Good Girl, Bad Blood

‘Are you sure you want to be here for this?’ Pip said, looking mainly at Joanna, her finger poised above the mousepad, about to pull up Jamie’s browser history in Google Chrome. ‘We don’t know what we might find.’

‘I understand,’ she said, hand tightly gripped on the back of the chair, not going anywhere.

Pip exchanged a quick look with Connor and he nodded that he was fine with that too.

‘OK.’

She clicked and Jamie’s history opened in a new tab. The most recent entry from Friday the 27th April, at 17:11. He’d been on YouTube, watching an Epic Fail compilation video. Other entries for that day: Reddit, more YouTube, a series of Wikipedia pages that tracked back from Knights Templar to Slender Man.

She scrolled to the day before, and one particular result grabbed her attention: Jamie had visited Layla Mead’s Instagram page twice on Thursday, the day before he’d gone missing. He’d also researched nat da silva rape trial max hastings which had taken him to Pip’s site, agoodgirlsguidetomurderpodcast.com, where it looked like Jamie had listened to her and Ravi’s trial update that day.

Her eyes flicked down through the days: all the Reddit hits and Wikipedia pages and Netflix binges. She was looking for something, anything that stuck out as unusual. Actually unusual, not Wikipedia unusual. She passed through Monday into the week before, and there was something that made her pause, something on the Thursday 19th, Jamie’s birthday. Jamie had googled what counts as assault? And then, after looking through a few results, he’d asked how to fight.

‘This is weird,’ Pip said, highlighting the results with her finger. ‘These searches were from eleven thirty on his birthday night. The night you heard him sneak out late, Connor, the night he came back with blood on his jumper.’ She glanced quickly at the grey jumper still crumpled on the basket. ‘Seems he knew he would get into an altercation that night. It’s like he was preparing himself for it.’

‘But Jamie’s never been in a fight before. I mean, clearly, if he had to google how to do it,’ Connor said.

Pip had more to say on this, but another result lower down had just caught her eye. Monday 16th, a few days earlier, Jamie had looked up controlling fathers. Pip’s breath snagged in her throat, but she controlled her reaction, scrolling quickly past it before the others saw it.

But she couldn’t unsee it. And now she couldn’t stop thinking about their explosive arguments, or Arthur’s near-total lack of attention to the fact his oldest son was missing, or the possible intersecting timelines of Jamie and Arthur that night. And suddenly, she was very aware that Arthur Reynolds was sitting in the room below her now, his presence like a physical thing, seeping up through the carpet.

‘What’s that?’ Connor said suddenly, making her flinch.

She’d been distractedly running down the results, but now she stopped, eyes following the line of Connor’s finger. Tuesday the 10th of April, at 01:26 a.m., there was an odd series of Google searches, starting with brain cancer. Jamie had clicked through to two results on the NHS website, one for Brain tumours, the other for Malignant brain tumour. A few minutes later, Jamie returned to Google, typing inoperable brain tumour, and clicking on to a cancer charity page. Then he’d asked one more thing of Google that night: Brain cancer clinical trials.

‘Hm,’ Pip said. ‘I mean, I know I look up all sorts of things online, and Jamie clearly does too, but this feels different from the general browsing. This feels sort of . . . targeted, deliberate. Do you know anyone who has brain cancer?’ Pip asked Joanna.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Did Jamie ever mention knowing someone who has?’ She turned the question over to Connor.

‘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 Google how to make money quickly, clicking on to an article titled 11 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 10th so 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 you as soon as 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 Jamie has been 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.’

‘Why does he stop suddenly at midnight?’ said Joanna.

‘Because that data falls under the next day,’ Pip said, pressing the back arrow to return to Friday’s dashboard. Before she flipped to Saturday instead, she noticed something in Jamie’s heart rate graph and clicked the icon to zoom in.

It looked like Jamie’s resting heart rate was around eighty beats per minute, that’s where it stood for most of the day. Then at half five, there was a series of spikes up to around one hundred beats per minute. That’s when Jamie and his dad had been arguing, according to Connor. It settled again for a couple of hours, but then started to climb back up through the nineties, as Jamie was following Stella Chapman, waiting to talk to her at the party. And then it got faster, during the time when George saw Jamie on the phone outside, most likely to Layla. It stayed at that level, just over a hundred, as Jamie walked. Beyond 11:40 p.m. when he was seen on Wyvil Road, his heart steadily grew faster, reaching one hundred and three at midnight.

Why was it fast? Was he running? Or was he scared?

The answers must lie in the early hours of Saturday’s data.

Pip switched over to it and immediately the page felt incomplete compared to the day before, coloured circles barely filled in. Only 2571 steps in total. She opened the step-count menu out fully and felt something heavy and cold dragging her stomach into her legs. Those steps all took place between midnight and around half past, and then . . . nothing. No data at all. The graph completely dropped off: an entire line of zero.

But there was another shorter period within that, where it looked like Jamie had taken no steps. He must have been standing still, or sitting. It happened just after midnight, and Jamie didn’t move for a few minutes, but it wasn’t for long because just after five past, he was on the move again, walking right up until the point where everything stopped, just before 12:30 a.m.

‘It just stops,’ Connor said, and that far-away look was back in his eyes.

‘But this is amazing,’ Pip said, trying to bring his eyes back from wherever they’d gone. ‘We can use this data to try track where Jamie went, where he was at just before half twelve. The step count tells us that that’s when the incident, whatever it was, happened, which fits, Joanna, with your text at 12:36 never delivering. And it might also tell us where it happened. So, from 11:40, when he’s seen at the bend in Wyvil Road, Jamie walks a total of two thousand and twenty-four steps before he stops for a few minutes. And then he walks another two thousand three hundred and seventy-five, and wherever that takes him is right where whatever happened, happened. We can use these figures to draw up a perimeter, working from that last sighting on Wyvil Road. And then we search within that specific zone, for any sign of Jamie or where he went. This is good, I promise.’

Connor tried a small smile, but it didn’t convince his eyes. Joanna also looked afraid, but her mouth was set in a determined line.

Pip’s phone rang in her pocket again. She ignored it, navigating back to the dashboard to look at Jamie’s heart rate in that time span. It started already high, above one hundred, and, strangely, in that window of a few minutes when he wasn’t moving, his heart was picking up faster and faster. At the point right before he started walking again, it spiked up to one hundred and twenty-six beats per minute. It trailed off, but only slightly as he walked those additional two thousand three hundred and seventy-five steps. And then, in those last couple of minutes before half past the hour, Jamie’s heart peaked up to one hundred and fifty-eight beats per minute.

And then, it flatlined.

Dropped from one hundred and fifty-eight straight to zero, and beat no more after that.

Joanna must have been thinking the same thing because just then, a gasp, wretched and guttural, ripped through her, hands smacking to her face to hold everything in. And then the thought took Connor too, his mouth hanging open as his eyes flickered over that steep fall in the graph.

‘His heart stopped,’ he said, so quietly that Pip almost didn’t hear him, his chest juddering. ‘He’s . . . is he . . .’

‘No, no,’ Pip said, firmly, holding up her palms, though it was a lie, because inside she was feeling the same dread. But she had to hide hers, that’s why she was here. ‘That’s not what it means. All this means is that the Fitbit was no longer monitoring Jamie’s heartbeat data, OK? Jamie could have taken the Fitbit off, that’s all this could be showing us. Please, don’t think that.’

But she could see from their faces that they weren’t really listening to her any more, both of their gazes fixed on that flatline, sailing along with it into nothingness. And that thought – it was like a black hole, feeding on whatever hope they had left, and nothing Pip could say, nothing she could think of to say, could possibly fill it in again.

I almost had a disaster, when I remembered you can’t get into DMs on the desktop version of Instagram, only on the mobile app. But it’s OK: Jamie’s associated email was still logged in on his laptop. I was able to send a reset password request from Instagram and then sign into Jamie’s account from my phone. I went straight to Jamie’s DMs with Layla Mead. There weren’t too many of them; only over the course of about eight days. Judging from context, it looks like they met on Tinder first, then Jamie moved the conversation to Instagram and then they moved on to WhatsApp, where I can’t follow them. The start of their conversation:

Found you . . .

so you did. i wasn’t exactly hiding
from you : )

how’s your day been?

Yeah it’s been good, thanks. I just made the best
dinner this world has ever seen and I might
possibly be the greatest chef.

And humble too. Go on, what was it?

Maybe you can make it for me some day.

I fear I may have talked this up a bit much.
It was essentially mac and cheese.

Most of their messages are like that: long bouts of chatting / flirting. On the third day of messages, they discovered they both loved the show Peaky Blinders and Jamie professed his lifelong ambition to be a gangster from the 1920s. Layla does seem very interested in Jamie, she was always asking him questions. But there are a few strange moments I noticed:

didn’t you say it was your birthday
coming up soon?

Yeah it is

The BIG 30

So what are you gonna do for it?

A party? Invite the family?

I’m not so much a party person tbh. I’ll
probably just have a chill one, hang with
friends.

This one particularly caught my eye because I was confused as to why Layla thinks Jamie is six years older than he is: twenty-nine turning thirty. The answer comes lower down in their conversation. But when I first saw this exchange, I couldn’t help but think of the similarities with what Mr Clark said: that Layla was direct about asking his age, bringing it up a few times. And, strangely, he too is twenty-nine turning thirty. Could be a coincidence, but I felt it was at least worth making a note of.

Another weird thing is that Jamie (and Layla) keep making reference to the fact that Jamie lives alone in a small house in Kilton, which isn’t a fact at all. Again, this all became clearer when I reached the end of their conversation on Insta:

hope we can meet up one day.

Yeah sure. I’d really like that : )

Listen Layla. I have to tell you something. It’s not
easy to say it, but I really like you. Really. I haven’t
felt like this about anyone ever and so I need to
be honest with you. I’m not actually 29, I’m turning
24 in a few weeks. And I’m not a successful
portfolio manager for a financial company in
London, that wasn’t true. I’m working as a
receptionist at a job a family friend got for me. And
I don’t own a house, I live at home still with my
parents and my brother. I’m so sorry, my intention
was never to deceive anyone, especially not you.
I’m not even sure why I made up all those lies for
my profile. I made it when I was in a really bad
place, feeling very self-conscious about me, my
life or lack thereof, and so I think I just invented
the person I want to be, instead of the real me.
Which was wrong, and I’m sorry. But I hope to be
that man one day, and meeting someone like you
makes me want to try. I’m sorry Layla and I
understand if you’re angry with me. But, if it’s OK,
I’d really like to keep talking to you. You make
everything better.

Which is veeeeerrrrryyyy interesting. So, Jamie sort of catfished the catfish first. Lying on his Tinder profile about his age, his job, his living arrangements. He explained it best himself: it was insecurity. I wonder if these insecurities are related to what happened with Nat da Silva, feeling like he lost someone so important to him to an older guy like Luke Eaton. In fact, I wonder whether Luke is twenty-nine and that’s why Jamie picked that age, as a sort of confidence boost, or a rationalisation in his head of why Nat chose Luke and not him.

After that long message, Layla stops replying to Jamie for three days. During that time, Jamie keeps trying, until he finds something that works:

Layla, please talk to me.

Let me explain

I am very truly sorry

I would never want to upset you ever

I understand if you never talk to
me again.

But you haven’t blocked me, so
maybe there’ s a chance?

Layla, please talk to me

I care about you a lot.

I would do anything for you

Anything?

Oh my god hi Yes. Anything. I’d do
anything for you. I swear. I promise

ok

hey what’s your number? Let’s
move this over to WhatsApp

I’m so happy you’re speaking to me
again. I’m 07700900472

I don’t know, there’s something about this exchange that gives me chills. She ignores him for three days and then she just comes back with that ‘Anything?’ It feels creepy, but maybe those are just my residual feelings from my one small exchange with Layla. Who is Layla? Nothing here gives me any real identifying marks. She’s very careful, good at being the right amount of vague. If only she’d given Jamie her phone number instead of asking for his, I’d be in a different position now: able to call Layla directly, or look up the number. But here I am, still hanging on those two questions. Who really is Layla? And how is she involved in Jamie’s disappearance?

Other notes

I looked up heart rate information, I just needed some context about what I was seeing in these graphs. But now I wish I hadn’t. Jamie’s heart rate spikes up to 126 in that initial stationary period at 12:02 a.m., and then it races up to 158 just before the data cuts out. But that range of beats per minute – the experts say – is what they might consider the heart rate of someone who is experiencing a fight-or-flight response.

Wednesday

5 Days Missing

Hello everyone,

As you might have heard, Connor Reynolds’ older brother, Jamie, has been missing for 5 days now, and I am looking into his disappearance for my podcast.

But I need your help! I’ve recently uncovered some information that provides an approximate area for Jamie’s last known location. This area needs to be searched for any sign or clue as to where exactly Jamie was on Friday night and what happened to him. But the area is quite large, so I’m in desperate need of volunteers to help in the search.

If you would like to offer a hand, please meet after school today, 4:30 p.m., at the end of the car park for the briefing. If we have enough volunteers, we’ll be splitting into three search teams, led by me, Connor Reynolds and Cara Ward. Please come and find one of us to be assigned to a team.

Thank you, and please let me know if you’re intending to come.

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