‘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 .’

Nine

They probably thought she couldn’t hear them. Her parents, bickering in the living room downstairs. She had long ago learned that the word ‘Pip’ was one that travelled exceptionally well through walls and floors.

Listening through the crack of her bedroom door, it wasn’t hard to catch hold of snatches and shape them into a gist. Her mum wasn’t happy that Pip was spending so much of her summer on schoolwork. Her dad wasn’t happy that her mother had said that. Then her mum wasn’t happy because her dad had misunderstood what she meant. She thought that obsessing over the Andie Bell thing would be unhealthy for her. Her dad wasn’t happy that her mum wouldn’t give Pip the space to make her own mistakes, if that’s what they were.

Pip grew bored of the sparring match and closed her bedroom door. She knew their cyclical argument would burn itself out soon, without neutral intervention. And she had an important phone call to make.

She had private-messaged both of Andie’s best friends last week. Emma Hutton replied a few hours ago with a phone number, saying she didn’t mind answering ‘just a few’ questions at eight o’clock tonight. When Pip told Ravi this, he’d texted back with a whole page of shock-face and fist-bump emojis.

She glanced at the clock on her computer dashboard and the glance became a stare. The clock stood stubbornly at 7:58 p.m.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said when, even after twenty Mississippis, the eight in the :58 hadn’t sprung into the leg of a nine.

When it did, an age later, Pip said, ‘Close enough,’ and pressed the record button on her app. She dialled Emma’s number, her skin prickling with nerves. It picked up on the third ring.

‘Hello?’ said a high and sweet voice.

‘Hi, Emma, this is Pippa here.’

‘Oh yeah, hi. Hold on, let me just go up to my room.’

Pip listened impatiently to the sound of Emma’s feet skipping up a flight of stairs.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘So, you said you’re doing a project about Andie?’

‘Sort of, yeah. About the investigation into her disappearance and the media’s role in it. A kind of case study.’

‘OK,’ Emma said, sounding uncertain. ‘I’m not sure how much help I can be with that.’

‘Don’t worry, I just have a few basic questions about the investigation as you remember it,’ Pip said. ‘So firstly, when did you find out she was missing?’

‘Um . . . it was around one o’clock that night. Her parents rang both me and Chloe Burch; we were Andie’s best friends. I said how I hadn’t seen her or heard from her and told them I would call around a bit. I tried Sal Singh that night but he didn’t pick up until the next morning.’

‘Did the police contact you at all?’ asked Pip.

‘Yeah, Saturday morning. They came around asking questions.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘Just the same as I said to Andie’s parents. That I had no idea where she was; she hadn’t told me she was going anywhere. And they were asking about Andie’s boyfriend, so I told them about Sal and that I’d just rung and told him she was missing.’

‘What did you tell them about Sal?’

‘Well, only that at school that week they were kind of fighting. I definitely saw them bickering on the Thursday and Friday, which was out of the ordinary. Usually Andie bickered at him and he didn’t get involved. But this time he seemed super mad about something.’

‘What about?’ Pip said. It was suddenly clearer to her why the police might have thought it prudent to interview Sal that afternoon.

‘I don’t know, honestly. When I asked Andie she just said that Sal was being “a little bitch” about something.’

Pip was taken aback. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So Andie didn’t have plans to see Sal on the Friday?’

‘No, she didn’t have plans to do anything actually; she was supposed to stay at home that night.’