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“Nah, we’re good.”
“But I can’t—” I tried to think how to phrase it. He wasn’t much younger than me. If he was doing this in the hopes of a date or something… well, that was so far off the cards it was laughable and I should probably let him know. But what if he was just a Good Samaritan? How could I tell him without sounding hopelessly up my own arse? “I’m only here for one night,” I managed. “If I don’t pay you back now—”
“We’re good,” he repeated, and smiled. He had a kind smile. I felt something inside me begin to crack. “I don’t need paying back; people been good to me along the road. I’m just happy to help a damsel in distress.”
In spite of myself, I smiled back. The old-fashioned phrase sounded so funny in his drawling American accent.
“Listen, do me a favor, Red, pay it forward next time you see someone in need, yeah?”
“I will,” I said. I bit my lip. I wished I could tell him what his kindness meant to me, but there was no way of saying anything without making myself even more conspicuous than I already was. “Thank you, seriously. Wh-what’s your name?”
“Lucius.” He held out his hand and shook mine. His was large and warm, and for a piercing, painful second, the feel of his fingers against mine reminded me of Gabe. “Lucius Doyle. What’s yours?”
The question caught me off guard.
“Sorry?”
“Your name.” He smiled, amused, his wide grin curling at the corner with a tug of laughter. “I take it you do know it?”
Fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of this?
“K-Kate,” I said, remembering, belatedly, the name I’d cooked up at the police station. “Kate… Hudson.” The surname came out of nowhere. I didn’t know any Hudsons—but it felt like a suitably anonymous, unmemorable name, without being too obviously pseudonymous.
“Like the actress?” Lucius asked, and I mentally slapped my hand across my forehead. Of course like the bloody actress. That was why the surname had tripped off my tongue.
“Yes,” I said with an attempt at a laugh. “But no relation, sadly. As you can probably tell.”
“You’ll need to sign in,” the front desk girl said, with a very plain hate to break in yawn. “Name, address, email, phone number.”
“Of course,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief that she was giving me an out with Lucius. I owed him—but that didn’t mean I could afford to let my guard down with him, and I’d come perilously close to doing so. I filled in the form she slid across the counter, making up a fictional address in Cornwall and praying she wouldn’t notice the postcode was complete BS, because I didn’t know the real one for Padstow. I was pretty sure it wasn’t EX24.
I took my time over it, making my writing intentionally hard to read when it came to the email address and phone number. I didn’t think they would check them, but if they did, a plausible smear of ink would give me an out.
When I looked up, Lucius was gone.
I said I’m almost done!” I shouted. That was the third time someone had banged on the shower room door, and I couldn’t completely blame them. I had been in here for almost an hour, first cleaning and re-dressing the puncture below my ribs as well as I could, and then applying the hair bleach. It was only supposed to take thirty minutes, but the red dye had proved stubborn and I’d had to have another go, thanking God that Hel had thought to give me two packs. Second time around it smelled even worse, and now not only were my eyes watering, but my nose was tingling and the skin on my scalp was beginning to hurt. Do not leave on for more than 30 minutes said the packet. I’d done twenty the first time, but it hadn’t been enough, so this time I’d left it for the full thirty. Maybe all my hair would fall out. Would a bald woman be less conspicuous than one with bright red hair? I doubted it.
At last the timer on the burner phone pinged and I stepped back into the shower, leaning over to keep the stream of water away from the fresh dressing on my ribs and watching the creamy white foam swirl into the plug hole. At least not too much of my hair seemed to be disappearing with it. When I stepped out of the shower, shivering now, I looked into the mirror, unsure what I was going to see. My hair was still there, thankfully, and at last the red was gone. A girl with draggled white-blond hair stared back, looking strangely startled; like me, but with all the color drained out.
As I raised my hands to run them through the fragile wet strands, I saw that my fingers were shaking. I hadn’t eaten for… I tried to think back. Not since breakfast, and then only a snatched piece of toast. I’d been subsisting on shock and fear. Now as the banging came again and I jumped convulsively, every nerve jangling, I realized that I had to get some food inside me or I was going to faint.
“I said,” I tried to keep the sob out of my voice as I dragged my jeans up over wet, trembling legs, “I am fucking coming. Give me a break.”
“This isn’t a fucking spa, you know,” the girl standing outside snapped as I opened the door. She was pretty and very tanned. “There’s three showers for the whole bloody place. Jesus. The nerve of some people.”
She pushed past me through the narrow doorway, deliberately shoving me with her shoulder as she did.
“Fuck you very much,” I said bitterly, swallowing back the lump rising in my throat. I wanted—God, I didn’t even know what I wanted. I wanted to curl up in the rented bunk and pull the curtains around my mattress and hide from all of this until it had gone away. I wanted to wake up tomorrow and find this whole thing had been the worst nightmare I’d ever had. I wanted to find whoever had done this to Gabe and rip off small parts of their body, one by one, until they bled to death, slowly, agonizingly. I wanted to go home, sink my face into Gabe’s chest, and wrap my arms around his warm, solid body. I wanted to listen to his heart. I wanted to cry. Why couldn’t I cry?
Instead I got my laptop out of the luggage cage and made my way down to the communal dining room, where I bought a Pot Noodle from the commissary, topped it up with boiling water from the electric kettle in the corner, and curled up in the window seat to eat it.
As I forked the scalding noodles into my mouth, I tried to ignore the griping pain in my side and concentrate on figuring out my next move. Tomorrow I should get out of London, that was a given. But where? And in the meantime, I needed to make contact with Hel, to let her know I was okay, at least for tonight. I just wasn’t sure how. I knew her number off by heart, but if I texted her from the burner phone there was a strong chance the police would join up the dots, and once they had this phone number, I would be instantly traceable.
I could email her—Gabe had installed VPNs on all our laptops, so in theory there was no way to track my location from an email, not if I crossed all the T’s properly. But I had to assume that the police might eventually read anything I sent—and Hel’s reply along with it.
I opened up the laptop. The first thing I did was disable all the location services. Then I fired up the VPN and connected to the internet. My heart was thumping as I hovered the mouse over the web browser icon. I knew logically that the VPN ought to shield me—it protected my web identity from anyone on the hostel’s Wi-Fi network, and meant that anyone trying to trace the email from Hel’s end would be able to follow the threads back to the offices of the VPN operator but no further. But, unlike Gabe, I didn’t fully understand the technology behind it. I knew how VPNs worked—roughly, at least. But was I safe opening Gmail in the normal way? Or should I use Tor, the anonymized dark-web browser that Gabe employed for checking out the shadier hacking forums? Did Gmail even work in Tor?
I sat there for a good five minutes, my finger on the trackpad but not quite clicking, and then I gave up and pressed. The police were highly unlikely to be monitoring Hel’s email right this second, and if they did eventually manage to trace me back to the hostel, I would hopefully be long gone.
