I can’t believe I’m even allowing myself to think this. Who will be next on the persons of interest list? Cara? Ravi? Dad? Me?

I think I should just grit my teeth and ask Elliot so I can bite down on some actual facts. Otherwise I may end up suspecting everybody I know who may have spoken to Andie at some point in their lives. And paranoia does not suit me.

But how do you casually ask a grown man you’ve known since you were six why they lied about a murdered girl?

Persons of Interest

Jason Bell

Naomi Ward

Secret Older Guy

Elliot Ward

Thirteen

Her writing hand must have had its own mind, an independent circuitry from the one contained in her head.

Mr Ward was speaking, ‘But Lenin did not like Stalin’s policy towards Georgia after the Red Army invasion in 1921,’ and Pip’s fingers moved in harmony, scribbling it all down with dates underlined too. But she wasn’t really listening.

There was a war going on inside her, the two sides of her head squabbling and pecking at each other. Should she ask Elliot about Andie’s comments, or was that a risk to the investigation? Was it rude to ask probing questions about murdered students, or was it an entirely forgivable Pippism?

The bell rang for lunch and Elliot called over the scraping chairs and zipping bags, ‘Read chapter three before our next lesson. And if you want to be really keen, you can Trotsky on over to chapter four as well.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

‘You coming, Pip?’ Connor said, standing up and swinging his rucksack on to his back.

‘Um, yeah I’ll come find you lot in a minute,’ she said. ‘I need to ask Mr Ward something first.’

‘You need to ask Mr Ward something, eh?’ Elliot had overheard. ‘That’s ominous. I hope you haven’t started thinking about the coursework already.’

‘No, well, yes I have,’ Pip said, ‘but that’s not what I want to ask you about.’

She waited until they were the only two left in the classroom.

‘What is it?’ Elliot glanced down at his watch. ‘You have ten of my minutes before I start panicking about the panini queue.’

‘Yeah, sorry,’ Pip said, grasping for her stash of courage but it leaked out of reach. ‘Um . . .’

‘Everything OK?’ Elliot said, sitting back on his desk, his arms and legs crossed. ‘You worrying about university applications? We can go over your personal statement some time if –’

‘No, it’s not that.’ She took a breath and blew out her top lip. ‘I . . . when I interviewed you before you said you didn’t have anything to do with Andie in the last two years of school.’

‘Yes, correct.’ He blinked. ‘She didn’t take history.’

‘OK, but –’ the courage trickled back all at once and her words raced each other out – ‘one of Andie’s friends said that, excuse the language, Andie referred to you as an arsehole and other unsavoury words sometime in the weeks before she went missing.’

The why question was evidently there hiding beneath her words; she didn’t need to speak it.

‘Oh,’ Elliot said, rubbing the dark hair back from his face. He looked at her and sighed. ‘Well, I was hoping this wouldn’t come up. I don’t see what good it can do to dwell on it now. But I can see you’re being very thorough with your project.’

Pip nodded, her long silence beckoning an answer.

Elliot shuffled. ‘I don’t feel too comfortable about it, saying unpleasant things about a student who has lost their life.’ He glanced up at the open classroom door and scooted over to shut it. ‘Um, I didn’t have much to do with Andie at school but I knew of her, of course, as Naomi’s dad. And . . . it was in that capacity, through Naomi, that I learned some things about Andie Bell.’

‘Yes?’

‘No soft way of saying it but . . . she was a bully. She was bullying another girl in their year. I can’t remember her name now, something Portuguese-sounding. There was some sort of incident, a video online that Andie had posted.’

Pip was both surprised and not at all. Yet another path opening up in the maze of Andie Bell’s life. Palimpsest upon palimpsest, the original concept of Andie only just peeking out through all the overlaying scribbles.

‘I knew enough to understand that Andie would be in trouble with both the school and the police for what she’d done,’ Elliot continued. ‘And I . . . I thought it was a shame because it was the first week back after Easter and her A-level exams were coming up. Exams that would determine her entire future.’ He sighed. ‘What I should have done, when I found out, was tell the head teacher about the incident. But the school has a no-tolerance policy on bullying or cyber-bullying and I knew Andie would be expelled immediately. No A levels, no university and I, well, I just couldn’t do it. Even though she was a bully, I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d play a part in ruining a student’s future.’

‘So what did you do?’ Pip asked.

‘I looked up her father’s contact details and I called him, the first day of term after the Easter holidays.’

‘You mean the Monday of the week Andie disappeared?’

Elliot nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it was. I phoned Jason Bell and I told him everything I’d learned and said that he needed to have a very serious talk with his daughter about bullying and consequences. And I suggested restricting her online access. I said I was trusting him to sort this out, otherwise I would have no choice but to inform the school and have Andie expelled.’