Chapter Twenty-Five

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Glasgow

May 2024

CLEM

Stephanie arrives at Clem’s flat half an hour after her phone call.

“Thanks for seeing me so late in the day,” Stephanie says when Clem opens the door to her.

“No DC Sanger?” Clem asks, and Stephanie shakes her head.

“He’s up in Orkney, viewing the site.”

Quinn doesn’t look up when Stephanie comes into the kitchen, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Can I get you some coffee?” Clem asks, but Stephanie shakes her head. She takes a seat at the dining table next to Quinn and flips open her iPad.

“We found this TikTok account of Erin’s through Senna’s,” she says.

“What do you mean, through Senna’s?” Quinn asks grumpily.

“Senna’s account is active. She last posted about two weeks ago and we can see she was last active at eight o’clock on Wednesday the first of May.”

“So—the night of the fire?”

“Correct,” Stephanie says. “We went through the list of accounts that she’s following, and we came across this one by Erin. I wanted to know if you were aware of it at all?”

Quinn and Clem share empty looks. “No,” Clem says, her heart sinking. “To be honest, I know very little about TikTok.”

Stephanie opens an app on her iPad and brings up a screen of paused video clips, most of them showing Erin’s face, her hair in various colors as time passes. Some of them show Freya, too.

Stephanie clicks on one of the thumbnails, and Erin’s face fills the screen. She looks sullen, her eyes heavy and darkened with smeared mascara.

Erin lays out a deck of tarot cards in her bedroom. The room is dark, with a row of candles flickering on a chest of drawers in the background as Erin sits cross-legged on the floor. Her blonde hair is shoulder length, and she wears a vest top, revealing a new tattoo of a raven on her shoulder beneath the words Second Skin . From the hair and the tattoo, Clem pinpoints the video to be from five months ago. A song is overlaid on the clip of Erin selecting her tarot cards, and she looks happy, showing four cards laid out in a cross: the Ace of Swords, the Lovers, the Two of Cups, the Devil. Finally, she leans close into the lens and says, “The Green Man’s hands must be bound.”

Stephanie hits pause and looks at Clem, who tries not to show her reaction to the clip.

“What do you make of that?” Stephanie asks.

“What do we make of what?” Quinn interjects. “I’m not into tarot, personally.”

“Arlo’s hands were bound before he was burned,” Stephanie says, and Clem tries not to show the sudden fear that leaps up inside her. “It seems coincidental that she would say this in the video here.”

“Oh, come on,” Quinn says. “I think that’s quite a stretch.”

Clem’s breath catches. She thinks of Erin’s notebook. It can’t be coincidental at all, she knows that.

“We looked into the Green Man reference,” Stephanie says. “It turns out he’s a mythological figure from Beltane. Do you know what that is?”

“Is it a place?” Clem asks.

“No, it’s a pagan festival,” Stephanie says.

“A festival of what?” Quinn asks.

“It marks the beginning of summer. It celebrates fertility. The Green Man typically represents the new growth on earth. He’s a figure associated with that festival. Usually there’s both a Green Man and a May Queen. It occurs on the first of May, which, interestingly, is the day of the accident.”

She lets that hang in the air. Clem keeps her eyes on the table.

Stephanie clicks on another thumbnail. “This is the last TikTok she posted,” she tells them, and Clem sees that Erin has pink hair in this footage, the date stamp reading twenty-first of January this year.

Again, the footage shows Clem’s face up close, the bars of Freya’s cot just visible in the background. “I think I know what to do about my problem,” she says. “But I have to wait until Beltane. It involves a fire ceremony.” She crosses her fingers in front of the lens. “Here’s hoping.”

Stephanie presses pause and smiles. “Can I ask you what you make of that?” she asks.

“What is it you’re accusing Erin of, exactly?” Quinn says in a hard voice. “I mean, I appreciate it’s a coincidence that she mentions a fire ceremony, and then there was a fire, but…”

“It indicates that there was some sort of plan,” Stephanie says gently. “Beltane is mentioned, and that’s exactly the day of the fire, the first of May. We think they were performing a ritual, a fire ceremony, just like she mentions in the video. And it got out of hand.”

“Even if they were performing a fire ceremony,” Clem says. “It sounds like an accident to me.”

“The fire, yes,” Stephanie says. “But…it doesn’t explain why Senna is missing.”

“I think it’s easy to take things out of context,” Clem says. “Maybe they were performing a fire ceremony. But I think there are other things we need to consider before we connect this to Senna’s disappearance.”

“Yeah,” Quinn says. “Like Senna’s TikToks. What do they say?”

Stephanie clicks through to Senna’s account, where Clem spies a split screen video, called a “duet.” It features both Erin and Senna, laughing and chatting about something.

“This is not a recruitment video.” Senna is laughing.

“Guys, the Triskele are the best, okay?” Erin adds. “I want to talk about them, seeing as I’m officially a member.”

“You want to talk about the scholarship?” Senna interjects.

“Well, first I’ll talk about who the Triskele are, and what it means to be a member, okay?”

“I think this might need to be a number of clips,” Senna laughs.

“The Triskele is a special group of people,” Erin continues. “The absolute best. They believe that we’re all connected to nature, and that nature is basically magic. And we’ve all got so bloody consumerized that we’ve lost that connection, but once we get it back we realize there is nothing that we can’t do.”

“Okay,” Stephanie says, hitting pause. “That’s the first mention, there’s another one.” She flicks through to another clip from February. Just three months ago. Another close-up of Erin, chipped blue nail polish, no makeup, walking along the street. Clem can tell Senna is filming Erin as she’s heading to her job at the café.

“I got amazing help from Paul,” Erin says to the camera, animated. “Seriously, he has been the best in helping me out. It involves a fire ceremony. He told me the spell I need to do in Orkney to get rid of it.”

Stephanie pauses the clip and looks over at them both. “Who is Paul?” she asks. “And why do you think Erin joined a pagan cult?”