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Inhaltsangabe
“So clever and fresh with a wild and incredibly satisfying twist at the end.” —Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author
A dinner party in a beautiful Notting Hill townhouse turns into a sinister game, as six old friends are forced to spill their darkest secrets . . . or else.
Six friends reunite in London to celebrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999 to help build a dating website based on psychological testing.
But what is meant to be a night of bittersweet nostalgia soon becomes a twisted and deadly game when the old friends are given an ultimatum: reveal their darkest secrets to the group or pick each other off one-by-one.
It soon becomes clear that their current predicament is related to their shared past. The love questionnaire they helped develop in 1999 for the dating site was also turned into a tool for weeding out psychopaths: The Wasp Trap. This and the other tragic events of that summer long ago may help reveal the truth behind a killer hiding in plain sight.
Alternating between the past and present, The Wasp Trap is a stingingly sharp thriller perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Riley Sager.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
MARK EDWARDS is the bestselling author and coauthor of over twenty books, including those he has written with Louise Voss, and his books have sold over five million copies. His latest thriller is The Wasp Trap. Originally from Hastings in East Sussex, Mark now lives in Wolverhampton, UK, with his wife, their children, two cats, and a golden retriever. Find out more at MarkEdwardsAuthor.com or follow him on Facebook and Instagram @markedwardsauthor.
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Prologue
July 1999
It was the last Friday in July and I was trying hard not to panic about the deadline when Lily made the suggestion that would change everything.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said, in that measured tone of hers. ‘I want to devise a test that will tell us if someone is a psychopath.’
There were only three of us left in the library: Lily, Sophie and me. The others had gone outside to smoke or get some air while we carried on working, though at least we were cool in that dark panelled room that the sun barely touched. The library was now a makeshift office. Antique tables and chairs with wobbly legs had been dragged in from other rooms, and cables snaked across the floorboards to connect the fruit-coloured iMacs that we’d been sitting in front of since first light.
We were spurred on by the date that was written on a whiteboard and propped on a shelf in the fiction section. The launch date, just four weeks away. The fiction section was apt because there was no way the site would be ready by then. But we kept hearing rumours that our rivals were going to beat us to the punch, that they would revolutionize online dating, not us. ‘No prize for second,’ Sebastian kept saying, and we could always tell when he’d been on the phone to his chief investor. He would march into the office, sweat gleaming on his creased brow, and demand to know exactly what we had achieved that day.
‘This is our revolution,’ he said to us many times. ‘We can’t let them take it from us.’
I could hear the professor upstairs in his study now, pacing from one end of the room to the other. I looked up. One of the dogs, sitting by my feet, lifted his head too.
‘I want to help him,’ Lily said, following my gaze towards the ceiling. And that was when she came up with her suggestion. A test to identify psychopaths, a subject I had been obsessed with over the past couple of weeks, since we’d been up there, in Sebastian’s study, searching through his papers and scouring the psychology periodicals that he still subscribed to. ‘We could ensure it was reliable, trustworthy, something he could use in his other work. What do you think? Will? Sophie?’
A test. Hadn’t we done enough of those this summer? I’d been tested before I even met the professor and since coming here, to his house, I’d spent hours in front of the computer, completing questionnaires, trying to figure out how much I agreed or disagreed with statements like I feel comfortable around strangers.
‘How would you go about it, Lily?’
That was Sophie. She was seated across from me, leaning forward with her elbows on her desk, her wavy black hair tumbling around her face; a face I found it hard not to stare at.
Lily smiled. ‘I haven’t quite figured that out yet. I’ll have to make sure it’s not easy to fool.’ I could almost hear the crackle of that remarkable brain, the firing of synapses, as she grabbed a pad and pen and began making notes. Sophie and I got up from our desks and peered over Lily’s shoulder. She scribbled fast: a flow chart, arrows and question marks. Beyond the library I could hear chatter and laughter.
My colleagues. After a month at the professor’s, I was still unsure how many of them I could call friends.
‘What do you think?’ Lily asked, when she’d finished making notes.
I picked up her notepad and tried to make sense of it. I quickly put it down again. It was like being a work-experience kid on the Manhattan Project.
‘Will?’
I chose my words carefully. ‘It sounds . . . interesting. And I want to help the professor too. But aren’t we busy enough? Everything we’re here to do. Our stock options. All of it. We’re already running out of time.’
She had the smile of a benevolent dictator. ‘It will be fine. I have the capacity, Will. I’ll base it on the same algorithm we’re using for the site. It’s just another form of psychometric testing, really. And if I can’t pull it off, we won’t have lost anything.’ A pause. ‘So? Shall we do it?’
I caught Sophie’s eye, thinking about another test we’d taken and the results it had spat out, and I wondered if that would ever lead to anything or if work and pressure would get in our way. We still had so many problems that needed fixing. Words that had to be written and polished. Bugs squashed.
I was about to tell Lily we were too busy, that it would be too difficult. A test to catch a psychopath? I had faith in her genius, but did she really have time? And could she really create a test that a psychopath wouldn’t be able to fool?
But as I opened my mouth to put forward my argument, Sophie said, ‘I’m in. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Surely you do too, Will?’
They both turned to me and I swallowed my words.
I simply couldn’t say no to them.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said, and both Sophie and Lily clapped their hands.
‘What’s all the excitement about?’
Georgina came into the room, followed by the others, smelling of cigarettes and sunshine, the spaniel rousing himself and running over to greet them, tail a happy blur. Once everyone was inside, Lily began to tell them about her idea, explaining that we would all need to take part, volunteer to be tested, just as we’d acted as guinea pigs for the dating site.
As they listened to her, the ceiling creaked again. Sebastian, still up there, pacing.
I looked over at my colleagues. Sebastian’s six hires and the other two, spending all our time together, sunrise to sunset and sunset to dawn.
No one had protested, not then anyway, although there were one or two frowns of doubt, signs of disquiet that would come out later. At that point, though, there were no arguments, and I knew that, at some point in the coming weeks, we would all risk exposing a darkness in ourselves. A difference.
I looked around again, as the conversation turned towards the evening, to plans, to beer and wine and a dip in the lake. The genius. The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally, me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down.
If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.
Part One
Chapter 1
February 2024
Of course Georgina and Theo lived in an enormous house. Out of all of us, they were the ones who had always been the most likely to achieve success. As individuals, each would have made something of themself, I had no doubt of that. But as a couple? They were unstoppable.
Still, even after the invitation had landed on my doormat and I’d checked the address on Google Maps, I hadn’t expected the Howard residence to be quite so impressive. It was a Georgian townhouse, four storeys plus a basement, the last one on a row of imposing terraces in Notting Hill. The house to its left was covered with scaffolding that appeared to have been there some time, green netting flapping in the wind. Next door to the right, set just a little way apart from the row of terraces, was a grand detached house that seemed empty too, its windows dark, the wrought-iron gate secured with a chain and padlock. Between these two unwelcoming buildings the Howards’ home stood even prouder and taller, its front windows illuminated, the white paintwork immaculate, a family home that happened to belong to two people I had once known but hadn’t seen for over twenty years.
It had taken a death to bring us back...
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