The Ivy House Hotel doesn’t have its own website but it has a page on TripAdvisor, only two and a half stars. It’s a small family-run B&B with four available rooms, right by Chalfont station. From the few pictures on the site it looks quaint and cosy, but it’s ‘right on a busy road and loud when you’re trying to sleep’ according to Carmel672. And Trevor59 wasn’t happy with them at all; they’d double-booked his room and he’d had to find other accommodation. T9Jones said ‘the family were lovely’ but that the bathroom was ‘tired and filthy – with dirt tracked all round the tub.’ She’s even posted some pictures on her review to bolster her point.

CRAP.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I’ve been saying, oh my god, out loud for at least thirty seconds but it’s not enough; it needs to be typed as well. Oh My God.

And Ravi isn’t picking up his damn phone!

My fingers can’t keep up with my brain. T9Jones posted two close-up pictures of the bathtub at different angles. And then she has a long shot of the entire bathroom. Beside the bath is a huge full-length mirror on the wall; we can see T9Jones and the flash of her phone reflected in it. We can see the rest of the bathroom too, from its cream ceiling with circle spotlights down to its tiled floor. A red and white tiled floor.

I’ll eat my fluffy fox-head hat if I’m wrong, BUT I’m almost certain it is the very same tiled floor from a grainy printed photo pinned up behind a Reservoir Dogs poster in Max Hastings’ bedroom. Andie naked but for a small pair of black pants, pouting at a mirror, this mirror . . . in the Ivy House Hotel, Little Chalfont.

If I’m right, then Andie went to that hotel at least three times in the span of three weeks. Who was she there to meet? Max? Secret Older Guy?

Looks like I’m going to Little Chalfont after school tomorrow.

Twenty-Four

There were a few moments of muffled shrieking as the train pulled off and started to gain speed. It jerked and jogged Pip’s pen, scribbling a line down the page from her essay introduction. She sighed, ripped the piece of paper from the pad and screwed it into a ball. It was no good anyway. She shoved the paper ball into the top of her rucksack and readied her pen again.

She was on the train to Little Chalfont. Ravi was meeting her there, straight from work, so she thought she could put the eleven minutes there to good use, get a chunk of her Margaret Atwood essay drafted. But reading her own words back, nothing felt right. She knew what she wanted to say, each idea perfectly formed and moulded but the words got muddled and lost on the way from brain to fingers. Her mind stuck in Andie Bell sidetracks.

The recorded voice on the tannoy announced that Chalfont was the next stop and Pip gratefully looked away from the thinning A4 pad and shoved it back in her rucksack. The train slackened and came to a stop with a sharp mechanical sigh. She skipped down on to the platform and fed her ticket into the barriers.

Ravi was waiting for her outside.

‘Sarge,’ he said, flicking his dark hair out of his eyes. ‘I was just coming up with our crime-fighting theme tune. So far, I’ve got chilled strings and a pan flute when it’s me, and then you come on with some heavy, Darth Vader-ish trumpets.’

‘Why am I the trumpets?’ she said.

‘Because you stomp when you walk; sorry to be the one to tell you.’

Pip pulled out her phone and typed the Ivy House Hotel address into her maps app. The line appeared on screen and they followed the three-minute-long walking directions, Pip’s blue circle avatar sliding along the route in her hands.

She looked up when her blue circle collided with the red destination pin. There was a small wooden sign just before the drive that read Ivy House Hotel in fading carved letters. The drive was sloped and pebbled, leading to a red-brick house almost wholly covered in creeping ivy. It was so thick with the green leaves that the house itself seemed to shiver in the gentle wind.

Their footsteps crunched up the drive as they headed for the front door. Pip clocked the parked car, meaning someone must be in. Hopefully it was the owners and not a guest.

She jabbed her finger on to the cold metal doorbell and let it ring out for one long note.

They heard a small voice inside, some slow shuffled steps and then the door swung inward, sending a tremor through the ivy around the frame. An old woman with fluffy grey hair, thick glasses and a very premature Christmas-patterned jumper stood before them and smiled.

‘Hello, dears,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize we were expecting someone. What name did you make the booking under?’ she said, ushering Pip and Ravi inside and closing the door.

They stepped into a dimly lit squared hallway, with a sofa and coffee table on the left and a white staircase running along the far wall.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Pip said, turning back to face the woman, ‘we haven’t actually got a booking.’

‘I see, well, lucky for you two we aren’t booked up so –’

‘– Sorry,’ Pip cut in, looking awkwardly at Ravi, ‘I mean, we’re not looking to stay here. We’re looking for . . . we have some questions for the owners of the hotel. Are you . . .?’

‘Yes, I own the hotel,’ the woman smiled, looking unnervingly at a point just left of Pip’s face. ‘Ran it for twenty years with my David; he was in charge of most things, though. It’s been hard since my David passed a couple of years ago. But my grandsons are always here, helping me get by, driving me around. My grandson Henry is just upstairs cleaning the rooms.’