A Good Girl's Guide to Murder(21)

‘I can agree to that,’ she smiled, holding out her hand.

‘Deal,’ he said, taking her hand in his warm, clammy one, although he forgot to shake it. ‘OK, I’ve got something for you.’ He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an old iPhone cradled in his palm.

‘Um, I’ve actually already got one, thanks,’ Pip said.

‘It’s Sal’s phone.’





Eight



‘What do you mean?’ Pip stared at him, open-mouthed.

Ravi answered by holding up the phone and shaking it gently.

‘That’s Sal’s?’ Pip said. ‘How do you have it?’

‘The police released it to us a few months after they closed Andie’s investigation.’

A cautious electricity sparked up the back of Pip’s neck. ‘Can I . . .’ she said, ‘can I look at it?’

‘Of course,’ he laughed, ‘that’s why I brought it round, you plonker.’

Unchecked, the excitement charged through her, nimble and dizzying.

‘Holy pepperoni,’ she said, flustered and hurrying to unlock the door. ‘Let’s go and look at it at my workstation.’

She and Barney bolted over the threshold, but a third set of feet didn’t follow. She spun back round.

‘What’s funny?’ she said. ‘Come on.’

‘Sorry, you’re just very entertaining when you’re extra serious.’

‘Quick,’ she said, beckoning him through the hallway and to the stairs. ‘Don’t drop it.’

‘I’m not going to drop 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.’