it.’
Pip jogged up the steps, Ravi following far too slowly behind. Before he got there, she did a hasty check of her bedroom for potential embarrassment. She dived for a pile of just-laundered bras by her chair, scooped them up and shoved them in a drawer, slamming it shut just as Ravi walked in. She pointed him into her desk chair, too flappy to sit herself.
‘Workstation?’ he asked.
‘Yep,’ she said, ‘while some people might work in their bedrooms, I sleep in my workstation. It’s very different.’
‘Here you go then. I charged it last night.’
He handed her the phone and she took it in her cupped palms with as much deliberate dexterity and care as she did yearly when unwrapping her first father’s German-market Christmas baubles.
‘Have you looked through it before?’ she asked, sliding to unlock more carefully than she’d ever unlocked her own phones, even at their newest.
‘Yeah, of course. Obsessively. But go ahead, Sergeant. Where would you look first?’
‘Call log,’ she said, tapping the green phone button.
She looked through the missed call list first. There were dozens from the 24th April, the Tuesday he had died. Calls from Dad , Mum, Ravi, Naomi, Jake and unsaved numbers that must have been the police trying to locate him.
Pip scrolled back further, to the date of Andie’s disappearance. Sal had two missed calls that day. One was from Max-y Boy at 7:19 p.m., probably a when-are-you-coming-over call from Max. The other missed call, she read with a skipped heartbeat, was from Andie<3 at 8:54 p.m.
‘Andie rang him that night,’ Pip said to herself and Ravi. ‘Just before nine.’
Ravi nodded. ‘Sal didn’t pick up, though.’
‘Pippa!’ Victor’s jokey-but-serious voice sailed up the stairs. ‘No boys in bedrooms.’
Pip felt her cheeks flood with heat. She turned so Ravi couldn’t see and yelled back, ‘We’re working on my EPQ! My door is open.’
‘OK, that will do!’ came the reply.
She glimpsed back at Ravi and saw he was chuckling at her again.
‘Stop finding my life amusing,’ she said, looking back at the phone.
She went through Sal’s outgoing calls next. Andie’s name repeated over and over again in long streams. It was broken up in places with the odd call to home, or Dad, and one to Naomi on Saturday. Pip took a few moments to count all the ‘Andie’s: from 10:30 a.m. on the Saturday until 7:20 a.m. on the Tuesday, Sal called her 112 times. Each call lasted two or three seconds; straight to voicemail.
‘He called her over a hundred times,’ Ravi said, reading her face.
‘Why would he ring her so many times if he’d supposedly killed her and had her phone hidden somewhere?’ said Pip.
‘I contacted the police years ago and asked them that very question,’ Ravi said. ‘The officer told me it was clear that Sal was making a conscious effort to look innocent, by ringing the victim’s phone so many times.’
‘But,’ Pip countered, ‘if they thought he was making an effort to appear innocent and evade capture, why didn’t he dispose of Andie’s phone? He could have put it in the same place as her body and it never would have connected him to her death. If he was trying to not get caught, why would he keep the one biggest bit of evidence? And then feel desperate enough to end his life with this vital evidence on him?’
Ravi shot two clicking gun-hands at her. ‘The policeman couldn’t answer that either.’
‘Did you look at the last texts Andie and Sal sent each other?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, have a look. Don’t worry, they aren’t sexty or anything.’
Pip exited on to the home screen and opened the messages app. She clicked on the Andie tab, feeling like a time-hopping trespasser.
Sal had sent two texts to Andie after she disappeared. The first on the Sunday morning: andie just come home everyones worried. And on Monday afternoon: please just ring someone so we know youre safe.
The message preceding them was sent on the Friday she went missing. At 9:01 p.m. Sal texted her: im not talking to you till youve stopped.
Pip showed Ravi the message she’d just read. ‘He said that just after ignoring her call that night. Do you know what they could have been fighting about? What did Sal want Andie to stop?’
‘No idea.’
‘Can I just type this out in my research?’ she said, reaching over him for her laptop. She parked herself on her bed and typed out the text, grammar mistakes and all.
‘Now you need to look at the last text he sent