No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

blog? And have you seen Max’s Facebook page?’

His heart sank. He had a fair idea what would be on there before he logged in. And sure enough, the trolls were going wild in the comments section of the blog. They had posted links to a Dropbox account on which a video had appeared of Bram singing the bothy ballad. And it had popped up on Max’s Facebook page too.

Bram had deleted all the previous troll comments from his blog and blocked those posters before his parents had seen them. He hastily deleted all the new ones, and then he woke Max, pulling the curtains open and setting his laptop down on the covers.

‘You need to take a look at these.’

Max half sat up in bed. His hair was sticking up around his face in a mad punk look, and he seemed unable to open his eyes. There was a sweaty, vinegary stench in the room.

Bram opened the window. ‘There are a whole lot of troll comments on your Facebook timeline. We need to get them deleted. That’s possible, isn’t it? Ideally we should block them too. Is that possible?’

‘Yeah, but they’ll just pop up again with new profiles.’

‘They’ll soon get tired of it.’ Bram sat down on the bed. ‘You need to do this now, Max. Oma and Opa have seen the comments and are pretty upset.’

That had him screwing his eyes open. Max loved his Dutch grandparents. He sat up properly and Bram gave him the laptop.

‘Look at this one,’ Max said, frowning at the screen. ‘Dad, look!’

Someone calling themselves William Wallace had posted a photo of Bram singing the bothy ballad to Max’s timeline, with the text:

Talk about cultural appropriation.

Cara Taylor had waded in:

What, so unless you can trace your Scottish ancestry back five generations you’re not allowed to sing a Scottish song? Talk about racism.

That had been a red rag to a bull, with half a dozen people commenting that it was fine as long as they did it respectfully, but Bram was just having a go. Bessie Brown – aka Red? – had posted:

The guy’s out of control.

‘Good of Cara to stick up for me,’ Bram said weakly.

‘I’ll get on to it,’ Max promised, his eyelids drooping again.

‘Okay, but see that you do. Don’t go back to sleep.’

Kirsty appeared an hour later, when Bram and Phoebe were sitting on the sofa together in the Room with a View designing a new mandala for the wall of the downstairs loo. Bram had photographed the writing ‘Stupid hippy shit’ and then painted over it, but it looked like it would need at least two more coats to obliterate that aggressive black marker pen.

Phoebe jumped up and ran at her. Kirsty stooped to her level, adjusting the collar of Phoebe’s shirt. ‘What are you two doing?’

‘We have to make a new mandala. Because the psychopath – Okay, okay, Dad,’ Phoebe pre-empted him. ‘I know: there is no psychopath.’

‘Well,’ said Bram, going over to them and tweaking Phoebe’s plait. ‘Do you really think one of the people at the party last night was a psychopath?’

Phoebe nodded. Damn. ‘I know Grandad thinks it was one of Max’s friends, but I don’t. It’s someone older.’

‘What makes you say that, kleintje?’

Phoebe frowned. ‘I don’t know. There’s just… too many things, and too horrible, for it to be just a kid.’ She grabbed Bram’s hand. ‘Don’t go outside today!’

‘We have to get water from the stream. But other than to do that, I won’t.’

‘What are the police doing to catch him?’

Good question. ‘How about I call Scott right now and ask him?’

Phoebe nodded vigorously. ‘Yes! Scott needs to make more of an effort, Dad.’

Scott didn’t answer, but called Bram back half an hour later, when he was heating stream water on the stove in four pans for a bath he and Kirsty planned to share.

He checked he was alone in the room. ‘Hi, Scott, thanks for calling back. I just wanted to let you know the latest. Trolls on Max’s Facebook page and my blog are mouthing off and linking to a video of me at the party. One or more of them must have been here last night, or at least know someone who was.’

‘You really think these trolls could be responsible for the incidents at Woodside?’

Bram sighed. ‘Who knows, but it’s a line of inquiry, isn’t it?’

‘Okay, I’ll take a look at the blog and Max’s Facebook. It might be possible to identify some of them with a bit of local knowledge, without going through the rigmarole of contacting Facebook’s Law Enforcement Response Team.’

‘Oh, uh, actually, we just deleted all the comments. And blocked the trolls.’

‘Well, not to worry – I’m sure they’ll be back. Let me know when more comments appear.’

When, Bram noted, not if. ‘Okay. And we’ve got two writing samples now, the “Your next” written in blood on the worktop and “Stupid hippy shit” across the mandala. You could get everyone who was here last night to provide writing samples and see if they match up.’

‘Scrawling in marker pen on a wall isn’t exactly a crime, Bram. And there’s nothing to suggest that whoever did that left the other message, and the heart in the risotto.’

‘So it’s just a coincidence?’

‘There were a lot of drunk people in the house last night. Any one of them might have scrawled on the wall without meaning it to be in any way threatening.’ Silence. Then: ‘In these situations, it’s very easy to become… not paranoid, but oversensitive. Having a go at those kids last night, when really you had no evidence that they’d done anything… Telling everyone to leave…’

‘Oh God, I know,’ said Bram. ‘I know I overreacted. The thing is, Scott, I’ve got this feeling that it’s all aimed at me. Not the family. Me personally. All the stuff online is about me. My suspicion is that it’s not a dozen or so different people, it’s one person with multiple online identities.’

‘Right…?’

‘“Fucking wee hipster arsewipe”… “Your next”… “Stupid hippy shit”… And