Page 122 of Good Girl, Bad Blood

‘No, never.’

And something Pip wanted to ask, but couldn’t: was it possible Jamie was researching brain tumours because he’d learned he had one? No, it couldn’t be. Surely that wasn’t something he could keep from his mum.

Pip tried to scroll further, but she’d reached the end of the results. Jamie must have wiped his history from that point. She was about to move on when one last pair of search items jumped out at her, ones she’d glanced over and hadn’t registered, nestled quietly in between the brain tumour results and videos about dogs walking on their hind legs. Nine hours after researching brain cancer, presumably after going to sleep and waking up the next day, Jamie had asked Googlehow to make money quickly, clicking on to an article titled11 Easy Ways to Make a Quick Buck.

It wasn’t the strangest thing to see on the computer of a twenty-four-year-old who still lived at home, but the timing made it significant. Just one day after Jamie had searched that, Pip’s mum caught him trying to steal her company credit card. This had to be related. But why did Jamie wake up on Tuesday the 10thso desperate for money? Something must have happened the day before.

Crossing her fingers, Pip typed Instagram into the address bar. This was the most important thing: access to Jamie and Layla’s private messages, a way to identify the catfish.Please have Jamie’s passwords saved, please please please.

The home page popped up, logged in to Jamie Reynolds’ profile.

‘Yes,’ she hissed, but a loud buzzing interrupted her. It was her phone in her back pocket, vibrating loudly against the chair. She pulled it out. Her mum was calling and, glancing at the time, Pip knew exactly why. It had gone ten, on a school night, and now she was going to be in trouble for that. She sighed.

‘Do you need to go, sweetie?’ Joanna must have read the screen over her shoulder.

‘Um, I probably should. Do you . . . would you mind if I take Jamie’s laptop with me? Means I can go through it all with a fine-tooth comb tonight, his social media accounts, update you on anything I find tomorrow?’ Plus, she was thinking that Jamie probably wouldn’t want his mum and little brother going through his private messages with Layla. Not if they were, you know . . . not for the eyes of a mother and brother.

‘Yes, yes of course,’ Joanna said, brushing her hand against Pip’s shoulder. ‘You’re the one who actually knows what you’re doing with it.’

Connor agreed with a quiet, ‘Yeah,’ though Pip could tell he wished he could come with her, that real life didn’t have to keep getting in the way. School, parents, time.

‘I’ll text youas soonas I find anything significant,’ she reassured him, turning to the computer to minimize the Chrome window, the blue robot-themed home screen reappearing. The computer ran Windows 10, and Jamie had it set up in app mode. That had confused her at first, before she’d spotted the Chrome app, tucked in neatly beside the Microsoft Word square. She reached for the lid to close it, running her eyes over the rest of the apps: Excel, 4OD, Sky Go, Fitbit.

She paused before closing the laptop, something stopping her, the faintest outline of an idea, not yet whole. ‘Fitbit?’ She looked at Connor.

‘Yeah, remember my dad bought him one for his birthday. It was obvious Jamie didn’t want it though, wasn’t it?’ Connor asked his mum.

‘Well, you know, Jamie is quite impossible to buy presents for. Your father was just trying to be helpful. I thought it was a nice idea,’ Joanna said, her tone growing sharp and defensive. ‘I know, I was just saying.’ Connor returned to Pip. ‘Dad set up the account for him and downloaded the app on his phone and on here, because he said Jamie would never get around to doing it himself, which is probably true. And Jamiehasbeen wearing it since, I think mostly to keep Dad off his – happy, I mean,’ he said, a half-glance in his mum’s direction.

‘Hold on,’ Pip said, the idea a fully formed thing now, solid, pressing down on her brain. ‘The black watch that Jamie had on the night he went missing, that’s his Fitbit?’

‘Yes,’ Connor said slowly, unsurely, but he could clearly tell Pip was going somewhere with this; he just wasn’t with her yet.

‘Oh my god,’ she said, voice cracking as it rushed out of her. ‘What type of Fitbit is it? Is it GPS enabled?’

Joanna reeled back, like Pip’s momentum had jumped right into her. ‘I still have the box, hold on,’ she said, running out of the room.

‘If it has GPS,’ Connor said, breathless, though he wasn’t the one running, ‘does that mean we can find out exactly where he is?’

He didn’t really need Pip to answer that question. She wasted no time, clicking on the Fitbit app and staring as a colourful dashboard opened up on the screen.

‘No.’ Joanna was back in the room, reading from a plastic box. ‘It’s a Charge HR, doesn’t mention GPS, just says heart rate, activity tracker and sleep quality.’

But Pip had already found that for herself. The dashboard on Jamie’s computer had icons for step count, heart rate, calories burned, sleep, and active minutes. But below each of the icons were the same words:Data not cleared. Sync&try again. That was for today, Tuesday 1st May. Pip clicked on the calendar icon at the top and skipped back to yesterday. It said the same thing:Data not cleared. Sync&try again.

‘What does that mean?’ Connor asked.

‘That he’s not wearing the Fitbit now,’ Pip said. ‘Or it hasn’t been in the proximity of his phone to sync the data.’

But when she skipped past Sunday and Saturday and clicked on to the Friday he went missing, the icons burst into life, completed circles in thick bands of green and orange. And those words were gone, replaced by numbers: 10,793 steps walked that day, 1649 calories burned. A heart rate graph that spiked up and down in bright blocks.

And Pip felt her own heart react, taking over, pulsating inside her fingers as it guided them along the mousepad. She clicked on the step count icon and it brought up a new screen, with a bar-chart breakdown of Jamie’s steps throughout the day.

‘Oh my god!’ she said, eyes on the very end of the graph. ‘There’s data here from after the last time Jamie was seen. Look.’ She pointed to it as Joanna and Connor drew closer still, eyes spooling. ‘He was walking, right up until midnight. So, after 11:40ish when he was seen on Wyvil Road, he did . . .’ She highlighted the columns between 11:30 p.m. and 12:00 to work out the specific number. ‘One thousand, eight hundred and twenty-eight steps.’

‘What distance is that?’ Joanna asked.

‘Just googling it,’ Connor said, tapping at his phone. ‘That’s just under a mile.’