Pip was certain she could see the very moment Joanna’s heart began to break. It wasn’t when she told her and Connor about the calamity party, about Jamie following someone there. It wasn’t when she said he’d left the party at half ten and was witnessed on the phone, mentioning the police. It wasn’t even when she told them Jamie had been lying to them for two weeks about still having his job, and how he’d lost it. No, it was precisely when she said those exact words: life or death.
Something instantly changed in Joanna: the way she held her head, the outline of her eyes, the way her skin slackened and paled like some of the life in her had slipped away, drifting out into the cold air of the kitchen. And Pip knew she’d just given voice to Joanna’s very worst fears. Even worse than that, those words had come from Jamie himself.
‘But we don’t know what Jamie meant by that. It’s possible he was exaggerating in order to minimize the trouble he was in, or to get my mum to sympathize with him,’ Pip said, looking from Connor to Joanna’s broken eyes. Arthur Reynolds was not in. Apparently, he’d been out most of the day and neither of them knew where he was. Blowing off steam was Joanna’s best guess. ‘Do you have any idea what Jamie might have needed the money for?’
‘Wednesday two weeks ago?’ Connor said. ‘It’s not like there were any birthdays or occasions coming up which he’d need money for.’
‘I doubt Jamie intended to steal money to buy birthday presents,’ Pip replied as gently as she could. ‘Do you know if he had any debts he might have needed to pay off? Phone bill? We know he was very attached to his phone in recent weeks.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Joanna finally spoke. ‘He was on a good salary at the estate agents, I’m sure that more than covered his phone bill. It’s not like he’s been spending more than usual. Jamie hardly ever buys anything for
himself, not clothes or anything. I think his main expense would just be, well, lunch.’
‘OK, I’ll look into it.’
‘Where has Jamie been going?’ asked Connor. ‘When he told us he was going to work?’
‘I’ll also look into that,’ Pip said. ‘Maybe he was just getting out of the house, so he wouldn’t have to tell any of you what happened. Maybe he was working on getting a new job, before he told you he’d lost the last one? I know it was a point of contention between Jamie and his dad, maybe he was trying to avoid another argument about jobs.’
‘Yes,’ Joanna said, scratching her chin. ‘Arthur would have been angry about him losing another job. And Jamie hates confrontation.’
‘Skipping back to the calamity party,’ Pip said, steering the conversation, ‘do you have any idea who Jamie could have been on the phone to? Someone who might have asked him to do something?’
‘No. It was none of us,’ she said. ‘Zoe?’ asked Pip.
‘No, she had no contact with Jamie that day. The only person I know Jamie calls regularly is Nat da Silva. Or it used to be.’
‘It wasn’t her,’ Pip said. ‘She told me Jamie never turned up at her house as planned and ignored all her texts and calls.’
‘I don’t know then. I’m sorry,’ Joanna said in a small voice, like that was slipping away from her too.
‘That’s OK.’ Pip brightened hers to compensate. ‘I’m guessing you would have told me, but any luck with the computer password?’
‘Not yet,’ Connor said. ‘We’ve been working through that questionnaire, trying all variables with number replacements. Nothing so far. We’re keeping a record of everything we’ve tried, think we’re over six hundred failed attempts now.’
‘OK, well, keep trying. Tomorrow after school I’ll see if I can contact someone who can brute-force the password without damaging any of the data.’
‘Yep, will do.’ Connor fiddled with his own fingers. There was an open packet of cereal on the counter behind him, and two discarded bowls; Pip guessed those had been dinner. ‘Is there anything else we can be doing, other than the password? Anything?’
‘Um, yeah of course,’ she said, scrambling to think of something. ‘I’m still going through all the videos and photos people have sent me from the calamity party. As I said, I’m looking for people who were standing around the fireplace, from 9:38 p.m. until about 9:50 p.m. The only near-hit I’ve found is a photo taken at 9:29 in the direction of the fireplace. There are about nine people in it, some in our year, some the year below. The photo might be too early to show whoever Jamie was watching, but it’s something I . . . we can chase up tomorrow at school. Connor, I’ll email you the photo and video files and you could look through them, too?’
‘Yeah.’ He sat up straighter. ‘I’ll do that.’ ‘Perfect.’
‘I’ve been getting messages from people,’ Joanna said. ‘From friends and neighbours who’ve seen your missing posters. I haven’t left the house, been trying Jamie’s computer and phone all day. Could I see the photo you used?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Pip swiped her finger across the mousepad to reawaken her laptop. She navigated through her recent files, pulled up the photograph and twisted the computer to face Joanna. ‘I went for this one,’ she said. ‘You can see his face clearly, and his smile isn’t too wide, because I often think people look quite different when they’re smiling smiling. This was one you took before the birthday cake was lit, so no strange lighting from the candles. Is that OK?’
‘Yes,’ Joanna said quietly, covering her mouth with her balled-up hand. ‘Yes, it’s perfect.’ Her eyes filled as they flitted up and down over her son’s face, like she was scared to let her gaze settle in one spot for too long. What did she think she’d see if it did? Or was she studying his face, trying to remember every detail?
‘I’m just going to nip to the bathroom,’ Joanna said in a far-away voice, standing up shakily from her chair. She closed the kitchen door behind her and Connor sighed, deflated. He picked at the loose skin by his fingernails.
‘She’s gone upstairs to cry,’ he said. ‘Been doing it all day. I know what she’s doing, and she must know I know. But she won’t do it in front of me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Maybe she thinks I’ll lose hope if I see her crying.’
‘I’m sorry, Connor.’ Pip reached out to touch his arm, but he was too far across the table. She went for her laptop instead, pulling it back in front of her, Jamie’s face staring out. ‘But we’ve made progress today, we have.
We’ve filled in more of Jamie’s timeline that night and have a couple of leads to look into.’
Connor shrugged, looking at the time on his phone. ‘Jamie was last seen at 10:32 now, right? That means the forty-eight-hour mark is in fifty-seven minutes.’ He went quiet for a moment. ‘He’s not coming back in the next fifty-seven minutes, is he?’
Pip didn’t know what to say to that. She knew something she should say, something she should have told him yesterday: not to touch Jamie’s toothbrush or his comb or anything that would have his DNA on it, in case it was ever needed. But now was not the time. She wasn’t sure there would ever be a right time to say that. A line that could never be uncrossed.
She looked instead at her screen, at Jamie’s half-smiling face, his eyes seeing out into hers as she saw into his, as though there weren’t ten days between them. And then she realized: he was sitting exactly opposite her, at this very same table. She was here and Jamie was right there, like a crack in time had opened up across this polished wooden surface. Everything was the same as in the photograph behind him: the fridge door with a scattered collection of cheesy souvenir magnets, the cream blind pulled one third of the way down behind the sink, the wooden chopping board propped up in the same place above Jamie’s left shoulder, and the black cylindrical knife rack above his other shoulder, holding six differently sized knives with colour-coded bands on their handles.
Well, actually – Pip’s eyes flickered between the screen and up – the knife set behind Jamie in the photo was complete, all the knives tucked inside: purple, orange, light green, dark green, red and yellow. But now, looking up, one of the knives was missing. The one with the yellow band.
‘What are you looking at?’ Connor said. Pip hadn’t noticed him standing behind her, watching over her shoulder.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just looking at this photo, and I noticed one of the knives isn’t here now. It’s nothing,’ she repeated, waving her hand to dismiss the idea.
‘It’s probably just in the dishwasher.’ Connor walked over and pulled open the dishwasher door. ‘Hm,’ he said, abandoning it and moving to the sink instead. He clattered around in there, the sound of porcelain hitting porcelain making Pip flinch. ‘Someone probably put it in a drawer by accident. I’m always doing that,’ he said, but there was a frantic edge to his
voice now as he went about pulling out the drawers, their contents crashing around, drawers straining at their very limits.
Pip must have caught the dread from watching him, her heart spiking at every crash, and something cold made itself at home in her chest. Connor kept going, in a frenzy, until every drawer was open, like the kitchen had grown outward teeth, biting into the rest of the room. ‘Not here,’ he told her, needlessly.
‘Maybe you should ask your mum,’ Pip said, rising to her feet.
‘Mum!’ Connor shouted, turning his attention to the cupboards, opening each door until it looked like the kitchen was hanging upside down. It felt like it, too: Pip’s stomach lurching, feet stumbling over themselves.
She heard Joanna thundering down the stairs.
‘Calm down, Connor,’ Pip tried. ‘It’s probably here somewhere.’
‘And if it isn’t,’ he said on his knees, checking the cupboard under the sink, ‘what would that mean?’
What would it mean? Maybe she should have kept this observation to herself a little longer. ‘It would mean that one of your knives is missing.’
‘What’s missing?’ Joanna said, rushing in through the door.
‘One of your knives, the one with the yellow band,’ Pip said, dragging the laptop over to show Joanna. ‘Can you see? It was here in this photo taken on Jamie’s birthday. But it’s not in the rack now.’
‘It’s not anywhere,’ Connor said, out of breath. ‘I’ve checked the whole kitchen.’
‘I can see that,’ Joanna said, closing some of the cupboards. She re- inspected the sink, removing all the mugs and glasses sitting in there, checking underneath. She looked over the drying rack, even though Pip could see from back here that it was empty. Connor was at the knife rack, removing each of the other knives, as though the yellow one could somehow be hiding underneath.
‘Well, it’s lost,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s not in any of the places it should be. I’ll ask Arthur when he’s back.’
‘Do you have any recent memories of using that knife?’ Pip asked. She flicked through the photos from Jamie’s birthday. ‘Jamie used the red knife to cut the cake on his birthday, but do you have any memories, since that date, of using the yellow one?’
Joanna looked up to the right, eyes flitting in miniscule movements as she searched her memory. ‘Connor, what day this week did I make
moussaka?’
Connor’s chest was rising and falling with his breath. ‘Um, that was the day I came in late, after guitar lesson, wasn’t it? So, Wednesday.’
‘Yes, Wednesday.’ Joanna turned to Pip. ‘I don’t actually remember using it, but that’s always the one I use for cutting aubergine, because it’s the sharpest and widest. I would have noticed if it was gone, I’m sure.’
‘OK, OK,’ Pip said, buying herself some time to think. ‘So, the knife likely went missing in the last four days.’
‘What does that mean?’ Joanna said.
‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ Pip said, tactfully. ‘It might have no correlation to Jamie at all. Might turn up somewhere round the house you hadn’t thought to look. Right now, it’s just a piece of information about something out of the ordinary, and I want to know everything that’s out of the ordinary, no matter what it is. That’s all.’
Yeah, she should have kept it to herself, the panic in both of their eyes confirmed that. Pip glanced at the make of the knives, took a photo of the rack and empty slot on her phone, trying not to draw too much attention to what she was doing. Returning to her laptop, she googled the brand and an image came up from the website, of all the different colour-coded knives laid out in a row.
‘Yes, those are the ones,’ Joanna said behind her.
‘OK.’ Pip closed her laptop and slid it back in her bag. ‘I’ll get those calamity files to you, Connor. I’ll be looking through them until late, so if you find anything text me right away. And, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow at school. Goodnight, Joanna. Sleep well.’
Sleep well? What a stupid thing to say, of course she wasn’t going to sleep well.
Pip backed out of the room with a strained, toothless smile, and hoped they couldn’t read anything on her face, any imprint of the thought she’d just had. The thought she’d had before she could stop herself, looking at the image of the six coloured knives arranged in a line, her eyes circling the yellow one. The thought that if you wanted to use one of those knives as a weapon, that’s the one you would choose. The missing one.
File Name:
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Photographs of knife-set last Thursday and today.jpg
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The missing knife:
Might be irrelevant, I’m desperately hoping it is, otherwise this case has already taken a sinister turn I don’t want to go down. But the timing does feel significant: that both Jamie and a knife from their house go missing in the same week. How do you just lose a great big knife like that (a 6-inch chef ’s knife, the website says) around the house? You don’t. It must have been taken out of the house at some point after Wednesday evening.
Strange behaviour:
Attempting to steal money from Mum’s company is definitely out of character for the Jamie I know. The Reynoldses say so too; he’s never stolen anything before. What was his plan – take the card to an ATM and draw out the maximum amount of cash (Google says this can be between £250 – £500)? And why was he so desperate for the money? Random thought: could this have anything to do with that women’s watch I found in Jamie’s bedside table? It doesn’t look new, but maybe he bought it second-hand? Or could that have been stolen, too?
And what did Jamie’s ‘life or death’ comment mean? I get chills thinking about it, looking back on it from the other side of his disappearance. Was he talking about himself or someone else? (NB: buying a second-hand women’s watch probably doesn’t fall under ‘life or death’.)
Not telling his family about losing his job doesn’t feel inherently suspicious to me. Of course he’d want to cover up the reason he was fired, but it also makes sense he wanted to hide the fact he was jobless again, given that so much of the tension between Jamie and his father has been about his non- committal job-hopping, about not having enough ambition or drive.
On the topic of strange behaviour – where has Arthur Reynolds been all of today? OK, I understand he doesn’t believe Jamie is really missing, that he’s likely run off after their big argument and will be back in a few days completely fine. Past experience supports this theory. But if your wife and younger son are so convinced something’s wrong, wouldn’t you start to entertain the possibility? It’s clear his wife is distraught, even if Arthur doesn’t believe anything is wrong, wouldn’t he stick around to support her? He still wants nothing to do with this investigation. Maybe he’ll change his mind soon, now we’ve passed the forty-eight-hour mark.
Calamity party:
What was Jamie doing there? My working theory is that the ‘someone’ he saw is likely a person in my year or the year below at school. Jamie spotted them at the memorial, and afterwards, he followed this person as they walked (presumably with a group of friends) to Highmoor and the calamity party at Stephen Thompson’s house. I suspect Jamie slipped inside (the sighting at 9:16 p.m.) and that he wanted to talk to this ‘someone’ – why else follow them? At 9:38 p.m. I believe Jamie was watching ‘someone’ as they stood near the fireplace. A photo at 9:29 p.m. shows nine identifiable people around the fireplace.
From Year 13: Elspeth Crossman, Katya Juckes, Struan Copeland, Joseph Powrie, Emma Thwaites, and Aisha Bailey.
From Year 12: Yasmin Miah, Richard Willett and Lily Horton.
The photo doesn’t overlap with the Jamie sighting, but it’s the closest I have. I’ll find them all at school tomorrow and see if they know anything.
0pen leads:
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More photos / videos from calamity party being sent in – go through them.
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Hillary F. Weiseman –the only Hillary F. Weiseman I can find is the 84-year-old who died in Little Kilton in 2006. Obit says she left behind one daughter and two grandsons, but I can’t find any other Weisemans. Why was Jamie writing her name down within the last week and a half? What’s the connection?
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Who was Jamie on the phone to at 10:32 p.m.? Long conversation – 30 mins+? Same person he’s been texting / talking to in recent weeks? Not Nat da Silva.
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The identity of ‘someone’ and why Jamie followed them to calamity?
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Stealing money – why? Life or death?
