A Good Girl's Guide to Murder — Chapter no 23

Twenty-Three The sunlight followed them inside, cracking into the tiled hallway in a long, glowing strip. As they stepped over the threshold, their shadows carved through the beam of light, both of them together as one stretched silhouette, with two heads and a tangle of moving arms and legs.

Ravi closed the door and they walked slowly down the hallway. Pip couldn’t help but tiptoe, even though she knew no one was home. She’d seen this house many times before, pictured at different angles with police in black and high-vis swarming outside. But that was always outside. All she’d ever seen of the inside were snippets when the front door was open and a press photographer clicked the moment into forever.

The border between outside and in felt significant here.

She could tell Ravi felt it too, the way he held his breath. There was a heaviness to the air in here. Secrets captured in the silence, floating around like invisible motes of dust. Pip didn’t even want to think too loudly, in case she disturbed it. This quiet place, the place where Andie Bell was last seen alive when she was only a few months older than Pip. The house itself was part of the mystery, part of Kilton’s history.

They moved towards the stairs, glancing into the plush living room on the right and the huge vintage-style kitchen on the left, fitted with duck-egg blue cabinets and a large wood-top island.

And then they heard it. A small thump upstairs.

Pip froze and Ravi grabbed her gloved hand with his.

Another thump, closer this time, just above their heads.

Pip looked back at the door; could they make it in time?

The thumps became a sound of frantic jingling and a few seconds later a black cat appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Holy crap,’ Ravi said, dropping his shoulders and her hand, his relief like an actual blast of air rippling through the quiet.

Pip sniffed a hollow, anxious laugh, her hands starting to sweat inside the rubber. The cat bounded down the stairs, stopping halfway to meow in their direction. Pip, born and raised a dog person, wasn’t sure how to react. ‘Hi, cat,’ she whispered as it padded down the rest of the stairs and slinked over to her. It rubbed its face on her shins, curling in and out of her legs. ‘Pip, I don’t like cats,’ Ravi said uneasily, watching with disgust as the cat started to press its fur-topped skull into his ankles. Pip bent down and patted the cat lightly with her rubber-gloved hand. It came back over to her

and started to purr. ‘Come on,’ she said to Ravi.

Unwinding her legs from the cat, Pip headed for the stairs. As she took them, Ravi following behind, the cat meowed and raced after them, darting round his legs. ‘Pip . . .’ Ravi’s voice trailed nervously as he tried not to step on it. Pip shooed the cat and it trotted back downstairs and into the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ he added unconvincingly.

Gloved hand on the banister, she climbed the rest of the stairs, almost knocking off a notebook and a USB stick that were balanced on the post at the very top. Strange place to keep them.

When they were both upstairs, Pip studied the various doors that opened on to the landing. That back bedroom on the right couldn’t be Andie’s; the floral bedspread was ruffled and slept in, paired socks on the chair in the corner. Nor could it be the bedroom at the front where a dressing gown was strewn on the floor and a glass of water on a bedside table.

Ravi was the first to notice. He tapped her gently on the arm and pointed.

There was only one door up here that was closed. They crossed over to it.

Pip grasped the gold handle and pushed open the door.

It was immediately obvious this was her room.

Everything felt staged and stagnant. Though it had all the props of a teenage girl’s bedroom – pinned-up photos of Andie standing between Emma and Chloe as they posed with their fingers in Vs, a picture of her and Sal with a candyfloss between them, an old brown teddy tucked into the bed with a fluffy hot-water bottle beside it, an overflowing make-up case on the desk – the room didn’t feel quite real. A place entombed in five years of grief.

Pip took a first step on to the plush cream carpet.

Her eyes flicked from the lilac walls to the white wooden furniture; everything clean and polished, the carpet showing recent vacuum tracks.

Dawn Bell must still clean her dead daughter’s room, preserving it as it had been when Andie left it for the final time. She didn’t have her daughter but she still had the place where she’d slept, where she’d woken, where she’d dressed, where she’d screamed and shouted and slammed the door, where her mum whispered goodnight and turned off the light. Or so Pip imagined, reanimating the empty room with the life that might have been lived here.

This room, perpetually waiting for someone who was never coming back while the world ticked on outside its closed door.

She looked back at Ravi and, by the look on his face, she knew there was a room just like this in the Singhs’ house.

And though Pip had come to feel like she knew Andie, the one buried under all those secrets, this bedroom made Andie a real person to her for the first time. As she and Ravi crossed over to the wardrobe, Pip silently promised the room that she would find the truth. Not just for Sal, but for Andie too.

The truth that could very well be hidden right here.

‘Ready?’ Ravi whispered.

She nodded.

He opened the wardrobe on to a rack bulging with dresses and jumpers on wooden hangers. At one end hung Andie’s old Kilton Grammar uniform, squashed against the wall by skirts and tops, no room to part even an inch of space between the clothes.

Struggling with the rubber gloves, Pip pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and swiped up to turn on the torch. She got down on her knees, Ravi beside her, and they crawled under the clothes, the torch lighting up the old floorboards inside. They started prodding the boards, tracing their fingers round the shape of them, trying to prise up their corners.

Ravi found it. It was the one against the back wall, on the left.

He pushed down one corner and the other side of the board kicked up.

Pip shuffled forward to pull up the floorboard, sliding it behind them. With her phone held up, Pip and Ravi leaned over to look inside the dark space

below. ‘No.’ She moved the torch down inside the small space to be absolutely sure, pivoting the light into each corner. It illuminated only layers of dust, gusting

out in whirlwinds now because of their picked-up breath.

It was empty. No phone. No cash. No drug stash. Nothing. ‘It’s not here,’ Ravi said.

The disappointment was a physical sensation gouging through Pip’s gut, leaving a space for the fear to fill in. ‘I really thought it would be here,’ he said.

Pip had too. She thought the phone screen would light up the killer’s name for them and the police would do the rest. She thought she’d be safe from Unknown. It was supposed to be over, she thought, her throat constricting the way it did before she cried.

She slid the floorboard back in place and inched backwards out of the wardrobe after Ravi, her hair getting briefly tangled in the zip of a long dress. She stood, closed the doors and turned to him. ‘Where could the burner phone be then?’ he said. ‘Maybe Andie had it on her when she died,’ Pip said, ‘and now it’s buried with her or otherwise destroyed by the killer.’ ‘Or,’ Ravi said, studying the items on Andie’s desk. ‘Or someone knew where it was hidden and they took it after her disappearance, knowing that it would lead the police to them if it was found.’ ‘Or that,’ Pip agreed. ‘But that doesn’t help us now.’ She joined Ravi at the desk. On top of the make-up case was a paddle hairbrush with long blonde hairs still wound round the bristles. Beside it, Pip spotted a Kilton Grammar academic planner for the year 2011/2012, almost identical to the one she owned for this year. Andie had decorated the title page of her planner under the plastic with doodled hearts and stars and small printouts of supermodels.

She flipped through some of the pages. The days were filled with scribbled homework and coursework assignments. November and December had various university open days listed. The week before Christmas there was a note to herself to maybe get Sal a Christmas present. Dates and locations of calamity parties, school deadlines, people’s birthdays. And, strangely, random letters with times scribbled in next to them. ‘Hey.’ She held it up to show Ravi. ‘Look at these weird initials. What do you think they mean?’ Ravi stared for a moment, resting his jaw in his gardening-gloved hand.

Then his eyes darkened as he tensed his brows. He said, ‘Do you remember

that thing Howie Bowers said to us? That he’d told Andie to use codes instead of names.’ ‘Maybe these are her codes,’ Pip finished his sentence for him, tracing her rubber finger over the random letters. ‘We should document these.’ She laid the planner down and pulled out her phone again. Ravi helped her tug one of her gloves off and she thumbed on to the camera. Ravi skipped the pages back to February 2012 and Pip took pictures of each double page, as they flicked right through to that week in April just after the Easter holidays, where the last thing Andie had written on the Friday was: Start French revision notes soon. Eleven photos in all. ‘OK,’ Pip said, pocketing her phone and slipping back into the glove.

‘We –’ The front door slammed below them.

Ravi’s head snapped round, terror pooling in the pupils of his eyes.

Pip dropped the planner in its place. She nodded her head towards the wardrobe. ‘Get back in,’ she whispered.

She opened the doors and crawled inside, looking for Ravi. He was on his knees now just outside the cupboard. Pip shuffled aside to give him space to crawl back in. But Ravi wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving?

Pip reached forward and grabbed him, pulling him into her against the back wall. Ravi snapped back into life then. He grasped the wardrobe doors and quietly swung them closed, shutting them inside.

They heard sharp-heeled steps in the hallway. Was it Dawn Bell, back from work already? ‘Hello, Monty.’ A voice carried through the house. It was Becca.

Pip felt Ravi shaking beside her, right through into her own bones. She took his hand, the rubber gloves squeaking as she held it.

They heard Becca on the stairs then, louder with each step, the jingling collar of the cat behind her. ‘Ah, that’s where I left them,’ she said, footsteps pausing on the landing.

Pip squeezed Ravi’s hand, hoping he could feel how sorry she was.

Hoping he knew she would take the fall if she could. ‘Monty, have you been in here?’ Becca’s voice drew nearer.

Ravi closed his eyes. ‘You know you’re not supposed to go in this room.’ Pip buried her face into his shoulder.

Becca was in the room with them now. They could hear her breathing, hear the ticking of her tongue as she moved it around her mouth. More steps, stifled by the thick carpet. And then the sound of Andie’s bedroom door clicking shut.

Becca’s words were muffled through it now as she called, ‘Bye, Monty.’ Ravi opened his eyes slowly, squeezing Pip’s hand back, his panicked

breaths rippling through her hair.

The front door slammed again.