A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #1) - Holly Jackson Page 0,65

halfway to meow in their direction. Pip, born and raised a dog person, wasn’t sure how to react.

‘Hi, cat,’ she whispered as it padded down the rest of the stairs and slinked over to her. It rubbed its face on her shins, curling in and out of her legs.

‘Pip, I don’t like cats,’ Ravi said uneasily, watching with disgust as the cat started to press its fur-topped skull into his ankles. Pip bent down and patted the cat lightly with her rubber-gloved hand. It came back over to her and started to purr.

‘Come on,’ she said to Ravi.

Unwinding her legs from the cat, Pip headed for the stairs. As she took them, Ravi following behind, the cat meowed and raced after them, darting round his legs.

‘Pip . . .’ Ravi’s voice trailed nervously as he tried not to step on it. Pip shooed the cat and it trotted back downstairs and into the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ he added unconvincingly.

Gloved hand on the banister, she climbed the rest of the stairs, almost knocking off a notebook and a USB stick that were balanced on the post at the very top. Strange place to keep them.

When they were both upstairs, Pip studied the various doors that opened on to the landing. That back bedroom on the right couldn’t be Andie’s; the floral bedspread was ruffled and slept in, paired socks on the chair in the corner. Nor could it be the bedroom at the front where a dressing gown was strewn on the floor and a glass of water on a bedside table.

Ravi was the first to notice. He tapped her gently on the arm and pointed. There was only one door up here that was closed. They crossed over to it. Pip grasped the gold handle and pushed open the door.

It was immediately obvious this was her room.

Everything felt staged and stagnant. Though it had all the props of a teenage girl’s bedroom – pinned-up photos of Andie standing between Emma and Chloe as they posed with their fingers in Vs, a picture of her and Sal with a candyfloss between them, an old brown teddy tucked into the bed with a fluffy hot-water bottle beside it, an overflowing make-up case on the desk – the room didn’t feel quite real. A place entombed in five years of grief.

Pip took a first step on to the plush cream carpet.

Her eyes flicked from the lilac walls to the white wooden furniture; everything clean and polished, the carpet showing recent vacuum tracks. Dawn Bell must still clean her dead daughter’s room, preserving it as it had been when Andie left it for the final time. She didn’t have her daughter but she still had the place where she’d slept, where she’d woken, where she’d dressed, where she’d screamed and shouted and slammed the door, where her mum whispered goodnight and turned off the light. Or so Pip imagined, reanimating the empty room with the life that might have been lived here. This room, perpetually waiting for someone who was never coming back while the world ticked on outside its closed door.

She looked back at Ravi and, by the look on his face, she knew there was a room just like this in the Singhs’ house.

And though Pip had come to feel like she knew Andie, the one buried under all those secrets, this bedroom made Andie a real person to her for the first time. As she and Ravi crossed over to the wardrobe, Pip silently promised the room that she would find the truth. Not just for Sal, but for Andie too.

The truth that could very well be hidden right here.

‘Ready?’ Ravi whispered.

She nodded.

He opened the wardrobe on to a rack bulging with dresses and jumpers on wooden hangers. At one end hung Andie’s old Kilton Grammar uniform, squashed against the wall by skirts and tops, no room to part even an inch of space between the clothes.

Struggling with the rubber gloves, Pip pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and swiped up to turn on the torch. She got down on her knees, Ravi beside her, and they crawled under the clothes, the torch lighting up the old floorboards inside. They started prodding the boards, tracing their fingers round the shape of them, trying to prise up their corners.

Ravi found it. It was the one against the back wall, on the left.

He pushed down one corner and the other side of the board kicked up. Pip shuffled forward to