‘Why?’ Pip said again when Naomi had stared wordlessly down at her feet long enough.
‘Someone made us,’ she sniffed. ‘Someone made us do it.’ ‘What do you mean?’
‘We – me, Max, Jake and Millie – we all got a text on that Monday night.
From an unrecognized number. It told us we had to delete every picture of Sal taken on the night Andie disappeared and to upload the rest as normal. It told us that at school on Tuesday we had to ask the head teacher to call in the police so we could make a statement. And we had to tell them that Sal actually left Max’s at half ten and that he’d asked us to lie before.’
‘But why would you do that?’ asked Pip.
‘Because –’ Naomi’s face cracked as she tried to hold back her sobs – ‘because they knew something about us. About something bad we’d done.’
She couldn’t hold them back anymore. She slapped her hands to her face and bawled into them, the cries strangled against her fingers. Cara jumped up from her seat and ran over, wrapping her arms round her sister’s waist.
She looked over at Pip as she held the quaking Naomi, her face pale with the touch of fear.
‘Max?’ Pip said.
Max cleared his throat, his eyes down on his fiddling hands. ‘We, um . . .
something happened on New Year’s Eve 2011. Something bad, something we did.’
‘We?’ Naomi spluttered. ‘We, Max? It all happened because of you. You got us into it and you’re the one who made us leave him there.’
‘You’re lying. We all agreed at the time,’ he said. ‘I was in shock. I was scared.’
‘Naomi?’ Pip said.
‘We . . . um, we went out to that crappy little club in Amersham,’ she said. ‘The Imperial Vault?’
‘Yeah. And we had all had a lot to drink. And when the club closed it was impossible to get a taxi; we were like seventieth in the queue and it was freezing outside. So Max, who’d driven us all there, he said that actually he hadn’t drunk that much and was OK to drive. And he convinced me, Millie and Jake to get in the car with him. It was so stupid. Oh god, if I could go back and change one thing in my life, it would be that moment . . .’ She trailed off.
‘Sal wasn’t there?’ Pip asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wish he had been because he’d never have let us be that stupid. He was with his brother that night. So Max, who was just as drunk as the rest of us, he was driving too fast up the A413. It was like four o’ clock and there were no other cars on the road. And then –’ the tears came again –
‘and then . . .’
‘This man comes out of nowhere,’ Max said.
‘No, he didn’t. He was standing well back on the shoulder, Max. I remember you losing control of the car.’
‘Well, then we remember very differently,’ Max snapped defensively.
‘We hit him and spun. When we came to a stop I pulled off the road and we went to see what had happened.’
‘Oh god, there was so much blood,’ Naomi cried. ‘And his legs were bent out all wrong.’
‘He looked dead, OK?’ Max said. ‘We checked to see if he was breathing and we thought he wasn’t. We decided it was too late for him, too late to call an ambulance. And because we’d all been drinking, we knew how much trouble we’d be in. Criminal charges, prison. So we all agreed and we left.’
‘Max made us,’ Naomi said. ‘You got inside our heads and scared us into agreeing, because you knew you were the one really in trouble.’
‘We all agreed, Naomi, all four of us,’ Max shouted, a red flush creeping to the surface of his face. ‘We drove back to mine ’cause my parents were in Dubai. We cleaned off the car and then crashed it again into the tree just before my driveway. My parents never suspected a thing and got me a new one a few weeks later.’
Cara was now crying too, wiping the tears before Naomi could see them.
‘Did the man die?’ Pip said.
Naomi shook her head. ‘He was in a coma for a few weeks, but he pulled through. But . . . but . . .’ Naomi’s face creased in agony. ‘He’s paraplegic.
He’s in a wheelchair. We did that to him. We should never have left him.’ They all listened as Naomi cried, struggling to suck in air between the tears. ‘Somehow,’ Max eventually said, ‘someone knew what we had done.
They said that if we didn’t do everything they asked, they would tell the police what we did to that man. So we did it. We deleted the pictures and we lied to the police.’
‘But how could someone have found out about your hit-and-run?’ said Pip. ‘We don’t know,’ Naomi said. ‘We all swore to never tell anyone, ever.
And I never did.’
‘Me neither,’ Max said.
Naomi looked over at him with a weepy scoff. ‘What?’ he stared back at her.
‘Me, Jake and Millie have always thought you were the one who let it slip.’
‘Oh, really?’ he spat.
‘Well, you’re the one who used to get completely plastered almost every night.’
‘I never told anyone,’ he said, turning back to Pip now. ‘I have no idea how someone found out.’
‘There’s a pattern of you letting things slip,’ said Pip. ‘Naomi, Max accidentally told me you were M.I.A. for a while the night Andie disappeared. Where were you? I want the truth.’
‘I was with Sal,’ she said. ‘He wanted to talk to me upstairs, alone.
About Andie. He was angry at her about something she’d done; he wouldn’t say what. He told me she was a different person when it was just the two of them, but he could no longer ignore the way she treated other people. He decided that night that he was going to end things with her. And he seemed .
. . almost relieved after he came to that decision.’
‘So let’s be clear,’ Pip said. ‘Sal was with you all at Max’s until twelve fifteen the night Andie disappeared. On the Monday, someone threatens you to go to the police and say he left at ten thirty and to delete all trace of him from that night. The next day Sal disappears and is found dead in the woods.
You know what this means, don’t you?’
Max looked down, picking at the skin around his thumbs. Naomi covered her face again.
‘Sal was innocent.’
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Max said.
‘Sal was innocent. Someone killed Andie and then they killed Sal, after making sure he’d look guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Your best friend was innocent, and you’ve all known it for five years.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Naomi wept. ‘I’m so, so sorry. We didn’t know what else to do. We were in too deep. We never thought that Sal would end up dead. We thought if we just played along, the police would catch whoever had hurt Andie, Sal would be cleared and we’d all be OK. We told ourselves it was just a small lie at the time. But we know now what we did.’
‘Sal died because of your small lie.’ Pip’s stomach twisted with a rage quieted with sadness.
‘We don’t know that,’ Max said. ‘Sal might still have been involved in what happened to Andie.’
‘He didn’t have time to be,’ said Pip.
‘What are you going to do with the photo?’ he said quietly.
Pip looked over at Naomi, her red puffy face etched with pain. Cara was holding her hand, staring at Pip, tears trickling down her cheeks.
‘Max,’ Pip said. ‘Did you kill Andie?’
‘What?’ He stood up, scraping the messy hair out of his face. ‘No, I was at my house the whole night.’
‘You could have left when Naomi and Millie went to bed.’ ‘Well, I didn’t, OK?’
‘Do you know what happened to Andie?’ ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Pip,’ Cara spoke up now. ‘Please don’t go to the police with that photo.
Please. I can’t have my sister taken away as well as Mum.’ Her bottom lip trembled and she scrunched her face, trying to hold back the sobs. Naomi wrapped her arms round her.
Pip’s throat ached with a helpless, hollow feeling, watching them both in so much pain. What should she do? What could she do? She didn’t know whether the police would take this photo seriously anyway. But if they did, Cara would be left all alone and it would be Pip’s fault. She couldn’t do that to her. But what about Ravi? Sal was innocent and there was no question of her abandoning him now. There was only one way through this, she realized.
‘I won’t go to the police,’ she said.
Max heaved a sigh and Pip eyed him, disgusted, as he tried to hide a faint smile crossing his mouth.
‘Not for you, Max,’ she said. ‘For Naomi. And everything your mistakes have done to her. I doubt the guilt has played much on your mind, but I hope you pay in some way.’
‘They’re my mistakes too,’ Naomi said quietly. ‘I did this too.’
Cara walked over to Pip and hugged her from the side, tears soaking into her jumper.
Max left then, without another word. He packed up his laptop and notes, swung his bag on his shoulder and took off towards the front door.
The kitchen was silent as Cara went to splash her face in the sink and filled up a glass of water for her sister. Naomi was the first to break the silence.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Pip said. ‘I know you are. I won’t go to the police with the photo. It would be far easier, but I don’t need Sal’s alibi to prove his innocence. I’ll find another way.’
‘What do you mean?’ Naomi sniffed.
‘You’re asking me to cover for you and what you did. And I will. But I will not cover up the truth about Sal.’ She swallowed and it grated all the way down her tight and scratchy throat. ‘I’m going to find who really did all this, the person who killed Andie and Sal. That’s the only way to clear Sal’s name and protect you at the same time.’
Naomi hugged her, burying her tear-stained face in Pip’s shoulder.
‘Please do,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s innocent and it’s killed me every day since.’
She stroked Naomi’s hair and looked over at Cara, her best friend, her sister. Pip’s shoulders slumped as a weight settled there. The world felt heavier than it had ever been before.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi EPQ 16/10/2017
Production Log – Entry 31 He’s innocent.
All day at school those two words have ticker-taped around my head. This project is no longer the hopeful conjecture it started life as. It’s no longer me indulging my gut instinct because Sal was kind to me when I was small and hurting. It’s no longer Ravi hoping against hope that he really knew the brother he loved. It’s real, no shred of maybe/possibly/allegedly left. Sal Singh did not kill Andie Bell. And he did not kill himself.
An innocent life was taken and everyone in this town turned it ugly in their mouths, turned him into a villain. But if a villain can be made, then they can be unmade. Two teenagers were murdered in Little Kilton five and a half years ago. And we hold the clues to finding the killer: me and Ravi and this ever-expanding Word document.
I went to meet Ravi after school – I’ve only just got home. We went to the park and talked for over three hours, well into darkness. He was angry when I told him why Sal’s alibi had been taken away. A quiet kind of angry. He said it wasn’t fair that Naomi and Max Hastings got to walk away from everything without punishment when Sal, who never hurt anyone, was killed and framed as a murderer. Of course it’s not fair; nothing about any of this is fair. But Naomi never meant to hurt Sal, it’s clear from her face, clear from the way she’s tiptoed through life since. She acted out of fear and I can understand that. Ravi does too, though he’s not sure he can forgive her.
His face fell when I said I didn’t know whether the photo was enough for the police to reopen the case; I’d bluffed to get Max and Naomi to talk. The police might think I doctored the image and refuse to apply for a warrant to check Max’s profile. He’s deleted the photo already, of course. Ravi thinks I’d have more credibility with the police than him, but I’m not so sure; a teenage girl rabbiting on about photo angles and tiny white numbers on a phone screen, especially when the evidence against Sal is so solid.
Not to mention Daniel da Silva on the force, shutting me down.
And the other thing: it took Ravi a long time to understand why I wanted to protect Naomi. I explained that they are family, that Cara and Naomi are both sisters to me and though Naomi may have played her part in what happened, Cara is innocent. It would kill me to do this to her, to make her lose her sister after her mum too. I promised Ravi that this wouldn’t be a setback, that we don’t need Sal to have an alibi to prove his innocence; we just have to find the real killer. So we came to a deal: we are giving ourselves three more weeks. Three weeks to find the killer or solid evidence against a suspect. And if we have nothing after that deadline, Ravi and I will take the photo to the police, see if they’ll even take it seriously.
So that’s it. I have just three weeks now to find the killer or Naomi’s and Cara’s lives get blown apart. Was it wrong of me to ask Ravi to do this, to wait when he’s waited so long already? I’m torn, between the Wards and the Singhs and what’s right. I don’t even know what’s right any more – everything is so muddied. I’m not sure I’m the good girl I once thought I was. I’ve lost her along the way.
But there’s no time to waste thinking about it. So from the persons of interest list, we now have five suspects. I’ve taken Naomi off the list. My reasons for suspecting her have now been explained away: the M.I.A. thing and her being so awkward when answering questions about Sal.
 |
 |
 |
 |
A
spider
diagram
recap
on
all
the suspects:
Along with the note and text I received, I now have another lead straight to the killer: the fact that they knew about the hit-and-run. First up and most obviously, Max knew about it because he was the one who did it. He could have pretended to threaten himself along with his other friends so he could pin Andie’s murder on Sal.
But, as Naomi said, Max has always partied a lot. Drinking and taking drugs. He could have let slip about the hit-and-run to someone while in that state. Someone he knew, like Nat da Silva or Howie Bowers. Or maybe even Andie Bell who then, in turn, could have told any of the names above. Daniel da Silva was a working policeman who responded to traffic accidents; maybe he put two and two together? Or could one of them have been on the same road that night and watched it all happen? It’s feasible then that
any of the five could have learned about the accident and used it to their advantage. But Max remains the strongest option in that respect.
I know Max technically has an alibi for the majority of the Andie disappearance window but I do not trust him . He could have left when Naomi and Millie went to bed. As long as he intercepted Andie before 12:45, when she was expected to pick her parents up, it’s still possible. Or maybe he went to help finish something that Howie started? He said he didn’t leave his house but I don’t trust his answers. I think he called my bluff. I think he knew it was so unlikely I would turn Naomi in to the police, so he didn’t have to be honest with me. I’m in a bit of a Catch 22 here: I can’t protect Naomi without simultaneously protecting Max too.
The other lead this new information gives me is that the killer somehow had access to the phone numbers of Max, Naomi, Millie and Jake (as well as mine). But again, this doesn’t really narrow it down. Max obviously had them and Howie could have had access that way. Nat da Silva probably had all their numbers, especially as she was good friends with Naomi; Daniel
could have got them through her. Jason Bell may seem like the black sheep in this matter, BUT if he did kill Andie and had her phone, she probably had each of their numbers saved on it.
Agh. I haven’t narrowed anything down and I’m running out of time. I need to pursue every open lead, find the loose threads that, when pulled, can unravel this writhing and confusing ball of string. AND finish my bloody Margaret Atwood essay!!!
