The Next Girl by Pip Drysdale

Author:Pip Drysdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

9.05 AM

My vision blurs and I hold onto the desk to steady myself. How the hell is he dead? Because he was one hundred per cent alive last night at 11 pm. I know this for certain because the last thing I did before I flicked off the lights and went to sleep was check his location on the tracker app. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I couldn’t help it. And his little blue dot was safely parked at the hospital then. And now it’s at his home.

Which means last night he was alive enough to drive.

My ears ring as I stare down at the screen, willing those figures to vanish, for everything to be okay. But they don’t disappear. In fact, there are three of them now, all milling around the kitchen in protective clothing doing things I can’t quite make out.

Police.

Those are police.

But something aches in my chest now and the world spins a little slower. He had a mother. And a sister, Meredith; a flash of her smile in those bathroom mirrors. Probably a father, too.

My eyes prick with tears and my insides ache as I think of the morning they told me my mother was dead. Nothing prepares you for that.

Do they know yet?

This wasn’t meant to happen.

And what did happen?

I need to know. I need to know everything. Now.

And so I pull up a search window and, as my breath gets quicker and quicker, I type in D-r S-a-m-u-e-l G-r-a-n-g-e.

A list of links appear; I scan down through them. But I’ve seen every single one of them before: his practice website, articles in the news, pictures at events. There’s nothing new. Nothing to explain why there are police in his apartment and he’s lying dead on his kitchen floor.

But his security app. His saved footage. Maybe there’s something there?

My hands shake as I tap on the app and move through to his saved videos.

I scan down through the list of recordings; there are two from this morning. I tap on the most recent one and watch it play. It’s the doorbell camera: there are flashing lights in the background and people in uniform. The police.

I tap on the next one down: a woman in a uniform arrives at the front door, inserts a key and moves inside. She looks like she’s maybe from a cleaning service.

Is she the one who found him?

I tap on the one below that, but it’s just a delivery guy and it’s daylight. There’s nothing at all from last night. Not even from the doorbell camera.

A dark certainty moves through me: Whoever killed him deleted those files. Just like I did the other night. Which means they knew what they were doing.

And: Oh crap, is this my fault?

Is this because of the videos I uploaded yesterday?

Did one of those women do this?

Jane. Please don’t let it have been Jane. But it couldn’t be. According to her social media, she’s in Delaware. And you can’t lie about things like that so openly on social media; people close to her would know.

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