Page 84 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

‘Car number plate, right?’ Ravi said.

‘Looks it. He wrote that down in his notes two days before Andie went missing. Do you recognize it?’

Ravi shook his head. ‘I tried to Google it, see if I could find the owner, but no luck.’

Pip typed it up in her log anyway, and the exact time the note was last edited.

‘That’s everything,’ Ravi said, ‘that’s all I could find.’

Pip gave the phone one last wistful look before handing it back.

‘You seem disappointed,’ he said.

‘I just hoped there’d be something more substantial we could chase up on. Inconsistent grammar and lots of phone calls to Andie certainly make him appear innocent, but they don’t actually open any leads to pursue.’

‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘but you needed to see it. Have you got anything to show me?’

Pip paused. Yes, she did, but one of those things was Naomi’s possible involvement. Her protective instinct flared up, grabbing hold of her tongue. But if they were going to be partners, they had to be all in. She knew that. She opened up her production log documents, scrolled to the top and handed the laptop to Ravi. ‘This is everything so far,’ she said.

He read through it quietly and then handed the computer back, a thoughtful look on his face.

‘OK, so the Sal alibi route is a dead end,’ he said. ‘After he left Max’s at ten thirty, I think he was alone because that explains why he panicked and asked his friends to lie for him. He could have just stopped on a bench on his walk home and playedAngry Birdsor something.’

‘I agree,’ said Pip. ‘He was most likely alone and therefore has no alibi; it’s the only thing that makes sense. So that line of enquiry is lost. I think the next step should be to find out as much as we can about Andie’s life and, in the process, identify anyone who might have had motive to kill her.’

‘Read my mind, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should start with Andie’s best friends, Emma Hutton and Chloe Burch. They might actually speak to you.’

‘I’ve messaged them both. Haven’t heard back yet, though.’

‘OK, good,’ he said, nodding to himself and then to the laptop. ‘In that interview with the journalist, you talked about inconsistencies in the case. What other inconsistencies do you see?’

‘Well, if you’d killed someone,’ she said, ‘you’d scrub yourself down multiple times, fingernails included. Especially if you were lying about alibis and making fake calls to look innocent, wouldn’t you think to, oh, I don’t know, wash the frickin’ blood off your hands so you don’t get caught red-handed, literally.’

‘Yeah, Sal definitely wasn’t that stupid. But what about his fingerprints in her car?’

‘Of course his fingerprints would be found in her car; he was her boyfriend,’ said Pip. ‘Fingerprints can’t be accurately dated.’

‘And what about hiding the body?’ Ravi leaned forward. ‘I think we can guess, living where we do, that she’s buried somewhere in the woods in or just out of town.’

‘Exactly,’ Pip nodded. ‘A hole deep enough that she’s never been found. How did Sal have enough time to dig a hole that big with his bare hands? It would even be a push with a shovel.’

‘Unless she isn’t buried.’

‘Yeah, well, I think it takes a little more time and a lot more hardware to dispose of a body in other ways,’ said Pip.

‘And this is the path of least resistance, you said.’

‘It is, supposedly,’ she said. ‘Until you start askingwhere, whatandhow.’

Nine

They probably thought she couldn’t hear them. Her parents, bickering in the living room downstairs. She had long ago learned that the word ‘Pip’ was one that travelled exceptionally well through walls and floors.

Listening through the crack of her bedroom door, it wasn’t hard to catch hold of snatches and shape them into a gist. Her mum wasn’t happy that Pip was spending so much of her summer on schoolwork. Her dad wasn’t happy that her mother had said that. Then her mum wasn’t happy because her dad had misunderstood what she meant. She thought that obsessing over the Andie Bell thing would be unhealthy for her. Her dad wasn’t happy that her mum wouldn’t give Pip the space to make her own mistakes, if that’s what they were.

Pip grew bored of the sparring match and closed her bedroom door. She knew their cyclical argument would burn itself out soon, without neutral intervention. And she had an important phone call to make.

She had private-messaged both of Andie’s best friends last week. Emma Hutton replied a few hours ago with a phone number, saying she didn’t mind answering ‘just a few’ questions at eight o’clock tonight. When Pip told Ravi this, he’d texted back with a whole page of shock-face and fist-bump emojis.