Page 83 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Pip felt her cheeks flood with heat. She turned so Ravi couldn’t see and yelled back, ‘We’re working on my EPQ! My door is open.’

‘OK, that will do!’ came the reply.

She glimpsed back at Ravi and saw he was chuckling at her again.

‘Stop finding my life amusing,’ she said, looking back at the phone.

She went through Sal’s outgoing calls next. Andie’s name repeated over and over again in long streams. It was broken up in places with the odd call to home, or Dad, and one to Naomi on Saturday. Pip took a few moments to count all the ‘Andie’s: from 10:30 a.m. on the Saturday until 7:20 a.m. on the Tuesday, Sal called her 112 times. Each call lasted two or three seconds; straight to voicemail.

‘He called her over a hundred times,’ Ravi said, reading her face.

‘Why would he ring her so many times if he’d supposedly killed her and had her phone hidden somewhere?’ said Pip.

‘I contacted the police years ago and asked them that very question,’ Ravi said. ‘The officer told me it was clear that Sal was making a conscious effort to look innocent, by ringing the victim’s phone so many times.’

‘But,’ Pip countered, ‘if they thought he was making an effort to appear innocent and evade capture, why didn’t he dispose of Andie’s phone? He could have put it in the same place as her body and it never would have connected him to her death. If he was trying to not get caught, why would he keep the one biggest bit of evidence? And then feel desperate enough to end his life with this vital evidence on him?’

Ravi shot two clicking gun-hands at her. ‘The policeman couldn’t answer that either.’

‘Did you look at the last texts Andie and Sal sent each other?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, have a look. Don’t worry, they aren’t sexty or anything.’

Pip exited on to the home screen and opened the messages app. She clicked on the Andie tab, feeling like a time-hopping trespasser.

Sal had sent two texts to Andie after she disappeared. The first on the Sunday morning:andie just come home everyones worried.And on Monday afternoon:please just ring someone so we know youre safe.

The message preceding them was sent on the Friday she went missing. At 9:01 p.m. Sal texted her:im not talking to you till youve stopped.

Pip showed Ravi the message she’d just read. ‘He said that just after ignoring her call that night. Do you know what they could have been fighting about? What did Sal want Andie to stop?’

‘No idea.’

‘Can I just type this out in my research?’ she said, reaching over him for her laptop. She parked herself on her bed and typed out the text, grammar mistakes and all.

‘Now you need to look at the last text he sent my dad,’ Ravi said. ‘The one they said is his confession.’

Pip flicked over to it. At 10:17 a.m. on his final Tuesday morning, Sal said to his father:it was me. i did it. i’m so sorry.Pip’s eyes flicked over it several times, picking up a little more each read through. The pixelated building blocks of each letter were a riddle, the kind you could only solve if you stopped looking and started seeing.

‘You see it too, don’t you?’ Ravi was watching her.

‘The grammar?’ Pip said, looking for the agreement in Ravi’s eyes.

‘Sal was the cleverest person I knew,’ he said, ‘but he texted like an illiterate. Always in a rush, no punctuation, no capital letters.’

‘He must have had autocorrect turned off,’ Pip said. ‘And yet, in this last text, we have three full stops and an apostrophe. Even though it’s all in lower case.’

‘And what does that make you think?’ asked Ravi.

‘My mind doesn’t make small jumps, Ravi,’ she said. ‘Mine takes Everest-sized leaps. It makes me think that someone else wrote that text. Someone who added in the punctuation themselves because that’s how they were used to writing in texts. Maybe they checked quickly and thought it looked enough like Sal because it was all lower case.’

‘That’s what I thought too, when we first got it back. The police just sent me away. My parents didn’t want to hear it either,’ he sighed. ‘I think they’re terrified of false hope. I am too, if I’m honest.’

Pip scoured through the rest of the phone. Sal hadn’t taken any photos on the night in question, and none since Andie disappeared. She checked in the deleted folder to be sure. The reminders were all about essays he had to hand in, and one about buying his mum’s birthday present.

‘There’s something interesting in the notes,’ Ravi said, rolling over on the chair and opening the app for her.

The notes were all quite old: Sal’s home Wi-Fi password, a listed abs workout, a page of work experience placements he could apply to. But there was just one later note, written on Wednesday 18thApril 2012. Pip clicked into it. There was one thing typed on the page:R009 KKJ.