‘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.

Pippa Fitz-Amobi EPQ 09/10/2017

Production Log – Entry 25

Well, I thought I’d need about six coffees to keep me awake for the rest of the day. Turns out that close call with Becca more than did the trick. Ravi still wasn’t quite himself by the time he had to leave for work. I can’t believe how close we came to getting caught. And the burner phone wasn’t there . . . but it might not all have been for nothing.

I emailed the photos of Andie’s planner to myself so I could see them bigger on my laptop screen. I’ve trawled through each one dozens of times and I think there are some things to pick up on here.

This is the week after the Easter holidays, the week Andie disappeared. There’s quite a lot to note on this page alone. I can’t ignore that Fat da Silva 0–3 Andie scorecard comment. This was just after Andie had posted the nude video of Nat online. And I know from Nat that she only returned to school on Wednesday 18th April and Andie called her a slut in the corridor, prompting the death threat stuffed in Andie’s locker.

But, judging this comment at face value, it seems Andie was gloating over three victories she’d had over Nat in her twisted high-school games. What if the topless video accounts for one of these goals and Andie blackmailing Nat to drop out of The Crucible was another? What was the third thing Andie did to Nat da Silva that she’s revelling in here? Could that have been what made Nat snap and turned her into a killer?

Another significant entry on that page is on Wednesday 18th April. Andie wrote: CP @ 7:30 .

If Ravi is right, and Andie is noting things down in code, I think I’ve just cracked this one. It’s so simple.

CP = car park. As in the train station car park. I think Andie was reminding herself that she had a meeting with Howie in the car park that evening. I know that she did , in fact, meet Howie that evening, because Sal wrote Howie’s number plate in his phone at 7:42 p.m. on the very same Wednesday.

There are many more instances of CP with an accompanying time in the photos we took. I think I can confidently say that these refer to Andie’s drug trades with Howie and that she was following Howie’s instruction to use codes, to keep her activities hidden from any prying eyes. But, as all teenagers, she was prone to forgetting things (especially her schedule) so she wrote the meetings down on the one item she would have looked at once every lesson at least. The perfect memory prompt.