The Hit List Read online

  ‘Do you look through Louise’s things?’ she’d asked and he’d propped himself up onto his side.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I sorted her clothes out and—’

  ‘No,’ Marianne pressed. ‘I mean, do you look through stuff she didn’t show you when she was here? Letters and emails and …’ Her voice fell away. The look on his face had nearly stopped her heart with shame. She didn’t mention it again.

  Greg’s laptop sits on the table in front of her now. Lumpen. Out of charge. Covered in tides of dust. She uncoils the cable, plugs it in and opens it up. Some of the keys have been rubbed clear of symbols so she feels for the ‘on’ button as if she’s reading braille. A little light blinks and the machine whirrs lazily awake as she opens a bottle of Pinot Noir.

  The screen finally comes alive with a freeze frame from last time. And so she pours a glass of wine, taps a Gauloise from the pack and brings the flame close to her face.

  *

  They met in July 2013. Greg newly arrived from his native Scotland, where he’d drifted for a few years after finishing his geography degree. Marianne, an émigrée to the East End from South London and from Devon before that. She’d arrived in a hurry. He’d taken his time. They met in the middle on the number forty-eight bus one boozy Friday evening.

  That summer in the city. Both mid-twenties. Lives barely begun.

  They’d swapped numbers and she’d woken the next morning to three messages. The first, asking if she’d like to see the Tate Modern’s exhibition of street art. The second, apologising for being presumptuous. ‘I completely understand’, he’d written, ‘if you woke up and regretted giving your number to some strange man.’ And then a third. ‘Oh god, I sound like a nutter. I realise this is the third text I’ve sent. Can I start again? I’d love to meet up some time, at your convenience, but no worries if you’re not up for it. Yours, Greg.’

  It was the sign-off that did it.

  They’d previously met drunk, her recollection of his face blurred at the edges, the details smudged. The man waiting outside the gallery had a sharp nose and high cheekbones. Out of his bus seat, he was around five foot nine, slim but muscular.

  He wore a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans. He’d trimmed his beard but still looked like a man who lived in the woods. She wore a blue 1950s rockabilly dress, hair carefully coiled into victory rolls and held in place with pins. Heels to make her feel taller. It was, she realised immediately, too much.

  As they left the gallery, Greg let out a long sigh. ‘I didn’t understand any of that. Do you want to get a beer?’

  ‘I would really love a beer,’ she said, unpinning her hair and shaking it out as they walked.

  The day turned into evening as they shared a basket of chips and clinked beer bottles. Sitting on the concrete overlooking Bankside Pier and wrapping each other in stories. This is who I am. This is who I am. All those words, long lost to the evening sunshine. There were always going to be more words, so she barely bothered to remember.

  And then they slid slowly, comfortably, into constant communication. Phone calls at night and emails by day. Hers sent in bursts around lessons; his scattergun and frequent. She pictures him back then, sharing his every thought as he had it. ‘You have no inner monologue,’ she used to say.

  ‘You should be grateful you get to receive such a waterfall of wisdom,’ he’d reply in his soft, staccato Scots. When had the waterfall dried up? Last year. But it had slowed to a trickle before that.

  At first, they met on scheduled dates. Cheap dinners with vouchers, too skint to hide it. Films at the Troxy, smuggling in pick ’n’ mix from a nearby shop.

  Between those moments in the flesh, more words. Strings and strings of emails. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Never ending. Until they did.

  *

  Tonight, of course, there’s nothing new in his sent items and that is as painful as ever. She clears the spam, unsubscribes from a few more straggling newsletters. It’s like gardening, ripping out the weeds. Widow’s work.

  Her favourite ‘sent item’ was the first time Greg told her he loved her. ‘By email? How very Noughties,’ her colleague Clare had joked. But it wasn’t high tech, it was low confidence.

  She searches for it now, opening sent items and typing ‘love’ in the search bar. There are hundreds of results, of course. She takes a swig of wine, switches to sort ‘oldest’ first, then sits back in surprise. Jenna. Of course. His account predates Marianne by several years but it’s still a slap in the face to see all these emails.

  Jenna. The one that got away. She takes a breath and clicks in to the first email containing ‘love’ that he sent his ex-girlfriend. The ‘I love you’ is just there amongst general chit-chat. Of course, he opened this email account when they’d been going out for years. He and Jenna had got together during their Highers.

  She clicks out and into the next and the next.

  The conversations here are briefer than Greg and Marianne’s. Jenna the intrepid solicitor, a really modern girl. Stop it, it doesn’t matter now. She searches for all emails to and from ‘Jenna Fairbarn’. Seeing snipey emails from the bitter end would be easier on the heart. Marianne can see already from the subject lines that their relationship had dissolved into accusations and nit-picking. She clicks into one where Jenna is dressing Greg down for forgetting to leave the ten pounds that he owed her. And another where Greg has emailed Jenna to try to explain, clumsily, what he actually meant the previous night when she had ‘done your legal bit at me instead of letting me talk’. Greg was always more comfortable with emails than text messages, a hangover from the days of 140-character limits. ‘I have too much to say,’ he’d laugh. There is even the odd email from Greg to Jenna sent after he met Marianne. A vague and half-arsed attempt at staying friends. ‘Just checking in!’

  The emails had long stopped by the time Marianne and Greg married. All except one. Marianne blinks and takes a thick swig of wine. There is an email to Jenna sent just days before he died but ‘archived’, so she hadn’t seen it before. It was only unearthed through searching. The subject line reads: ‘I need you.’

  Jenna,

  Can we meet? I can come to you? Or we can talk on the phone. I know a lot of time has passed but I’m begging you, please don’t turn your back on me.

  Greg xxx

  She can find no reply in his inbox. She checks the archive – nothing. Deleted items then? It’s empty. Picked clean before he died. Did he do that to delete Jenna’s response?

  Outside, the night sky has turned navy, the street below quiet.

  ‘I need you.’

  I needed you, Greg.

  Still she stares, reading it again and again.

  Stung, Marianne considers tracking Jenna down. Calling her, screaming at her even. But Jenna hadn’t even replied and mustn’t she be grieving too? She must have found out about Greg’s death – they both came from the same small town. Maybe she’d decided to ignore the email, not feeling the same pull to Greg that he obviously felt to her. And now she has to live with that. Besides, it’s too late for that kind of call. It’s too dark and she’s too frayed with wine.

  Three kisses, though, just like in the other ‘Jenna’ correspondence, instead of the customary two that Marianne and Greg had somehow settled on, wordlessly. Could he have met Jenna and started a very brief affair? Or did he just want to cheat on Marianne?

  Begging and desperate for the one who got away, years after he’d last seen her? How could he? In those last days of his life, why was he preoccupied with his ex-girlfriend from a million years ago? She would never have expected this from Greg. Principled, relentlessly good Greg. But then, he had already started to withdraw at that point, so who knew?

  Marianne rubs her hands over her face and clicks through the mess of folders cluttering up his desktop. Looking for what, she’s not sure. Photos of Jenna? Plans to divorce? She doesn’t know, but in lieu of anything else to do, she picks up pace, feverishly looking under pixelated rocks
.

  And then she sees it.

  Not a photo of Jenna. Not a love letter.

  An icon. A name.

  What the fuck?

  She wouldn’t even know what it was if she hadn’t heard a group of Year 12 pupils talking about it at school. About the depravity. About how everything, anything, is available.

  Bragging, really. Lying, probably.

  It’s a browser but not like the one she’s been using. A different animal altogether. A wormhole to the dark and dirty place beneath the normal internet. An illegal place, filled with the worst of everything and where anything is available for a price.

  Before he died, she realises with a sudden punch to her gut, Greg hadn’t just been emailing his ex, he had been accessing the dark web.

  Marianne

  It has become dark so quickly that the screen in front of Marianne is lit up like a fire. She leans back in her chair, her shoulders stiff and tight. She blinks, as if a quick slice with her eyelids will wipe away the scene. But of course it doesn’t. Marianne is still in the flat, at their table for two. The bottle of red in front of her is empty and her ashtray overflows with little grey caterpillars. And on the screen, an icon for a dark web browser sits where Greg tucked it, hidden away from her eyes.

  What do I do?

  Unable to process the discovery, instead she carries the ashtray into the kitchen and dumps the contents in the bin. A stale cloud rushes up at her.

  Clumsily, she rinses a layer of dust from a single heavy glass tumbler that’s been unused for a long time. She has to clamber onto the sideboard to grasp the near-empty bottle of Macallan.

  ‘You can take the boy out of Scotland,’ he’d say, late at night, then fall asleep after two soft sips while she was still brushing her teeth. The bottle was a gift from her father-in-law to his only son, the Christmas before Greg died. He received one every year and spent the next twelve months slowly finishing it.

  Her fingers tremble as she lights another Gauloise and sucks it deeply. Then she takes a sip. She sits back down with a thud, takes another slug of whisky and winces. She stares for a moment as her pale fingers wind around the slim white cigarette as if they belong to someone else.

  Somehow, it’s nearly eleven at night. Where has the time gone? She should focus on the here and now and close this old laptop down. Maybe even wipe its contents or throw it away.

  The thought of destroying everything that’s left on here sends her heart racing even harder. But why was he going to that place, and why didn’t she know? Could this be connected to Jenna? Some kind of sick obsession that united them?

  A creeping fear closes in on her. She’d found porn on his computer last time she went grief-snooping, of course she had. Tell-tale links in his search history, links she didn’t need to click on to understand. Nothing weird, though; nothing you’d need to go to the dark web to find.

  And, yes, over the years they’d definitely cooled from the feverish, intensely physical early years into something more comfortable, less frequent. They were both so busy and Greg was so stressed. If anything, it was her who was frustrated and occasionally found herself climbing the walls, missing passion and human touch.

  What more did he want that Marianne or videos of random glistening bodies weren’t able to provide?

  She closes her eyes; thoughts of skin and metal, of blood and fear race across her mind. She doesn’t even know what she’s trying not to imagine.

  Some things are better left unseen.

  But her heart just hammers harder. She opens her eyes and it’s still there. This little icon, winking at her like Alice’s white rabbit.

  Marianne staggers through to the kitchen, pouring the last from the whisky bottle into her glass. She cracks her knuckles, releasing a burst of pressure, and then pulls a fresh carton of cigarettes from the cupboard where food used to be kept.

  She lights up and smokes fast, then sits back down, still staring at the screen. The ash spills in knots all over the table as her hands tremble.

  Fuck it.

  Marianne clicks on the icon and holds her breath.

  *

  It takes far longer than a normal browser to open, so long she thinks it might not work, but then finally it appears. At first it looks familiar. A recognisable browser frame around four tabs open already – presumably from the last time he logged on.

  She clicks through them. The first one is an email service she’s never heard of. There’s no pre-filled information, no way to log in. She tries his usual usernames and passwords, but the site does not yield.

  So he had a secret email address.

  She clicks on, dreading how much worse this could get, the pastry and wine sitting heavily in her stomach. The next tab is filled with chaos. It takes a while to make sense of what she’s seeing.

  It’s not a page of horrific porn at least. Instead, it’s rather like an old-fashioned-looking forum divided into sub-forums. She scrolls down carefully. It appears to be some kind of marketplace, with each sub-forum offering a different speciality. Guns, pharmaceuticals, hardcore porn of every flavour, even snuff films. The kind of stuff she’d heard the Year 12s joking about. She’d thought they were exaggerating. It can’t be real, surely?

  Why were you here, Greg?

  She stares at the marketplace and tries to make sense of it. Alongside the sale links, it’s full of weird lingo, disgusting pictures and gifs. Plus a hodgepodge of inane topics, grim rambling and braggadocio.

  And so much of the content shared here seems to be cruel. Greg worked with victims of human trafficking, he helped desperate people access help. He may have been quick to temper in his final months but he was kind and good. He was not the sort of person who would find this entertaining. But then Greg hadn’t seemed the type to keep secrets from her, or to know how to use the dark web. He didn’t seem the type to contact his ex in a fit of pique, but he did.

  I’m begging you, please don’t turn your back on me.

  When Marianne and Greg first met, he worked for an animal charity. He’d turn up on dates with little ribbons of fur on his trousers from the fluffy visitors to the office.

  People were who he always wanted to help, though; he’d told her that on their very first date, squinting into the sun overlooking the Thames. People who’d been treated like animals, modern-day slaves.

  But when he finally got a role at the small charity Hidden Humans after a few years, he became more serious, more troubled. Every week there were more people he hadn’t been able to help as much as he’d wanted, vulnerable people who’d slipped through his fingers and back into the world of cash landlords and paperless jobs – at best. The boomerang back to exploitation was an ever-present risk, even for those who had got out before.

  He gave it his all. Turned himself inside out trying to do more and more. Their last holiday, the summer before he died, she’d read thrillers by the pool and knocked back Aperol Spritzes until her head swam. He’d paced around and struggled to relax. He’d been stressed, wondering aloud how long he could keep doing such a thankless, frustrating job. The relentlessness, the sheer numbers in need, had crushed him. He was a rescuer, a doer. In the thick Italian heat, he’d spent his time scooping tiny frogs from the pool and setting them free, while she’d watched from behind her sunglasses. There were more little kickers churned in the filter than he could possibly have saved.

  How could that Greg have laughed at jokes like the ones she can see right now? How could he have spent time somewhere that offers access to watch live executions?

  Then she sees it. Now it starts to make sense. A sub-forum all about buying people. Women, mostly. Available to the highest bidder. No photos, just physical measurements and a ‘guarantee’ of clean health.

  Oh Greg. Ever the Good Samaritan, he must have come looking for people who’d slipped away, back to black. She wonders if he ever saved anyone here. Ever disrupted anything. If any of these ads are even real. He never told her anything about this place, never so much as hinted.
She often joked that he never stopped talking, always one silly monologue going on. But actually, about the serious stuff, he kept mum.

  She clicks away to the next tab, guilty that she’d thought the worst.

  It’s another chat forum but far more basic, less busy. A meeting point for activists by the looks of it. Others like him, big hearts and wide eyes. Is that fair? For all his naivety, Greg wasn’t so blithely trusting. He didn’t even talk about this place. Or maybe he just didn’t trust me.

  She thinks again of his email to Jenna, an ache building behind her breast.

  Unlike on the other tabs, here she can click back and retrace Greg’s steps. She clicks once. The site churns so slowly she imagines hearing cogs turning. Everything is so much slower down here, in this cesspit of a place. Eventually the screen comes alive again.

  The subject of the post reads: ASSASSIN SUPERMARKET HACKED.

  She reads on to the main body of the post, disbelieving and confused:

  Usual hoax caveats but apparently someone’s hacked the database of the Assassin Supermarket and you can search for anyone with a price on their head.

  Worth checking to see if any of the trafficking bosses are on the list, or anyone else that you’re looking into. Unlikely that any of us will have gained that kind of attention but advise you check anyway.

  Here’s the link.

  Her gut reaction is that this is a hoax. It looks like a very strange link, even ignoring the extraordinary claims of what will be found there. It’s nothing like normal URLs. An unmemorable spit-up of numbers and letters. She won’t click it. Far too cautious, far too wary of technology, and of dangerous secret places that she doesn’t understand.

  Instead, she clicks into the final tab that Greg left open on this browser. And realises that while she would never click on such a link, a link to a supposed hit-list database, Greg did. Because it’s right here in front of her eyes.