Page 189 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Another significant entry on that page is on Wednesday 18thApril. 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 shedid, 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.

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 17thentry, 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.

An earlier spread in March caught my eye too. Those numbers scrawled in and scribbled out on the Thursday 8thMarch 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 heractualphone. 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. Anothernot recognizedand ano longer in service.The third column racked up twonot recognizedand 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, oneno longer in serviceand 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 2ndNovember 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.