A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

Pip ceremoniously placed her knife and fork across her plate with exaggerated precision.

‘Now may I leave the table?’ She looked at her mum, who was scowling.

‘I don’t see what the rush is,’ her mum said.

‘I’m just right in the middle of my EPQ and I want to hit my targets before bed.’

‘Yes, off you pop, pickle,’ her dad smiled, reaching over to scrape Pip’s leftovers on to his own plate.

‘Vic!’ Her mum now turned the scowl on him as Pip stood and tucked in her chair.

‘Oh, darling, some people have to worry about their kids rushing off from dinner to inject heroin into their eyeballs. Be thankful it’s homework.’

‘What’s heroin?’ Josh’s small voice said as Pip left the room.

She took the steps two at a time, leaving her shadow Barney at the foot of the stairs, his head tilting in confusion as he watched her go to that dog-forbidden place.

She’d had the chance to think over all things Nancy Tangotits at dinner, and now she had an idea.

Pip closed her bedroom door, pulled out her phone and dialled.

‘Hello, muchacha ,’ Cara chimed down the line.

‘Hey,’ Pip said, ‘are you busy bingeing Downton or do you have a few minutes to help me be sneaky?’

‘I’m always available for sneakiness. What d’you need?’

‘Is Naomi in?’

‘No, out in London. Why? ’ Suspicion crept into Cara’s voice.

‘OK, sworn to secrecy?’

‘Always. What’s up?’

Pip said, ‘I’ve heard rumours about old calamity parties that might give me a lead for my EPQ. But I need to find proof, which is where the sneakiness comes in.’

She hoped she’d played it just right, omitting Max’s name and downplaying it enough that Cara wouldn’t worry about her sister, leaving just enough gaps to intrigue her.

‘Oooh, what rumours?’ she said.

Pip knew her too well.

‘Nothing substantial yet. But I need to look through old calamity photos. That’s what I need your help with.’

‘OK, hit me.’

‘Max Hastings’ Facebook profile is a decoy, you know for employers and universities. His actual one is under a fake name and has really strict privacy settings. I can only see things that Naomi is tagged in as well.’

‘And you want to log in as Naomi so you can look through Max’s old photos?’

‘Bingo,’ Pip said, sitting down on her bed and dragging the laptop over.

‘Can do,’ Cara’s voice trilled. ‘Technically we’re not snooping on Naomi, like that time when I just had to know whether ginger Benedict Cumberbatch-alike was her new boyfriend. So this doesn’t technically break any rules, Dad . Plus, Nai should learn to change her password sometime; she has the same one for everything.’

‘Can you get on to her laptop?’ Pip said.

‘Just opening it now.’

A pause filled with the tapping of keys and a clicking mousepad. Pip could picture Cara now with that ridiculously oversized topknot she always wore on her head when she was dressed in pyjamas. Which was, in Cara’s case, as often as physically possible.

‘OK, she’s still signed in here. I’m on.’

‘Can you click on to security settings?’ asked Pip.

‘Yep.’

‘Uncheck the box next to log-in alerts so she won’t know I’m logging in from a new machine.’

‘Done.’

‘OK,’ Pip said, ‘that’s all the hacking I need from you.’

‘Shame,’ Cara said, ‘that was much more thrilling than my EPQ research.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have chosen to do yours on mould,’ Pip said.

Cara read out Naomi’s email address and Pip typed it into the Facebook log-in page.

‘Her password will be Isobel0610,’ Cara said.

‘Excellent.’ Pip typed it in. ‘Thanks, comrade. Stand down.’

‘Loud and clear. Although if Naomi finds out, I’m dobbing you in it straight away.’

‘Understood,’ said Pip.

‘All right, Plops, Dad’s yelling. Tell me if you find out anything interesting.’

‘OK,’ Pip said, even though she knew she couldn’t.

She dropped the phone and, leaning over her laptop, pressed the Facebook log-in button.

Glancing quickly at Naomi’s newsfeed, she noticed that, like her own, it was filled with cats doing silly things, quick-time recipe videos and posts with ungrammatical motivational quotes over pictures of sunsets.

Pip typed Nancy Tangotits into the search bar and clicked on to Max’s profile. The spinning loading circle on the tab disappeared and the page popped up, a timeline full of bright colours and smiling faces.

It didn’t take long for Pip to realize why Max had two profiles. There’s no way he would have wanted his parents to see what he got up to away from home. There were so many photos of him in clubs and bars, his blonde hair stuck down on his sweaty forehead, jaw tensed and his eyes reeling and unfocused. Posing with his arms round girls, sticking his stippled tongue out at the camera, drops from spilled drinks splattered on his shirts. And those were just the recent ones on his timeline.

Pip clicked on to Max’s photos and began the long scroll down towards 2012. Every eighty or so photos down, she had to wait for the three loading bars to take her further into Nancy Tangotits’ past. It was all much of the same: clubs, bars, bleary eyes. There was a brief respite from Max’s nocturnal activities with a series of photos from a ski trip, Max standing in the snow wearing just a Borat mankini.

The scrolling took so long that Pip propped up her phone and pressed play on the true crime podcast episode she was halfway through. She finally reached 2012 and took herself right back to January before looking through the photos properly, studying each one.

Most photos were of Max with other people, smiling in the foreground, or a crowd laughing as Max did something stupid. Naomi, Jake, Millie and Sal were his main co-stars. Pip lingered for a long time on a picture of Sal flashing his brilliant smile at the camera while Max licked his cheek. Her gaze flicked between the two drunk and happy boys, looking for any pixelated imprint of the possible and tragic secrets that existed between them.

Pip paid particular attention to those photos with a crowd of people, searching for Andie’s face in the background, searching for anything suspicious in Max’s hand, for him lurking too close to any girl’s drink. She clicked forward and back through so many photos of calamity parties that her tired eyes, scratchy from the laptop’s drying white light, turned them into flipbook moving pictures. Until she right arrowed on to the photos from that night and everything became sharp and static again.

Pip leaned forward.

Max had taken and uploaded ten photos from the night Andie disappeared. Pip immediately recognized everyone’s clothes and the sofas from Max’s house. Added to Naomi’s three and Millie’s six, that made a total of nineteen photos from that night, nineteen snapshots of time that existed alongside Andie Bell’s last hours of life.

Pip shivered and pulled the duvet over her feet. The photos were of a similar nature to the ones Millie and Naomi had taken: Max and Jake gripping controllers and staring out of frame, Millie and Max posing with funny filters superimposed over their faces, Naomi in the background staring down at her phone unaware of the posed photo going on behind her. Four best friends without their fifth. Sal out allegedly murdering someone instead of goofing around with them.

That’s when Pip noticed it. When it had been just Millie and Naomi it was simply a coincidence, but now that she was looking at Max’s too it made a pattern. All three of them had uploaded their photos from that night on Monday the 23rd , all between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. Wasn’t it a little strange that, in the midst of all the craziness of Andie’s disappearance, they all decided to post these photos at almost the exact same time? And why upload these photos at all? Naomi said she and the others had decided on the Monday night to tell the police the truth about Sal’s alibi; was uploading these photos the first step in that decision? To stop hiding Sal’s absence?

Pip typed up some notes about this upload coincidence, then she clicked save and closed the laptop. She got ready for bed, wandering back from the bathroom with her toothbrush in mouth, humming as she scribbled her to-do list for tomorrow. Finish Margaret Atwood essay was underlined three times.

Tucked up in bed, she read three paragraphs of her current book before tiredness started meddling with the words, making them strange and unfamiliar in her head. She only just managed to hit the light before sleep took her.

It was with a sniff and a jerk of the leg that Pip sat bolt upright in bed. She leaned against the headboard and rubbed her eyes as her mind stirred into wakefulness. She pressed the home button on her phone, the screen light blinding her. It was 4:47 a.m.

What had woken her? Was it a screaming fox outside? A dream?

Something stirred then, on the tip of her tongue and the tip of her brain. A vague thought: too fluffy, spiky and morphing to put into words, beyond the span of just-awake comprehension. But she knew where it was drawing her.

Pip slid quickly out of bed. The cold room stung her exposed skin, turning her breath into ghosts. She grabbed her laptop from the desk and took it back to bed, wrapping the duvet round her for warmth. Opening the computer, she was blinded again by the silvery backlight. Squinting through it, she opened up Facebook, still signed in as Naomi, and navigated her way back to Nancy Tangotits and the photos from that night.

She looked through them all once and then back again a little slower. She stopped on the second-to-last picture. All four of the friends were captured within it. Naomi was sitting with her back to the camera, looking down. Though she was in the background, you could see her phone in her hands lighting up its lock screen with small white numbers, her eyes down on it. The main focus of the photo was on Max, Millie and Jake, the three of them standing by the near side of the sofa, smiling as Millie rested her arms over both the boys’ shoulders. Max was still holding a controller in his outside hand and Jake’s disappeared out of shot on the right.

Pip shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.

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?’