A Good Girl's Guide to Murder(85)

‘Oh,’ Leanne said, taking the boxes from Ravi’s offered hands. ‘That’s very thoughtful. Thank you. Come in, come in. You must give me her number so I can thank her.’

‘Ravi?’ Pip said.

‘Hello, trouble,’ he said softly. ‘Can I talk to you?’

In her room, Ravi closed the door and dropped his bag on the carpet.

‘Um . . . I,’ Pip stuttered, looking for clues in his face. ‘I don’t understand why you’ve come back.’

He took a small step towards her. ‘I thought about it all night, literally all night; it was light outside when I finally slept. And there’s only one reason I can think of, only one thing that makes sense of this. Because I do know you; I wasn’t wrong about you.’

‘I don’t –’

‘Someone took Barney, didn’t they?’ he said. ‘Someone threatened you and they took your dog and killed him so you would stay quiet about Sal and Andie.’

The silence in the room was buzzy and thick.

She nodded and her face cracked with tears.

‘Don’t cry,’ Ravi said, closing the distance between them in one swift step. He pulled her into him, locking his arms round her. ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’

Pip leaned into him and everything – all the pain, all the secrets she’d caged inside – came free, radiating out of her like heat. She dug her nails into her palms, trying to hold back the tears.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he said when he finally let her go.

But the words got lost and tangled in Pip’s mouth. Instead she pulled out her phone and clicked on to the messages from Unknown, handing it to him. She watched Ravi’s flitting eyes as he read through.

‘Oh, Pip,’ he said, looking at her wide-eyed. ‘This is sick.’

‘They lied,’ she sniffed. ‘They said I’d get him back and then they killed him.’

‘That wasn’t the first time they contacted you,’ he said, scrolling up. ‘The first text here is from the eighth of October.’

‘That wasn’t the first,’ she said, pulling open the bottom drawer of her desk. She handed Ravi the two sheets of printer paper and pointed at the one on the left. ‘That one was left in my sleeping bag when I camped in the woods with my friends on the first of September. I saw someone watching us. That one –’ she pointed to the other – ‘was in my locker last Friday. I ignored it and I carried on. That’s why Barney’s dead. Because of my arrogance. Because I thought I was invincible and I’m not. We have to stop. Yesterday . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t know how else to get you to stop, other than to make you hate me so you stayed away, away from danger.’

‘I’m hard to get rid of,’ he said, looking up from the notes. ‘And this isn’t over.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She took them back and dropped them on the desk. ‘Barney’s dead, Ravi. And who will be next? You? Me? The killer’s been here, in my house, in my room. They read my research and typed a warning on my EPQ log. Here, Ravi, in the same house as my nine-year-old brother. We are putting too many people in danger if we carry on. Your parents could lose the only son they have left.’ She broke off, an image of Ravi dead in the autumn leaves behind her eyes, Josh beside him. ‘The killer knows everything we know. They’ve beaten us and we have too much to lose. I’m sorry that it means I have to abandon Sal. I’m so sorry.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about the threats?’ he said.

‘At first I thought it might just be a prank,’ she said, shrugging. ‘But I didn’t want you to know, in case you made me stop. And then I just got stuck, keeping it a secret. I thought they were just threats. I thought I could beat them. I was so stupid and now I’ve paid for my mistakes.’

‘You’re not stupid; you were right all along about Sal,’ he said. ‘He was innocent. We know that now but it’s not enough. He deserves everyone to know that he was good and kind until the end. My parents deserve that. And now we don’t even have the photo that proved it.’

‘I still have the photo,’ Pip said quietly, taking the printout from the bottom drawer and handing it to him. ‘Of course I’d never destroy it. But it can’t help us now.’

‘Why?’

‘The killer is watching me, Ravi. Watching us. If we take that photo to the police and they don’t believe us, if they think we Photoshopped it or something, then it’s too late. We would have played our final hand and it’s not strong enough. Then what happens? Josh gets taken? You do? People could die here.’ She sat on her bed, picking at the lumps on her socks. ‘We don’t have our smoking gun. The photo isn’t proof enough; it relies on massive interpretive leaps and it’s no longer online. Why would they believe us? Sal’s brother and a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. I hardly believe us. All we have are tall stories about a murdered girl, and you know what the police here think of Sal, just like the rest of Kilton. We can’t risk our lives on that photo alone.’

‘No,’ Ravi said, laying the photo on the desk and nodding. ‘You’re right. And one of our main suspects is a policeman. It’s not the right move. Even if the police did somehow believe us and reopen the case, it would take them a long time to find the actual killer that way. Time we wouldn’t have.’ He wheeled the desk chair over to face her on the bed, straddling it. ‘So I guess our only option is to find them ourselves.’