, to Vietnam and Cambodia, and said she might not come back.’

      Gary frowned. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have gone without telling me.’

      Amy picked up a framed photo from the bookcase, her face creasing with nostalgia at the sight of it. The photo was of her and Becky at Becky’s graduation, ten years ago. Their faces were close to the camera, smiling into the sun, so fresh-faced. They looked so alike in that photo that they could easily have passed for identical twins.

      ‘She’ll probably walk in the door at any moment and ask what the hell we’re doing—’

      ‘Here.’

      Amy felt cold inside. If Becky really had gone away without discussing it with her beforehand, that would hurt. And what was wrong in Becky’s life that made her feel the need to do such a thing?

      ‘When did you last talk to her?’ Gary asked.

      ‘I haven’t seen her for about a month. We had a fight.’

      Gary was clearly too English to ask what the fight had been about.

      ‘I’m really worried,’ she said, pulling out her phone and checking both her texts and emails, just in case something had come in from Becky. But there was nothing – just a load more emails from customers.

      With all the contradictory signs in the flat, Amy didn’t know what to think. But it was the email from Becky that jarred the most. Something about it was off, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Either the way it was written or … something else. What was it? Despite the recent row, she and Becky were close. They emailed and texted each other all the time, and left comments on each other’s Facebook updates, so she was familiar with Becky’s written ‘voice’.

      She hurried across to the desk where Becky’s new iMac sat. It looked as though Becky had been splashing the cash, she thought. She switched it on and waited for it to boot up.

      ‘She never told me she’d got a new computer.’

      Gary shrugged. ‘But you said you weren’t talking …’

      ‘Nothing’s password-protected.’

      ‘She told me she’d do it herself when she could think of a suitably good password. Maybe that was just an excuse, though. I told her she must make sure she did it.’

      ‘I was always nagging her about that too.’

      Amy went straight into her sister’s Mail program, where she checked the sent items. Because of the way the iMac synced with Becky’s phone, emails sent from either would show in the sent items of both.

      There was the email. She read it again: Don’t try to find me. It was the last email Becky had sent. She scanned the list of emails sent over previous days. There didn’t seem to be anything else very interesting.

      She turned away from the screen, all the energy that had propelled her since receiving Becky’s message ebbing away. At that moment, as if in sympathy, the room dimmed as a cloud passed over the sun. She was out of ideas. She looked up at Gary and was about to tell him that she was going to go home when the computer made a pinging sound.

      A new email had arrived. The sender was CupidsWeb. She recognized the name – they were always advertising on TV. How did it go? True love is just a click away.

      The subject line read: ‘You have a new message!’

      ‘What’s this?’ she said. Gary came closer to take a look as Amy opened the short email that was simply informing Becky that she had received a private message and that she needed to log in to read it. Amy clicked the link and CupidsWeb popped up, asking her for a username and password.

      Amy clicked back to the email program and did a quick search for CupidsWeb. There were no emails from them other than the one that had just arrived.

      ‘That’s really weird,’ she said. ‘How long has she had this iMac?’ Without waiting for him to answer, she added, ‘Do you know what she СКАЧАТЬ