Chapter 35
Venetia
Sunday
Felipe is at her side in seconds, hunkering down.
“I’m not sure this is helping…” he says, trying to soothe the phone from her hands.
“Of course it’s not helping,” she snaps, “but I need to know everything about her. She’s the reason Aimee is dead.”
Felipe rubs his beard and briefly closes his eyes. “We don’t know that for sure.”
She stares at him. “We absolutely do. That message is what killed Aimee. And Aimee’s baby.” Her voice cracks. “And Susan has a baby who is fine.”
He sits beside her, leaning in to look at her phone.
“I searched for her online, and nothing. How did you find out about her baby?”
“Facebook.”
“You found her on Facebook? I didn’t see her there.” He says it in a neutral, almost chatty way and she knows he’s trying to humor her, to keep things calm, while secretly worried this will send her back to heroin. And Felipe doesn’t know what she has in the shoebox in the bottom of her wardrobe.
She humors him back. “Susan O’Donnell has an old Facebook account she doesn’t use, but her sister, Leesa, tags her anyway. I found pictures of the baby on Leesa’s Instagram.”
He’s still leaning, looking at her phone.
“What’s MumsIRL?” he asks, pointing at a logo on her screen.
“It’s—” She stops. She’s told Felipe enough. He’s not going to be on board with what she’s doing. “It’s an ad I clicked on by accident.”
“Ah. Will I make another pot of tea?” He gestures toward the mugs on the coffee table.
She nods.
“Oh, by the way,” he continues, with false nonchalance, “where did you go, this afternoon, when you went out?”
“For a walk.” It’s the same answer she’d given him earlier.
“Not to Oakpark, right?”
She looks him in the eye. “I was at the supermarket, that’s all.”
“Good. Good. I think it’s better if we stay away from Susan O’Donnell and all the rest of it. The police will be doing investigations and…OK, I’ll make the tea.”
She waits till he leaves the room and clicks in again.
It’s so much easier to find people online than anyone ever realizes, especially if you have their phone number.
WhatsApp, for example—in any group you join, you have access to every single phone number.
Snapchat uses phone numbers to suggest connections, and this has been extremely useful in the last twenty-four hours.
It started late last night, when Venetia took Susan’s number from the screenshot shared in the Buy and Sell group and saved it into her contacts.
She tried X, WhatsApp, then Snapchat. On the Quick Add tab on Snapchat, Venetia clicked into All Contacts, where her phone contacts were crossmatched with Snapchat users.
She scrolled to Susan O’Donnell. And at midnight last night, as Saturday ticked over into Sunday, she struck gold.
Susan was there as “DaisyJones6.” Anonymous on Snapchat but not for anyone with her number in their phone.
Not for Venetia. That’s when Venetia’s heart rate began to speed up.
On X, she found nothing, but on Facebook she found a newish profile with the name Dai-syJones6 and a daisy avatar.
Venetia clicked in to see the Friends list; to check if they had anyone in common, or if Daisy was connected to Susan’s sister Leesa, but there were no friends at all.
That in itself was interesting. Then she checked the Facebook pages that Daisy had liked.
There were just four, and they were exclusively parenting sites—Mumsnet, Netmums, MumsIRL and Rollercoaster.
She tried the first two but found nothing.
Then she got to MumsIRL. She typed “DaisyJones” into the search bar and, finally, there it was.
Dated three months ago, a post by DaisyJones6:
Hi, first-time poster, please be gentle…
I’m scared of thoughts I’ve been having about my newborn.
I keep thinking I’m going to hurt her. I’m really not coping.
She cries all the time. I think about walking away and leaving her and then I feel horrible, but it happens again and again and again.
When I’m rocking her to get her to stop, I can imagine rocking her harder to try to stop her and I can understand (please, please, don’t judge me) why people could end up doing that.
I wouldn’t do it, I know I wouldn’t, but I can’t make the thoughts stop.
And what if I’m wrong? I can’t tell anyone in case she’s taken off me.
I know she’s not in danger. But also, I’m scared.
Well. Venetia sat back. Here was something she could work with. A woman afraid she’d hurt her baby. A mother afraid of being judged. Fearful that her baby would be taken from her if anyone knew she was having these thoughts. Venetia reread the post on Facebook, thinking.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if people found out that Susan O’Donnell was afraid she’d deliberately hurt her baby…
? Then she shook her head. That wasn’t enough.
She thought some more. What if Susan came to believe that something bad might happen to her baby while in her care?
She thought about Aimee’s unborn baby, inside Aimee’s body, cold and dead in a morgue.
A knot of rage uncurled again inside Venetia.
She worked to tamp it down. This wasn’t the time for spending energy on anger.
She thought some more. And then it came to her.
It would certainly be interesting if Susan thought something bad would happen to her baby.
Venetia sat up straight. But wouldn’t it be even better if, ultimately, something bad did happen to her baby?