Page 100 of The Family Remains

‘Images?’

‘Yes. Pictures of you. Nudes. Some film footage. And they have been sending them to me and making me pay them money to delete them.’

‘I’m sorry –who?’

‘I don’t know. An anonymous emailer. I just kept thinking it would stop. That he would go away if I gave him the money. But then he’d be back again a couple of weeks later with another picture. Another film. And now, well, as you’ve seen – there’s no more money left to give.’

Rachel screwed up her eyes and looked at the ceiling. Then she looked down again and exhaled. ‘Have you still got them? These … nudes?’

Her father nodded sheepishly. ‘I thought I should keep them in case this ever went to the police.’

‘Show them to me, please.’

‘Oh, no. You don’t need to—’

‘Just show them to me.’

He sighed and then indicated for her to follow him into his study, where he flipped open his laptop. ‘Here,’ he said, turning the screen towards her and then moving to the other side of the room.

Rachel took a deep breath, readying herself. Her father had put them in a folder named ‘Recipes’. She clicked on the first one and then immediately had to close it again. She knew instantly that it was one of her own photos, from her own phone, and she knew instantly that it had been taken when she was with a guy called Travis whom she had met online about three years ago and had enjoyed a very brief, very intense, very sex-based liaison with before he’d dumped her without any explanation. Her first instinct was that it was him, it was Travis, that he’d somehow reappeared, out of the blue, found her father’s email address and decided to blackmail him. But then she remembered that this was her photo, taken on her phone, that Travis would not have had access to it. And it was not a pretty photo. Not a pretty photo at all. She could see that now. Back then it had looked raw, extraordinary, exquisite, erotic. Now it looked sad, regressive, a little bit tragic.

She opened the next one. This was the time that Travis had brought his friend. Rachel couldn’t remember his name but staring at the image now she saw a look on his face that turned her stomach sour. She shuddered and opened the next. This was an MP4 and she gulped drily before pressing play. Her, Travis, hisdisgusting friend in her bedroom in Camden Town. Her finger went straight for the mute button as the sound came through. She looked at herself on the video and saw a woman who was lost. She wondered what the hell she’d been looking for.

She didn’t open the next file. She closed her father’s laptop and threw herself back into the chair. ‘Fuck.’

Then she looked at her father and said, ‘Dad. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. I want to kill myself. The thought of you, seeing that. It makes me want to kill myself.’

‘Please don’t do that, darling. Please don’t. It’s nothing. It’s forgotten. But is it him? Is it the man, in the photos? Who is he?’

She shook her head. ‘No. It’s not him. I haven’t seen him for over three years and he didn’t know anything about me, least of all that I had a rich dad. He just wasn’t the type, you know. He wasn’t …cleverenough.’

And as she said that, she knew. She just knew. Her stomach flipped and her blood ran hot and violent through her veins. She picked up her phone and she scrolled through her camera roll, way back to 2015, then she scrolled and scrolled to the beginning of the year, to February, just after she met Travis, and she scrolled all the way up to July and then down again and she knew, she knew that she and Travis were over by July, and she knew that they had met at the end of February and that that was where the photos and the films would have been, and they were not there, they were not there and there was only one person who might have been able to access her phone, only one person who would have wanted to go through her camera roll, only one person who was desperate enough, clever enough, horrible enough to do something like this to her.