picture of Andie from the Ivy House. So he was probably the one meeting her there. He bought Rohypnol from Andie and girls were getting spiked at calamities; he probably assaulted them. He’s clearly messed up, Pip.’
Ravi was going through the very same thoughts she’d struggled with and Pip knew he was about to run into a wall.
‘Also,’ he carried on, ‘he’s the only one here we know definitely has your phone number.’
‘Actually, no,’ she said. ‘Nat has it from when I tried to phone-interview her. Howie has it too: I rang him when trying to identify him, and forgot to withhold my number. I got Unknown’s first text soon after.’
‘Oh.’
‘And we know that Max was at school giving a statement to the police at the time when Sal disappeared.’
Ravi slumped back. ‘We must be missing something.’
‘Let’s go back to the connections.’ Pip shook the pot of pins at him. He took them and cut off a measure of red string.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘The two Da Silvas are obviously connected. And Daniel da Silva with Andie’s dad. And Daniel also with Max, because he filed the report on Max’s crashed car and might have known about the hit-and-run.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and maybe covered up drink spiking.’
‘OK,’ Ravi said, wrapping the string round a pin and pressing it in. He hissed when he stabbed himself in the thumb, a tiny bubble of blood bursting through.
‘Can you stop bleeding all over the murder board, please?’ Pip said.
Ravi pretended to throw a pin at her. ‘So Max also knows Howie and they were both involved in Andie’s drug dealing,’ he said, circling his finger round their three faces.
‘Yep. And Max knew Nat from school,’ Pip said, pointing, ‘and there’s a rumour she had her drink spiked as well.’
Lines of red fraying string covered the board now, webbing and criss-crossing each other.
‘So, basically –’ Ravi looked up at her – ‘they are all indirectly connected with each other, starting with Howie at one end and Jason Bell at the other. Maybe they all did it together, all five of them.’
‘Next you’ll be saying someone has an evil twin.’
Thirty-Eight
All day at school her friends handled her like she would shatter, never once mentioning Barney, talking around it in wide circles. Lauren let Pip have her last Jaffa Cake. Connor gave up his middle seat at the cafeteria table so Pip didn’t have to sit ignored at the end. Cara stayed by her side, knowing just when to talk to her and when to stay quiet. And none of them laughed too hard, checking her way whenever they did.
She spent most of the day working silently through past papers for the ELAT exam, trying to push everything else out of her head. She practised, creating brain-scribed essays in her head while pretending to listen to Mr Ward in history and Miss Welsh in politics. Mrs Morgan cornered her in the corridor, her pudgy face stern as she listed the reasons why it wasn’t really possible to change an EPQ title this late. Pip just mumbled, ‘OK,’ and drifted away, hearing Mrs Morgan tut, ‘Teenagers,’ under her breath.
As soon as she got home from school, she went straight to her workstation and opened up Ravi’s laptop. She would revise more later, after dinner and into the night, even though her eyes were already set inside dark planetary rings. Her mum thought she wasn’t sleeping because of Barney. But she wasn’t sleeping because there wasn’t time to.
Pip opened the browser and pulled up the TripAdvisor page for the Ivy House Hotel. This was her designated lead; Ravi was working on the phone number scribble from the planner. Pip had already messaged some Ivy House reviewers who’d posted around March and April 2012, asking if they remembered seeing a blonde girl at the hotel. But no responses yet.
Next she navigated to the website that had actually processed the bookings for the hotel. On the contact us page, she found their phone number and the friendly adage: Call us anytime! Perhaps she could pretend to be a relative of the old woman who owned the hotel and see whether she could access their old booking information. Probably not, but she had to try. Secret Older Guy’s identity could be at the end of this line.
She unlocked her mobile and clicked on to the phone app. It opened on her recent calls list. She pressed over to the keypad and started to type in the company’s number. Then her thumbs slackened