How To Kill Friends And Implicate People by Jay Stringer Page B

wish I was. Anyway.’ Hanya sipped from her drink then leaned forward. Her shoulders squared, and she gave me a look that said, Listen, I’m getting serious now. ‘So, listen, I logged into your vLove account today. After we talked.’
    Wait, she wasn’t talking about the case? No. She meant the dating site. Great. Hanya had the log in details because she’d been the one to set up the account and download the app to my phone. It had been here in FuBar that we’d recorded the video, and I’d had just enough drink in me to go along with it.
    ‘After we talked? Before or after you started a murder investigation, Han?’
    Hanya stiffened. ‘I’m not on that case. It’s weird.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I ran her name into the system. Came back with nothing. No national insurance, no address, absolutely nothing. But it must have flagged something because the feds came in and took it off us. I’ve been moved over to some arson job.’
    The feds was new cop slang. An in-joke aimed at the people working up in Gartcosh. The Scottish government had reorganised the police force in Scotland, merging all the regional forces into one organisation, Police Scotland . Gartcosh was the site of the new organisation’s big white bull, the Crime Campus. They would send detectives out to major cases, parachuting in to take over the investigations. Local cops around Scotland had come to see these visiting officers like the FBI in America.
    ‘So her name was on some list?’ I said. ‘Must’ve been.’
    There’s a look cops sometimes give me. Hanya’s old partner, John Cummings, had been a master of it. It was a signal to do the opposite of whatever they were saying. If his mouth was telling me to Stay out of the case , his eyes might be saying, Keep in the loop.
    Hanya gave me that look as she said, ‘Don’t get involved, Sam. And whatever you’ve got, hand it straight over to them.’
    She was as interested as me. Hanya was a professional, and policing was simply her job. She didn’t take work home the way I did. But territoriality was different, and the feds had made it personal by taking it off her.
    ‘Anyway,’ Hanya continued. Moving us both on. ‘Sam, you’ve got loads of guys liking your page. Have you looked?’
    I rolled my eyes hard enough for people to see them two streets away. ‘No, I told you, I’m not interested in any of that. Han, I’m fine. I don’t need help.’
    ‘When was the last time you had anything between your legs that was old enough to remember Euro ’96?’ The problem with Hanya being English was that all of her football references were English, too. I swear she mentioned 1966 every other time we spoke. She also kept forgetting the age difference between us.
    ‘Han, I only just remember Euro ’96.’
    ‘Okay, wean, take a look at the site.’
    She wasn’t going to give up unless I humoured her. I could make a show of it, at least. Look at a few of the pages, pretend I was thinking about contacting any of the guys. I picked my phone up off the table and loaded the app. A number glowed red at the bottom of the page, showing how many people had liked my profile. It was now down to me to decide whether I was going to return the gesture to any of them, which would then put us in contact.
    Each member had their own page, where we could upload videos. Blogs. Links. Whatever. Hanya had been using it for a couple of months, and her page was filled with short clips of her trying to be funny and opinionated.
    My page just had the one video. The one we’d filmed here.
    I pressed the icon for the first profile. A video started to play. The guy was cute. Brown hair, stubble that looked to be carefully maintained, and a lopsided smile. He was talking about himself, telling me his name was Billy, and he was twenty-six. He looked poised. Too poised. I didn’t want someone who was going to be reading a script when he spoke to me. Even in the hypothetical world where I would follow up on these