Page 85 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

She glanced at the clock on her computer dashboard and the glance became a stare. The clock stood stubbornly at 7:58 p.m.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said when, even after twenty Mississippis, the eight in the :58 hadn’t sprung into the leg of a nine.

When it did, an age later, Pip said, ‘Close enough,’ and pressed the record button on her app. She dialled Emma’s number, her skin prickling with nerves. It picked up on the third ring.

‘Hello?’ said a high and sweet voice.

‘Hi, Emma, this is Pippa here.’

‘Oh yeah, hi. Hold on, let me just go up to my room.’

Pip listened impatiently to the sound of Emma’s feet skipping up a flight of stairs.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘So, you said you’re doing a project about Andie?’

‘Sort of, yeah. About the investigation into her disappearance and the media’s role in it. A kind of case study.’

‘OK,’ Emma said, sounding uncertain. ‘I’m not sure how much help I can be with that.’

‘Don’t worry, I just have a few basic questions about the investigation as you remember it,’ Pip said. ‘So firstly, when did you find out she was missing?’

‘Um . . . it was around one o’clock that night. Her parents rang both me and Chloe Burch; we were Andie’s best friends. I said how I hadn’t seen her or heard from her and told them I would call around a bit. I tried Sal Singh that night but he didn’t pick up until the next morning.’

‘Did the police contact you at all?’ asked Pip.

‘Yeah, Saturday morning. They came around asking questions.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘Just the same as I said to Andie’s parents. That I had no idea where she was; she hadn’t told me she was going anywhere. And they were asking about Andie’s boyfriend, so I told them about Sal and that I’d just rung and told him she was missing.’

‘What did you tell them about Sal?’

‘Well, only that at school that week they were kind of fighting. I definitely saw them bickering on the Thursday and Friday, which was out of the ordinary. Usually Andie bickered at him and he didn’t get involved. But this time he seemed super mad about something.’

‘What about?’ Pip said. It was suddenly clearer to her why the police might have thought it prudent to interview Sal that afternoon.

‘I don’t know, honestly. When I asked Andie she just said that Sal was being “a little bitch” about something.’

Pip was taken aback. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So Andie didn’t have plans to see Sal on the Friday?’

‘No, she didn’t have plans to do anything actually; she was supposed to stay at home that night.’

‘Oh, how come?’ Pip sat up a little straighter.

‘Um, I don’t know if I should say.’

‘Don’t worry –’ Pip tried to hide the desperation in her voice – ‘if it’s not relevant it won’t go in my project. It just might help me better understand the circumstances of her disappearance.’

‘Yeah, OK. Well, Andie’s little sister, Becca, had been hospitalized for self-harming several weeks before. Her parents had to go out, so they told Andie she had to stay in and take care of Becca.’

‘Oh,’ was all Pip could think to say.

‘Yeah, I know, poor girl. And still Andie left her. Only looking back now can I understand how difficult it must have been having Andie as an older sister.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Erm, it’s just, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, you know, but . . . I’ve had five years to grow up and reflect on everything and when I think back to those times I don’t like the person I was at all. The person I was with Andie.’

---