A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

Pip knew where they lived.

Everyone in Little Kilton knew where they lived.

Their home was like the town’s own haunted house; people’s footsteps quickened as they walked by and their words strangled and died in their throats. Shrieking children would gather on their walk home from school, daring one another to run up and touch the front gate.

But it wasn’t haunted by ghosts, just three sad people trying to live their lives as before. A house not haunted by flickering lights or spectral falling chairs, but by dark spray-painted letters of Scum Family and stone-shattered windows.

The production log is intended to chart any obstacles you face in your research, your progress and the aims of your final report. My production log will have to be a little different: I’m going to record all the research I do here, both relevant and irrelevant, because, as yet, I don’t really know what my final report will be, nor what will end up being relevant. I don’t know what I’m aiming for. I will just have to wait and see what position I am in at the end of my research and what essay I can therefore bring together. [This is starting to feel a little like a diary???]

She should have been used to it by now, the lingering looks while people tried to work out the logistics of her family, the numbers and hedged words scribbled across their family tree. The giant Nigerian man was quite evidently her stepfather and Joshua her half-brother. But Pip didn’t like using those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren’t algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point. Victor and Josh weren’t just three-eighths hers, not just forty per cent family, they were fully hers. Her dad and her annoying little brother.

Evidence aside, he was the boyfriend, right? And it’s always the boyfriend or the ex-boyfriend. Not only that, Salil was Indian.

Pip flicked over to it. At 10:17 a.m. on his final Tuesday morning, Sal said to his father: it was me. i did it. i’m so sorry.

Oh My God. I’ve just had a horrible but maybe brilliant idea. Horrible and certainly immoral and probably stupid. And definitely, definitely wrong. And even so, I think I should do it. I can’t come out of this thing entirely squeaky clean if I actually want to find out what happened to Andie and Sal.

I’m going to catfish Emma, pretending to be Chloe.

Stop digging, Pippa.

“Yeah. Back when I started asking questions about Sal, he was the officer who told me to give it up, that my brother was guilty beyond doubt. He does not like me.” Ravi’s hand crept up to the back of his head, losing his fingers in his dark hair. “Last summer, I was sitting on the tables outside the cafe. This guy—” he gestured to the photo of Daniel—“made me move along, said I was ‘loitering.’ Funny that he didn’t think all the other people outside were loitering, just the brown kid with the murderer for a brother.”

He stepped forward and whipped the photo out of Pip’s hands. His thumb closed over Andie’s face, the picture crumpling in his tight and shaking grip. A crease split down the middle of Andie’s body as he folded her away.

“Don’t be a tease,” Stephen said, closing his fingers round both his phone and Pip’s hand. He leaned into her.

“No, thank you,” she said, scooting back. “Think I’m going to go inside.”

And then Stephen put his hand on the back of her head, grabbed her forward and lunged for her face. Pip twisted out of the way and shoved him back. She pushed so hard that he was deseated and fell three feet from the garden wall, sprawled on the wet grass.

“You stupid slut,” he said, picking himself up and wiping off his trousers.

She quickly switched off her phone torch and put Great Expectations down on the passenger seat. She shifted her own seat back so she could crouch on the car floor, hidden from sight by the door, the top of her head and her eyes pressed up against the window.

The man walked over to the very outer boundary of the car park and leaned against the fence there, in a gloomy space just between two orange-lit pools from the lamps. Pip watched him, holding her breath because it fogged the window and blocked her view.

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.

The camera must have been at least five feet in front of the grinning friends to get that much in the frame.

And in the dead silence of the night Pip whispered, “Who’s taking the picture?”

I don’t even know what’s right anymore—everything is so muddied. I’m not sure I’m the good girl I once thought I was. I’ve lost her along the way.

Daniel da Silva and Stanley Forbes had just left the library, the door banging behind them. They were deep in hushed conversation, Daniel explaining something with gestured hands. Stanley’s head did a half-owl spin, checking around them and that’s when he spotted Pip and Ravi.

Stanley’s eyes cooled, and his gaze was a cold blast in the wind as it flicked between the two of them. Daniel looked over and stared, but his eyes were just on Pip, sharp and blistering.

As for giving up on Andie now, could she really do that? Could she walk away, knowing that Sal Singh wasn’t guilty? Knowing a killer walked the same Kilton streets as her? She had to, didn’t she? For the dog she’d loved for ten years, the dog who loved her back even harder. For her family’s safety. For Ravi too. How would she convince him to give up on this? He had to, or his could be the next body in the woods. This couldn’t go on; it wasn’t safe anymore. There was no choice. The decision felt like a shard from the shattered laptop screen had stuck through her chest. It stabbed and cracked every time she breathed.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. He ran his sleeve over his face to catch the angry tears and reached for the door. “I’m sorry for thinking you were someone you’re clearly not. You are just a kid. A cruel one, like Andie Bell.”

The printer clacked behind her and she flinched.

Pivoting on the balls of her feet, she turned as it hissed, sucking in the top piece of paper.

She straightened up as it started to sputt-sputt-sputt the page through.

She moved towards it, a step between each sputt.

The paper started to push through, a glimpse of fresh black ink, upside down.

The printer finished and spat it out.

Pip reached for it.

She turned it round.

This is your final warning, Pippa. Walk away.

She bent forward and reached down to feel it, the phone in her hand. Pretending to knead her ankle, she twisted her wrist and pushed the phone far underneath the back seat.

Elliot’s voice broke. His eyes filled and a lone tear snaked down his cheek. “I said I was helping him, that he wouldn’t be a suspect if it looked like he’d been attacked too. He swallowed a few more and then he started to struggle. I pinned him down and forced him to take more. When he started to get sleepy, I held him and I talked to him about Oxford, about the amazing libraries, the formal hall dinners, how beautiful the city looked in spring. Just so he would fall asleep thinking about something good. When he was unconscious, I put the bag around his head and held his hand as he died.”

Pip had no pity for this man before her. Eleven years of memories dissolved from him, leaving a stranger standing in the room with her.

“We made it nice up there for her. I insulated it, put in plywood walls and proper flooring. She picked out the wallpaper. There aren’t any windows but we put in lots of lamps. I know you must think I’m a monster, Pip, but I’ve never touched her, not since that last time at the Ivy House. It’s not like that. And she’s not like she was before. She’s a different person; she’s calm and grateful. She has food up there but I come round to cook for her three times during the week, once at the weekend, and let her down to shower. And then we just sit together in her loft, watching TV for a while. She’s never bored.”

“She’s locked up there and that’s the key?” Pip pointed to it.

Elliot nodded.

“It’s not your job anymore, Pip,” he said. “The police have reopened Andie’s case. Let them do the rest. You’ve done enough.”

“I know,” she said and it wasn’t a lie. She was tired. She needed to finally be free of all this. She needed the weight on her shoulders to be just her own. And that last Andie Bell mystery wasn’t hers to chase any more.

Ravi was right; their part was over.

She looked them over and she knew who it was.

The killer had a face and a name.

The last person to see Andie alive.

“No, I didn’t know that at the time,” she said. “I didn’t see anything. She was just here, in the kitchen and I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to tell her. And—” Becca’s voice broke—“when I did she just looked at me and said she didn’t care. I tried to explain and she wouldn’t listen. She just said I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone or I’d get her in trouble. She tried to leave the room and I stood in her way. Then she said I should be grateful that someone had actually wanted me, because I was just the fat, ugly version of her. And she tried to push me out of the way. I just couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe she could be so cruel. I pushed her back and tried to explain again and we were both shouting and shoving and then . . . it was so fast.”

Pip reached down behind the lectern for Ravi’s hand, sliding her fingers between his. Their entwined hands became a new living thing, her finger pads perfect against the dips in his knuckles like they’d grown just that way to fit together.

“Any questions?”