The doorbell was shrill, splitting your ears the same way as a scream. Pip withdrew her finger, restoring quiet to the white-brick terraced house. She hoped this was the right house. This was the one they’d told her: number thirteen Beacon Close, dark red door.
An aggressively white BMW sports car sat in the drive, throwing the morning sun back into Pip’s eyes, blinding her.
She was about to ring the bell again, when she heard a sliding bolt. The door swung inward and a man appeared in the gap, screwing his eyes against the brightness outside. This must be the new boyfriend, then. He was wearing a crisp white sweatshirt—black Adidas stripes up the sleeves—and a pair of dark basketball shorts.
“Yeah?” he said gruffly, voice crackling like he hadn’t been awake long.
“Hello,” Pip said brightly. The man had a tattoo across his throat, the gray ink stark against his white skin in symmetrical repeating shapes that looked a little like scales. A flock of birds emerged from the pattern, flying up the side of his face and into his brown close-shaved hair. Pip returned her gaze to his eyes. “Um, is Nat da Silva in? I just asked at her parents’ house and her mom said she’d probably be here.”
“Yeah, she’s inside.” He sniffed. “You a friend of hers?”
“Yes,” Pip said, which was a lie, but it was easier to say than No, she still hates me even though I keep trying to make her not hate me. “I’m Pip…Fitz- Amobi. Can I come in? I need to talk to her about something urgent.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s kinda early,” he said, stepping back and gesturing for her to follow. “I’m Luke. Eaton.”
“Nice to meet you.” Pip closed the front door and followed Luke around the bend in the corridor, into the kitchen at the back.
“Nat, friend of yours,” Luke said as they entered the room.
The kitchen was square, with counters in an L shape on one side, a large wood table on the other. On one end of the table was what looked like a stack of money, the pile weighted down by BMW car keys. At the other end sat Nat da Silva, a bowl of cereal in front of her. She was wearing what must have been one of Luke’s sweaters, her bleached white hair brushed to one side.
She dropped her cereal-loaded spoon and it clattered noisily against the
bowl.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Hi, Nat.” Pip stood there awkwardly, trapped halfway between Luke in the doorway and Nat at the table.
“You already said what you wanted to say to me at the memorial,” Nat said dismissively, picking the spoon back up.
“Oh, no, this isn’t about the trial.” Pip chanced one step toward Nat.
“What trial?” Luke said behind her.
“Nothing,” Nat responded, the word spoken through a mouthful of cereal.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s Jamie Reynolds,” Pip said. A breeze came through the open window, fluttering the lace curtain and rustling a couple of brown paper bags on the counter. Probably takeout bags. “Jamie’s missing,” she added.
Nat’s eyebrows lowered, shadowing her blue eyes. “Missing? His mom called me yesterday, asking if I’d seen him. He still hasn’t turned up?”
“No, and his family is really worried. They filed a missing persons report yesterday, but the police aren’t doing anything about it.”
“My brother, you mean?”
Pip had walked right into that one.
“Well, no, I spoke to Detective Hawkins. He says there’s nothing they can do. So the Reynoldses asked if I would investigate.”
“For your podcast?” Nat said that last word full of spite, hardening the
consonants, sharpening them to a point.
“Well, yes.”
Nat swallowed another bite of cereal. “How opportunistic of you.”
Luke snorted.
“They asked me to,” Pip said quietly. “I’m guessing you won’t want to do a recorded interview.”
“Perceptive too,” Nat said, milk dripping onto the table as another spoonful hovered between her mouth and the bowl.
“Jamie told his brother he was going to your house—your parents’ house —after the memorial, to spend the evening with you.”
“He was supposed to. He never showed up.” Nat sniffed, glancing quickly up at Luke. “Never texted to say he wasn’t coming. I waited. Tried calling him.”
“So the last contact you had with Jamie was at the memorial, in person?”
“Yes.” Nat crunched another mouthful. “Until just after Andie’s friends spoke, when I noticed Jamie staring into the crowd on the other side, trying to see something. I asked him what was up, and he said, ‘I’ve just seen someone.’ ”
“And?” Pip said when Nat paused for too long.
“Then he left, presumably to go talk to whoever it was,” she said.
That’s when Pip had last seen him too. Jostling her as he made his way to the other side of the crowd, a strange intensity on his face. But who was he moving toward?
“Do you have any idea who the ‘someone’ he spotted was?”
“No,” Nat said, stretching her neck out with an audible crack. “Can’t be somebody I know or he would’ve said their name. He’s probably with whoever that someone is. He’ll come home. Jamie’s like that, very all or nothing.”
“His family is convinced something has happened to him,” Pip said, her legs starting to prickle from standing still too long. “That’s why I need to
work out his movements during and after the memorial. Find out who he interacted with on Friday night. Do you know anything that might help?”
She heard an inward breath behind her, from Luke, before he spoke.
“Nat’s right, Jamie’s probably just staying with a friend. I’m sure this is a lot of trouble over nothing.”
“Do you know Jamie?” Pip half turned to look at him.
“Nah, not really, only through Nat. They’re good friends. If she says he’s
OK, then he’s probably OK.”
“Well, I—” Nat started.
“Were you at the memorial?” Pip asked Luke. “Did you see—”
“Nah, wasn’t there.” Luke clicked his tongue. “Never knew either of those kids. So no, didn’t see Jamie. Didn’t actually leave the house at all on Friday.”
Pip nodded at him, then turned back to the kitchen table. As she did, she caught just the tail end of the expression on Nat’s face. She was looking up at Luke, hand frozen in midair on its way back to the spoon, mouth slightly open like she’d started to speak but had forgotten how. Then her eyes flicked to Pip and the expression immediately dropped out, so fast that Pip wasn’t sure she’d really seen it at all, nor what it might mean.
“So,” Pip said, watching Nat more closely now, “was Jamie acting strange that night, or in the weeks before?”
“I don’t think so,” said Nat. “I haven’t heard from him much lately.”
“Have you been texting? Late-night phone calls?” asked Pip.
“Well, not…,” Nat started to say, but then she suddenly abandoned her cereal, sitting back with her arms crossed. “What is this?” she said, her voice jagged with anger. “Are you interrogating me? I thought I was just telling you when I last saw Jamie, but now it’s sounding like you suspect me of
something. Like last time.”
“No, I’m not—”
“Well, you were wrong before, weren’t you? Should learn from your mistakes.” Nat pushed her chair back and it screeched on the tiles, cutting right through Pip. “Who made you the vigilante of this crappy town, anyway?
Everyone else might be happy to play along, but I’m not.” She shook her head and dropped her pale blue eyes. “You’re leaving. Now.”
“I’m sorry, Nat,” Pip said. There was nothing else she could say; anything she tried only made Nat hate her more. And there was only one person to blame for that. But Pip wasn’t that person anymore, was she? That yawning feeling opened up in her gut again.
Luke led Pip back down the hallway and opened the front door.
“You lied to me,” he said as Pip passed, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Said you were friends.”
She screwed her eyes against the glare from Luke’s car, turned back and shrugged.
“Thought I was good at spotting liars.” His grip tightened around the edge of the door. “Leave us out of it, whatever it is you’re up to. You hear?”
“I hear.”
Luke smiled at something and closed the door with a sharp click.
Walking away from the house, Pip pulled out her phone to check the time: 10:41 a.m. Thirty-eight and a half hours missing. Her home screen was piling up with notifications from Twitter and Instagram, more coming in as she watched. The scheduled post on her website and social media announcing the second season of the podcast had gone out at ten-thirty. So now everyone knew about Jamie Reynolds. There really was no going back.
A few emails had come in too. Another company inquiring about sponsorship. One from Stanley Forbes with twenty-two attachments, the subject line reading: memorial pictures. And one from two minutes ago: Gail Yardley, who lived on Pip’s street.
Hello Pippa, it read. I’ve just seen the Missing posters around town. I don’t remember seeing Jamie Reynolds that evening, but I’ve had a quick look through my photographs from the memorial, and I’ve found him. You might want to take a look at this photo.
File Name:
Case Notes 2.docx
It’s unmistakably Jamie, standing there in Gail Yardley’s photo. The metadata tells me the photo is time-stamped at 8:26 p.m., so here Jamie is, undisappeared, ten minutes after I last saw him.
Jamie is almost facing the camera, and that itself is the strangest thing about the photograph. Everyone else, every other face and every other pair of eyes are all turned up, looking at the exact same thing: the lanterns for Andie and Sal, hovering just over the roof of the pavilion during this sliver of time.
But Jamie is looking the wrong way.
His pale, freckled face is in the near darkness, at a slight angle to Gail’s camera, looking at something behind her. Or someone.
Probably the same someone he’d told Nat da Silva about.
And his face—there’s something there I can’t quite read. He doesn’t look scared, per se. But it’s something not far off.
Concerned? Worried? Nervous? His mouth is hanging open, eyes wide with one eyebrow slightly angled up, like he could be confused about something. But who or what caused this reaction? Jamie told Nat he’d spotted someone, but why was it urgent enough for him to fight through the crowd during the middle of the memorial? And why is he standing there, presumably staring at that someone instead of joining them? There’s something strange about this.
I’ve flicked through Stanley Forbes’s photos. Jamie isn’t in any of them, but I cross-referenced them against Gail’s photograph, trying to find her in the crowd to see if I can work out who Jamie is looking at or at least narrow it down. Stanley has just one photo pointing that way, time-stamped before the memorial began. I can see the Yardleys standing on the left, a few rows from the front. I’ve zoomed
in on the faces behind them, but the photo was taken from a distance and it’s not very clear. From their police uniforms and shiny peaked hats, I can tell Daniel da Silva and Soraya Bouzidi are standing next to the Yardleys. That dark green blur beside them must be Detective Hawkins. I think I recognize a few of the pixelated faces behind as people from my grade, but it’s impossible to tell who Jamie might have been looking at. Plus, this photo was taken an hour before the Jamie photo; the crowd might have shifted in that time. - Record these observations later for episode 1.
The photo—coupled with Nat’s evidence—has certainly opened up a lead to focus the investigation on. Who is the “someone” Jamie went to find in the crowd? They might know something about where Jamie went that night. Or what happened to him.
Other Observations
Jamie must have been distracted by something or someone that night because he doesn’t go to Nat’s house as planned or even text her to say he isn’t coming. Is what we see in this photo the start of that distraction?
Jamie’s recent late-night phone calls and constant texting haven’t been with Nat da Silva, unless she just didn’t want to say so in front of Luke (he is pretty intimidating).
That expression on Nat’s face when Luke said he hadn’t left the house at all on Friday. Might be nothing. Might be a “couple” thing between them that I don’t understand. But her reaction seems significant to me. Most likely it has nothing to do with Jamie, but I should note down everything. (Do not mention in podcast—Nat hates me enough already.)
