Pip found herself staring at the bloodied jumper too, unable to pull her eyes away. ‘There’s more to all this than we understand right now,’ she said. ‘There has to be a reason behind it. He hasn’t just changed after twenty-four years, flipped a switch. There’s a reason, and I will find it. I promise.’
‘I just want him back.’ Joanna squeezed Connor’s hand, meeting Pip’s eyes. ‘I want our Jamie back. The one who still calls me Jomumma because he knows it makes me smile. That was his name for me, when Jamie was three and first learned I had a name other than Mummy. He came up with Jomumma, so that I could have my own name back whilst still being his mum.’ Joanna sniffed and the sound stuttered all the way through her, shuddering in her shoulders. ‘What if I never get to hear him call me that again?’
But her eyes were dry, like she’d cried all she could cry and now she was empty. Hollow. Pip recognized the look in Connor’s eyes as he wrapped an arm around his mum: fear. He squeezed tight, like that was the only way he knew how to stop his mum from falling apart.
This wasn’t a moment for Pip to watch, to intrude on. She should leave them to their moment.
‘Thank you for calling me over, about the hoodie,’ she said, walking slowly backwards to Jamie’s bedroom door. ‘We’re getting one step closer, with every bit of information. I . . . I better get back to recording and editing. Maybe chase up those computer experts.’ She glanced at the closed lid of Jamie’s laptop as she reached the door. ‘Do you have any of those big Ziploc freezer bags?’
Connor screwed his eyes at her, confused, but he nodded nonetheless.
‘Seal that jumper inside one of them,’ she said. ‘And keep it somewhere cool, out of sunlight.’
‘OK.’
‘Bye,’ she said, and it came out as barely a whisper as she left them, walking away down the corridor. But after three steps, something stopped her. The fragment of a thought, circling too fast for her to catch. And when it finally settled, she retraced those three steps back to Jamie’s door.
‘Jomumma?’ she said.
‘Yes.’ Joanna lifted her gaze back to Pip, like it was almost too heavy.
‘I mean . . . did you try Jomumma?’ ‘Pardon?’
‘For Jamie’s password, sorry,’ she said.
‘N-no,’ Joanna said, glancing at Connor, a horrified look in her eyes. ‘I thought when you said to try nicknames, you meant just nicknames we had for Jamie.’
‘That’s OK. It really could be anything,’ Pip said, making her way over to Jamie’s desk. ‘Can I sit?’
‘Of course.’ Joanna came to stand behind her, Connor on the other side, as Pip pulled open the laptop. The dead screen mirrored back their faces, over-stretching them into the faces of phantoms. Pip pressed the power button and brought up the blue log-in screen, that empty white password box staring her down.
She typed it in, Jomumma, the letters mutating into small black circles as they entered the box. She paused, finger hanging over the enter button as the room suddenly went too silent. Joanna and Connor were holding their breath.
She pressed it and immediately:
Incorrect Password.
Behind her, they both exhaled, someone’s breath ruffling her half-up hair.
‘Sorry,’ Pip said, not wanting to look back at them. ‘I thought it was worth a try.’ It had been, and maybe it was worth a few more, she thought.
She tried it again, replacing the o with a zero.
Incorrect Password.
She tried it with a one at the end. And then a two. And then a one, two, three, and a one, two, three, four. Swapping the zero and o in and out.
Incorrect Password.
Capital J. Lowercase j.
Capital M for the start of Mumma. Lowercase m.
Pip hung her head, sighing.
‘It’s OK.’ Connor placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You tried. The experts will be able to do it, right?’
Yes, if they ever replied to her email. Clearly they hadn’t had time yet, which was all wrong because if anything, everyone else had all the time, and Pip had none. Jamie had none.
But giving up was too hard, she’d never been good at that. So she tried one last thing. ‘Joanna, what year were you born?’
‘Oh, sixty-six,’ she said. ‘Doubt Jamie knows that, though.’
Pip typed in Jomumma66 and pressed enter.
Incorrect Password. The screen mocked her, and she felt a flare of anger rise within her, itching in her hands to grab the machine and throw it against the wall. That hot, primal thing inside that she never knew existed before a year ago. Connor was saying her name, but it didn’t belong to this person sitting in the chair any more. But she controlled it, pushed it back. Biting her tongue, she tried again, fingers hammering the keys.
JoMumma66
Incorrect Password.
Fuck.
Jomumma1966
Incorrect.
Fuck.
JoMumma1966.
Incorr—
Fuck.
J0Mumma66.
Welcome Back.
Wait, what? Pip stared at the place where Incorrect Password should 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 researched nat da silva rape trial max hastings which 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. Actually unusual, 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 googled what counts as assault? And then, after looking through a few results, he’d asked how to fight.