to go and get the morning-after pill with her. I asked and asked and she just would not tell me who she’d slept with. I think she might have been embarrassed. That upset me at the time, though. Especially as she had considered it important enough to completely abandon me at a party I never wanted to go to. We had a big fight and, I guess, that was the start of the wedge in our friendship. Becca skipped some school and I didn’t see her for a few weekends. And that’s when Andie went missing.
Pip:
Did you see the Bells much after Andie disappeared?
Jess:
I visited a few times but Becca didn’t want to talk much. None of them did. Jason had an even shorter temper than usual, especially the day the police interviewed him. Apparently, on the night Andie disappeared, the alarm had gone off at his business offices during the dinner party. He’d driven round to check it out but he’d already drunk quite a lot of alcohol, so he was nervous talking to the police about it. Well, this is what Becca told me anyway. But, yeah, the house was just so quiet. And even months later, after it was presumed Andie was dead and never coming home, Becca’s mum insisted on leaving Andie’s room as it was. Just in case. It was all really sad.
Pip:
So, when you were at that calamity party in March, did you see what Andie was up to, who she was with?
Jess:
Yeah. You know, I never actually knew that Sal was Andie’s boyfriend until after she went missing; she’d never had him over at the house. I knew she had a boyfriend, though, and, after that calamity party, I had presumed it was this other guy. I saw them alone at that party, whispering and looking pretty close. Several times. Never once saw her with Sal.
Pip:
Who? Who was the guy?
Jess:
Um, he was this tall blonde guy, kind of long hair, spoke like he was posh.
Pip:
Max? Was his name Max Hastings?
Jess:
Yeah, yeah, I think that was him.
Pip:
You saw Max and Andie alone at the party?
Jess:
Yep, looking pretty friendly.
Pip:
Jess, thanks so much for talking with me. You’ve been a big help.
Jess:
Oh, that’s OK. Hey, Pippa, do you know how Becca’s doing now?
Pip:
I saw her just the other day actually. I think she’s doing well, she’s got her degree and she’s interning at the Kilton newspaper. She looks well.
Jess:
Good. I’m glad to hear that.
I’m struggling to even process the amount I’ve learned from that one conversation. This investigation shifts tonally each time I peek behind another screen in Andie’s life.
Jason Bell is looking darker and darker the more I dig. And I now know that he left his dinner party for a while on that night. From what Jess said, it sounds like he was emotionally abusive to his family. A bully. A chauvinist. An adulterer. It’s no wonder Andie turned out the way she did in a toxic environment like that. It seems Jason wrecked his children’s self-esteem so much that one became a bully like him and the other turned to self-harming. I know from Andie’s friend Emma that Becca had been hospitalized in the weeks before Andie’s disappearance and that Andie was supposed to be watching her sister that very night. It seems like Jess didn’t know about the self-harming; she just thought Becca had been skipping school.
So Andie wasn’t the perfect girl and the Bells weren’t the perfect family. Those family photographs may speak a thousand words but most of them are lies.
Speaking of lies: Max. Max bloody Hastings. Here’s a direct quote from his interview when I asked how well he knew Andie: ‘We sometimes spoke, yeah. But we weren’t ever, like, friend friends; didn’t really know her. Like an acquaintance.’
An acquaintance that you were seen cuddling up to at a party? So much so that a witness presumed YOU were Andie’s boyfriend?
And there’s this as well: even though they were in the same school year, Andie had a summer birthday and Max had been held back a year because of his leukaemia AND has a September birthday. When you look at it like this, there is almost a two-year age gap between them. From Andie’s perspective, Max WAS technically an older guy. But was he a secret older guy? Right up close and personal behind Sal’s back.
I’ve tried looking Max up on Facebook before; his profile is basically barren, just holiday and Christmas pictures with his parents and birthday wishes