The next day, Pip was doing one final read-through of her information request to the Thames Valley Police. Her room was sweltering and stagnant, the sun trapped and sulking in there with her, even though she’d pushed open the window to let it out.
She heard distant knocking downstairs as she verbally approved her own email, ‘Yep, good,’ and pressed the send button; the small click that began her twenty-working-day wait. Pip hated waiting. And it was a Saturday, so she had to wait for the wait to begin.
‘Pips,’ came Victor’s shout from downstairs. ‘Front door for you.’
With each step down the stairs, the air became a little fresher; from her bedroom’s first-ring-of-hell heat into quite bearable warmth. She took the turn after the stairs as a sock-skid across the oak but stopped in her tracks when she saw Ravi Singh outside the front door. He was being talked at enthusiastically by her dad. All the heat returned to her face.
‘Um, hi,’ Pip said, walking towards them. But the fast tap-tap of claws on wood grew behind her as Barney barged past and got there first, launching his muzzle into Ravi’s groin.
‘No, Barney, down,’ Pip shouted, rushing forward. ‘Sorry, he’s a bit friendly.’
‘That’s no way to talk about your father,’ said Victor. Pip raised her eyebrows at him.
‘Got it, got it, got it,’ he said, walking away and into the kitchen.
Ravi bent down to stroke Barney, and Pip’s ankles were fanned with the dog-tail breeze.
‘How do you know where I live?’ Pip asked.
‘I asked in the estate agents your mum works in,’ he straightened up.
‘Seriously, your house is a palace.’
‘Well, the strange man who opened the door to you is a hot-shot corporate lawyer.’
‘Not a king?’
‘Only some days,’ she said.
Pip noticed Ravi looking down and, though his lips twitched trying to contain it, he broke into a big smile. That’s when she remembered what she was wearing: baggy denim dungarees over a white T-shirt with the words TALK NERDY TO ME emblazoned across her chest.
‘So, um, what brings you here?’ she said. Her stomach lurched, and only then did she realize she was nervous.
‘I . . . I’m here because . . . I wanted to say sorry.’ He looked at her with his big downturned eyes, his brows bunching over them. ‘I got angry and said some things I shouldn’t have. I don’t really think you’re just some kid.
Sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ Pip said, ‘I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to step in and fight your battles for you. I just wanted to help, just wanted her to know that what she did wasn’t OK. But sometimes my mouth starts saying words without checking them with my brain first.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘That arsehole comment was pretty inspired.’
‘You heard?’
‘Feisty Pip was pretty loud.’
‘I’ve been told other kinds of Pip are pretty loud too, school-quiz Pip and grammar-police Pip among them. So . . . are we OK?’
‘We’re OK.’ He smiled and looked down at the dog again. ‘Me and your
human are OK.’
‘I was actually just about to head out on a dog walk, do you want to come with?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, ruffling Barney’s ears. ‘How could I say no to that handsome face?’
Pip almost said, Oh please, you’ll make me blush, but she bit it back. ‘OK, I’ll just grab my shoes. Barney, stay.’
Pip scooted into the kitchen. The back door was open and she could see her parents pottering around the flowers and Josh, of course, playing with his football.
‘I’m taking Barns, see you in a bit,’ she called outside and her mum waved a gardening-gloved hand to let her know she’d heard.
Pip slipped on her not-allowed-to-be-left-in-the-kitchen trainers that were left in the kitchen and grabbed the dog lead on her way back to the front door.
‘Right, let’s go,’ she said, clipping the lead to Barney’s collar and shutting the front door behind them.
At the end of her drive they crossed the road and into the woods opposite. The stippled shade felt nice on Pip’s hot face. She let Barney off the lead and he was gone in a golden flash.
‘I always wanted a dog.’ Ravi grinned as Barney circled back to hurry them on. He paused, his jaw moving as he chewed on some silent thought.
‘Sal was allergic, though, that’s why we never . . .’ ‘Oh.’ She wasn’t quite sure what else to say.
‘There’s this dog at the pub I work at, the owner’s dog. She’s a slobbery Great Dane called Peanut. I sometimes accidentally drop leftovers for her.
Don’t tell.’
‘I encourage accidental droppage,’ she said. ‘Which pub do you work at?’ ‘The George and Dragon, over in Amersham. It’s not what I want to do
forever. Just saving up so I can get myself as far away from Little Kilton as I can.’
Pip felt an unutterable sadness for him then, rising up her tightened throat. ‘What do you want to do forever?’
He shrugged. ‘I used to want to be a lawyer.’
‘Used to?’ She nudged him. ‘I think you could be great at that.’ ‘Hmm, not when the only GCSEs I got spell out the word DUUUDDEE.’
He’d said it like a joke, but she knew it wasn’t. They both knew how awful school had been for Ravi after Andie and Sal died. Pip had even witnessed some of the worst of the bullying. His locker painted in red dripping letters: Like brother like brother. And that snowy morning when eight older boys had pinned him down and upturned four full bins over his head. She would never forget the look on sixteen-year-old Ravi’s face.
Never.
That’s when, with the clarity of cold slush pooling in her stomach, Pip realized where they were.
‘Oh my god,’ she gasped, covering her face with her hands. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think. I completely forgot these are the woods where they found Sal –’
‘That’s OK.’ He cut her off. ‘Really. You can’t help it that these happen to be the woods outside your house. Plus, there’s nowhere in Kilton that
doesn’t remind me of him.’
Pip watched for a while as Barney dropped a stick at Ravi’s feet and Ravi raised his arm in mock-throws, sending the dog backwards and forwards and back, until he finally let go.
They didn’t speak for a while. But the silence wasn’t uncomfortable; it was charged with the offcuts of whatever thoughts they were working on alone. And, as it turned out, both their minds had wandered to the same place.
‘I was wary of you when you first knocked on my door,’ Ravi said. ‘But you really don’t think Sal did it, do you?’
‘I just can’t believe it,’ she said, stepping over an old fallen tree. ‘My brain hasn’t been able to leave it alone. So, when this project thing came up at school, I jumped at the excuse to re-examine the case.’
‘It is the perfect excuse to hide behind,’ he said, nodding. ‘I didn’t have anything like that.’
‘What do you mean?’ She turned to him, fiddling with the lead round her neck.
‘I tried to do what you’re doing, three years ago. My parents told me to leave it alone, that I was only going to make things harder for myself, but I just couldn’t accept it.’
‘You tried to investigate?’
He gave her a mock salute then, barking, ‘Yes, Sergeant.’ Like he couldn’t let himself be vulnerable, couldn’t let himself be serious long enough to expose a chink in his armour.
‘But I didn’t get anywhere,’ he carried on. ‘I couldn’t. I called Naomi Ward when she was at university, but she just cried and said she couldn’t talk about it with me. Max Hastings and Jake Lawrence never replied to my messages. I tried contacting Andie’s best friends, but they hung up as soon as I said who I was. Murderer’s brother isn’t the best intro. And, of course,
Andie’s family were out of the question. I was too close to the case, I knew it. I looked too much like my brother, too much like the “murderer”. And I didn’t have the excuse of a school project to fall back on.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Pip said, wordless and embarrassed by the unfairness of it.
‘Don’t be.’ He nudged her. ‘It’s good to not be alone in this, for once. Go on, I want to hear your theories.’ He picked up Barney’s stick, now foamy with dribble, and threw it into the trees.
Pip hesitated.
‘Go on.’ He smiled into his eyes, one eyebrow cocked. Was he testing her?
‘OK, I have four working theories,’ she said, the first time she’d actually given voice to them. ‘Obviously the path of least resistance is the accepted narrative of what happened: that Sal killed her and his guilt or fear of being caught led him to take his own life. The police would argue that the only reasons there are gaps in the case are because Andie’s body hasn’t been recovered and Sal isn’t alive to tell us how it happened. But my first theory,’
she said, holding up one finger, making sure it wasn’t the swear-y one, ‘is that a third party killed Andie Bell, but Sal was somehow involved or implicated, such as an accessory after the fact. Again his guilt leads him to suicide and the evidence found on him implicates him as the perpetrator, even though he isn’t the one who killed her. The actual killer is still at large.’
‘Yeah, I thought of that too. I still don’t like it. Next?’
‘Theory number two,’ she said, ‘a third party killed Andie, and Sal had no involvement or awareness at all. His suicide days later wasn’t motivated by a murderer’s guilt, but maybe a multitude of factors, including the stress of his girlfriend’s disappearance. The evidence found on him – the blood and the phone – have an entirely innocent explanation and are unrelated to her murder.’
Ravi nodded thoughtfully. ‘I still don’t think Sal would do that, but OK. Theory three?’
‘Theory three.’ Pip swallowed, her throat feeling dry and sticky. ‘Andie is murdered by a third party on the Friday. The killer knows that Sal, as Andie’s boyfriend, would make for the perfect suspect. Especially as Sal seems to have no alibi for over two hours that night. The killer murders Sal and makes it look like a suicide. They plant the blood and the phone on his body to make him look guilty. It works just as they planned it.’
Ravi stopped walking for a moment. ‘You think it’s possible that Sal was actually murdered?’
She knew, looking into his sharpened eyes, that this was the answer he’d been looking for.
‘I think it’s a theoretical possibility,’ Pip nodded. ‘Theory four is the most far-fetched of the lot.’ She took a large breath and did it in one. ‘No one killed Andie Bell, because she isn’t dead. She faked her disappearance and then lured Sal out into the woods, murdered him and dressed it up as a suicide. She planted her own phone and blood on him so that everyone believed she was dead. Why would she do this? Maybe she needed to disappear for some reason. Maybe she feared for life and needed to make it look like she was already dead. Maybe she had an accomplice.’
They were quiet again, while Pip caught her breath and Ravi ticked over her answers, his upper lip puffed out in concentration.
They had come to the end of their circuit round the woods; the bright sun- stroked road was visible through the trees ahead. She called Barney over and put him on the lead. They crossed the road and wandered over to Pip’s front door.
There was an awkward moment of silence and Pip wasn’t sure whether
she should invite him inside or not. He seemed to be waiting for something.
‘So,’ Ravi said, scratching his head with one hand, the dog’s with the other, ‘the reason I came over is . . . I want to make a deal with you.’
‘A deal?’
‘Yeah, I want in on this,’ he said, a small tremor in his voice. ‘I never had a chance, but you actually might. You’re an outsider to the case, you have this school project excuse to open doors. People might actually talk to you. You might be my chance to find out what really happened. I’ve waited so long for a chance.’
Her face felt full and hot again, the shaking edge in his voice making something tug inside her chest. He was really trusting her to help; she’d never have thought this would happen at the start of the project. Partners with Ravi Singh.
‘I can agree to that,’ she smiled, holding out her hand.
‘Deal,’ he said, taking her hand in his warm, clammy one, although he forgot to shake it. ‘OK, I’ve got something for you.’ He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an old iPhone cradled in his palm.
‘Um, I’ve actually already got one, thanks,’ Pip said. ‘It’s Sal’s phone.’
