Page 121 of Good Girl, Bad Blood

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Welcome Back.

Wait, what? Pip stared at the place whereIncorrect Passwordshould 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.

Twenty-Four

‘Are you sure you want to be here for this?’ Pip said, looking mainly at Joanna, her finger poised above the mousepad, about to pull up Jamie’s browser history in Google Chrome. ‘We don’t know what we might find.’

‘I understand,’ she said, hand tightly gripped on the back of the chair, not going anywhere.

Pip exchanged a quick look with Connor and he nodded that he was fine with that too.

‘OK.’

She clicked and Jamie’s history opened in a new tab. The most recent entry from Friday the 27th April, at 17:11. He’d been on YouTube, watching an Epic Fail compilation video. Other entries for that day: Reddit, more YouTube, a series of Wikipedia pages that tracked back from Knights Templar to Slender Man.

She scrolled to the day before, and one particular result grabbed her attention: Jamie had visited Layla Mead’s Instagram page twice on Thursday, the day before he’d gone missing. He’d also researchednat da silva rape trial max hastingswhich had taken him to Pip’s site, agoodgirlsguidetomurderpodcast.com, where it looked like Jamie had listened to her and Ravi’s trial update that day.

Her eyes flicked down through the days: all the Reddit hits and Wikipedia pages and Netflix binges. She was looking for something, anything that stuck out as unusual.Actuallyunusual, not Wikipedia unusual. She passed through Monday into the week before, and there was something that made her pause, something on the Thursday 19th, Jamie’s birthday. Jamie had googledwhat counts as assault?And then, after looking through a few results, he’d askedhow to fight.

‘This is weird,’ Pip said, highlighting the results with her finger. ‘These searches were from eleven thirty on his birthday night. The night you heard him sneak out late, Connor, the night he came back with blood on his jumper.’ She glanced quickly at the grey jumper still crumpled on the basket. ‘Seems he knew he would get into an altercation that night. It’s like he was preparing himself for it.’

‘But Jamie’s never been in a fight before. I mean, clearly, if he had to google how to do it,’ Connor said.

Pip had more to say on this, but another result lower down had just caught her eye. Monday 16th, a few days earlier, Jamie had looked upcontrolling fathers. Pip’s breath snagged in her throat, but she controlled her reaction, scrolling quickly past it before the others saw it.

But she couldn’t unsee it. And now she couldn’t stop thinking about their explosive arguments, or Arthur’s near-total lack of attention to the fact his oldest son was missing, or the possible intersecting timelines of Jamie and Arthur that night. And suddenly, she was very aware that Arthur Reynolds was sitting in the room below her now, his presence like a physical thing, seeping up through the carpet.

‘What’s that?’ Connor said suddenly, making her flinch.

She’d been distractedly running down the results, but now she stopped, eyes following the line of Connor’s finger. Tuesday the 10th of April, at 01:26 a.m., there was an odd series of Google searches, starting withbrain cancer. Jamie had clicked through to two results on the NHS website, one forBrain tumours, the other forMalignant brain tumour. A few minutes later, Jamie returned to Google, typinginoperable brain tumour, and clicking on to a cancer charity page. Then he’d asked one more thing of Google that night:Brain cancerclinical trials.

‘Hm,’ Pip said. ‘I mean, I know I look up all sorts of things online, and Jamie clearly does too, but this feels different from the general browsing. This feels sort of . . . targeted, deliberate. Do you know anyone who has brain cancer?’ Pip asked Joanna.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Did Jamie ever mention knowing someone who has?’ She turned the question over to Connor.

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