Forward Slash
A terrifying novel about internet dating, secret desires and a chilling serial killer. From bestselling authors Mark Edwards and Louise Voss.He's posted on your wall.He's following you on Twitter.He knows where you are right now…When Amy receives an email from her older sister, Becky, announcing that she's off travelling and «don't try to find me», she is worried. Becky would never do such a thing on a whim.Amy – who is recovering from an abusive relationship that has left her terrified of love – soon finds that Becky had started using online dating sites. Aided by Becky's neighbour, Gary, Amy sets about tracking down the men her sister had dated, following a trail that leads her into the darkly seductive world of internet hook-ups.But Amy is unaware that a sadistic killer is watching – a killer who’s been using the internet to stalk, torture and kill. Now he’s got something very special planned for Amy and she is about to find out that romance really is dead.
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LOUISE VOSS AND
MARK EDWARDS
Forward Slash
For Margaret Cutting and
Veronika Jackson
Table of Contents
She looked nothing like her profile picture. I mean, it was definitely the same woman but in the flesh she was seven or eight years older, her hair duller, skin pale and wrinkly, with saggy bags under her eyes, bags in which she appeared to be carrying half the world’s woes. When I saw her and realized this was Karen, my date, I almost fled. She so clearly wasn’t The One that there was no point even talking to her. But she had already seen me. Because, although I may be dishonest about everything else, including my name, on my dating profiles, I look as good in the flesh as I do on the screen.
‘I thought you were blonde,’ I said, after enduring a preliminary round of chitchat.
She pinkened. ‘Yes, I know, that photo is a couple of years old.’
And the rest.
‘I prefer to go natural now.’
She had ordered pasta with cheese sauce. As she talked, I could see strings of yellow saliva threaded in her mouth, making my own food inedible. She kept asking me stupid questions about my made-up job. She thought I was a professor of sociology, a subject in which she had a GCSE. She looked at me through her lashes as she went on, putting on that ridiculous sub-Diana coyness that many women believe drives men crazy but just makes me mad.
‘You’re a nurse,’ I said.
She nodded and shovelled more pasta into her cakehole. No wonder she was overweight. She had put on at least a stone since the sunny holiday photo she’d posted on the dating website. This was the big problem with Internet dating. You couldn’t trust anyone.
‘Any interesting accidents at the hospital recently?’ I asked.
‘Accidents?’
‘Yes. Like, I don’t know, I was reading about a woman who fell out of a window and was impaled on railings.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Nothing like that, no. Just people bitten by dogs and chopping their fingers off when they’re cooking.’
I yawned.
‘Am I boring you?’ she said, putting down her fork.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
I leaned closer so the diners around us wouldn’t hear and beckoned for her to come closer, giving me a better view of her jowls.
‘Not only are you boring me, but you disgust me. You eat like a pig and you’re not so much “mutton dressed as lamb” as “tripe dressed as mutton”.’
Her expression made the date worthwhile. For a second I thought she was going to slap me, which would have made the evening lead to more interesting places, but instead she burst into tears.
‘You’re the pig,’ she said, voice wobbling. She’ll probably make a complaint about me to the site, but who cares? It’s a rubbish site and I’m removing my profile later anyway, if this is typical of the calibre of women on it. Plenty more to choose from.
I pushed the tip of my nose to form a snout.
Karen stood up and, after groping around in her brain for a few seconds to find an adequate word, spat, ‘Bastard!’ at me. Pathetic.
I watched her go. She will never know what a lucky escape she had.
After Karen had stormed off into the night, I felt coiled and dissatisfied. My blood itched in my veins. Not wanting to go home, I headed to the bar next door to the restaurant. It was a cool place, all blue lights and shadowy corners, but crowded. That suited me. Nobody would notice me standing alone, watching.
I paid for a bottle of beer and stood against a pillar, phone in hand, and tapped to open the Girls Near Meapp. The app works just like Google Maps or the GPS in your car. Geo-location, they call it. After a few seconds it found my location on the South Bank.
Then came the clever part, the feature that makes Girls Near Me such a handy tool. It showed me women who were also in the area by scanning the Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare profiles of women who had ‘checked in’ using their phones to let those and other social networks know they were in the area. Very soon, I was looking at a list of women who had checked in within a hundred yards of where I stood. There were two, in fact, in this very bar. Tara and Charlotte.
A glance told me Tara wasn’t right. Too ugly. Wrong hair colour. Nothing like The One. But Charlotte looked very promising indeed. Long, honey-coloured hair, gorgeous eyes, pretty smile. I clicked on her name and was shown links to her Twitter profile and Facebook page.
