Page 160 of Good Girl, Bad Blood

They headed towards the train station, where Pip had parked her car earlier, so her mum wouldn’t see it if she was driving up and down High Street.

‘Why’d you ask his age?’ Ravi said. ‘Looking to trade me in for an older model?’

‘It’s too many now to be a coincidence,’ she said, more to herself than Ravi. ‘Adam Clark, Daniel da Silva, Luke Eaton, and even Jamie too – only because he lied about his age – but every single person Layla has spoken to is twenty-nine or recently thirty. And more than that, they’re all white guys, with brownish colour hair, living in the same town.’

‘Yeah,’ Ravi said, ‘so Layla has a type. A very,veryspecific type.’

‘I don’t know.’ Pip looked down at her trainers, still damp from last night. ‘All those similarities, asking lots of questions. It’s like Layla’s been looking for someone. Someone specific, but she doesn’t know who.’

Pip looked over to Ravi, but her eyes escaped from her, breaking away to the side, to someone standing right there on the other side of the road. Outside the new Costa that had opened there. Neat black jacket, messy blonde hair falling into his eyes. Sharp, angled cheekbones.

He was back.

Max Hastings.

Standing with two guys Pip didn’t recognize, talking and laughing in the street.

Pip emptied out and refilled with a feeling that was black and cold and red and burning. She stopped walking and stared.

How dare he? How dare he stand there, laughing, in this town? Out where anyone could see him?

Her hands tightened into fists, nails digging into Ravi’s palm.

‘Ouch.’ Ravi escaped her grip and looked at her. ‘Pip, wha—?’ Then he followed her eyes across the road.

Max must have felt it, her gaze, because at that exact moment, he looked up, over the street and the idling cars. Right at her. Into her. His mouth settled into a line, pulling up at one end. He raised one arm, his hand open palm-out in a small wave, and the line of his mouth was a smile.

Pip felt it growing inside her, sparking, but Ravi exploded first.

‘Don’t you look at her!’ he screamed at Max, over the top of the cars. ‘Don’t you dare look at her, you hear me?’

Heads turned in the street. Mutters. Faces in windows. Max lowered his arm, but the smile never once left his face.

‘Come on,’ Ravi said, retaking Pip’s hand. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Ravi lay on Pip’s bed, throwing a pair of her balled-up socks in the air and catching them. Throwing always helped him think.

Pip was at her desk, her laptop asleep before her, digging her finger through her small pot of pins, letting them jab her.

‘One more time,’ Ravi said, his eyes following the socks up to the ceiling and down to his hand.

Pip cleared her throat. ‘Jamie walks to the car park in Lodge Wood. He’s carrying the knife from home. He’s nervous, scared, his heart rate tells us that. Layla has potentially set this up, told Luke to be there. We don’t know why. Jamie says two words to Luke, studies him for a reaction and then runs off. He then goes to the abandoned farmhouse. His heart spikes higher. He’s even more scared, and the knife somehow ends up in the grass by the trees. And Jamie’s Fitbit is removed, or it breaks or . . .’

‘Or his heart stops.’ Catch and throw.

‘And then his phone is turned off a few minutes later and never turns on again,’ Pip said, lowering her head so her hands could take its weight.

‘Well,’ Ravi began, ‘Luke wasn’t exactly quiet about wanting to kill Jamie, because he thinks he’s the one who catfished him. Isn’t it possible he chased Jamie to the farmhouse?’

‘If Luke was the one who hurt Jamie, I don’t think he would’ve talked to us at all, not even for nine hundred quid.’

‘Fair point,’ Ravi said. ‘But he did lie initially, could have told you about seeing Jamie when you first talked to him and Nat.’

‘Yeah, but, you know, he went out there to cheat on Nat, and Nat was sitting in the room with us. Plus, I’m guessing he prefers not to be associated with missing people, given his line of work.’

‘OK. But the words Jamie said to Luke, they have to be important somehow.’ Ravi sat up, squeezing the socks in his hands. ‘They are the key.’

‘Child broomstick? Child brown sick?’ Pip looked over at him, sceptical. ‘They don’t sound verykey.’