Page 119 of Good Girl, Bad Blood

‘So, Jamie must have come back earlier, right?’ Connor asked.

‘Right,’ Pip said, but that’s not what she was thinking at all. She was thinking that Tom Nowak said he saw Jamie going into Nat da Silva’s house on Cross Lane at 10:50 p.m. And was there time to do both? Visit Nat, walk home and leave again? No, not really, not without Jamie’s time window overlapping with Arthur’s. But Arthur said he was home at 11:15 and hadn’t seen Jamie. Something wasn’t adding up here.

Either Jamie didn’t go to Nat’s at all, came home earlier and left before 11:15 when his dad got home. Or Jamiedidgo to Nat’s, briefly, then walked home, coinciding with the time his dad was back and Arthur just hadn’t noticed Jamie was there, or when he left. Or Arthurdidnotice, and for some reason he was lying about it.

‘Pip?’ Joanna repeated.

‘Sorry, what was that?’ Pip said, out of her head and back inside the room.

‘I said, when I was looking for Jamie’s black hoodie, I found something else.’ Joanna’s eyes darkened as she approached Jamie’s white laundry basket. ‘I looked through here,’ she said, opening the lid and retrieving an item of clothing from the top. ‘And this was about halfway down.’

She held it up by the seams on the shoulders to show Pip. It was a grey cotton jumper. And down the front, about five inches below the collar, were drops of blood, dried to a reddish brown. Seven stains in all, each one smaller than a centimetre. And a long smear of blood on the cuff of one sleeve.

‘Shit.’ Pip stepped forward to get a better look at the blood.

‘This is the jumper he wore on his birthday,’ Joanna said, and indeed Pip recognized it from the missing posters all over town.

‘You heard him sneak out late that night, didn’t you?’ Pip asked Connor.

‘Yeah.’

‘And he didn’t accidentally hurt himself at home that evening?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘He went into his bedroom and he was fine. Happy.’

‘These look like the blood dripped from above, it’s not spatter,’ Pip said, circling her finger in front of the jumper. ‘The sleeve looks like it was wiped against a source of blood.’

‘Jamie’s blood?’ The colour had gone from Joanna’s face, drained away to somewhere unseen.

‘Possibly. Did you notice if he had any cuts or bruises the next day?’

‘No,’ Joanna said quietly. ‘Nowhere I could see.’

‘It could be someone else’s blood,’ Pip thought aloud and immediately regretted it. Joanna’s face folded, collapsing in on itself as a lone tear escaped and twisted around the contours of her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry, Joanna,’ Pip said. ‘I shouldn’t have s—’

‘No, it’s not you,’ Joanna cried, carefully placing the jumper back on top of the basket. Two more tears broke free, racing each other to her chin. ‘It’s just this feeling, like I don’t even know my son at all.’

Connor went to his mum, folded her into a hug. She had shrunk again, and she disappeared inside his arms, sobbing into his chest. An awful, raw sound that hurt Pip just to hear it.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Connor whispered down into her hair, looking to Pip, but she also didn’t know what to say to make anything better.

Joanna re-emerged with a sniff, wiping at her eyes in vain. ‘I’m not sure I recognize him.’ She stared down at Jamie’s jumper. ‘Trying to steal from your mum, getting fired and lying to us for weeks. Breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night to steal a watch he didn’t need. Sneaking out. Coming back possibly with someone’s blood on his clothes. I don’t recognize this Jamie,’ she said, closing her eyes like she could imagine her son back in front of her, the one she knew. ‘This isn’t him, these things he’s done. He’s not this person; he’s sweet, he’s considerate. He makes me tea when I get in from work, he asks me how my day went. We talk, about how he’s feeling, how I’m feeling. We’re a team, me and him, we have been since he was born. I know everything about him – except clearly I don’t any more.’

Pip found herself staring at the bloodied jumper too, unable to pull her eyes away. ‘There’s more to all this than we understand right now,’ she said. ‘There has to be a reason behind it. He hasn’t just changed after twenty-four years, flipped a switch. There’s a reason, and I will find it. I promise.’

‘I just want him back.’ Joanna squeezed Connor’s hand, meeting Pip’s eyes. ‘I want our Jamie back. The one who still calls me Jomumma because he knows it makes me smile. That was his name for me, when Jamie was three and first learned I had a name other than Mummy. He came up with Jomumma, so that I could have my own name back whilst still being his mum.’ Joanna sniffed and the sound stuttered all the way through her, shuddering in her shoulders. ‘What if I never get to hear him call me that again?’

But her eyes were dry, like she’d cried all she could cry and now she was empty. Hollow. Pip recognized the look in Connor’s eyes as he wrapped an arm around his mum: fear. He squeezed tight, like that was the only way he knew how to stop his mum from falling apart.

This wasn’t a moment for Pip to watch, to intrude on. She should leave them to their moment.

‘Thank you for calling me over, about the hoodie,’ she said, walking slowly backwards to Jamie’s bedroom door. ‘We’re getting one step closer, with every bit of information. I . . . I better get back to recording and editing. Maybe chase up those computer experts.’ She glanced at the closed lid of Jamie’s laptop as she reached the door. ‘Do you have any of those big Ziploc freezer bags?’

Connor screwed his eyes at her, confused, but he nodded nonetheless.

‘Seal that jumper inside one of them,’ she said. ‘And keep it somewhere cool, out of sunlight.’