she was. Hoping he knew she would take the fall if she could.
‘Monty, have you been in here?’ Becca’s voice drew nearer.
Ravi closed his eyes.
‘You know you’re not supposed to go in this room.’
Pip buried her face into his shoulder.
Becca was in the room with them now. They could hear her breathing, hear the ticking of her tongue as she moved it around her mouth. More steps, stifled by the thick carpet. And then the sound of Andie’s bedroom door clicking shut.
Becca’s words were muffled through it now as she called, ‘Bye, Monty.’
Ravi opened his eyes slowly, squeezing Pip’s hand back, his panicked breaths rippling through her hair.
The front door slammed again.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 09/10/2017
Production Log – Entry 25
Well, I thought I’d need about six coffees to keep me awake for the rest of the day. Turns out that close call with Becca more than did the trick. Ravi still wasn’t quite himself by the time he had to leave for work. I can’t believe how close we came to getting caught. And the burner phone wasn’t there . . . but it might not all have been for nothing.
I emailed the photos of Andie’s planner to myself so I could see them bigger on my laptop screen. I’ve trawled through each one dozens of times and I think there are some things to pick up on here.
This is the week after the Easter holidays, the week Andie disappeared. There’s quite a lot to note on this page alone. I can’t ignore that Fat da Silva 0–3 Andie scorecard comment. This was just after Andie had posted the nude video of Nat online. And I know from Nat that she only returned to school on Wednesday 18th April and Andie called her a slut in the corridor, prompting the death threat stuffed in Andie’s locker.
But, judging this comment at face value, it seems Andie was gloating over three victories she’d had over Nat in her twisted high-school games. What if the topless video accounts for one of these goals and Andie blackmailing Nat to drop out of The Crucible was another? What was the third thing Andie did to Nat da Silva that she’s revelling in here? Could that have been what made Nat snap and turned her into a killer?
Another significant entry on that page is on Wednesday 18th April. Andie wrote: CP @ 7:30 .
If Ravi is right, and Andie is noting things down in code, I think I’ve just cracked this one. It’s so simple.
CP = car park. As in the train station car park. I think Andie was reminding herself that she had a meeting with Howie in the car park that evening. I know that she did , in fact, meet Howie that evening, because Sal wrote Howie’s number plate in his phone at 7:42 p.m. on the very same Wednesday.
There are many more instances of CP with an accompanying time in the photos we took. I think I can confidently say that these refer to Andie’s drug trades with Howie and that she was following Howie’s instruction to use codes, to keep her activities hidden from any prying eyes. But, as all teenagers, she was prone to forgetting things (especially her schedule) so she wrote the meetings down on the one item she would have looked at once every lesson at least. The perfect memory prompt.
So now that I think I’ve cracked Andie’s code, there are some other initialized entries with times written in the planner.
During this mid-March week, Andie wrote on Thursday the 15th : IV @ 8.
This one I’m stumped on. If it follows the same code pattern, then IV = I . . . V . . .
If, like CP, IV refers to a place, I have absolutely no idea what it is. There’s nowhere in Kilton I can think of with those initials. Or what if IV refers to somebody’s name? It only appears three times in the pages we photographed.
There’s a similar entry that appears much more frequently: HH @ 6. But on this March 17th entry, Andie has also written ‘before Calam’ underneath it. Calam presumably means Calamity Party. So maybe HH actually just means Howie’s House and Andie was picking up drugs to take to the party.
An earlier spread in March caught my eye too. Those numbers scrawled in and scribbled out on the Thursday 8th March are a phone number. 11 digits starting with 07; it has to be. Thinking out loud here: why would Andie be