Rachel was silent, her mind whirring. For a while she had even managed to forget about her throbbing wrist and the burning pain in her left shoulder.

‘I expect you have questions.’ Harland was still on the edge of the bed, her expression almost shy.

Rachel nodded, drawing on her experience of interviewing criminals and trying to remain as detached as possible. ‘If you to managed to make such an incredible change to your appearance – all that work and money – why not be proud of it? Why not just live permanently as…?’ She twitched her left shoulder in the direction of the wig and the make-up on the dresser. ‘Why not just do that? Be that person. Get out there with your size 6 body and your pretty face and knock ’em dead. That would give the likes of Christie Becker something to think about.’

Rachel found it impossible not to forget her fear for a few seconds and inject a note of empathy into her words.

Harland was nodding slowly. ‘I hear you. That’s a tough one to answer.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Only way I can explain it is that you need a heck of a lot of confidence to pull that off, and I just don’t have it. Not after I was broken down the way I was. I lack the confidence to carry off being that –’ she pointed at the wig – ‘24/7. I like to be able to hide, I guess. Being able to switch in and out of it.’

Rachel remembered Brickall’s treatise on bullying at school. Fifty–fifty. ‘An awful lot of kids go through bullying,’ she observed.

It doesn’t make them killers.

Harland shrugged. ‘We all react differently to different situations I guess,’ she responded dispassionately, as though they were discussing taste in interior décor.

‘So, how about your work as a lab technician? Didn’t your employers think it odd when you…’ Her voice trailed off as once more she tried to work out how to phrase the question. She couldn’t bring herself to say when you disappeared to kill people. She was on the brink of gaining Harland’s trust, and she couldn’t risk blowing it now. Pussyfooting – flattery even – was essential. ‘Why did they think you kept taking absences? Didn’t they mind?’

‘Oh, I’m self-employed,’ said Harland airily. ‘After I’d been there a few years I was given the chance to go onto a freelance contract. I set my own hours: work a few weeks on, a few weeks off.’

‘I see. Okay, something else that I’d like to know.’

‘Shoot.’ said Harland, smiling now.

She craves attention, thought Rachel. It’s been that way all her life. Rejected, ignored, overlooked. Something that can push you one of two ways: self-destruction or destruction of others.

‘Why go through a home-sharing app to find people? It seems like… how can I put this?’

‘Too much work?’

Rachel nodded. ‘Exactly. It’s another layer of detail and organisation, and that just adds massive risk, surely?’ The investigator in her was genuinely interested in the answers to her questions. Treat her as if you’re in the interview room, she repeated over and over in her head. Don’t lose it and lash out at her.

‘Well, first up, I enjoy the detail and the organisation. You could say that floats my boat. And remember, when you meet someone in that way, the interface confers a huge logistical advantage.’ Harland spoke as though describing a marketing campaign rather than a psychopathic murder. ‘Think about it: when you host on CasaMia you’re electing to open yourself up to complete strangers. You are inviting them right into your life. You’re not suspicious or afraid, your guard is right down. Quite the opposite really; you’re saying, “Here’s my home, come on in!” That’s why it was ridiculously easy to do what I did. Because they welcomed me in. They literally didn’t see it coming.’

She glanced at Rachel for a reaction, but there was none, so she went on. ‘But mostly it’s what you get in exchange for that extra preparation. It’s a trade-off, where the effort is matched by the reward. If you just, say, pick out a girl in the crowd and go after her, what are you left with? Nothing. I wanted to get inside the lives of these girls. I wanted to understand how it felt to truly be popular and entitled. I wanted to be them, just like I wanted to when I was at high school. When you create a home-sharing profile, you’re giving people a little window into your life. I built on that basic information by researching my hosts thoroughly in advance. And if they then handed me the key to their home, I was rewarded with access-all-areas.’

‘Temporarily. Each time, you knew it couldn’t last.’

‘Sure. But there are always more. There are a lot of entitled little homecoming queens out there.’

Rachel thought of Phoebe and Tiffany, and their callous treatment of the Harlands of this world. She thought about Melissa Downey, who by all accounts was a decent girl, but who couldn’t resist a bit of body-shaming of her own. She made her next observation as delicately as she could, but there was no way of whitewashing it completely.

‘So the pleasure was in inhabiting someone else’s life,’ she offered. ‘It wasn’t about ending it.’

Harland stared straight ahead, green eyes glittering. ‘Exactly right, Detective. The God’s honest truth is; I didn’t like the killing part at all. I find it distasteful. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way.’ She gave her odd smile. ‘And believe me, a dead body is a massive inconvenience.’

‘So, with Phoebe Stiles?’

‘That was pretty straightforward.’ Harland was matter of fact, and Rachel knew she must go along with this approach. Ensure things were unemotional, free of recrimination. Because keeping Harland on side was just about her only hope of getting out of that room alive. ‘It was a nice clean blow; trust me, she didn’t suffer at all.’

‘And once you’d done it, you could go along to her modelling assignment in her place.’

Harland glowed. ‘Exactly right. And I did enjoy that. I even had a go at a British accent. I had to wear the brown contacts – which gets uncomfortable pretty quickly – and the stylist was trying to mess with my wig. The shoes were the wrong size too, which nearly derailed the whole thing. But I thought it went pretty well, all things told.’

‘I guess you could say that,’ Rachel conceded, thinking back to the video, trying not to let her mind stray to Phoebe’s flower-laden casket. ‘And after that, impersonating her in phone messages wasn’t too much of a stretch.’

‘Exactly. And the boyfriend’s texts let me know he was going to Reno, so all I had to do was use the spare key he gave her and make a gift of the weapon.’

‘Your lab experience must have helped you when it came to cleaning up?’

‘Sure,’ Harland preened.

‘But of course Tiffany Kovak was first,’ said Rachel. ‘I almost forgot.’

Harland pulled a face. ‘Let’s be honest; she was quite forgettable. Easy enough to get her out of the way, but her life wasn’t exciting enough. She had a nice car, but that was about all. After I’d driven around in it a bit, I got bored. The school gym staging was probably the best part. I thought that was quite a stroke on my part. Took me right back to Christie and Josh.’

‘But you made a mistake when you cleaned up. You left a lipstick.’

Harland laughed. ‘No! No, that was deliberate! Out of boredom I guess. Just a little clue to keep things exciting. I knew nobody would figure out who it belonged to.’

Rachel gestured with her free hand. ‘And yet, here we are.’

The silence that followed was tense. ‘Tell me about Melissa,’ Rachel prompted.

‘Well that didn’t go so well. To start with, anyhow. I had to, you know –’ she mimed strangling – ‘which I did not like at all. I hated it.’ Harland shuddered, as though it were she who was the victim. ‘But the boyfriend kind of made up for things. He reminded me a lot of Josh Anstead.’

‘You killed him too?’

‘I had sex with him, and then I killed him.’ Harland’s tone was boastful. ‘Shows how much he must have loved her, right? But first I got him to help me with the body. He didn’t know that it was his girlfriend he was lifting, of course. And he was very easy to finish off, which evened things up after the –’ she pointed to her neck – ‘business.’ She spoke with genuine satisfaction.

‘And Talia Schull? In Boston?’

Harland sighed. ‘Mixed success there. But, you know, in some ways it was good that she stayed out of my way. There was no body to get rid of, and I had fun being her. I did her job in a lawyer’s office, and that was a great experience. I put my latent acting talents to good use again. And I was actually pretty good at it anyway. I like to think I would have made a good lawyer.’ She looked almost wistful. ‘Plus, she had awesome clothes.’

‘So overall, Boston was good?’

‘Yes, I’d say so.’

Rachel felt a tsunami of exhaustion and delayed shock wash over her. The room was warm and stuffy and filled with the pervasive smell of cloying perfume. A dull pain pulsed at her temples. She wanted desperately to get up and move her legs. To run.

Sensing her mood, Harland stood up. ‘You look beat. Tell you what, why don’t I make you a little more comfortable?’ She left the room and came back with kitchen scissors and a fresh cable tie, proceeding to cut Rachel’s left arm free, but only once she had fastened her right arm to the bed frame in its place. The relief from the spasms in her left shoulder was immense, but it was only a matter of time before the right side took up the burden. The sores on her left wrist were open and weeping. After offering a bedpan, Harland wished her a good night and left, exactly as though she was a regular guest.

---

Rachel was desperate for sleep, but forced herself to stay awake. She could hear Harland in the other bedroom, moving around without her manufactured limp. There was some clattering in the kitchen, then taps running, a toilet flushing, the faint sound of a TV or radio. Eventually, with an effort that took every ounce of her strength, Rachel lasted out until she heard the click of a light being turned out. Silence. How long would it take Harland to fall asleep, Rachel wondered?

She did not have to wait too long. After what must have been less than twenty minutes, she was rewarded by the sound of long, loud snores from the other bedroom.

Adrenaline kicked in. The cup of tea had been left cooling on the bedside table next to what had been her free hand at that point: her right. Harland had been so engrossed in her tale, she had forgotten to clear it away.

Now it was Rachel’s right hand that was tied and her left that was free. She performed a manoeuvre that was the bastard offspring of basic military training and hatha yoga, flipping her newly freed left wrist over her right shoulder and twisting, until she had rotated far enough to pick up the tea cup. She lifted it to her lips and drained the cold tea. She would pay for that later with the need to pee, but so be it. Then she took the china cup and smashed it hard against the iron bed frame. It cracked cleanly into two pieces which she managed, with great difficulty, to shove out of sight but within grasping distance, under the mattress.

Panting slightly, she fell back on the bed and drifted off to the sound of her captor’s snores.