The sunlight followed them inside, cracking into the tiled hallway in a long, glowing strip. As they stepped over the threshold, their shadows carved through the beam of light, both of them together as one stretched silhouette, with two heads and a tangle of moving arms and legs.
Ravi closed the door and they walked slowly down the hallway. Pip couldn’t help but tiptoe, even though she knew no one was home. She’d seen this house many times before, pictured at different angles with police in black and high-vis swarming outside. But that was always outside. All she’d ever seen of the inside were snippets when the front door was open and a press photographer clicked the moment into forever.
The border between outside and in felt significant here.
She could tell Ravi felt it too, the way he held his breath. There was a heaviness to the air in here. Secrets captured in the silence, floating around
like invisible motes of dust. Pip didn’t even want to think too loudly, in case she disturbed it. This quiet place, the place where Andie Bell was last seen alive when she was only a few months older than Pip. The house itself was part of the mystery, part of Kilton’s history.
They moved towards the stairs, glancing into the plush living room on the right and the huge vintage-style kitchen on the left, fitted with duck-egg blue cabinets and a large wood-top island.
And then they heard it. A small thump upstairs.
Pip froze and Ravi grabbed her gloved hand with his. Another thump, closer this time, just above their heads. Pip looked back at the door; could they make it in time?
The thumps became a sound of frantic jingling and a few seconds later a black cat appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Holy crap,’ Ravi said, dropping his shoulders and her hand, his relief like an actual blast of air rippling through the quiet.
Pip sniffed a hollow, anxious laugh, her hands starting to sweat inside the rubber. The cat bounded down the stairs, stopping halfway to meow in their direction. Pip, born and raised a dog person, wasn’t sure how to react.
‘Hi, cat,’ she whispered as it padded down the rest of the stairs and slinked over to her. It rubbed its face on her shins, curling in and out of her legs.
‘Pip, I don’t like cats,’ Ravi said uneasily, watching with disgust as the cat started to press its fur-topped skull into his ankles. Pip bent down and patted the cat lightly with her rubber-gloved hand. It came back over to her and started to purr.
‘Come on,’ she said to Ravi.
Unwinding her legs from the cat, Pip headed for the stairs. As she took them, Ravi following behind, the cat meowed and raced after them, darting
round his legs.
‘Pip . . .’ Ravi’s voice trailed nervously as he tried not to step on it. Pip shooed the cat and it trotted back downstairs and into the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ he added unconvincingly.
Gloved hand on the banister, she climbed the rest of the stairs, almost knocking off a notebook and a USB stick that were balanced on the post at the very top. Strange place to keep them.
When they were both upstairs, Pip studied the various doors that opened on to the landing. That back bedroom on the right couldn’t be Andie’s; the floral bedspread was ruffled and slept in, paired socks on the chair in the corner. Nor could it be the bedroom at the front where a dressing gown was strewn on the floor and a glass of water on a bedside table.
Ravi was the first to notice. He tapped her gently on the arm and pointed. There was only one door up here that was closed. They crossed over to it. Pip grasped the gold handle and pushed open the door.
It was immediately obvious this was her room.
Everything felt staged and stagnant. Though it had all the props of a teenage girl’s bedroom – pinned-up photos of Andie standing between Emma and Chloe as they posed with their fingers in Vs, a picture of her and Sal with a candyfloss between them, an old brown teddy tucked into the bed with a fluffy hot-water bottle beside it, an overflowing make-up case on the desk – the room didn’t feel quite real. A place entombed in five years of grief.
Pip took a first step on to the plush cream carpet.
Her eyes flicked from the lilac walls to the white wooden furniture; everything clean and polished, the carpet showing recent vacuum tracks.
Dawn Bell must still clean her dead daughter’s room, preserving it as it had been when Andie left it for the final time. She didn’t have her daughter but she still had the place where she’d slept, where she’d woken, where she’d
dressed, where she’d screamed and shouted and slammed the door, where her mum whispered goodnight and turned off the light. Or so Pip imagined, reanimating the empty room with the life that might have been lived here.
This room, perpetually waiting for someone who was never coming back while the world ticked on outside its closed door.
She looked back at Ravi and, by the look on his face, she knew there was a room just like this in the Singhs’ house.
And though Pip had come to feel like she knew Andie, the one buried under all those secrets, this bedroom made Andie a real person to her for the first time. As she and Ravi crossed over to the wardrobe, Pip silently promised the room that she would find the truth. Not just for Sal, but for Andie too.
The truth that could very well be hidden right here. ‘Ready?’ Ravi whispered.
She nodded.
He opened the wardrobe on to a rack bulging with dresses and jumpers
on wooden hangers. At one end hung Andie’s old Kilton Grammar uniform, squashed against the wall by skirts and tops, no room to part even an inch of space between the clothes.
Struggling with the rubber gloves, Pip pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and swiped up to turn on the torch. She got down on her knees, Ravi beside her, and they crawled under the clothes, the torch lighting up the old floorboards inside. They started prodding the boards, tracing their fingers round the shape of them, trying to prise up their corners.
Ravi found it. It was the one against the back wall, on the left.
He pushed down one corner and the other side of the board kicked up.
Pip shuffled forward to pull up the floorboard, sliding it behind them. With her phone held up, Pip and Ravi leaned over to look inside the dark space
below. ‘No.’
She moved the torch down inside the small space to be absolutely sure, pivoting the light into each corner. It illuminated only layers of dust, gusting
out in whirlwinds now because of their picked-up breath. It was empty. No phone. No cash. No drug stash. Nothing. ‘It’s not here,’ Ravi said.
The disappointment was a physical sensation gouging through Pip’s gut, leaving a space for the fear to fill in.
‘I really thought it would be here,’ he said.
Pip had too. She thought the phone screen would light up the killer’s name for them and the police would do the rest. She thought she’d be safe from Unknown . It was supposed to be over, she thought, her throat constricting the way it did before she cried.
She slid the floorboard back in place and inched backwards out of the wardrobe after Ravi, her hair getting briefly tangled in the zip of a long dress. She stood, closed the doors and turned to him.
‘Where could the burner phone be then?’ he said.
‘Maybe Andie had it on her when she died,’ Pip said, ‘and now it’s buried with her or otherwise destroyed by the killer.’
‘Or,’ Ravi said, studying the items on Andie’s desk. ‘Or someone knew where it was hidden and they took it after her disappearance, knowing that it would lead the police to them if it was found.’
‘Or that,’ Pip agreed. ‘But that doesn’t help us now.’
She joined Ravi at the desk. On top of the make-up case was a paddle
hairbrush with long blonde hairs still wound round the bristles. Beside it, Pip spotted a Kilton Grammar academic planner for the year 2011/2012, almost identical to the one she owned for this year. Andie had decorated the title page of her planner under the plastic with doodled hearts and stars and small printouts of supermodels.
She flipped through some of the pages. The days were filled with scribbled homework and coursework assignments. November and December
had various university open days listed. The week before Christmas there was a note to herself to maybe get Sal a Christmas present. Dates and locations of calamity parties, school deadlines, people’s birthdays. And, strangely, random letters with times scribbled in next to them.
‘Hey.’ She held it up to show Ravi. ‘Look at these weird initials. What do you think they mean?’
Ravi stared for a moment, resting his jaw in his gardening-gloved hand. Then his eyes darkened as he tensed his brows. He said, ‘Do you remember
that thing Howie Bowers said to us? That he’d told Andie to use codes instead of names.’
‘Maybe these are her codes,’ Pip finished his sentence for him, tracing her rubber finger over the random letters. ‘We should document these.’
She laid the planner down and pulled out her phone again. Ravi helped her tug one of her gloves off and she thumbed on to the camera. Ravi skipped the pages back to February 2012 and Pip took pictures of each double page, as they flicked right through to that week in April just after the Easter holidays, where the last thing Andie had written on the Friday was: Start French revision notes soon. Eleven photos in all.
‘OK,’ Pip said, pocketing her phone and slipping back into the glove. ‘We –’
The front door slammed below them.
Ravi’s head snapped round, terror pooling in the pupils of his eyes.
Pip dropped the planner in its place. She nodded her head towards the wardrobe. ‘Get back in,’ she whispered.
She opened the doors and crawled inside, looking for Ravi. He was on
his knees now just outside the cupboard. Pip shuffled aside to give him space to crawl back in. But Ravi wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving?
Pip reached forward and grabbed him, pulling him into her against the back wall. Ravi snapped back into life then. He grasped the wardrobe doors and quietly swung them closed, shutting them inside.
They heard sharp-heeled steps in the hallway. Was it Dawn Bell, back from work already?
‘Hello, Monty.’ A voice carried through the house. It was Becca.
Pip felt Ravi shaking beside her, right through into her own bones. She took his hand, the rubber gloves squeaking as she held it.
They heard Becca on the stairs then, louder with each step, the jingling collar of the cat behind her.
‘Ah, that’s where I left them,’ she said, footsteps pausing on the landing. Pip squeezed Ravi’s hand, hoping he could feel how sorry she was.
Hoping he knew she would take the fall if she could. ‘Monty, have you been in here?’ Becca’s voice drew nearer. Ravi closed his eyes.
‘You know you’re not supposed to go in this room.’
Pip buried her face into his shoulder.
Becca was in the room with them now. They could hear her breathing, hear the ticking of her tongue as she moved it around her mouth. More steps, stifled by the thick carpet. And then the sound of Andie’s bedroom door clicking shut.
Becca’s words were muffled through it now as she called, ‘Bye, Monty.’
Ravi opened his eyes slowly, squeezing Pip’s hand back, his panicked breaths rippling through her hair.
The front door slammed again.
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Pippa Fitz-Amobi EPQ 09/10/2017 Production Log – Entry 25
Well, I thought I’d need about six coffees to keep me awake for the rest of the day. Turns out that close call with Becca more than did the trick. Ravi
still wasn’t quite himself by the time he had to leave for work. I can’t believe how close we came to getting caught. And the burner phone wasn’t there . . . but it might not all have been for nothing.
I emailed the photos of Andie’s planner to myself so I could see them bigger on my laptop screen. I’ve trawled through each one dozens of times and I think there are some things to pick up on here.
This is the week after the Easter holidays, the week Andie disappeared. There’s quite a lot to note on this page alone. I can’t ignore that Fat da Silva 0–3 Andie scorecard comment. This was just after Andie had posted the nude video of Nat online. And I know from Nat that she only returned to school on Wednesday 18th April and Andie called her a slut in the corridor, prompting the death threat stuffed in Andie’s locker.
But, judging this comment at face value, it seems Andie was gloating over three victories she’d had over Nat in her twisted high-school games. What if the topless video accounts for one of these goals and Andie blackmailing Nat to drop out of The Crucible was another? What was the third thing Andie did to Nat da Silva that she’s revelling in here? Could that have been what made Nat snap and turned her into a killer?
Another significant entry on that page is on Wednesday 18th April. Andie wrote: CP @ 7:30 .
If Ravi is right, and Andie is noting things down in code, I think I’ve just cracked this one. It’s so simple.
CP = car park. As in the train station car park. I think Andie was reminding herself that she had a meeting with Howie in the car park that evening. I know that she did , in fact, meet Howie that evening, because Sal wrote Howie’s number plate in his phone at 7:42 p.m. on the very same Wednesday.
There are many more instances of CP with an accompanying time in the photos we took. I think I can confidently say that these refer to Andie’s drug trades with Howie and that she was following Howie’s instruction to use codes, to keep her activities hidden from any prying eyes. But, as all
teenagers, she was prone to forgetting things (especially her schedule) so she wrote the meetings down on the one item she would have looked at once every lesson at least. The perfect memory prompt.
So now that I think I’ve cracked Andie’s code, there are some other initialized entries with times written in the planner.
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During this mid-March week, Andie wrote on Thursday the 15th : IV @ 8. This one I’m stumped on. If it follows the same code pattern, then IV = I . .
. V . . .
If, like CP, IV refers to a place, I have absolutely no idea what it is. There’s nowhere in Kilton I can think of with those initials. Or what if IV refers to somebody’s name? It only appears three times in the pages we photographed.
There’s a similar entry that appears much more frequently: HH @ 6. But on this March 17th entry, Andie has also written
‘before Calam’ underneath it. Calam presumably means Calamity Party. So maybe HH actually just means Howie’s House and Andie was picking up drugs to take to the party.
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An earlier spread in March caught my eye too. Those numbers scrawled in and scribbled out on the Thursday 8th March are a phone number. 11 digits starting with 07; it has to be. Thinking out loud here: why would Andie be writing down a phone number in her planner? Of course the planner would have been on her at most times, both in school and afterwards, just as mine is a permanent fixture in my bag. But if she was taking a new number, why not enter it straight into her phone? Unless, perhaps, she didn’t want to put that number into her actual phone. Maybe she wrote it down because she didn’t have her burner phone on her at the time and that’s where she wanted the number to go. Could this be Secret Older Guy’s number? Or maybe a new phone number for Howie?
Or a new client wanting to buy drugs from her? And after she entered it into her second phone, she must have scribbled over it to hide her tracks.
I’ve been staring at the scribble for a good half an hour. It looks to me like the first eight digits are: 07700900. It’s possible those last two numbers are a double 8 instead, but I think that’s just the way the scribble crosses them. And then, for the last three digits, it gets a bit tricky. The third final digit looks like a 7 or a 9, the way it seems to have a leg and a hooked line at the top. The next number I’m pretty confident is either a 7 or a 1, judging by that straight upward line. And then bringing up the rear is a number with a curve in it, so either a 6, a 0 or an 8.
This
leaves
us
with
twelve
possible combinations:
I’ve tried ringing the first column. I got the same robotic response to each call: I’m sorry, the number you have dialled has not been recognized. Please hang up and try again.
In the second column, I got through to an elderly woman up in Manchester, who’d never been to or even heard of Little Kilton. Another not recognized and a no longer in service. The third column racked up two not recognized and a generic phone provider voicemail. In the final three numbers, I got through to the voicemail for a boiler engineer called Garrett Smith with a thick Geordie accent, one no longer in service and a final straight to a generic voicemail.
Chasing this phone number is another dud. I can hardly make out those last three digits and the number is over five years old now and probably out of use. I’ll keep trying the numbers that went to generic voicemails, just in case anything comes of it. But I really need a) a proper night’s sleep and b) to finish my Cambridge application.
Persons of Interest Jason Bell Naomi Ward Secret Older Guy Nat da Silva Daniel da Silva Max Hastings Howie Bowers
Pippa Fitz-Amobi EPQ 11/10/2017 Production Log – Entry 26
Application to Cambridge sent off this morning. And school has registered me for the pre-interview ELAT exam on 2nd November for Cambridge English applicants. In my free periods today I started looking back through my literature essays to send into admissions. I like my Toni Morrison one, I’ll send that off. But nothing else is good enough. I need to write a new one, about Margaret Atwood, I think.
I should really be getting on with it now, but I’ve found myself dragged back into the world of Andie Bell, clicking on to my EPQ document when I should be starting a blank page. I’ve read over Andie’s planner so many times that I can almost recite her February-to-April schedule by heart.
One thing is abundantly clear: Andie Bell was a homework procrastinator.
Two other things are quite clear, leaning heavily on assumption: CP refers to Andie’s drug deal meetings with Howie at the station car park and HH refers to those at his house.
I still haven’t managed to work out IV at all. It appears only three times in total: on Thursday 15th March at 8p.m., Friday 23rd March at 9p.m. and Thursday the 29th March at 9p.m.
Unlike CPs or HHs, which jump around at all different times, IV is once at eight and twice at nine.
Ravi’s been working on this too. He just sent me an email with a list of possible people/places he thinks IV could refer to.
He’s spread the search further afield than Kilton, looking into neighbouring towns and villages as well. I should’ve thought to do that.
His list: Imperial Vault Nightclub in Amersham The Ivy House Hotel in Little Chalfont Ida Vaughan, aged ninety, lives in Chesham The Four Cafe in Wendover (IV = four in Roman numerals) OK, on to Google I go.
Imperial Vault’s website says that the club was opened in 2010. From its location on the map it looks like it’s just in the middle of nowhere, a concrete slab nightclub and car park amid a mass of green grass pixels. It has student nights every Wednesday and Friday and holds regular events like ‘Ladies’ Night’. The club is owned by a man called Rob Hewitt. It’s possible that Andie was going there to sell drugs. We could go and look into it, ask to speak to the owner.
The Ivy House Hotel doesn’t have its own website but it has a page on TripAdvisor, only two and a half stars. It’s a small family-run B&B with
four available rooms, right by Chalfont station. From the few pictures on the site it looks quaint and cosy, but it’s ‘right on a busy road and loud when you’re trying to sleep’ according to Carmel672 . And Trevor59 wasn’t happy with them at all; they’d double-booked his room and he’d had to find other accommodation. T9Jones said ‘the family were lovely’ but that the bathroom was ‘tired and filthy – with dirt tracked all round the tub.’ She’s even posted some pictures on her review to bolster her point.
CRAP.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I’ve been saying, oh my god, out loud for at least thirty seconds but it’s not enough; it needs to be typed as well. Oh My God.
And Ravi isn’t picking up his damn phone!
My fingers can’t keep up with my brain. T9Jones posted two close-up pictures of the bathtub at different angles. And then she has a long shot of the entire bathroom. Beside the bath is a huge full-length mirror on the wall; we can see T9Jones and the flash of her phone reflected in it. We can see the rest of the bathroom too, from its cream ceiling with circle spotlights down to its tiled floor. A red and white tiled floor.
I’ll eat my fluffy fox-head hat if I’m wrong, BUT I’m almost certain it is the very same tiled floor from a grainy printed photo pinned up behind a Reservoir Dogs poster in Max Hastings’ bedroom. Andie naked but for a small pair of black pants, pouting at a mirror, this mirror . . . in the Ivy House Hotel, Little Chalfont.
If I’m right, then Andie went to that hotel at least three times in the span of three weeks. Who was she there to meet? Max?
Secret Older Guy?
Looks like I’m going to Little Chalfont after school tomorrow.
