She took a reluctant bite of the quiche. Pregnancy seriously affected her appetite and, of course, @__________ hovering ominously at the edge of her mind wasn’t helping. Any time she let more than a few hours lapse between posts, they were back in the DMs goading her and demanding she keep her ‘Insta content more consistent’. It was a very particular kind of blackmail, as Detective Bríd had commented.
‘It’s difficult when their aim isn’t clear like this. Usually we would expect them to have moved to demands for money or something by now.’
The fact that her stalker was confounding the police was not comforting. Shelly wished she could block the account but, as Amy had pointed out, they would be back within minutes with a new account.
‘Trying to shake these trolls can be like whack-a-mole. You block one and they’re immediately back with another account. And nothing pisses them off more than people trying to get rid of them,’ she’d explained.
Amy was right, as @__________ could become very heated if Shelly didn’t follow their low-grade demands to the letter. The first message she’d woken up to that morning was definitely verging on angry.
@__________: Where was the bedtime skincare routine last night, Shelly? I TOLD you I wanted a ‘get un-ready’ with me on IGTV. Whatever happened to ‘I’d be nothing without my Shell-Belles, without you guys I wouldn’t have my amazing career and all these incredible opportunities’? You owe us, Shelly. You seem to be forgetting who holds all the power here. What would people say to this getting into the public domain????”
Beneath the message was an old pic from the SHELLY account. They had put it up for breastfeeding awareness week. Shelly had swallowed uneasily.
How could @_________ know about this post? She remembered the day clearly. Hazel and Polly had been over at the time for an #InstaMamaMorning, Hazel banging on about how important it was to be seen to be empowering women on awareness weeks like this. She’d no Insta-worthy pics of nursing baby Georgie – taking nice pics had been the last thing on her mind as her experience of breastfeeding had been pretty rocky. She and Amy had been hard-pressed to find one where she wasn’t looking despairing and ugly-crying, while Baby Georgie was wrinkled and red-faced screeching at her breast. Amy had dismissed them all for not being on-brand and then Hazel suggested they do a staged shot.
Shelly remembered burning with embarrassment. She couldn’t be so bald as that. However, after Hazel and Polly had left, she’d given in and helped Amy concoct a tasteful portrait of Shelly breastfeeding a doll of Georgie’s. It had been wrapped in a pink baby blanket.
@__________’s pic was from the same day, the same set-up but snapped from another angle. It showed Shelly smiling beatifically into the face of a small plastic doll, gently proffering a breast to it. Oh Jesus. This was bad, there was no way to couch it that didn’t come off as pure batshit crazy. How did @__________ have all these photos? In darker moments lately she’d been suspicious of everyone. Amanda, her MUA? Marni? Even Amy herself – it had to be someone close, she decided. The level of access displayed in these pictures seemed to confirm this.
Shelly checked that Georgie was engrossed in the strawberry bowl and picked up the phone to look at the picture once more.
It was this same room, though before they had done the full light-filled-extension revamp. The sliding doors that now ran the full width of the kitchen-dining room had yet to be put in and instead that wall just had two large windows. This picture exposing the charade of the breastfeeding post had been taken from the window of the old back door.
Shelly twisted slightly to look at the spot where it had been. There were some floating shelves there now with tasteful Insta-essential accessories: a couple of ferns, a succulent, a glowing diffuser and a picture of resplendent pregnant Shelly. What a different story that pregnancy was compared with this one. She looked down.
At nineteen weeks, her bump was nearly as big now as it had ever gotten when she’d been expecting Georgie – she’d be massive by the end. Apparently, this happened on second pregnancies, the young midwife had sympathised before posing for a selfie for her own burgeoning account (@AWhiffOfMidwifery, 12,000 followers). ‘It’s ’cos the extension’s already been built, know what I mean?’
Shelly grimaced just remembering her words. Ewww.
Of course, this latest incriminating photo knocked Marni firmly off the list of suspects. She hadn’t joined them at that stage. And Shelly felt in her heart of hearts it couldn’t be Amy. For starters, Amy was behind the camera when this picture had been taken. She’d have needed an accomplice. It was too ludicrous; Shelly shook the thought from her head. She’d seen Amy’s reactions to some of these posts and, really, no one was that good an actor – Shelly should know, she’d studied with some seriously talented people at RADA. Of course, there was Hazel and Polly. There was always a little competition simmering between them. And they had been there earlier that day, but they had both left by the time this pic was taken. And if it was either of them it didn’t make much sense. Wouldn’t they be trying to get her off Insta? Not demanding she be more prolific in her posting?
Hazel was off on her own mad tangent of earth mama stuff and she surely had too much on her plate already for a committed campaign of blackmail, and Polly was just so nice and boring. Shelly felt bad thinking this, but it was true, she was so basic. There were always mortifying spelling mistakes in her captions. Shelly cringed. She genuinely appeared to not know the difference between ‘you’re’ and ‘your’. She just didn’t seem to have the imagination for something like this.
Maybe it was a stranger? A Shell-Belle gone bad? She shivered at the idea of a stranger creeping around the property. She screengrabbed the latest shots and sent them to Detective Bríd. Hopefully they would get some time to discuss the case soon but Shelly knew from her email that Bríd was snowed under.
Chapter 11
Ali observed the crowd outside the Glasnevin community centre from the safety of her car at the far side of the car park. It was a fairly wide demographic, lots of old people, a few teenagers and every age in between. They mostly looked as if they had just come from work. She consulted the pin Amy had sent her the night before to double-check that she was indeed in the right place. They just didn’t look like a bunch of crazy catfishers. The bulk of them looked like boring nine to fivers. The whole crew could have just as easily been a community choir or something. There was a little old man who looked about seventy. What was he doing on the internet full stop? Never mind catfishing people?
She checked the time on her phone. Twenty-five past. According to Amy’s text, the meeting started at half and she could see people in the group stubbing out cigarettes and putting away their vapes as others began to file inside. It was now or never. Ali definitely didn’t want to walk in after everyone. She’d always hated that feeling in school of everyone watching her while she tried to find a seat. Best to be among the crowd and remain anonymous. Though Ali was just about the least anonymous person in Dublin these days. Everywhere she went, she could see people doing double-takes, leaning in to whisper urgently to their friends or, worse, seizing their phones to snap a pic. Ugh. So many pics kept cropping up online of her looking shady ducking into the Spar near her and Liv’s place. Notions.ie kept posting them alongside headlines like ‘Not So Glam Now: Shamed Instagrammer Spotted Purchasing Findus Crispy Pancakes’.