A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

‘What do you mean?’ Pip stared at him, open-mouthed.

Ravi answered by holding up the phone and shaking it gently.

‘That’s Sal’s?’ Pip said. ‘How do you have it?’

‘The police released it to us a few months after they closed Andie’s investigation.’

A cautious electricity sparked up the back of Pip’s neck. ‘Can I . . .’ she said, ‘can I look at it?’

‘Of course,’ he laughed, ‘that’s why I brought it round, you plonker.’

Unchecked, the excitement charged through her, nimble and dizzying.

‘Holy pepperoni,’ she said, flustered and hurrying to unlock the door. ‘Let’s go and look at it at my workstation.’

She and Barney bolted over the threshold, but a third set of feet didn’t follow. She spun back round.

‘What’s funny?’ she said. ‘Come on.’

‘Sorry, you’re just very entertaining when you’re extra serious.’

‘Quick,’ she said, beckoning him through the hallway and to the stairs. ‘Don’t drop it.’

‘I’m not going to drop it.’

Pip jogged up the steps, Ravi following far too slowly behind. Before he got there, she did a hasty check of her bedroom for potential embarrassment. She dived for a pile of just-laundered bras by her chair, scooped them up and shoved them in a drawer, slamming it shut just as Ravi walked in. She pointed him into her desk chair, too flappy to sit herself.

‘Workstation?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ she said, ‘while some people might work in their bedrooms, I sleep in my workstation. It’s very different.’

‘Here you go then. I charged it last night.’

He handed her the phone and she took it in her cupped palms with as much deliberate dexterity and care as she did yearly when unwrapping her first father’s German-market Christmas baubles.

‘Have you looked through it before?’ she asked, sliding to unlock more carefully than she’d ever unlocked her own phones, even at their newest.

‘Yeah, of course. Obsessively. But go ahead, Sergeant. Where would you look first?’

‘Call log,’ she said, tapping the green phone button.

She looked through the missed call list first. There were dozens from the 24th April, the Tuesday he had died. Calls from Dad , Mum, Ravi, Naomi, Jake and unsaved numbers that must have been the police trying to locate him.

Pip scrolled back further, to the date of Andie’s disappearance. Sal had two missed calls that day. One was from Max-y Boy at 7:19 p.m., probably a when-are-you-coming-over call from Max. The other missed call, she read with a skipped heartbeat, was from Andie<3 at 8:54 p.m.

‘Andie rang him that night,’ Pip said to herself and Ravi. ‘Just before nine.’

Ravi nodded. ‘Sal didn’t pick up, though.’

‘Pippa!’ Victor’s jokey-but-serious voice sailed up the stairs. ‘No boys in bedrooms.’

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 18th April 2012. Pip clicked into it. There was one thing typed on the page: R009 KKJ.

‘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 played Angry Birds or 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 asking where, what and how .’