‘I just … I don’t know. As soon as I sent the email I regretted it, then I spoke to him the other day and look what happened.’

Oli’s eyebrows knit together. ‘Hang on, you think what happened to Cooper is linked to you contacting him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Zoe says. ‘Maybe. It’s the reason why I didn’t say anything for so long.’

‘Please talk to me. I need to understand what’s going on.’

‘I want to, I’m so sick of not saying anything, but I’m not sure it’s safe.’

‘Please, Zoe,’ Oli says. ‘It’s so important that if you know something you tell me. You know that, right?’

‘Okay, look, I don’t want to be linked to this at all. I mean it.’

‘That’s fine. Just talk to me, please. Tell me what you told Cooper.’

Zoe smothers a sob. ‘I was a messed-up kid, okay? Drugs and whatever. But I was smart and I did alright at school. I got into uni and I was doing my best, but I was still struggling. I had no money, and my parents kicked me out, so I was doing whatever I could to earn cash—selling weed, stripping, the usual. Anyway, I got into some trouble with drug possession, stealing and stuff, and things weren’t great for me. I met this girl and I was telling her how fucked things were, and she said there was an easy way I could make some cash.’ Zoe pauses. ‘It was so weird, but I was desperate, and she said there was this group of people who, like, sourced photos of kids.’

All the air seems to leave the room. ‘You mean pornography.’

‘Yeah, I guess. But not like, explicit or doing sex stuff. Just shots of them in the bath or getting dressed or whatever. She said it could be kids you knew or kids you babysat. The whole conversation was pretty bizarre.’

‘Was it one of the housemates?’ Oli can barely breathe.

‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t. It was a blonde girl. She had a tattoo on her neck under her hair. I don’t know who she was.’

‘Did she say how it would work?’

‘Just that you would upload photos to this website. I think it was untraceable somehow.’

‘Like a hidden Dropbox.’ Oli remembers covering a story a few years ago where files and images were traded on the dark web.

‘I guess so. She said you could do it at the uni library through a dummy account.’

Oli’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘At the library?’

‘Yep. She said the whole thing went all the way to the top, and that’s why it was safe—that no one involved had ever got in any trouble.’

‘What did she mean by “the top”?’