Good Girl, Bad Blood

The Reynoldses’ house stared her down, the top windows yellow and unblinking. But only for a second before the door swung inwards and Joanna Reynolds appeared in the crack.

‘You’re here.’ Joanna ushered Pip inside as Connor appeared down the hall. ‘Thanks for coming straight away.’

‘That’s OK.’ Pip shrugged off her bag and shoes. She and Ravi had just finished recording the new update on Max Hastings’ trial – discussing two witnesses for the defence, Max’s male friends from university – when Joanna had called.

‘It sounded urgent?’ Pip said, looking between the two of them. She could hear the sounds of the television behind the closed door to the living room. Presumably Arthur Reynolds was inside, still refusing to have anything to do with this. But Jamie had been gone for four days now, when would his dad relent? Pip understood: it’s hard to climb back out of the hole once you’ve dug in your heels. But surely he was starting to worry?

‘Yes, it is, I think.’ Joanna gestured for Pip to follow her down the hallway, turning to climb the stairs behind Connor.

‘Is it his computer?’ Pip asked. ‘Did you manage to get on?’

‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘We’ve been trying. Tried more than seven hundred options now. Nothing.’

‘OK, well I emailed two computer experts yesterday, so we’ll see what they say.’ Pip moved up the stairs, trying not to catch Joanna’s heels. ‘So, what’s wrong?’

‘I’ve listened to the first episode you released last night, several times already,’ Joanna spoke quickly, growing breathless halfway up the steps. ‘It’s the interview you did with the eyewitnesses from the bookshop, the ones who saw him on Wyvil at 11:40. There was something nagging at me about that interview, and I finally realized what it was.’

Joanna led her into Jamie’s chaotic bedroom, where Connor had switched on the light, waiting for them.

‘Is it Harry Scythe?’ Pip asked. ‘Do you know him?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘It’s that part where they talked about what Jamie was wearing. Two witnesses thought they saw him in the burgundy shirt, the one we know he left the house in. But those were the first two to see him, as Jamie would have been walking towards them. The other two witnesses got to the door after, when Jamie would have already passed. So, they saw him from behind. And they both thought that maybe he wasn’t wearing a burgundy shirt, maybe he was wearing something darker, with a hood, and pockets because they couldn’t see Jamie’s hands.’

‘Yes, there is that discrepancy,’ Pip said. ‘But that can happen with small details in eyewitness accounts.’

Joanna’s eyes were alight now, burning a path across Pip’s face. ‘Yes, and our instinct was to believe the two who saw him in the shirt, because that’s what we presumed Jamie was wearing. But what if it’s the other two who are right, the ones who saw him in a black hoodie? Jamie has a black hoodie,’ she said, ‘one with a zip. He wears it all the time. If it was undone, maybe from the front you wouldn’t see much of it and would focus on the shirt beneath.’

‘But he wasn’t wearing a black hoodie when he left the house on Friday,’ Pip said, looking to Connor. ‘And he wasn’t carrying it with him, didn’t have a rucksack or anything.’

‘No, he definitely didn’t have it on him,’ Connor stepped in. ‘That’s what I said at first. But . . .’ He gestured back to his mum.

‘But –’ Joanna picked it up – ‘I’ve looked everywhere. Everywhere. In his wardrobe, his drawers, all these piles of clothes, his laundry basket, the ironing pile, the cupboards in our room, Connor’s and Zoe’s. Jamie’s black hoodie isn’t here. It’s not in the house.’

Pip’s breath stalled in her chest. ‘It’s not here?’

‘We’ve, like, triple-checked everywhere it could be,’ said Connor. ‘Spent the last few hours searching. It’s gone.’

‘So, if they’re right,’ Joanna said, ‘if those two eyewitnesses are right, and they saw Jamie wearing a black hoodie, then . . .’

‘Then Jamie came back home,’ Pip said, and she felt a cold shiver, wandering the wrong way past her stomach, filling the hollows of her legs. ‘Between the calamity party and the sighting on Wyvil Road, Jamie came back home. Back here,’ she said, looking around the room with new eyes: the hectic piles of clothes strewn about, maybe when Jamie had been frantically searching for the hoodie. The smashed mug by his bed, maybe that happened by accident, in his haste. The missing knife downstairs. Maybe, if Jamie was the one who took it, maybe that’s the real reason he returned home.

‘Yes, exactly,’ Joanna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking. Jamie came home.’ She said it with such hope in her voice, such undisguised wanting, her little boy back home, like the part that came after couldn’t ever take that away from her; that he’d then left again and disappeared.

‘So if he did come back and take his hoodie,’ Pip said, avoiding any mention of the missing knife, ‘it must have been between, say, 10:45 p.m., after walking back from Highmoor, and 11:25ish, because it would’ve taken at least fifteen minutes to get halfway down Wyvil.’

Joanna nodded, hanging on her every word.

‘But . . .’ Pip stopped herself, and restarted, directing the question at Connor. It was easier that way. ‘But didn’t your dad get home from the pub around 11:15?’

Joanna answered anyway. ‘Yes, he did. About then. Obviously, Arthur didn’t see Jamie at all, so Jamie must have come and gone before Arthur got back.’

‘Have you asked him about that?’ Pip said tentatively.

‘Asked him what?’

‘About his movements that night?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Joanna said bluntly. ‘He got back from the pub around 11:15, as you said. No sign of Jamie.’

‘So, Jamie must have come back earlier, right?’ Connor asked.

‘Right,’ Pip said, but that’s not what she was thinking at all. She was thinking that Tom Nowak said he saw Jamie going into Nat da Silva’s house on Cross Lane at 10:50 p.m. And was there time to do both? Visit Nat, walk home and leave again? No, not really, not without Jamie’s time window overlapping with Arthur’s. But Arthur said he was home at 11:15 and hadn’t seen Jamie. Something wasn’t adding up here.

Either Jamie didn’t go to Nat’s at all, came home earlier and left before 11:15 when his dad got home. Or Jamie did go to Nat’s, briefly, then walked home, coinciding with the time his dad was back and Arthur just hadn’t noticed Jamie was there, or when he left. Or Arthur did notice, and for some reason he was lying about it.

‘Pip?’ Joanna repeated.

‘Sorry, what was that?’ Pip said, out of her head and back inside the room.

‘I said, when I was looking for Jamie’s black hoodie, I found something else.’ Joanna’s eyes darkened as she approached Jamie’s white laundry basket. ‘I looked through here,’ she said, opening the lid and retrieving an item of clothing from the top. ‘And this was about halfway down.’

She held it up by the seams on the shoulders to show Pip. It was a grey cotton jumper. And down the front, about five inches below the collar, were drops of blood, dried to a reddish brown. Seven stains in all, each one smaller than a centimetre. And a long smear of blood on the cuff of one sleeve.

‘Shit.’ Pip stepped forward to get a better look at the blood.

‘This is the jumper he wore on his birthday,’ Joanna said, and indeed Pip recognized it from the missing posters all over town.

‘You heard him sneak out late that night, didn’t you?’ Pip asked Connor.

‘Yeah.’

‘And he didn’t accidentally hurt himself at home that evening?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘He went into his bedroom and he was fine. Happy.’

‘These look like the blood dripped from above, it’s not spatter,’ Pip said, circling her finger in front of the jumper. ‘The sleeve looks like it was wiped against a source of blood.’

‘Jamie’s blood?’ The colour had gone from Joanna’s face, drained away to somewhere unseen.

‘Possibly. Did you notice if he had any cuts or bruises the next day?’

‘No,’ Joanna said quietly. ‘Nowhere I could see.’

‘It could be someone else’s blood,’ Pip thought aloud and immediately regretted it. Joanna’s face folded, collapsing in on itself as a lone tear escaped and twisted around the contours of her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry, Joanna,’ Pip said. ‘I shouldn’t have s—’

‘No, it’s not you,’ Joanna cried, carefully placing the jumper back on top of the basket. Two more tears broke free, racing each other to her chin. ‘It’s just this feeling, like I don’t even know my son at all.’

Connor went to his mum, folded her into a hug. She had shrunk again, and she disappeared inside his arms, sobbing into his chest. An awful, raw sound that hurt Pip just to hear it.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Connor whispered down into her hair, looking to Pip, but she also didn’t know what to say to make anything better.

Joanna re-emerged with a sniff, wiping at her eyes in vain. ‘I’m not sure I recognize him.’ She stared down at Jamie’s jumper. ‘Trying to steal from your mum, getting fired and lying to us for weeks. Breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night to steal a watch he didn’t need. Sneaking out. Coming back possibly with someone’s blood on his clothes. I don’t recognize this Jamie,’ she said, closing her eyes like she could imagine her son back in front of her, the one she knew. ‘This isn’t him, these things he’s done. He’s not this person; he’s sweet, he’s considerate. He makes me tea when I get in from work, he asks me how my day went. We talk, about how he’s feeling, how I’m feeling. We’re a team, me and him, we have been since he was born. I know everything about him – except clearly I don’t any more.’

Pip found herself staring at the bloodied jumper too, unable to pull her eyes away. ‘There’s more to all this than we understand right now,’ she said. ‘There has to be a reason behind it. He hasn’t just changed after twenty-four years, flipped a switch. There’s a reason, and I will find it. I promise.’

‘I just want him back.’ Joanna squeezed Connor’s hand, meeting Pip’s eyes. ‘I want our Jamie back. The one who still calls me Jomumma because he knows it makes me smile. That was his name for me, when Jamie was three and first learned I had a name other than Mummy. He came up with Jomumma, so that I could have my own name back whilst still being his mum.’ Joanna sniffed and the sound stuttered all the way through her, shuddering in her shoulders. ‘What if I never get to hear him call me that again?’

But her eyes were dry, like she’d cried all she could cry and now she was empty. Hollow. Pip recognized the look in Connor’s eyes as he wrapped an arm around his mum: fear. He squeezed tight, like that was the only way he knew how to stop his mum from falling apart.

This wasn’t a moment for Pip to watch, to intrude on. She should leave them to their moment.

‘Thank you for calling me over, about the hoodie,’ she said, walking slowly backwards to Jamie’s bedroom door. ‘We’re getting one step closer, with every bit of information. I . . . I better get back to recording and editing. Maybe chase up those computer experts.’ She glanced at the closed lid of Jamie’s laptop as she reached the door. ‘Do you have any of those big Ziploc freezer bags?’

Connor screwed his eyes at her, confused, but he nodded nonetheless.

‘Seal that jumper inside one of them,’ she said. ‘And keep it somewhere cool, out of sunlight.’

‘OK.’

‘Bye,’ she said, and it came out as barely a whisper as she left them, walking away down the corridor. But after three steps, something stopped her. The fragment of a thought, circling too fast for her to catch. And when it finally settled, she retraced those three steps back to Jamie’s door.

‘Jomumma?’ she said.

‘Yes.’ Joanna lifted her gaze back to Pip, like it was almost too heavy.

‘I mean . . . did you try Jomumma?’ ‘Pardon?’

‘For Jamie’s password, sorry,’ she said.

‘N-no,’ Joanna said, glancing at Connor, a horrified look in her eyes. ‘I thought when you said to try nicknames, you meant just nicknames we had for Jamie.’

‘That’s OK. It really could be anything,’ Pip said, making her way over to Jamie’s desk. ‘Can I sit?’

‘Of course.’ Joanna came to stand behind her, Connor on the other side, as Pip pulled open the laptop. The dead screen mirrored back their faces, over-stretching them into the faces of phantoms. Pip pressed the power button and brought up the blue log-in screen, that empty white password box staring her down.

She typed it in, Jomumma, the letters mutating into small black circles as they entered the box. She paused, finger hanging over the enter button as the room suddenly went too silent. Joanna and Connor were holding their breath.

She pressed it and immediately:

Incorrect Password.

Behind her, they both exhaled, someone’s breath ruffling her half-up hair.

‘Sorry,’ Pip said, not wanting to look back at them. ‘I thought it was worth a try.’ It had been, and maybe it was worth a few more, she thought.

She tried it again, replacing the o with a zero.

Incorrect Password.

She tried it with a one at the end. And then a two. And then a one, two, three, and a one, two, three, four. Swapping the zero and o in and out.

Incorrect Password.

Capital J. Lowercase j.

Capital M for the start of Mumma. Lowercase m.

Pip hung her head, sighing.

‘It’s OK.’ Connor placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You tried. The experts will be able to do it, right?’

Yes, if they ever replied to her email. Clearly they hadn’t had time yet, which was all wrong because if anything, everyone else had all the time, and Pip had none. Jamie had none.

But giving up was too hard, she’d never been good at that. So she tried one last thing. ‘Joanna, what year were you born?’

‘Oh, sixty-six,’ she said. ‘Doubt Jamie knows that, though.’

Pip typed in Jomumma66 and pressed enter.

Incorrect Password. The screen mocked her, and she felt a flare of anger rise within her, itching in her hands to grab the machine and throw it against the wall. That hot, primal thing inside that she never knew existed before a year ago. Connor was saying her name, but it didn’t belong to this person sitting in the chair any more. But she controlled it, pushed it back. Biting her tongue, she tried again, fingers hammering the keys.

JoMumma66

Incorrect Password.

Fuck.

Jomumma1966

Incorrect.

Fuck.

JoMumma1966.

Incorr—

Fuck.

J0Mumma66.

Welcome Back.

Wait, what? Pip stared at the place where Incorrect Password should be. But instead, there was a loading circle, spooling round and around, reflecting in the dark of her eyes. And those two words: Welcome Back.

‘We’re in!’ She jumped up from the chair, a shocked half-cough, half-laugh escaping from her.

‘We’re in?!’ Joanna caught Pip’s words, remoulded them with disbelief.

‘J0Mumma66,’ Connor said, raising his arms up in victory. ‘That’s it. We did it!’

And Pip didn’t know how it happened, but somehow, in a strange, confusing blur, they were hugging, all three of them in a chaotic embrace, the chirping sounds of Jamie’s laptop waking up behind them.