Leave Her Hanging: A Noir Thriller

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It was nearly five in the afternoon by the time I found an Internet cafe that wasn’t full to the brim with guys playing games. The place I entered was a tiny basement room that smelled of potato chips. I gave the guy behind the counter one of Malcolm’s twenties, collected my change, and eased myself down at a computer in the back corner away from the cafe’s three other patrons.

I inserted the USB drive into the port and opened up the folder. When I double-clicked on audvid_backup, the familiar window popped up demanding that I say the magic words. I typed in the code I’d pulled off Malcolm’s ID card. My hands were shaking so bad I mistyped several letters and had to backspace and try again. This had to be it. It had to be. I hit the Enter key.

The folder opened.

Several icons popped up. Three audio files and a couple of videos. I sat back in my seat, feeling triumphant and sick at the same time. I had something. But now that I’d opened the folder, I didn’t want to look at what was inside. It was hard to breathe in the humid cafe. I took the mouse and hovered over each of the files in turn. If I waited any longer I was going to lose my nerve. I pulled on the computer’s headphones and double-clicked one of the video files. My heart slapped against my chest as the video loaded.

A bed. Not the same one as in the studio under Deepest Desires; this one was a kid’s bed, coloured stripes on the duvet, yellow paint on the walls. The video quality was crisp. I wished it was blurrier.

The girl on the screen was no older than thirteen, pretty, nervous. Her hair was longer than it was when I knew her, but her skin still held the touch of darkness that I loved so much. Her hands nervously smoothed down the front of the thin robe she wore. The pain in my stomach flared.

A man’s voice spoke from off-screen. “Have you chosen your stage name, honey?”

Ella nodded quickly. “Darcy.” Her voice was nothing like the strong, confident girl I knew.

“Darcy,” the man said. “That’s lovely. Are you ready?”

She hesitated and nodded again.

The man came on screen wearing a dress shirt and pants. I didn’t recognise him. He loomed over thirteen-year-old Ella like a giant. She shivered as his hand came out to untie the sash of her robe.

I closed the video file. I didn’t want to see more. I couldn’t. I felt like my guts were trying to crawl out my mouth.

No. I had to be logical. Think. What had I just seen? That was Ella’s first foray into this world. It looked like unedited footage, so it didn’t just come from one of the films these people put out. It came from the source. I checked the time of the video. 32 minutes. Was that the entire video length, or had Malcolm just taken the first half hour? And why did he have this on his computer? The guy in the video wasn’t him, wasn’t anyone I’d seen hanging around this crew. An ex-partner?

I glanced around the Internet cafe to make sure I hadn’t attracted any attention. Everyone was too engrossed with their own stuff to care about me. I exhaled slowly, trying to collect myself. Next video. I double-clicked.

Ella was older now, like I remembered her. Short hair, straight-backed. She smiled enticingly at someone out of the camera’s view, but it was only a bad photocopy of the smile she used to give me.

Malcolm Barker came on-screen. He was naked. White rage flashed through me. Something in Ella’s smile slipped for a moment, then it was back. She undid her own robe this time.

I stopped the video and tried to control my shaking hands. There was no hiding from it now. Ella had been there as a kid, and she’d gone back in the last few months. And then she’d wound up dead. But I still didn’t understand why Malcolm had copies of these videos and no others. I rubbed my eyes and clicked on the first audio file.