‘That’s fine,’ Pip said, nodding for Connor to go ahead. He pushed open the door, the room full of dark shapes until Connor flicked on the light, and the shapes became an unmade bed, a cluttered desk under the window, and an open wardrobe disgorging clothes on to the floor, piles like islands against the sea-blue carpet.
Untidy was one word for it.
‘Can I, um . . . ?’
‘Yeah, do whatever you have to. Right, Mum?’ said Connor.
‘Right,’ Joanna said quietly, staring around the place from which her son was most missing.
Pip made a beeline for the desk, stepping over and between the small mountains of T-shirts and boxers. She ran her finger over the lid of the closed laptop in the middle of the desk, over the Iron Man sticker, peeling at the edges. Gently, she pulled open the lid and clicked the on button.
‘Do either of you know Jamie’s password?’ she asked as the machine purred into life, the blue Windows login screen jumping up.
Connor shrugged and Joanna shook her head.
Pip bent down to type password1 into the input box.
Incorrect Password.
12345678
Incorrect Password.
‘What was your first cat called?’ asked Pip. ‘That ginger one?’
‘PeterPan,’ said Connor. ‘All one word.’
Pip tried it. Incorrect.
She’d entered it wrong three times and now the password hint popped up beneath. In it, Jamie had written: Get off my computer, Con.
Connor sniffed, reading it.
‘It’s really important we get in,’ Pip said. ‘Right now this is our strongest link to Jamie, and what he’s been up to.’
‘My maiden name?’ Joanna said. ‘Try Murphy.’
Incorrect Password.
‘Football team?’ asked Pip.
‘Liverpool.’
Incorrect. Even with numbers replacing some vowels and trying one and two at the end.
‘Can you keep trying?’ Joanna asked. ‘It won’t shut you out?’
‘No, there’s no limit on Windows. But guessing the exact password with correct placement of numbers and capitals is going to be tricky.’
‘Can’t we get around it some other way?’ said Connor. ‘Like reset the computer?’
‘If we reboot the system, we lose all the files. And most importantly, the cookies and saved passwords on his browser, for his email and social media accounts. Those are what we really need to get into. No chance you know the password to the email account Jamie’s Windows is linked to?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’ Joanna’s voice cracked. ‘I should know these things about him. Why don’t I know these things? He needs me and I’m no help to him.’
‘It’s OK.’ Pip turned to her. ‘We’ll keep trying until we get in. Failing that, I can try contact a computer expert who might be able to brute-force it.’
Joanna seemed to shrink again, hugging her own shoulders.
‘Joanna,’ said Pip, standing up, ‘why don’t you keep trying passwords while I carry on searching? Try think of Jamie’s favourite places, favourite foods, holidays you’ve been on. Anything like that. And try variations of each one, lower case, capitals, replacing letters with numbers, a one or two at the end.’
‘OK.’ Her face seemed to brighten just a little, at having something to do.
Pip moved on, checking the two desk drawers either side. One just had pens and a very old dried up glue-stick. The other, a pad of A4 paper and a faded folder labelled Uni Work.
‘Anything?’ Connor asked.
She shook her head, dropping to her knees so she could reach the bin beneath the desk, leaning across Joanna’s legs and pulling it out. ‘Help me with this,’ she said to Connor, fishing out the contents of the bin one by one. An empty can of deodorant. A crumpled receipt: Pip unfolded it and saw it was for a chicken mayo sandwich on Tuesday 24th at 14:23 from the Co-op along the high street. Beneath that was a packet of Monster Munch: pickled onion flavour. Sticking to the grease on the outside of the packaging was a small slip of lined paper. Pip unpeeled it and spread it open. Written on it in a blue ballpoint pen were the words: Hillary F Weiseman left 11
She held it up to Connor. ‘Is this Jamie’s handwriting?’ Connor nodded. ‘Hillary Weiseman,’ Pip said. ‘Do you know her?’
‘No,’ Connor and Joanna said at the same time. ‘Never heard that name,’ Joanna added.
‘Well, Jamie must know her. Looks like this note was quite recent.’
‘Yes,’ Joanna said, ‘we have a cleaner, comes every fortnight. She’s coming on Wednesday so everything in that bin is from the last ten, eleven days.’
‘Let’s look up this Hillary, she might know something about Jamie.’ Pip pulled out her phone. On the screen was a text from Cara: Ready for stranger things soon?? Shit. Pip quickly fired back: I’m so sorry, I can’t tonight, I’m at Connor’s house. Jamie’s gone missing. I’ll explain tomorrow. Sorry xxx. Pip pressed send and tried to ignore the guilt, clicking on the browser and bringing up 192.com to search the electoral register. She typed in Hillary Weiseman and Little Kilton and searched.
‘Bingo,’ she said, when it came up. ‘We have a Hillary F. Weiseman who lives in Little Kilton. Has been on the electoral roll here . . . oh . . . from 1974 until 2006. Hold on.’ Pip opened another tab, googled the name along with Little Kilton and obituary. The first result from the Kilton Mail gave her the answer she was looking for. ‘No, that can’t be the right Hillary. She died in 2006 aged eighty-four. Must be someone else. I’ll look into that later.’
Pip spread the bit of paper out in her fingers and took a photo of it on her phone.
‘You think it’s a clue?’ Connor asked.
‘Everything’s a clue until we discount it,’ she replied.
There was just one last thing left in the bin: an empty brown paper bag, scrunched up into a ball.
‘Connor, without disturbing anything too much, can you search the pockets in all of Jamie’s clothes?’
‘For what?’
‘Anything.’ Pip crossed to the other side of the room. She stopped and looked at the bed with its blue-patterned duvet, and her foot nudged into something on the floor. It was a mug, the sugar encrusted remains of tea coating the very bottom. But it wasn’t yet mouldy. The handle had broken off, lying a few inches away. Pip picked them up to show Joanna.
‘Not just a bit untidy,’ Joanna said, quiet affection in her voice. ‘Very untidy.’
Pip placed the mug, handle inside, on the bedside table, where it had probably been knocked from in the first place.
‘Just tissues and spare change,’ Connor reported back to her.
‘No luck here,’ Joanna said, typing away at the keyboard, the clack of the enter key louder and more desperate each time she tried.
On the bedside table, now in addition to the broken mug, was a lamp, a battered copy of Stephen King’s The Stand, and the cord of an iPhone charger. There was one drawer below, before the table split into four rickety legs, and Pip knew that it would probably be where Jamie kept his more private items. She turned her back to block Connor and Joanna from seeing what she was doing, just in case, and pulled the drawer open. She was surprised to find there were no condoms, nor anything like that. There was Jamie’s passport, a set of tangled white earphones, a tub of multivitamins ‘with added iron’, a bookmark shaped like a giraffe and a watch. Pip’s attention was immediately drawn to the last item, for one reason only: it couldn’t have belonged to Jamie.