SWNOVELS : Part 2 – Chapter 15
‘Take my hand,’ Pip said, reaching down and cupping her fingers round Joshua’s.
They crossed the road, Josh’s palm sticky in her right hand, Barney’s lead grating in the other as the dog pulled ahead.
She let go of Josh when they reached the pavement outside the cafe and crouched to loop Barney’s lead round the leg of a table.
‘Sit. Good boy,’ she said, stroking his head as he looked up at her with a tongue-lolling smile.
She opened the door to the cafe and ushered Josh inside.
‘I’m a good boy too,’ he said.
‘Good boy, Josh,’ she said, absently patting his head as she scanned the sandwich shelves. She picked out four different flavours, brie and bacon for Dad, of course, and cheese and ham ‘without the icky bits’ for Josh. She took the bundle of sandwiches up to the till.
‘Hi, Jackie,’ she said, smiling as she handed over the money.
‘Hello, sweetheart. Big Amobi lunch plans?’
‘We’re assembling garden furniture and it’s getting tense,’ Pip said. ‘Need sandwiches to placate the hangry troops.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Jackie. ‘Would you tell your mum I’ll pop by next week with my sewing machine?’
‘I shall do, thanks.’ Pip took the paper bag from her and turned back to Josh. ‘Come on then, squirt.’
They were almost at the door when Pip spotted her, sitting at a table alone, her hands cupped round a takeaway coffee. Pip hadn’t seen her in town for years; she’d presumed she was still away at university. She must be twenty-one by now, maybe twenty-two. And here she was just feet away, tracing her fingertips over the furrowed words caution hot beverage, looking more like Andie than she ever had before.
Her face was slimmer now, and she’d started dying her hair lighter, just like her sister’s had been. But hers was cut short and blunt above her shoulders where Andie’s had hung down to her waist. Yet even though the likeness was there, Becca Bell’s face did not have the composite magic of her sister’s, a girl who had looked more like a painting than a real person.
Pip knew she shouldn’t; she knew it was wrong and insensitive and all those words Mrs Morgan had used in her ‘I’m just concerned about the direction of your project’ warnings. And even though she could feel the sensible and rational parts of herself rallying in her head, she knew that a small sliver of Pip had already made the decision. That flake of recklessness inside contaminating all other thoughts.
‘Josh,’ she said, handing him the sandwich bag, ‘can you go and sit outside with Barney for a minute? I’ll be two seconds.’
He looked pleadingly up at her.
‘You can play on my phone,’ she said, digging it out of her pocket.
‘Yes,’ he said in hissed victory, taking it and scrolling straight to the page where the games were, bumping into the door on his way out.
Pip’s heart kicked up in an agitated protest. She could feel it like a turbulent clock in the base of her throat, the ticking fast-forward in huddling pairs.
‘Hi. Becca, isn’t it?’ she said, walking over and placing her hands on the back of the empty chair.
‘Yeah. Do I know you?’ Becca’s eyebrows dropped in scrutiny.
‘No, you don’t.’ She tried to don her warmest smile but it felt stretchy and tight. ‘I’m Pippa, I live in town. Just in my last year at Kilton Grammar.’
‘Oh, wait,’ Becca said, shuffling in her seat, ‘don’t tell me. You’re the girl doing a project about my sister, aren’t you?’
‘Wh-wh– ’ Pip stammered. ‘How did you know?’
‘I’m, err.’ She paused. ‘I’m kind of seeing Stanley Forbes. Kind of not.’ She shrugged.
Pip tried to hide her shock with a fake cough. ‘Oh. Nice guy.’
‘Yeah.’ Becca looked down at her coffee. ‘I just graduated and I’m doing an internship over at the Kilton Mail .’
‘Oh, cool,’ Pip said. ‘I actually want to be a journalist too. An investigative journalist.’
‘Is that why you’re doing a project about Andie?’ She went back to tracing her finger round the rim of the cup.
‘Yes,’ Pip nodded. ‘And I’m sorry for intruding and you can absolutely tell me to go away if you want. I just wondered whether you could answer some questions I have about your sister.’
Becca sat forward in her chair, her hair swinging about her neck. She coughed. ‘Um, what kind of questions?’
Far too many; they all rushed in at the same time and Pip spluttered.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Like, did you and Andie get an allowance from your parents as teenagers?’
Becca’s face scrunched in a wrinkled, bemused look. ‘Um, that’s not what I was expecting you to ask. But no, not really. They kind of just bought us stuff as and when we needed it. Why?’
‘Just . . . filling in some gaps,’ Pip said. ‘And was there ever tension between your sister and your dad?’
Becca’s eyes dropped to the floor.
‘Erm.’ Her voice cracked. She wrapped her hands round the cup and stood, the chair screaming as it scraped against the tiled floor. ‘Actually, I don’t think this is a good idea,’ she said, rubbing her nose. ‘Sorry. It’s just . . .’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Pip said, stepping back, ‘I shouldn’t have come over.’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Becca said. ‘It’s just that things are finally settled again. Me and my mum, we’ve found our new normal and things are getting better. I don’t think dwelling on the past . . . on Andie stuff, is healthy for either of us. Especially not my mum. So, yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘You do your project if that’s what you want to do, but I’d prefer it if you left us out of it.’
‘Absolutely,’ Pip said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No worries.’ Becca’s head dipped in a hesitant nod as she walked briskly past Pip and out of the cafe door.
Pip waited several moments and then followed her out, suddenly enormously glad she had changed out of the grey T-shirt she’d been wearing earlier, otherwise she’d now certainly be modelling giant dark grey pit-rings.
‘All right,’ she said, unhooking Barney’s lead from the table, ‘let’s get home.’
‘Don’t think that lady liked you,’ Josh said, his eyes still down on the cartoon figures dancing across her phone screen. ‘Were you being unfriendly, hippo pippo?’
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 24/09/2017
I know, I pushed my luck trying to question Becca. It was wrong. I just couldn’t help myself; she was right there, two steps away from me. The last person to see Andie alive, other than the killer of course.
Her sister was murdered. I can’t expect her to want to talk about it, even if I am trying to find the truth. And if Mrs Morgan finds out, my project will be disqualified. Not that I think that would stop me at this point.
But I am lacking a certain insight into Andie’s home life and, of course, it’s not even in the realm of possibility or acceptability to try to speak to her parents.
I’ve been stalking Becca on Facebook back to five years ago, pre-murder. Other than learning that her hair used to be mousier and her cheeks fuller, it looks like she had one really close friend in 2012. A girl called Jess Walker. Maybe Jess will be detached enough to not be as emotional about Andie, yet close enough that I can get some of the answers I desperately need.
Jess Walker’s profile is very neat and informative. She’s currently at university in Newcastle. Just scrolled back to five years ago (it took forever) and nearly all of her photos were taken with Becca Bell back then, until they abruptly aren’t.
Crap crap fudging bugger monkeypoo crapola arse chops . . .
I just accidentally liked one of her photos from five years ago.
Damn it. Could I look any more like a stalker??? I’ve un-liked it now but she’ll still get the notification. Grr, laptop/tablet hybrids with touch screens are ABSOLUTELY HAZARDOUS to the casual Facebook prowler.
It’s too late now anyway. She’ll know I’ve been poking my nose into her life half a decade ago. I’ll send her a private message and see if she’d be willing to give me a phone interview.
STUPID CLUMSY THUMBS.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 26/09/2017
Production Log – Entry 20
Transcript of interview with Jess Walker (Becca Bell’s friend)
[We talk a bit about Little Kilton, about how the school has changed since she left, which teachers are still there, etc. It’s a few minutes until I can steer the conversation back to my project.]
Pip: | So I wanted to ask you, really, about the Bells, not just Andie. What kind of family they were, how did they get on? Things like that. | |
Jess: | Oh, well I mean, that’s a loaded question right there. (She sniffs.) | |
Pip: | What do you mean? | |
Jess: | Um, I don’t know if dysfunctional is quite the right word. People use that as a funny kind of accolade. I’d mean it in the proper sense. Like they weren’t quite normal. I mean, they were normal enough; they seemed normal unless you spent a lot of time there, like I did. And I picked up on a lot of little things that you wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t live among the Bells. | |
Pip: | What do you mean by not quite normal? | |
Jess: | I don’t know if that’s a good way of describing it. There were just a couple of things that weren’t quite right. It was mainly Jason, Becca’s dad. | |
Pip: | What did he do? | |
Jess: | It was just the way he spoke to them, the girls and Dawn. If you only saw it a couple of times, you’d think he was just trying to be funny. But I saw it often, very often, and I think it definitely affected the environment in that house. | |
Pip: | What? | |
Jess: | Sorry, I’m talking in circles, aren’t I? It’s quite difficult to explain. Um. He would just say things to them, always little digs about how they looked and stuff. The total opposite of how you should talk to your teenage daughters. He’d pick up on things he knew they were self-conscious about. He said things to Becca about her weight and would laugh it off as a joke. He’d tell Andie she needed to put on make-up before she left the house, that her face was her money-maker. Jokes like this all the time. Like how they looked was the most important thing in the world. I remember when I was over for dinner one time Andie was upset that she didn’t get any offers from the universities she’d applied to, only one from her back-up, that local one. And Jason said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’re only going to university to find a rich husband anyway.’ | |
Pip: | No?! | |
Jess: | And he did it to his wife too; he’d say really uncomfortable things when I was there. Like how she was looking old, joking around counting wrinkles on her face. Saying that he’d married her for her looks and she’d married him for his money and only one of them was upholding their deal. I mean, they would all laugh when he did it, like it was just family teasing. But seeing it happen so many times, it was . . . unsettling. I didn’t like being there. | |
Pip: | And do you think it affected the girls? | |
Jess: | Oh, Becca never, ever wanted to talk about her dad. But, yes, it was obvious it played havoc with their self-esteem. Andie started caring so much about what she looked like, about what people thought of her. There would be screaming matches when her parents said it was time to go out and Andie wasn’t ready, hadn’t done her hair or make-up yet. Or when they refused to buy her a new lipstick she said she needed. How that girl could ever have thought she was ugly is beyond me. Becca became obsessed with her flaws; she started skipping meals. It affected them in different ways, though: Andie got louder, Becca got quieter. | |
Pip: | And what was the relationship between the sisters like? | |
Jess: | Jason’s influence was all over that as well. He made everything in that house a competition. If one of the girls did something good, like got a good grade, he would use it to put the other one down. | |
Pip: | But what were Becca and Andie like together? | |
Jess: | I mean, they were teenage sisters, they fought like hell and then a few minutes later it was forgotten. Becca always looked up to Andie, though. They were really close in age, only fifteen months between them. Andie was in the year just above us at school. And when we turned sixteen Becca started, I guess, trying to copy Andie. I think because Andie always seemed so confident, so admired. Becca started trying to dress like her. She begged her dad to start teaching her to drive early so that as soon as she was seventeen she could take her test and get a car, like Andie had. She started wanting to go out like Andie too, to house parties. | |
Pip: | You mean the ones called calamity parties? | |
Jess: | Yeah, yeah. Even though it was people in the year above that threw them, and we hardly knew anyone, she convinced me to go one time. I think it was in March, so not too long before Andie’s disappearance. Andie hadn’t invited her or anything, Becca just found out where the next one was being hosted and we turned up. We walked there. | |
Pip: | How was it? | |
Jess: | Ugh, awful. We just sat in the corner all night, not talking to anyone. Andie completely blanked Becca; I think she was angry she’d turned up. We drank a bit and then Becca completely disappeared on me. I couldn’t find her anywhere among all the drunk teenagers and I had to walk home, tipsy, all by myself. I was really angry at Becca. Even more angry the next day when she finally answered her phone and I found out what happened. | |
Pip: | What happened? | |
Jess: | She wouldn’t tell me but I mean it was pretty obvious when she asked me to go and get the morning-after pill with her. I asked and asked and she just would not tell me who she’d slept with. I think she might have been embarrassed. That upset me at the time, though. Especially as she had considered it important enough to completely abandon me at a party I never wanted to go to. We had a big fight and, I guess, that was the start of the wedge in our friendship. Becca skipped some school and I didn’t see her for a few weekends. And that’s when Andie went missing. | |
Pip: | Did you see the Bells much after Andie disappeared? | |
Jess: | I visited a few times but Becca didn’t want to talk much. None of them did. Jason had an even shorter temper than usual, especially the day the police interviewed him. Apparently, on the night Andie disappeared, the alarm had gone off at his business offices during the dinner party. He’d driven round to check it out but he’d already drunk quite a lot of alcohol, so he was nervous talking to the police about it. Well, this is what Becca told me anyway. But, yeah, the house was just so quiet. And even months later, after it was presumed Andie was dead and never coming home, Becca’s mum insisted on leaving Andie’s room as it was. Just in case. It was all really sad. | |
Pip: | So, when you were at that calamity party in March, did you see what Andie was up to, who she was with? | |
Jess: | Yeah. You know, I never actually knew that Sal was Andie’s boyfriend until after she went missing; she’d never had him over at the house. I knew she had a boyfriend, though, and, after that calamity party, I had presumed it was this other guy. I saw them alone at that party, whispering and looking pretty close. Several times. Never once saw her with Sal. | |
Pip: | Who? Who was the guy? | |
Jess: | Um, he was this tall blonde guy, kind of long hair, spoke like he was posh. | |
Pip: | Max? Was his name Max Hastings? | |
Jess: | Yeah, yeah, I think that was him. | |
Pip: | You saw Max and Andie alone at the party? | |
Jess: | Yep, looking pretty friendly. | |
Pip: | Jess, thanks so much for talking with me. You’ve been a big help. | |
Jess: | Oh, that’s OK. Hey, Pippa, do you know how Becca’s doing now? | |
Pip: | I saw her just the other day actually. I think she’s doing well, she’s got her degree and she’s interning at the Kilton newspaper. She looks well. | |
Jess: | Good. I’m glad to hear that. |
I’m struggling to even process the amount I’ve learned from that one conversation. This investigation shifts tonally each time I peek behind another screen in Andie’s life.
Jason Bell is looking darker and darker the more I dig. And I now know that he left his dinner party for a while on that night. From what Jess said, it sounds like he was emotionally abusive to his family. A bully. A chauvinist. An adulterer. It’s no wonder Andie turned out the way she did in a toxic environment like that. It seems Jason wrecked his children’s self-esteem so much that one became a bully like him and the other turned to self-harming. I know from Andie’s friend Emma that Becca had been hospitalized in the weeks before Andie’s disappearance and that Andie was supposed to be watching her sister that very night. It seems like Jess didn’t know about the self-harming; she just thought Becca had been skipping school.
So Andie wasn’t the perfect girl and the Bells weren’t the perfect family. Those family photographs may speak a thousand words but most of them are lies.
Speaking of lies: Max. Max bloody Hastings. Here’s a direct quote from his interview when I asked how well he knew Andie: ‘We sometimes spoke, yeah. But we weren’t ever, like, friend friends; didn’t really know her. Like an acquaintance.’
An acquaintance that you were seen cuddling up to at a party? So much so that a witness presumed YOU were Andie’s boyfriend?
And there’s this as well: even though they were in the same school year, Andie had a summer birthday and Max had been held back a year because of his leukaemia AND has a September birthday. When you look at it like this, there is almost a two-year age gap between them. From Andie’s perspective, Max WAS technically an older guy. But was he a secret older guy? Right up close and personal behind Sal’s back.
I’ve tried looking Max up on Facebook before; his profile is basically barren, just holiday and Christmas pictures with his parents and birthday wishes from uncles and aunties. I remember thinking before that it didn’t seem fitting but I shrugged it off.
Well, I’m not shrugging any more, Hastings. And I’ve made a discovery. In some of Naomi’s pictures online, Max isn’t tagged as Max Hastings but as Nancy Tangotits. I thought it was some kind of private joke before but NO, Nancy Tangotits is Max’s actual Facebook profile. The Max Hastings one must be a tame decoy he kept in case universities or potential employers decided to look up his online activities. It makes sense, even some of my friends have started changing their profile names to make them unsearchable as we draw closer to uni-application season.
The real Max Hastings – and all his wild, drunken photos and posts from friends – has been hiding as Nancy. This is what I presume, at least. I can’t actually get on to see anything: Nancy has his privacy settings set on full throttle. I can only see photos or posts that Naomi is also tagged in. It’s not giving me much to work with: no secret pictures of Max and Andie kissing in the background, none of his photos from the night she disappeared.
I’ve already learned my lesson here. When you catch someone lying about a murdered girl, the best thing to do is to go and ask them why.
Persons of Interest
Jason Bell
Naomi Ward
Secret Older Guy
Nat da Silva
Daniel da Silva
Max Hastings (Nancy Tangotits)