Good Girl, Bad Blood

Her throat closed in on her, trapping her voice inside, cornering the words until they gave up and scattered away. All she could do was stare at the messages, unravel them and put them back together until they made some kind of sense.

Hello Pip.

You’re getting closer : )

Connor was the first to find words. ‘What the fuck does that mean? Pip?’

Her name sounded strange, like it didn’t belong to her, had been stretched out of shape until it no longer fit. Pip stared at those three letters, unrecognizable in the hands of this stranger. This stranger who was less than a mile away.

‘Um,’ was all she had to offer.

‘She knew it was you,’ Ravi said, his voice coaxing Pip back to herself. ‘She knows who you are.’

‘What does “You’re getting closer” mean?’ Connor asked.

‘To finding Jamie,’ Pip said. Or finding out what happened

to Jamie, she thought to herself, which sounded almost the same but was very, very different. And Layla knew. Whoever Layla was, she knew everything, Pip was sure of that now.

‘That smiley face, though.’ Ravi shivered; she felt it through his fingers.

The shock had receded now, and Pip jumped into action. ‘I need to reply. Now,’ she said, typing out: Who are you? Where’s Jamie? There was no point pretending any more, Layla was one step ahead.

She pressed send but an error box appeared instead.

Unable to send message. User not found.

‘No,’ Pip whispered. ‘Nononono.’ She thumbed back to Layla’s page but it was no longer there. The profile picture and bio still displayed, but the grid was gone, replaced by the words No Posts Yet and a banner of User not found at the top of the app. ‘No,’ Pip growled in frustration, the sound raw and angry in her throat. ‘She’s disabled her account.’

‘What?’ Connor said.

‘She’s gone.’

Ravi hurried back over to Pip’s laptop, refreshing Layla Mead’s Facebook page. The page you requested was not found. ‘Fuck. She’s deactivated her Facebook too.’

‘And Tinder,’ Pip said, checking the app. ‘She’s gone. We lost her.’

A quietness settled over the room, a quietness that wasn’t the absence of sound, it was its own living thing, stifling in the spaces between them.

‘She knows, doesn’t she?’ Ravi said, his voice gentle, skimming just above the quiet instead of breaking through. ‘Layla knows what happened to Jamie.’

Connor was holding his head, shaking it again. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said, speaking to the ground.

Pip watched him, transfixed by the movement of his head. ‘I don’t either.’

It was a fake smile, the one she put on for her dad later as she walked Ravi towards the front door.

‘Done with your trial update, pickle?’ he asked, clapping Ravi gently on the back; her dad’s way of saying goodbye reserved just for him.

‘Yeah. Just uploaded it,’ Pip said.

Connor had gone home over an hour ago, after they’d run out of ways of asking each other the same questions. There was nothing more they could have done tonight. Layla Mead was gone, but the lead wasn’t dead. Not entirely. Tomorrow at school Pip and Connor would ask Mr Clark what he knew about her, that was the plan. And tonight, once Ravi was gone, Pip would record about what had just happened, finish editing the interviews, and then it would go out later tonight: the first episode of season two.

‘Thanks for dinner, Victor,’ Ravi said, turning to give Pip one of their hidden goodbyes, a slight scrunching of his eyes. She blinked back at him and he reached for the catch on the front door, pulling it open.

‘Oh,’ someone said, standing on the step right outside, fist floating in the air ready to knock.

‘Oh,’ Ravi replied in turn, and Pip leaned to see who it was. Charlie Green, from four doors down, his rusty-coloured hair pushed back from his face.

‘Hi, Ravi, Pip,’ Charlie said with an awkward wave. ‘Evening, Victor.’

‘Hello, Charlie,’ Pip’s dad said in his bright, showy-offy voice, that booming one that always switched on in front of someone he considered a guest. Ravi had outgrown guest a while ago into something more, thank god. ‘How can we help you?’

‘Sorry to disturb,’ Charlie said, a slight nervous edge to his voice and his pale green eyes. ‘I know it’s getting late, and it’s a school night, it’s just . . .’ He trailed off, locking on to Pip’s eyes. ‘Well, I saw your missing poster in the newspaper, Pip. And, I think I have some information about Jamie Reynolds. There’s something I should show you.’

Twenty minutes, her dad agreed, and twenty minutes was all it would take, Charlie had said. Now Pip and Ravi were following him down the darkened street, the orange streetlamps grafting monstrous, overstretched shadows to their feet.

‘You see,’ Charlie said, glancing back at them as they walked up the gravel path to his front door, ‘Flora and I, we have one of these doorbell cameras. We’ve moved around a lot, used to live in Dartford and while there we had a few breakins. So we installed the camera, for Flora’s peace of mind, and it came with us here, to Kilton. I thought there’s no harm in having extra security, no matter how nice the town, you know?’

He pointed the camera out to them, a small black device above the existing faded brass doorbell. ‘It’s motion-detected, so it’ll be recording us right now.’ He gave it a small wave as he unlocked the door and showed them inside.

Pip already knew this house, from when Zach and his family lived here, following Charlie into what used to be the Chens’ front playroom, but now it looked like an office. There were bookshelves and an armchair beneath the bay windows at the front. And a wide white desk against the far wall, two large computer monitors upon it.

‘Here,’ Charlie said, pointing them towards the computer.

‘Nice set-up,’ said Ravi, checking the screens like he had a clue what he was talking about.

‘Oh, I work from home. Web design. Freelance,’ he said in explanation.

‘Cool,’ said Ravi.

‘Yeah, mostly because I get to work in my pyjamas,’ Charlie laughed. ‘My dad would probably say, “You’re twenty-eight now, get a real job”.’

‘Older generations,’ Pip said disapprovingly, ‘they just don’t understand the allure of pyjamas. So, what did you want to show us?’

‘Hello.’ A new voice entered the room, and Pip turned to see Flora in the doorway, hair tied back and a smudge of flour down the front of her oversized shirt. She was holding a Tupperware stacked four rows high with flapjack squares. ‘I just baked these, for Josh’s class tomorrow. But I wondered if you guys were hungry. No raisins, I promise.’

‘Hi Flora,’ Pip smiled. ‘I’m actually OK, thank you.’ Her appetite still hadn’t quite returned; she’d had to force dinner down.

But a wide crooked smile appeared on Ravi’s face as he sauntered over to Flora and picked up a flapjack from the middle, saying, ‘Yes please, these look amazing.’

Pip sighed: Ravi liked anyone who fed him.

‘Have you shown them, Charlie?’ Flora asked.

‘No, I was just getting to it. Come look at this,’ he said, wiggling the mouse to bring life back to one of the screens. ‘So, like I was saying, we have this doorbell camera, and it starts recording whenever it detects motion, sends a notification to the app on my phone. Whatever it records, it uploads to the Cloud for seven days before it’s wiped. When I woke up last Tuesday morning, I saw a notification on my app from the middle of the night. But I went downstairs and checked and everything looked fine, nothing out of place or missing, so I presumed it was just a fox setting off the camera again.’

‘Right,’ Pip said, moving closer as Charlie navigated through his files.

‘But, yesterday, Flora noticed something of hers was missing. Can’t find it anywhere, so I thought I’d check the doorbell footage, just in case, before it got wiped. I didn’t think there’d be anything on it, but . . .’ He double-clicked on a video file and it opened in a media player. Charlie clicked it into full screen and then hit play.

It was a 180-degree view of the front of their house, down the garden path to the gate they’d just come through, and over to the bay windows from the rooms either side of the front door. Everything was green, all light greens and bright greens, set against the darker green of the night sky.

‘It’s night vision,’ Charlie said, watching their faces. ‘This was taken at 3:07 a.m. Tuesday morning.’

There was movement by the gate. Whatever it was had set the camera off.

‘Sorry, the resolution’s not great,’ said Charlie.

The green shape moved up the garden path, growing blurry arms and legs as it neared the camera. And as it walked right up to the front door, it grew a face, a face she knew, except for the absent black pinpoints for eyes. He looked scared.

‘I don’t know him, and I only saw his picture in the Kilton Mail today, but that’s Jamie Reynolds, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ Pip said, her throat constricting again. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Well, if you look to the window on the left, that’s the one in here, this room,’ Charlie pointed to it on screen. ‘I must have had it open during the day, for a breeze, and maybe I thought I closed it properly. But look, it’s still open, just a couple of inches from the bottom.’

As he said that, the green Jamie on screen noticed it too, bending down in front of it and creeping his fingers in under the gap. You couldn’t see the back of his head; he had a dark hood pulled up over his hair. Pip watched Jamie pull at the window, sliding it up until the gap was large enough.

‘What’s he doing?’ Ravi asked, leaning closer to the screen too, the flapjack a thing of the past. ‘Is he breaking in?’

The question become redundant a half second later as Jamie lowered his head and climbed through the window, slipping his legs in behind him, leaving just an empty dark green opening into the house.

‘He’s only in the house for a total of forty-one seconds,’ Charlie said, skipping the video to the point where Jamie’s lighter green head re-emerged at the window. He dragged himself outside, landing on one unsteady foot. But he looked the same as before he’d gone in: still scared, nothing in his hands. He turned back to the window, leaning into his elbows as he pushed it closed, right down to the sill. And then he walked away from the house, his steps breaking into a run as he reached the gate and disappeared into the engulfing all-green night.

‘Oh,’ Pip and Ravi said together.

‘We only found this yesterday,’ Charlie said. ‘And we discussed it. It’s my fault for leaving the window open. And we’re not going to go to the police and press charges or anything, seems like this Jamie guy has enough on his plate as it is. And what he took, well, what we think he took, it wasn’t that valuable, only sentimental value, so –’

‘What did he take?’ Pip asked, her eyes flicking to Flora, instinct pulling her gaze to the empty spaces at Flora’s wrists. ‘What did Jamie steal from you?’

‘My watch,’ Flora said, putting the box of flapjacks down. ‘I remember leaving it in here the weekend before last, because it kept catching on the book I was reading. I haven’t seen it since. And it’s the only thing missing.’

‘Is this watch rose gold with light pink leather straps, metal flowers on one side?’ Pip asked, and immediately Charlie and Flora’s eyes snapped to each other in alarm.

‘Yes,’ Flora said. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it. It wasn’t that expensive, but Charlie bought it for our first Christmas together. How did you . . .’

‘I’ve seen your watch,’ Pip said. ‘It’s in Jamie Reynolds’ bedroom.’

‘O-oh,’ Charlie stuttered.

‘I can make sure it’s returned to you, right away.’

‘That would be great, but no rush,’ Flora smiled kindly. ‘I know you must be very busy.’

‘But the strange thing is –’ Charlie crossed the room, past a watchful Ravi, over to the window Jamie had climbed through just a week ago – ‘why did he take only the watch? It’s clearly not expensive. And I leave my wallet in this room, with cash in. There’s my computer equipment too, none of that is cheap. Why did Jamie ignore all the rest of that? Why just a watch that’s almost worthless? In and out in forty seconds and just the watch?’

‘I don’t know, that is strange,’ Pip said. ‘I can’t explain it. I’m so sorry, this . . .’ she cleared her throat, ‘this isn’t the Jamie I know.’

Charlie’s eyes fell to the bottom ledge of the window, where Jamie’s fingers had snuck through. ‘Some people are pretty good at hiding who they really are.’