Jess:

Good. I’m glad to hear that.

I’m struggling to even process the amount I’ve learned from that one conversation. This investigation shifts tonally each time I peek behind another screen in Andie’s life.

Jason Bell is looking darker and darker the more I dig. And I now know that he left his dinner party for a while on that night. From what Jess said, it sounds like he was emotionally abusive to his family. A bully. A chauvinist. An adulterer. It’s no wonder Andie turned out the way she did in a toxic environment like that. It seems Jason wrecked his children’s self-esteem so much that one became a bully like him and the other turned to self-harming. I know from Andie’s friend Emma that Becca had been hospitalized in the weeks before Andie’s disappearance and that Andie was supposed to be watching her sister that very night. It seems like Jess didn’t know about the self-harming; she just thought Becca had been skipping school.

So Andie wasn’t the perfect girl and the Bells weren’t the perfect family. Those family photographs may speak a thousand words but most of them are lies.

Speaking of lies: Max. Max bloody Hastings. Here’s a direct quote from his interview when I asked how well he knew Andie: ‘We sometimes spoke, yeah. But we weren’t ever, like, friend friends; didn’t really know her. Like an acquaintance.’

An acquaintance that you were seen cuddling up to at a party? So much so that a witness presumed YOU were Andie’s boyfriend?

And there’s this as well: even though they were in the same school year, Andie had a summer birthday and Max had been held back a year because of his leukaemia AND has a September birthday. When you look at it like this, there is almost a two-year age gap between them. From Andie’s perspective, Max WAS technically an older guy. But was he a secret older guy? Right up close and personal behind Sal’s back.

I’ve tried looking Max up on Facebook before; his profile is basically barren, just holiday and Christmas pictures with his parents and birthday wishes from uncles and aunties. I remember thinking before that it didn’t seem fitting but I shrugged it off.

Well, I’m not shrugging any more, Hastings. And I’ve made a discovery. In some of Naomi’s pictures online, Max isn’t tagged as Max Hastings but as Nancy Tangotits. I thought it was some kind of private joke before but NO, Nancy Tangotits is Max’s actual Facebook profile. The Max Hastings one must be a tame decoy he kept in case universities or potential employers decided to look up his online activities. It makes sense, even some of my friends have started changing their profile names to make them unsearchable as we draw closer to uni-application season.

The real Max Hastings – and all his wild, drunken photos and posts from friends – has been hiding as Nancy. This is what I presume, at least. I can’t actually get on to see anything: Nancy has his privacy settings set on full throttle. I can only see photos or posts that Naomi is also tagged in. It’s not giving me much to work with: no secret pictures of Max and Andie kissing in the background, none of his photos from the night she disappeared.

I’ve already learned my lesson here. When you catch someone lying about a murdered girl, the best thing to do is to go and ask them why.

Persons of Interest Jason Bell Naomi Ward Secret Older Guy Nat da Silva Daniel da Silva Max Hastings (Nancy Tangotits)

Sixteen

The door was different now. It had been brown the last time she was here, over six weeks ago. Now it was covered in a streaky layer of white paint, the dark undercoat still peering through.

Pip knocked again, harder this time, hoping it would be heard over the droning murmur of a vacuum cleaner running inside.

The drone clicked off abruptly, leaving a slightly buzzy silence in its wake. Then sharp footsteps on a hard floor.

The door opened and a well-dressed woman with cherry-red lipstick stood before her.

‘Hi,’ Pip said. ‘I’m a friend of Max’s, is he in?’

‘Oh, hi,’ the woman smiled, revealing a smear of red on one of her top teeth. She stood back to let Pip through. ‘He certainly is, come in . . .’

‘Pippa,’ she smiled, stepping inside.

‘Pippa. Yes, he’s in the living room. Shouting at me for vacuuming while he’s playing some death match. Can’t pause it, apparently.’

Max’s mum walked Pip down the hall and through the open archway into the living room.

Max was spread out on the sofa, in tartan pyjama bottoms and a white T-shirt, his hands gripped round a controller as he furiously thumbed the X button.

His mum cleared her throat.

Max looked up.

‘Oh, hi, Pippa Funny-Surname,’ he said in his deep, refined voice, his eyes returning to his game. ‘What are you doing here?’

Pip almost grimaced in reflex, but she fought it with a fake smile. ‘Oh, nothing much.’ She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Just here to ask you how well you really knew Andie Bell.’

The game was paused.

Max sat up, stared at Pip, then his mum, then back to Pip.

‘Um,’ his mum said, ‘would anyone like a cup of tea?’

‘No, we don’t.’ Max stood. ‘Upstairs, Pippa.’

He strode past them and up the grand stairs in the hallway, his bare feet thundering on the steps. Pip followed, flashing a polite wave back at his mother. At the top, Max held open his bedroom door and gestured her inside.