‘And are you certain it was Jamie Reynolds?’
‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was him,’ Soph spoke up, leaning instinctively towards the microphone. ‘There was no one else walking around at that time, so I sort of noticed him more, if that makes sense. I knew it when Harry showed me your poster. I walked out the front door first, saw Jamie walking towards us and then I turned around to say bye to Mike.’
‘What was he wearing?’ Pip asked. It wasn’t a test, exactly, but she had to be sure.
‘He had on a dark red, purply kind of shirt,’ Soph said, looking for confirmation in her friends’ eyes.
‘Yeah, burgundy colour,’ Harry said. ‘Jeans. Trainers.’
Pip unlocked her phone, scrolling to the clear photo of Jamie from the memorial. She held it up, and Soph and Harry nodded. But only Soph and Harry.
‘I dunno,’ Mike said, stretching out one side of his mouth in a sort of wince. ‘I could’ve sworn he was wearing something darker. I mean, I only looked at him for a couple of seconds, and it was dark. But I thought he was wearing something with a hood. Lucy thinks so too. And I swear I couldn’t see his hands because they were in pockets, like jacket pockets. If he was just wearing a shirt, then where were his hands? But I got to the door last, so I only really saw the back of him.’
Pip flipped her phone back, looking again at Jamie. ‘This is what he was wearing when he disappeared,’ she said.
‘Ah, guess I just didn’t get a proper look,’ Mike conceded, shuffling a half step back.
‘That’s OK,’ she smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s hard to remember small details you don’t know will later become significant. Can you remember anything else about Jamie? His demeanour?’
‘Nothing that really stuck out,’ Harry said, speaking across Soph. ‘Guess I noticed he was breathing pretty hard. But he just looked like a guy in a hurry to be somewhere.’
In a hurry to be somewhere. Pip’s mind replayed those words, adding her own: and now he was nowhere.
‘OK.’ She clicked stop on the recording. ‘Thank you all so much for your time.’
Eighteen
Pip returned to the scrap of paper in her hand, running her eyes over the list she’d scribbled half an hour ago:
Leila
Leyla
Laila
Layla
Leighla
Lejla
‘This is impossible,’ Connor said, sitting back from Pip’s desk in defeat, in a chair she’d borrowed from the kitchen.
Pip spun impatiently in her own chair, letting the breeze disturb the list in her hand. ‘Annoying our catfish chose a name with so many bloody variant spellings.’ They’d tried searching the name on Facebook and Instagram, but without a last name – or even knowing the proper form of the first name – the search results were numerous and useless. Nor had reverse image-searching all of Stella Chapman’s Instagram photos led anywhere. Clearly Leila’s versions had been manipulated enough that the algorithm couldn’t locate them.
‘We’re never going to find her,’ Connor said.
There was a faint triple-knock at her bedroom door.
‘Go away,’ Pip said, scrolling down a page of Leighlas on Instagram. The door skittered open and Ravi stood there, lips pursed in affront, one eyebrow raised.
‘Oh, not you.’ Pip looked up, a smile breaking across her face. ‘I thought it was Josh again. Sorry. Hi.’
‘Hi,’ Ravi said, an amused half smile on his face as he raised both brows in greeting to Connor. He walked over to the desk and sat up beside the laptop, resting one foot on Pip’s chair, tucking it in under her thigh.
‘How was the rest of trial today?’ Pip looked up at him as he wriggled his toes against her leg in a hidden hello that Connor couldn’t see.
‘It was OK.’ He narrowed his eyes to look at what they were doing on her screen. ‘Final victim gave her testimony this morning. And they presented Andie Bell’s burner phone to try prove it was Max who regularly bought Rohypnol from her. Then the defence kicked off after lunch break, called Max’s mum to the stand first.’
‘Oh, how’d that go?’ asked Pip.
‘Epps asked her about Max’s childhood, when he almost died of leukaemia aged seven. His mum talked about his bravery during the illness, how sensitive and caring and sweet he was. How quiet and shy Max was in school after the all-clear because he’d been held back a year. How he’s carried these traits into adulthood. She was quite convincing,’ he said.
‘Well, I think that’s because she is quite convinced that her son isn’t a rapist,’ Pip said. ‘Epps is probably ecstatic, that’s like hitting the goldmine. What’s better than childhood cancer to humanize your client?’
‘My thoughts exactly,’ Ravi said. ‘We’ll record the update later, yeah? What are we doing now, looking for the catfish? That’s not how you spell Leyla,’ he added, pointing.
‘It’s one of the many ways,’ Pip sighed. ‘We’re hitting blanks here.’
‘What about the sighting from the bookshop guy?’ Ravi asked.
‘Yeah, I think it’s legit,’ she said. ‘11:40 walking halfway up Wyvil Road. Four eyewitnesses.’
‘Well,’ Connor said quietly, ‘they didn’t agree on everything.’
‘No?’ Ravi said.
‘Slight conflicting accounts on what Jamie was wearing,’ Pip said. ‘Two saw him in the burgundy shirt, two thought he’d been wearing something like a hoodie instead.’ She turned to Connor. ‘Small inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts are normal. Human memory isn’t infallible. But four people swearing they saw your brother with otherwise matching accounts, we can trust that.’
‘11:40,’ Ravi thought aloud, ‘that’s over an hour from the last sighting. And it doesn’t take over an hour to walk from Highmoor to Wyvil Road.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Pip picked up his thread. ‘He must have stopped somewhere in between. And I’m betting it has something to do with Layla.’
‘You think so?’ Connor asked.
‘He speaks to Stella at the calamity,’ Pip said. ‘Finds out
Leyla has been catfishing him. He’s next seen outside with his phone, where he appears agitated and mentions calling the police. He had to be calling his Laila, confronting her with what he’d just found out. Jamie would have felt betrayed, upset, hence George’s description of his behaviour. What happens afterwards, wherever Jamie was going, it has to be relevant to that. To Leighla.’
‘She’s had to explain that more than once, I can tell,’ Ravi said conspiratorially to Connor. ‘Heads up: she hates doing that.’
‘I’m learning,’ Connor said.
Pip flashed Ravi an angry look. At least he could read her eyes, reacting right away. ‘She’s also, annoyingly, always right, so . . .’
‘Right, next plan,’ Pip said. ‘Make a Tinder profile.’
‘I just said you were always right,’ Ravi replied, voice shrill and playful.
‘To catch a catfish.’ She whacked him on the knee. ‘We’re not going to find Laila by blindly searching that name. At least on Tinder we can narrow down the search field by location. From Stella’s interview, it didn’t seem that Jamie was surprised at seeing Leyla in Little Kilton, just specifically at the calamity party. That makes me think she told him she was local, they’d just never met up IRL because, well . . . catfish.’