Pip leaned forward.

Max had taken and uploaded ten photos from the night Andie disappeared. Pip immediately recognized everyone’s clothes and the sofas from Max’s house. Added to Naomi’s three and Millie’s six, that made a total of nineteen photos from that night, nineteen snapshots of time that existed alongside Andie Bell’s last hours of life.

Pip shivered and pulled the duvet over her feet. The photos were of a similar nature to the ones Millie and Naomi had taken: Max and Jake gripping controllers and staring out of frame, Millie and Max posing with funny filters superimposed over their faces, Naomi in the background staring down at her phone unaware of the posed photo going on behind her. Four best friends without their fifth. Sal out allegedly murdering someone instead of goofing around with them.

That’s when Pip noticed it. When it had been just Millie and Naomi it was simply a coincidence, but now that she was looking at Max’s too it made a pattern. All three of them had uploaded their photos from that night on Monday the 23rd , all between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. Wasn’t it a little strange that, in the midst of all the craziness of Andie’s disappearance, they all decided to post these photos at almost the exact same time? And why upload these photos at all? Naomi said she and the others had decided on the Monday night to tell the police the truth about Sal’s alibi; was uploading these photos the first step in that decision? To stop hiding Sal’s absence?

Pip typed up some notes about this upload coincidence, then she clicked save and closed the laptop. She got ready for bed, wandering back from the bathroom with her toothbrush in mouth, humming as she scribbled her to-do list for tomorrow. Finish Margaret Atwood essay was underlined three times.

Tucked up in bed, she read three paragraphs of her current book before tiredness started meddling with the words, making them strange and unfamiliar in her head. She only just managed to hit the light before sleep took her.

It was with a sniff and a jerk of the leg that Pip sat bolt upright in bed. She leaned against the headboard and rubbed her eyes as her mind stirred into wakefulness. She pressed the home button on her phone, the screen light blinding her. It was 4:47 a.m.

What had woken her? Was it a screaming fox outside? A dream?

Something stirred then, on the tip of her tongue and the tip of her brain. A vague thought: too fluffy, spiky and morphing to put into words, beyond the span of just-awake comprehension. But she knew where it was drawing her.

Pip slid quickly out of bed. The cold room stung her exposed skin, turning her breath into ghosts. She grabbed her laptop from the desk and took it back to bed, wrapping the duvet round her for warmth. Opening the computer, she was blinded again by the silvery backlight. Squinting through it, she opened up Facebook, still signed in as Naomi, and navigated her way back to Nancy Tangotits and the photos from that night.

She looked through them all once and then back again a little slower. She stopped on the second-to-last picture. All four of the friends were captured within it. Naomi was sitting with her back to the camera, looking down. Though she was in the background, you could see her phone in her hands lighting up its lock screen with small white numbers, her eyes down on it. The main focus of the photo was on Max, Millie and Jake, the three of them standing by the near side of the sofa, smiling as Millie rested her arms over both the boys’ shoulders. Max was still holding a controller in his outside hand and Jake’s disappeared out of shot on the right.

Pip shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.

The camera must have been at least five feet in front of the grinning friends to get that much in the frame.

And in the dead silence of the night Pip whispered, ‘Who’s taking the picture?’

Twenty-Six

It was Sal.

It had to be.

Despite the cold, Pip’s body was a flume of racing blood, warm and fast, hammering through her heart.

She moved mechanically, her mind adrift in waves of thoughts shouting unintelligibly over each other. But her hands somehow knew what to do. A few minutes later, she’d downloaded the trial version of Photoshop to her computer. She saved Max’s photo and opened the file up in the programme. Following an online tutorial by a man with a silky Irish accent, she enlarged the photo and then sharpened it.

Her skin flashed cold to hot. She sat back and gasped.

There was no doubt about it. The little numbers projected on Naomi’s phone read 00:09.

They said Sal left at half ten but there they were, all four of the friends at nine minutes past midnight, encased in the frame, and not one of them could have taken the photo themselves.

Max’s parents were away that night and no one else had been there, that’s what they’d always said. It was just the five of them until Sal left at ten thirty to go and kill his girlfriend.

And here, right in front of Pip’s eyes, was proof that that was a lie. There was a fifth person there after midnight. And who could it have been but Sal?

Pip scrolled up to the topmost strip of the enlarged photo. Behind the sofa on the far wall was a window. And in its very centre pane was the flash of the phone camera. You couldn’t distinguish the figure holding the phone from the darkness of outside. But, just beyond the streaks of bright white, there was a faint halo of reflected blue, only just visible against the surrounding black. The very same blue as the corded shirt Sal was wearing that night, the one Ravi still wore sometimes. Her stomach flipped as she thought his name, as she imagined the look in his eyes when he saw this photo.