A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

It was Sal.

It had to be.

Despite the cold, Pip’s body was a flume of racing blood, warm and fast, hammering through her heart.

She moved mechanically, her mind adrift in waves of thoughts shouting unintelligibly over each other. But her hands somehow knew what to do. A few minutes later, she’d downloaded the trial version of Photoshop to her computer. She saved Max’s photo and opened the file up in the programme. Following an online tutorial by a man with a silky Irish accent, she enlarged the photo and then sharpened it.

Her skin flashed cold to hot. She sat back and gasped.

There was no doubt about it. The little numbers projected on Naomi’s phone read 00:09.

They said Sal left at half ten but there they were, all four of the friends at nine minutes past midnight, encased in the frame, and not one of them could have taken the photo themselves.

Max’s parents were away that night and no one else had been there, that’s what they’d always said. It was just the five of them until Sal left at ten thirty to go and kill his girlfriend.

And here, right in front of Pip’s eyes, was proof that that was a lie. There was a fifth person there after midnight. And who could it have been but Sal?

Pip scrolled up to the topmost strip of the enlarged photo. Behind the sofa on the far wall was a window. And in its very centre pane was the flash of the phone camera. You couldn’t distinguish the figure holding the phone from the darkness of outside. But, just beyond the streaks of bright white, there was a faint halo of reflected blue, only just visible against the surrounding black. The very same blue as the corded shirt Sal was wearing that night, the one Ravi still wore sometimes. Her stomach flipped as she thought his name, as she imagined the look in his eyes when he saw this photo.

She extracted the enlarged image to a document and cropped it to show only Naomi with her phone on one page and the flash in the window on another. Along with the original saved photo, she sent each page over to the wireless printer on her desk. She watched from her bed as the printer sputt-sputtered each page, making that gentle steam train rattle as it did. Pip closed her eyes for just a moment, listening to the soft chugging sound.

‘Pips, can I come in and vacuum?’

Pip’s eyes snapped open. She pulled herself up from her slumped position, the whole right side of her body aching from hip to neck.

‘You’re still in bed?’ her mum said, opening the door. ‘It’s half one, lazy. I thought you were already up.’

‘No . . . I,’ Pip said, her throat dry and scratchy, ‘was just tired, not feeling so well. Could you do Josh’s room first?’

Her mum paused and looked at her, her warm eyes staining with worry.

‘You’re not overworking yourself, are you, Pip?’ she said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’

‘No, I promise.’

Her mum closed the door and Pip climbed out of bed, almost knocking her laptop off. She got ready, pulling her dungarees on over a dark green jumper, fighting to get the brush through her hair. She picked up the three photo printouts, placed them in a plastic folder and slid them inside her rucksack. Then she scrolled to the recent calls list in her phone and dialled.

‘Ravi!’

‘What’s up, Sarge?’

‘Meet me outside your house in ten minutes. I’ll be in the car.’

‘OK. What’s on the menu today, more blackmailing? Side order of breaking and enteri–’

‘It’s serious. Be there in ten.’

Sitting in her passenger seat, his head almost touching the roof of the car, Ravi stared down open-mouthed at the printed photo in his hands.

It was a long while before he said anything. They sat in silence, Pip watching as Ravi traced his finger over the fuzzy blue reflection in the far window.

‘Sal never lied to the police,’ he said eventually.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Pip said. ‘I think he left Max’s at twelve fifteen, just like he originally said. It was his friends who lied. I don’t know why, but on that Tuesday they lied and they took away his alibi.’

‘This means he’s innocent, Pip.’ His big round eyes fixed on hers.

‘That’s what we’re here to test, come on.’

She opened her door and stepped out. She’d picked Ravi up and driven him straight here, parking on the grass verge off Wyvil Road, her hazard lights flashing. Ravi closed the car door and followed as Pip started up the road.

‘How are we testing that?’

‘We need to be sure, Ravi, before we accept it as truth,’ she said, making her steps fall in time with his. ‘And the only way to be sure is to do an Andie Bell murder re-enactment. To see, with Sal’s new time of departure from Max’s, whether he would still have had enough time to kill her or not.’

They turned left down Tudor Lane and traipsed all the way to just outside Max Hastings’ sprawling house, where this had all begun five and a half years ago.

Pip pulled out her phone. ‘We should give the pretend prosecution the benefit of the doubt,’ she said. ‘Let’s say that Sal left Max’s just after that photo was taken, at ten minutes past midnight. What time did your dad say Sal got home?’

‘Around twelve fifty,’ he replied.

‘OK. Let’s allow for some misremembering and say it was more like twelve fifty-five. Which means that Sal had forty-five minutes door to door. We have to move fast, Ravi, use the minimum possible time it might have taken to kill her and dispose of her body.’

‘Normal teenagers sit at home and watch TV on a Sunday,’ he said.

‘Right, I’m starting the stopwatch . . . now.’

Pip turned on her heels and marched back up the road the way they’d come, Ravi at her side. Her steps fell somewhere between a fast walk and a slow jog. Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds later, they reached her car and her heart was already pounding. This was the intercept point.

‘OK.’ She turned the key in the ignition and pulled back on to the road. ‘So this is Andie’s car and she has intercepted Sal. Let’s say that she was driving for a faster pick-up time. Now we go to the first quiet spot where the murder theoretically could have taken place.’

She hadn’t been driving long before Ravi pointed.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s quiet and secluded. Turn off here.’

Pip pulled off on to the small dirt road, packed in by tall hedgerows. A sign told them that the winding single-track road led down to a farm. Pip stopped the car where a widened passing place was cut into the hedge and said, ‘Now we get out. They didn’t find any blood in the front of the car, just the boot.’

Pip glanced at the ticking stopwatch as Ravi was crossing round the bonnet to meet on her side of the car: 15:29, 15:30 . . .

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s say that right now they are arguing. It’s starting to get heated. Could have been about Andie selling drugs or about this secret older guy. Sal is upset, Andie’s shouting back.’ Pip hummed tunelessly, rolling her hands to fill the time of the imaginary scene. ‘And right about now, maybe Sal finds a rock on the road, or something heavy from Andie’s car. Maybe no weapon at all. Let’s give him at least forty seconds to kill her.’

They waited.

‘So now Andie’s dead.’ Pip pointed down at the gravel road. ‘He opens the boot –’ Pip opened her boot – ‘and he picks her up.’ She bent down and held out her arms, taking enough time to lift the invisible body. ‘He puts her inside the boot where her blood was found.’ Pip laid her arms down on the carpeted boot floor and stepped back to shut it.

‘Now back in the car,’ Ravi said.

Pip checked the timer: 20:02, 20:03 . . . She put the car in reverse and swung back out on to the main road.

‘Sal’s driving now,’ she said. ‘His fingerprints get on the steering wheel and around the dashboard. He’d be thinking of how to dispose of her body. The closest possible forest-y area is Lodge Wood. So, maybe he’d come off Wyvil Road here,’ she said, turning, the woods appearing on their left.

‘But he would have needed to find a place to get the car up close to the woods,’ said Ravi.

They chased the woods for several minutes searching for such a place, until the road grew dark under a tunnel of trees pressing in on either side.

‘There.’ They spotted one together. Pip indicated and pulled off on to the grassy verge that bordered the forest.

‘I’m sure the police searched here a hundred times, as these are the closest woods to Max’s house,’ she said. ‘But let’s just say Sal managed to hide the body here.’

Pip and Ravi got out of the car once more.

26:18.

‘So he opens the boot and drags her out.’ Pip recreated the action, noticing the muscles in Ravi’s jaw clench and release. He’d probably had nightmares about this very scene, his kind older brother dragging a dead and bloodied body through the trees. But maybe, after today, he’d never have to picture it again.

‘Sal would have had to take her quite far in, away from the road,’ she said.

Pip mimicked dragging the body, her back bent, staggering slowly backwards.

‘Up here’s pretty hidden from the road,’ Ravi said once Pip had dragged her about 200 feet through the trees.

‘Yep.’ She let go of Andie.

29:48.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘so the hole has always been a problem, how he could have had enough time to dig one deep enough anyway. But, now that we’re here,’ she glanced around the sun-dappled trees, ‘there are quite a few downed trees in these woods. Maybe he didn’t need to dig much at all. Maybe he found a shallow ditch ready made for him. Like there.’ She pointed to a large mossy dip in the ground, a tangle of old dry roots creeping through it, still attached to a long-fallen tree.

‘He would’ve needed to make it deeper,’ Ravi said. ‘She’s never been found. Let’s allow three or four minutes for digging.’

‘Agreed.’

When the time came she dragged Andie’s body into the hole. ‘Then he would have needed to fill it again, cover her with dirt and debris.’

‘Let’s do it then,’ Ravi said, his face determined now. He stabbed the toe of his boot into the dirt and kicked a spray of soil into the hole.

Pip followed suit, pushing mud, leaves and twigs in to fill the small ditch. Ravi was on his knees, sweeping whole armfuls of earth over and on top of Andie.

‘OK,’ Pip said when they were done, eyes on the once-hole that was now invisible on the forest floor. ‘So now her body is buried, Sal would have headed back.’

37:59.

They jogged back to Pip’s car and climbed inside, kicking mud all over the floor. Pip three-point turned, swearing when a horn screamed at them from an impatient four-by-four trying to pass, her ears ringing with it all the way.

When they were back on Wyvil Road she said, ‘Right, now Sal drives to Romer Close, where Howie Bowers happens to live. And he ditches Andie’s car.’

They pulled into it a few minutes later and Pip parked out of sight of Howie’s bungalow. She blipped the car behind them.

‘And now we walk to my house,’ Ravi said, trying to keep up with Pip, her steps breaking into an almost-run. They were both concentrating too hard for words, their eyes down on their pounding feet, treading in allegedly Sal ’s years-old footsteps.

They arrived outside the Singhs’ house breathless and warm. A sheen of sweat was tickling Pip’s upper lip. She wiped it on her sleeve and pulled out her phone.

She pressed the stop button on the timer. The numbers rushed through her, dropping all the way to her stomach, where they began to flutter. She looked up at Ravi.

‘What?’ His eyes were wide and searching.

‘So,’ Pip said, ‘we gave Sal an upper-limit forty-five-minute time window between locations. And our re-enactment worked with the closest possible locations and in an almost inconceivably prompt manner.’

‘Yes, it was the speediest of murders. And?’

Pip held her phone out to him and showed him the timer.

‘Fifty-eight minutes, nineteen seconds,’ Ravi read aloud.

‘Ravi.’ His name fizzed on her lips and she broke into a smile. ‘Sal couldn’t possibly have done it. He’s innocent; the photo proves it.’

‘Shit.’ He stepped back and covered his mouth, shaking his head. ‘He didn’t do it. Sal’s innocent.’

He made a sound then, one that grew slowly in his throat, gravelly and strange. It burst out of him, a quick bark of laughter shaded with the breathiness of disbelief. The smile stretched so slowly across his face, it was as though it were unfolding muscle by muscle. He laughed again, the sound pure and warm, Pip’s cheeks flushing with the heat of it.

And then, the laughter still on his face, Ravi looked up at the sky, the sun on his face, and the laugh became a yell. He roared up into the sky, neck strained, eyes screwed shut.

People eyed him from across the street and curtains twitched in houses. But Pip knew he didn’t care. And neither did she, watching him in this raw, confusing moment of happiness and grief.

Ravi looked down at her and the roar cracked into laughter again. He lifted Pip from her feet and something bright whirred through her. She laughed, tears in her eyes, as he spun her round and round.

‘We did it!’ he said, putting her down so clumsily that she almost fell over. He stepped back from her, looking suddenly embarrassed, wiping his eyes. ‘We actually did it. Is it enough? Can we go to the police with that photo?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pip said. She didn’t want to take this away from him, but she really didn’t know. ‘Maybe it’s enough to convince them to reopen the case, maybe it isn’t. But we need answers first. We need to know why Sal’s friends lied. Why they took his alibi away from him. Come on.’

Ravi took one step and hesitated. ‘You mean, ask Naomi?’

She nodded and he drew back.

‘You should go alone,’ he said. ‘Naomi won’t talk if I’m there. She physically can’t talk. I bumped into her last year and she burst into tears just looking at me.’

‘Are you sure?’ Pip said. ‘But you, out of everyone, deserve to know why.’

‘It’s the way it has to be, trust me. Be careful, Sarge.’

‘OK. I’ll ring you straight after.’

Pip wasn’t quite sure how to leave him. She touched his arm and then walked past and away, carrying that look on Ravi’s face with her.