SWNOVELS : Part 2 – Chapter 24
There were a few moments of muffled shrieking as the train pulled off and started to gain speed. It jerked and jogged Pip’s pen, scribbling a line down the page from her essay introduction. She sighed, ripped the piece of paper from the pad and screwed it into a ball. It was no good anyway. She shoved the paper ball into the top of her rucksack and readied her pen again.
She was on the train to Little Chalfont. Ravi was meeting her there, straight from work, so she thought she could put the eleven minutes there to good use, get a chunk of her Margaret Atwood essay drafted. But reading her own words back, nothing felt right. She knew what she wanted to say, each idea perfectly formed and moulded but the words got muddled and lost on the way from brain to fingers. Her mind stuck in Andie Bell sidetracks.
The recorded voice on the tannoy announced that Chalfont was the next stop and Pip gratefully looked away from the thinning A4 pad and shoved it back in her rucksack. The train slackened and came to a stop with a sharp mechanical sigh. She skipped down on to the platform and fed her ticket into the barriers.
Ravi was waiting for her outside.
‘Sarge,’ he said, flicking his dark hair out of his eyes. ‘I was just coming up with our crime-fighting theme tune. So far, I’ve got chilled strings and a pan flute when it’s me, and then you come on with some heavy, Darth Vader-ish trumpets.’
‘Why am I the trumpets?’ she said.
‘Because you stomp when you walk; sorry to be the one to tell you.’
Pip pulled out her phone and typed the Ivy House Hotel address into her maps app. The line appeared on screen and they followed the three-minute-long walking directions, Pip’s blue circle avatar sliding along the route in her hands.
She looked up when her blue circle collided with the red destination pin. There was a small wooden sign just before the drive that read Ivy House Hotel in fading carved letters. The drive was sloped and pebbled, leading to a red-brick house almost wholly covered in creeping ivy. It was so thick with the green leaves that the house itself seemed to shiver in the gentle wind.
Their footsteps crunched up the drive as they headed for the front door. Pip clocked the parked car, meaning someone must be in. Hopefully it was the owners and not a guest.
She jabbed her finger on to the cold metal doorbell and let it ring out for one long note.
They heard a small voice inside, some slow shuffled steps and then the door swung inward, sending a tremor through the ivy around the frame. An old woman with fluffy grey hair, thick glasses and a very premature Christmas-patterned jumper stood before them and smiled.
‘Hello, dears,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize we were expecting someone. What name did you make the booking under?’ she said, ushering Pip and Ravi inside and closing the door.
They stepped into a dimly lit squared hallway, with a sofa and coffee table on the left and a white staircase running along the far wall.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Pip said, turning back to face the woman, ‘we haven’t actually got a booking.’
‘I see, well, lucky for you two we aren’t booked up so –’
‘– Sorry,’ Pip cut in, looking awkwardly at Ravi, ‘I mean, we’re not looking to stay here. We’re looking for . . . we have some questions for the owners of the hotel. Are you . . .?’
‘Yes, I own the hotel,’ the woman smiled, looking unnervingly at a point just left of Pip’s face. ‘Ran it for twenty years with my David; he was in charge of most things, though. It’s been hard since my David passed a couple of years ago. But my grandsons are always here, helping me get by, driving me around. My grandson Henry is just upstairs cleaning the rooms.’
‘So five years ago, you and your husband were running the hotel?’ Ravi said.
The woman nodded and her eyes swayed over to him. ‘Very handsome,’ she said quietly, and then to Pip, ‘lucky girl.’
‘No, we’re not . . .’ Pip said, looking to Ravi. She wished she hadn’t. Out of the old lady’s wandering eyeline, he shimmied his shoulders excitedly and pointed to his face, mouthing ‘very handsome’ at Pip.
‘Would you like to sit down?’ the woman said, gesturing to a green-velvet sofa beneath a window. ‘I know I would.’ She shuffled over to a leather armchair facing the sofa.
Pip walked over, intentionally treading on Ravi’s foot as she passed. She sat down, knees pointed towards the woman, and Ravi slotted in beside her, still with that stupid grin on his face.
‘Where’s my . . .’ the woman said, patting her jumper and her trouser pockets, a blank look falling over her face.
‘Um, so,’ Pip said, drawing the woman’s attention back to her. ‘Do you keep records of people who have stayed here?’
‘It’s all done on the, err . . . that, um . . . the computer now, isn’t it?’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes by the telephone. David always sorted all the bookings; now Henry does it for me.’
‘So how did you keep track of the reservations you had?’ Pip said, guessing already that the answer would be lacking.
‘My David did it. Had a spreadsheet printed out for the week.’ The woman shrugged, staring out of the window.
‘Would you still have your reservation spreadsheets from five years ago?’ asked Ravi.
‘No, no. The whole place would be flooded in paper.’
‘But do you have the documents saved on a computer?’ Pip said.
‘Oh no. We threw David’s computer out after he passed. It was a very slow little thing, like me,’ she said. ‘My Henry does all the bookings for me now.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ Pip said, unzipping her rucksack and pulling out the folded bit of printer paper. She straightened out the page and handed it to the woman. ‘Do you recognize this girl? Has she ever stayed here?’
The woman stared down at the photo of Andie, the one that had been used in most newspaper reports. She lifted the paper right to her face, then held it at arm’s length, then brought it close again.
‘Yes,’ she nodded, looking from Pip to Ravi to Andie. ‘I know her. She’s been here.’
Pip’s skin prickled with nervous excitement.
‘You remember that girl stayed with you five years ago?’ she said. ‘Do you remember the man she was with? What he looked like?’
The woman’s face muddied and she stared at Pip, her eyes darting right and left, a blink marking each change in direction.
‘No,’ she said shakily. ‘No, it wasn’t five years ago. I saw this girl. She’s been here.’
‘In 2012?’ Pip said.
‘No, no.’ The woman’s eyes settled past Pip’s ear. ‘It was just a few weeks ago. She was here, I remember.’
Pip’s heart sank a few hundred feet, a drop tower back into her chest.
‘That’s not possible,’ she said. ‘That girl has been dead for five years.’
‘But, I –’ the woman shook her head, the wrinkled skin around her eyes folding together – ‘but I remember. She was here. She’s been here.’
‘Five years ago?’ Ravi prompted.
‘No,’ the woman said, anger creeping into her voice. ‘I remember, don’t I? I don’t –’
‘Grandma?’ A man’s voice called from upstairs.
A set of heavy boots thundered down the stairs and a fair-haired man came into view.
‘Hello?’ he said, looking at Pip and Ravi. He walked over and proffered his hand. ‘I’m Henry Hill,’ he said.
Ravi stood and shook his hand. ‘I’m Ravi, this is Pip.’
‘Can we help you with something?’ he asked, darting concerned looks over at his grandmother.
‘We were just asking your grandma a couple of questions about someone who stayed here five years ago,’ said Ravi.
Pip looked back to the old woman and noticed that she was crying. Tears snaking down her tissue-paper skin, dropping from her chin on to the printout of Andie.
The grandson must have noticed as well. He walked over and squeezed his grandma’s shoulder, taking the piece of paper out of her shaking grip.
‘Grandma,’ he said, ‘why don’t you pop the kettle on and make us a pot of tea? I’ll help out these people here, don’t worry.’
He helped her up off the chair and steered her towards a door to the left of the hall, handing the photo of Andie to Pip as they passed. Ravi and Pip looked at each other, questions in their eyes, until Henry returned a few seconds later, closing the kitchen door to muffle the sound of the boiling kettle.
‘Sorry,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘She gets upset when she gets confused. The Alzheimer’s . . . it’s starting to get quite bad. I’m actually just cleaning up to put the place on the market. She keeps forgetting that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Pip said. ‘We should have realized. We didn’t mean to upset her.’
‘No, I know, course you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Can I help with whatever it is?’
‘We were asking about this girl.’ Pip held up the paper. ‘Whether she stayed here five years ago.’
‘And what did my grandma say?’
‘She thought she’d seen her recently, just weeks ago,’ she swallowed. ‘But this girl died in 2012.’
‘She does that quite often now,’ he said, looking between the two of them. ‘Gets confused about times and when things happened. Sometimes still thinks my grandad is alive. She’s probably just recognizing your girl from five years ago, if that’s when you think she was here.’
‘Yeah,’ Pip said, ‘I guess.’
‘Sorry I can’t be of more help. I can’t tell you who stayed here five years ago; we haven’t kept the old records. But if she recognized her, I guess that gives you your answer?’
Pip nodded. ‘It does. Sorry for upsetting her.’
‘Will she be OK?’ said Ravi.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Henry said gently. ‘Cup of tea will do the trick.’
They strolled out of Kilton station, the town just dimming as it ticked into the hour of six and the sun slumped off to the west.
Pip’s mind was a centrifuge, spinning over the shifting pieces of Andie, separating them and putting them back together in different combinations.
‘Weighing it up,’ she said, ‘I think we can confirm that Andie stayed at the Ivy House Hotel.’ She thought the bathroom tiles and the woman’s time-confused recognition were proof enough of that. But this confirmation loosened and rearranged certain pieces.
They turned right into the car park, heading for Pip’s car down at the far end, speaking in harmonized if s and so s as they walked.
‘If Andie was going to that hotel,’ Ravi said, ‘must be because that’s where she met Secret Older Guy and they were both trying to avoid getting caught.’
Pip nodded in agreement. ‘So,’ she said, ‘that means that whoever Secret Older Guy was, he couldn’t have Andie over at his house. And the most likely reason for that would be that he lived with his family or a wife.’
This changed things.
Pip carried on. ‘Daniel da Silva lived with his new wife in 2012 and Max Hastings was living with his parents who knew Sal well. Both of them would have needed to be away from home to carry on a secret relationship with Andie. And, let’s not forget, Max has a naked photo of Andie taken inside the Ivy House Hotel, a photo he supposedly “found”,’ she said, using fingered air quotes.
‘Yeah,’ Ravi said, ‘but Howie Bowers lived alone then. If it was him Andie was secretly seeing, they wouldn’t have needed to stay in a hotel.’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Pip said. ‘Which means, we can now rule Howie out as a candidate for Secret Older Guy. Although that doesn’t mean he can’t still be the killer.’
‘True,’ Ravi agreed, ‘but at least it starts to clear the picture a little. It wasn’t Howie who Andie was seeing behind Sal’s back in March, and it wasn’t him she spoke of ruining.’
They had deduced all the way over to her car. Pip fiddled in her pocket and blipped the key. She opened the driver door and shoved her rucksack inside, Ravi taking it on his lap in the passenger seat. But as she started to climb in she looked up and noticed a man leaning against the far fence, about sixty feet away, in a green parka coat with bright orange lining. Howie Bowers, furred hood up, obscuring his face, nodding at the man beside him.
A man whose hands were gesticulating wildly as he mouthed silent and angry-looking words. A man in a smart wool coat with floppy blonde hair.
Max Hastings.
Pip’s face drained. She dropped into her seat.
‘What’s wrong, Sarge?’
She pointed out of his window to the fence where the two men stood. ‘Look.’
Max Hastings, who had lied to her yet again, saying he never bought drugs in Kilton after Andie disappeared, that he had no clue who her dealer was. And here he was, shouting at that very drug dealer, the words lost and blown apart in the distance between them all.
‘Oh,’ Ravi said.
Pip started the engine and pulled out, driving away before either Max or Howie could spot them, before her hands started to shake too much.
Max and Howie knew each other.
Yet another tectonic shift in the world of Andie Bell.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 12/10/2017
Production Log – Entry 27
Max Hastings. If anyone should go on the persons of interest list in bold, it’s him. Jason Bell has been downgraded as number-one suspect and Max has now stepped up to take the title. He’s lied twice now in Andie-related matters. You don’t lie unless you have something to hide.
Let’s recap: he’s an older guy, he has a naked picture of Andie taken in a hotel he could very well have been meeting her in in March 2012, he was close to both Sal and Andie, he regularly bought Rohypnol from Andie and he knows Howie Bowers pretty well from the looks of it.
This also opens up the possibility of another pair who could have colluded together in Andie’s murder: Max and Howie.
I think it’s time to pick up the Rohypnol trail and run with it. I mean, it’s no normal nineteen-year-old that buys roofies for school parties, is it? It’s the thing that links this messy Max/Howie/Andie triangle.
I’ll message some 2012 Kilton Grammar schoolers and see if I can shed some light on what was going on at calamity parties. And if I find that what I’m suspecting is true, could Max and Rohypnol be key players in what happened to Andie that night? Like the missing cards on a Cluedo board.
Persons of Interest
Jason Bell
Naomi Ward
Secret Older Guy
Nat da Silva
Daniel da Silva
Max Hastings
Howie Bowers
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 13/10/2017
Production Log – Entry 28
Emma Hutton replied to my text while I was at school. This is what she said:
Yeah, maybe. I do remember girls saying they thought their drinks had been spiked. But tbh everyone used to get really really drunk at those parties, so they were probably just saying it because they didn’t know their limits or for attention. I never had mine spiked.
Chloe Burch replied forty minutes ago, when I was watching The Fellowship of the Ring with Josh:
No, I don’t think so. I never heard any rumours like that. But girls sometimes say that when they’ve drunk too much, don’t they?
Last night, I messaged a few people who were tagged in photos with Naomi at calamities in 2012 and helpfully had their email addresses on their profiles. I lied slightly, told them I was a reporter for the BBC called Poppy because I thought it would encourage them to talk. If they had anything to say, that is. One of them just responded.
Pippa Fitz-Amobi
EPQ 14/10/2017
Production Log – Entry 29
Two more responses this morning while I was out at Josh’s football match. The first one said she didn’t know anything about it and didn’t want to offer any comment. The second one said this:
The plot just keeps on thickening.
I think I can safely assume that drinks were being spiked at calamity parties in 2012, though the fact wasn’t widely known to partygoers. So, Max was buying Rohypnol from Andie and girls were getting their drinks spiked at the parties he started. It doesn’t take a genius to put the two together.
Not only that, Nat da Silva may very well have been one of the girls he spiked. Could this be relevant to Andie’s murder? And did anything happen to Nat the night she thought she’d been drugged? I can’t ask her: she’s what I would call an exceptionally hostile witness.
And finally, to top it all off, Joanna Riddell said that her friend thought she was spiked and reported it to the Kilton police. To a ‘young’ male officer. Well, I’ve done my research and the only young and male officer in 2012 was (yep, DING DING DING) Daniel da Silva. The next youngest male officer was forty-one in 2012. Joanna said that nothing came of the report. Was that just because the unnamed girl reported it after any drug would have shown up in her system? Or was Daniel involved somehow . . . trying to cover something up? And why?
I think I’ve just stumbled on another link between entries on the persons of interest list, between Max Hastings and the two Da Silvas. I’ll call Ravi later and we can brainstorm what this possible triangle could mean. But my focus needs to be on Max right now. He’s lied enough times and now I have real reason to believe he was spiking girls’ drinks at parties and secretly seeing Andie behind Sal’s back at the Ivy House Hotel.
If I had to stop the project right now and point my finger, it would be pointing at Max. He is suspect number one.
But I can’t just go and talk to him about all this; he’s another hostile witness and now possibly one with a history of assault. He won’t talk without leverage. So I have to find some the only way I know how: by way of serious cyber-stalking.
I need to find a way to get on to his Facebook profile and hound him through every post and picture, looking for anything that connects him to Andie or the Ivy House Hotel or drugging girls. Something I can use to make him talk or, even better, go straight to the police with.
I need to get round Nancy Tangotits’ (aka Max’s) privacy settings.