BooksBarbecue
Back The Game
Chapters (68)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. NOW
  4. One
  5. BEFORE
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. NOW
  26. Twenty-One
  27. BEFORE
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. NOW
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. BEFORE
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-One
  50. Forty-Two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-Four
  53. Forty-Five
  54. Forty-Six
  55. Forty-Seven
  56. Forty-Eight
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. NOW
  61. Fifty-Two
  62. Fifty-Three
  63. Fifty-Four
  64. Fifty-Five
  65. AFTER
  66. Fifty-Six
  67. Acknowledgements
  68. About the Author

Mark wasn’t exactly in touch with all the tricks of the online trade, but he knew enough to struggle through. He accessed the account with the information the family had provided for the security questions, but it turned out they’d already done that when they’d realised she was missing. What he noticed instantly was the number of times her main email address was used as a recovery address for another email address. A result of the family trying to gain access to her various social media accounts after she’d gone missing, he guessed. He began making a list of each individual email address, so he could collect them all in one place, before working on getting access to each of them.

The inbox also had messages from Emily’s Facebook messaging account.

Dozens of individual messages. Some group chats.

All of them from people she’d catfished.

It was difficult to read for the most part – an unending litany of badly spelled, hate-filled messages, which didn’t seem to ever generate a response.

U NEED TO STP DIS!

Y????? I NVR DID ANYTHIN TO U!!!!

JUMP OF A BUILDIN OR SOMETIN. I H8 U

KILL URSELF!! UR SCUM

LEAVE MEALONE!!

UR PROB A UGLY FAT B1TCH. KILL URSELF! DO US A FVOUR

Each message became worse as he scrolled through them. A whole range of different people, who all wanted to get back at her in some way, for something.

Mark knew what she’d done, of course, he knew about her way of getting back at these people she’d gone to school with. Now, he could see their reaction.

What puzzled him was the lack of replies from Emily herself. He continued going through them all, but couldn’t find a single time she had responded to any message she received. It was almost like having invited this sort of reaction, Emily had then ignored it entirely.

From the dates of the messages, she had continued on also. More people tricked, more people sending obscenities to her when they found out.

More victims.

They stretched back over months, the first occurring a year earlier. Mark wondered how this hadn’t spilled over into her real life, but then realised it probably had.

He would need to talk to the family again.

Mark was ignoring the main question – of what the messages probably meant. What they would do to someone over a sustained period of time.

‘I think she did something to herself,’ he said, under his breath. Everything about the way the case was going now pointed to this. The isolation, the way Emily had turned her anger outwards, then received attention in return. Yet, what started as just attention – albeit only the bad kind – would have begun to hurt. It would have been a slow build, a snowball rolling down a mountain, gathering and gathering, until it finally became an avalanche of hate.