Pip stepped closer, into the yellow glow of the lamplight. She took a quieting breath, trying to think over the screeching that filled her head. She screwed her eyes and studied the face before her.
Now that she was closer, she could see the obvious differences, the slight differing slope to her plump lips, the downturn to her eyes where they should flick up, the swell of her cheekbones lower than they should be. Changes that time couldn’t make to a face.
Pip had looked at the photographs so many times these past months, she knew every line and groove of Andie Bell’s face.
This wasn’t her.
Pip felt unattached to the world, floating away, empty of all sense.
‘You’re not Andie,’ she said quietly, just as the policeman climbed up the ladder behind and placed a hand on her shoulder.
The wind was screaming in the trees and 42 Mill End Road was lit up
with flashes of blue, rippling in and out of darkness. Four police cars in a broken square filled the drive now, and Pip had just seen DI Richard Hawkins – in the same black coat he’d worn in all those press conferences five years ago – step into the house.
Pip stopped listening to the policewoman taking her statement. She heard her words only as a rockslide of falling syllables. She concentrated on breathing in the fresh and whistling air and that’s when they brought Elliot out. Two officers on either side, his hands cuffed behind. He was weeping, the blue lights blinking on his wet face. The wounded sounds he made woke some ancient, instinctive fear inside her. This was a man who knew his life was finished. Had he really believed the girl in his loft was Andie? Had he clung to that belief this whole time? They ducked Elliot’s head for him, put him in a car and took him away. Pip watched it go until the tunnel of trees swallowed all the car’s edges.
As she finished dictating her contact number to the officer she heard a car door slamming behind her.
‘Pip!’ The wind carried Ravi’s voice to her.
She felt the pull in her chest and then she was running after it. At the top of the driveway she ran into him and Ravi caught her, his arms tight as they anchored themselves together against the wind.
‘Are you OK?’ he said, holding her back to look at her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Me?’ He tapped his chest. ‘When you didn’t turn up at mine, I looked for you on Find My Friends. Why did you come here alone?’ He eyed the police cars and officers behind her.
‘I had to come,’ she said. ‘I had to ask him why. I didn’t know how much longer you’d have to wait for the truth if I didn’t.’
Her mouth opened once, twice, three times before the words found their way, and then she told Ravi everything. She told him how his brother had died, standing under shivering trees, blue light undulating all around them.
She said she was sorry when the tears broke down Ravi’s face, because that’s all there was to say; a blanket stitch sent to mend a crater.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said with a half-laugh, half-cry. ‘Nothing can bring him back, I know that. But we have, in a way. Sal was murdered, Sal was innocent, and now everyone will know.’
They turned to watch as DI Richard Hawkins walked the girl out of the house, a lilac blanket wrapped round her shoulders.
‘It’s really not her, is it?’ Ravi said. ‘She looks a lot like her,’ said Pip.
The girl’s eyes were wide and spinning and free as she looked around at everything, relearning what outside was. Hawkins led her to a car and climbed in beside her as two uniformed officers got in the front.
Pip didn’t know how Elliot had come to believe this girl he found on the side of the road was Andie. Was it delusion? Did he need to believe Andie hadn’t died as some kind of atonement for what he did to Sal in her name?
Or was it fear that blinded him?
That’s what Ravi thought: that Elliot was terrified Andie Bell was alive and would come back home and then he’d go down for Sal’s murder. And in that heightened state of fear, all it took was a blonde girl who looked similar enough to convince himself he’d found Andie. And he’d locked her up, so he could lock up that terrible fear of being caught right along with her.
Pip nodded in agreement, watching the police car drive away. ‘I think,’
she said quietly, ‘I think she was just a girl with the wrong hair and the wrong face when the wrong man drove past.’
And that other itching question that Pip couldn’t yet give voice to: what had happened to the real Andie Bell after she’d left the Wards’ house that night?
The officer who’d taken her statement approached them with a warm smile. ‘Do you need someone to take you home, darling?’ she asked Pip.
‘No, it’s OK,’ she said, ‘I have my car.’
She made Ravi get in the car with her; there was no way she’d let him drive home on his own – he was shaking too hard. And, secretly, she didn’t want to be alone either.
Pip turned the key in the ignition, catching sight of her face in the rear-view mirror before the lights dimmed. She looked gaunt and grey, her eyes glowing inside sunken shadows. She was tired. So unutterably tired.
‘I can finally tell my parents,’ Ravi said when they were back on the main road out of Wendover. ‘I don’t know how to even start.’
Her headlights lit up the Welcome to Little Kilton sign, the letters thickening with side shadows as they moved past and crossed into town. Pip drove down the high street, heading towards Ravi’s house. She drew to a stop at the main roundabout. There was a car waiting on the cusp of the roundabout at the other side, its headlights a bright and piercing white. It was their right of way.
‘Why aren’t they moving?’ Pip said, staring at the dark boxy car ahead, lines of yellow light across its body from the street lamp above.
‘Don’t know,’ Ravi said. ‘You just go.’
She did, pulling forward slowly across the roundabout. The other car had still not moved. As they drew closer and out of the glare of the oncoming headlights, Pip’s foot eased up on the pedal as she looked curiously out of her window.
‘Oh shit,’ Ravi said.
It was the Bell family. All three of them. Jason was in the driver seat, his face red and striped with tear trails. It looked like he was shouting, smacking his hand against the steering wheel, his mouth moving with angry words.
Dawn Bell was beside him, shrinking away. She was crying, her body heaving as she tried to breathe through the tears, her mouth bared in confused agony.
Their cars drew level and Pip saw Becca in the back seat on this side.
Her face was pale, pushed up against the cold touch of the window. Her lips were parted and her brows furrowed, her eyes lost in some other place as she stared quietly ahead.
And as they passed Becca’s eyes snapped into life, landing on Pip. There was a flicker of recognition in them. And something heavy and urgent, something like dread.
They drove away down the street and Ravi let out his held breath. ‘You think they’ve been told?’ he said
‘Looks like they just have,’ said Pip. ‘The girl kept saying her name was Andie Bell. Maybe they have to go and formally identify that she isn’t.’
She looked into her rear-view mirror and watched as the Bells’ car finally rolled away across the roundabout, towards the snatched promise of a daughter returned.
