‘This is weird,’ Pip said, highlighting the results with her finger. ‘These searches were from eleven thirty on his birthday night. The night you heard him sneak out late, Connor, the night he came back with blood on his jumper.’ She glanced quickly at the grey jumper still crumpled on the basket. ‘Seems he knew he would get into an altercation that night. It’s like he was preparing himself for it.’
‘But Jamie’s never been in a fight before. I mean, clearly, if he had to google how to do it,’ Connor said.
Pip had more to say on this, but another result lower down had just caught her eye. Monday 16th, a few days earlier, Jamie had looked up controlling fathers. Pip’s breath snagged in her throat, but she controlled her reaction, scrolling quickly past it before the others saw it.
But she couldn’t unsee it. And now she couldn’t stop thinking about their explosive arguments, or Arthur’s near-total lack of attention to the fact his oldest son was missing, or the possible intersecting timelines of Jamie and Arthur that night. And suddenly, she was very aware that Arthur Reynolds was sitting in the room below her now, his presence like a physical thing, seeping up through the carpet.
‘What’s that?’ Connor said suddenly, making her flinch.
She’d been distractedly running down the results, but now she stopped, eyes following the line of Connor’s finger. Tuesday the 10th of April, at 01:26 a.m., there was an odd series of Google searches, starting with brain cancer. Jamie had clicked through to two results on the NHS website, one for Brain tumours, the other for Malignant brain tumour. A few minutes later, Jamie returned to Google, typing inoperable brain tumour, and clicking on to a cancer charity page. Then he’d asked one more thing of Google that night: Brain cancer clinical trials.
‘Hm,’ Pip said. ‘I mean, I know I look up all sorts of things online, and Jamie clearly does too, but this feels different from the general browsing. This feels sort of . . . targeted, deliberate. Do you know anyone who has brain cancer?’ Pip asked Joanna.
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Did Jamie ever mention knowing someone who has?’ She turned the question over to Connor.
‘No, never.’
And something Pip wanted to ask, but couldn’t: was it possible Jamie was researching brain tumours because he’d learned he had one? No, it couldn’t be. Surely that wasn’t something he could keep from his mum.
Pip tried to scroll further, but she’d reached the end of the results. Jamie must have wiped his history from that point. She was about to move on when one last pair of search items jumped out at her, ones she’d glanced over and hadn’t registered, nestled quietly in between the brain tumour results and videos about dogs walking on their hind legs. Nine hours after researching brain cancer, presumably after going to sleep and waking up the next day, Jamie had asked Google how to make money quickly, clicking on to an article titled 11 Easy Ways to Make a Quick Buck.
It wasn’t the strangest thing to see on the computer of a twenty-four-year-old who still lived at home, but the timing made it significant. Just one day after Jamie had searched that, Pip’s mum caught him trying to steal her company credit card. This had to be related. But why did Jamie wake up on Tuesday the 10th so desperate for money? Something must have happened the day before.
Crossing her fingers, Pip typed Instagram into the address bar. This was the most important thing: access to Jamie and Layla’s private messages, a way to identify the catfish. Please have Jamie’s passwords saved, please please please.
The home page popped up, logged in to Jamie Reynolds’ profile.
‘Yes,’ she hissed, but a loud buzzing interrupted her. It was her phone in her back pocket, vibrating loudly against the chair. She pulled it out. Her mum was calling and, glancing at the time, Pip knew exactly why. It had gone ten, on a school night, and now she was going to be in trouble for that. She sighed.
‘Do you need to go, sweetie?’ Joanna must have read the screen over her shoulder.
‘Um, I probably should. Do you . . . would you mind if I take Jamie’s laptop with me? Means I can go through it all with a fine-tooth comb tonight, his social media accounts, update you on anything I find tomorrow?’ Plus, she was thinking that Jamie probably wouldn’t want his mum and little brother going through his private messages with Layla. Not if they were, you know . . . not for the eyes of a mother and brother.
‘Yes, yes of course,’ Joanna said, brushing her hand against Pip’s shoulder. ‘You’re the one who actually knows what you’re doing with it.’
Connor agreed with a quiet, ‘Yeah,’ though Pip could tell he wished he could come with her, that real life didn’t have to keep getting in the way. School, parents, time.
‘I’ll text you as soon as I find anything significant,’ she reassured him, turning to the computer to minimize the Chrome window, the blue robot-themed home screen reappearing. The computer ran Windows 10, and Jamie had it set up in app mode. That had confused her at first, before she’d spotted the Chrome app, tucked in neatly beside the Microsoft Word square. She reached for the lid to close it, running her eyes over the rest of the apps: Excel, 4OD, Sky Go, Fitbit.
She paused before closing the laptop, something stopping her, the faintest outline of an idea, not yet whole. ‘Fitbit?’ She looked at Connor.
‘Yeah, remember my dad bought him one for his birthday. It was obvious Jamie didn’t want it though, wasn’t it?’ Connor asked his mum.
‘Well, you know, Jamie is quite impossible to buy presents for. Your father was just trying to be helpful. I thought it was a nice idea,’ Joanna said, her tone growing sharp and defensive. ‘I know, I was just saying.’ Connor returned to Pip. ‘Dad set up the account for him and downloaded the app on his phone and on here, because he said Jamie would never get around to doing it himself, which is probably true. And Jamie has been wearing it since, I think mostly to keep Dad off his – happy, I mean,’ he said, a half-glance in his mum’s direction.
‘Hold on,’ Pip said, the idea a fully formed thing now, solid, pressing down on her brain. ‘The black watch that Jamie had on the night he went missing, that’s his Fitbit?’
‘Yes,’ Connor said slowly, unsurely, but he could clearly tell Pip was going somewhere with this; he just wasn’t with her yet.
‘Oh my god,’ she said, voice cracking as it rushed out of her. ‘What type of Fitbit is it? Is it GPS enabled?’
Joanna reeled back, like Pip’s momentum had jumped right into her. ‘I still have the box, hold on,’ she said, running out of the room.
‘If it has GPS,’ Connor said, breathless, though he wasn’t the one running, ‘does that mean we can find out exactly where he is?’
He didn’t really need Pip to answer that question. She wasted no time, clicking on the Fitbit app and staring as a colourful dashboard opened up on the screen.
‘No.’ Joanna was back in the room, reading from a plastic box. ‘It’s a Charge HR, doesn’t mention GPS, just says heart rate, activity tracker and sleep quality.’
But Pip had already found that for herself. The dashboard on Jamie’s computer had icons for step count, heart rate, calories burned, sleep, and active minutes. But below each of the icons were the same words: Data not cleared. Sync & try again. That was for today, Tuesday 1st May. Pip clicked on the calendar icon at the top and skipped back to yesterday. It said the same thing: Data not cleared. Sync & try again.