Chapter 13

Pembroke was starting to panic. So far he had followed Sophie around but now he was approaching crunch time. He had no plan to snatch her that did not depend on her reaction to being blackmailed with her own naked photos and videos. How would she react? How should he approach it? He told himself that it had worked on four girls so far, but the fourth, Rosemary, had probably set him up. Was that an unlucky aberration or where the first three lucky outliers?

He decided to first get a tracker on Sophie’s phone. This was relatively straightforward, but he could not rely on Luke, who needed to be above suspicion to Sophie. After a few evenings, Sophie was unlucky enough to respond to an online message asking her to sign up to a new app promising to show her where the exciting cool events would be in her area. She downloaded it out of curiosity, but could not then find it on her phone. Surprised, she checked again, then realised it must be a dud app, and forgot about it. Little did she know, Pembroke now had the capacity to track her, though it would drain her batter quickly so he knew to use it sparingly.

He mused when to pull the trigger, then decided to treat himself to another stalking session before wrecking her world and putting her on guard. He got the weekend train to her area, then tentatively turned on the tracker. She was in her tower block. What a boring girl, he thought. If only she knew that she only had a few more weeks at most to enjoy the outside world before forever being confined underground!

Pembroke sat in the same nearby café he had before, with a view of her block. He was engrossed in a newspaper when he heard a young female voice at the counter asking for a can of coke. He recognised it from the recorded webcams, it was Sophie! She was standing there, her back to him, in a pair of denim shorts up to her butt cheeks and a cropped red top. Her ginger red hair cascaded down to the small of her back. He quickly dipped his head down, and pulled up the newspaper pages to hide his face from her. He sensed her turning around and walking out, and he looked out the window at her cute bottom swaying as she walked back to her block.

‘Come on, do something Sophie’, he said to himself. If this was how she spent her life now then she really couldn’t complain later when she was locked up. Half an hour later, he re-checked her, and she was on the move. She was in a local park feeding ducks, she had a backpack on and seemed to be killing time. He took a few photos while keeping his distance, and then saw her move off to the main road where she got on a bus. He stayed where he was, and checked the tracker again later. She was now in central London near the river Thames in a tourist area. He hoped she would stay there, and got on the tube to travel to her location.

It was another hot day and several girls caught his eye as he walked around. He found her again, with her red hair being a great help, walking around a street off the river which was full of cafes. He followed her from behind; she was with a group of girls and some boys, and he got some more footage of her.

He heard laughter and giggling from the table, and watched Sophie interact with the others. She seemed a little shy and reactive, nervously glancing from person to person and when she talked she moved her hands about almost apologetically and did not make much eye contact. He filmed this as well, and thought he would make an excellent documentarian, his subject being shy young girls on the verge of being kidnapped.

The day was a lot less satisfying than he hoped, but he had proved to himself that the tracking app did work.

Pembroke had a full day planned the next day, Sunday, but when Sophie told Luke that evening that she and her friends were going swimming in an outdoor lido tomorrow, he scrambled to cancel everything to go back down to London. He managed to book a carer to look after his mother for the day, and set off the next morning to London again.

He had been exercising but was painfully aware his large gut and frame made him stand out. A cap and sunglasses offered some disguise in case Sophie saw him, though even if she did, he was just the creep from the bus, nothing illegal. He was more worried about being caught perving over teenagers sunbathing. He was therefore happy to see people of all ages there. His tracker told him Sophie was there, and it took him a while to see her. She was with friends, her social life was starting to take off it seemed.

Sophie herself was incredibly nervous of showing herself off in a bathing suit in front of her friends and some of the boys. She had carefully selected a blue swimsuit through which one could clearly see her rib cage, nipples and the crack of her ass. Pembroke took some camera footage both from his bag and a special camera pointing from his wrist watch. But for the most part, he avoided taking much footage, in view of the obvious dangers. Instead he enjoyed perving with his eyes over the pert bottoms of the girls as the water glistened off them.

He got in the water and swam some lengths, which was one of the few exercises he had enjoyed since resolving to lose weight. At one point, he found himself swimming a few metres away from Sophie, and using his goggles, swam underwater so that he could admire her body under the water. Seeing her in the wild like this was intoxicating.

He got out and took out a book to read close to Sophie’s group. There was a babble of girls still around the group, gossiping and laughing. “Look at her, she can’t swim!” squeaked one larger framed girl, in blonde hair and a pink swimsuit and wearing a sarong. It became obvious they were talking about Sophie. “Her hair is gonna be disgusting, that water is filthy, she doesn’t even wear a bathing cap!” The blonde girl seemed bitter and Pembroke realised she herself was not very willing to get in the water or show off her own body, which was nowhere near as hot as Sophie’s.

“Leave it out Emma, she’s all right, she’s just a bit quiet, there’s no need to bully her all the time,” a young Asian girl, wearing a sheer white bikini, spoke back.

So this was Emma, Pembroke mused. He looked ahead, following the conversation without looking in their direction, occasionally looking sideways through his dark glasses. He got his camera ready for when Sophie got out of the pool, capturing the divine movement she made as she pulled herself out, flicked the water out of her hair, and plucked the swimsuit out of the ass crack, before sauntering over to her group.

Pembroke was enjoying himself, but thought he should not linger long unless he was going to keep swimming. He got up to order a coffee at the nearby stall, when he was approached by the blonde girl, whom he guessed, must be Emma, the bully. “Here mister” she said, “could you lend me twenty quid for some cigarettes?”