‘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 twisted 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 mid-air 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 face immediately dropped out, so fast 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 strangely that night, or in recent weeks?’
‘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 suddenly abandoned her cereal, sitting back in the chair 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 back then, 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 any more, 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 faint 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 had gone out at half ten, announcing the second season of the podcast. 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 reading: memorial pictures. And one from two minutes ago: Gail Yardley, who lived down Pip’s road.
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.
It’s unmistakably Jamie, standing there in Gail Yardley’s photo. The metadata tells me the photo is time-stamped from 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 single 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 to fight through the crowd during the middle of the memorial? And why is he standing here, presumably staring at that someone instead of joining them? There’s something strange about this.
I’ve flicked through Stanley Forbes’ 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 there, a few rows from the front on the left. I’ve zoomed right in on the faces behind, but the photo was taken from quite a distance and it’s not very clear. From the black police uniforms and shiny peaked hats, I can tell Daniel da Silva and Soraya Bouzidi are standing next to the Yardleys. That dark green jacket blur beside them must be DI Richard Hawkins. I think I recognize a few of the pixelated faces behind as people from my year at school, 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 very 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 quite 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 seemed significant to me. Most likely nothing to do with Jamie, but I should note down everything. (Not to mention in podcast – Nat hates me enough already.)
Eleven
The bell above the café door jangled, clattering around in her head long after it should. An unwelcome echo that cut through all other thoughts, but she couldn’t go work at home, so the café had to do. Her parents must have seen the posters up around town by now. If Pip went home, she’d have to have The Conversation and there wasn’t time for that now. Or she just wasn’t ready.