A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #1
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First published in Great Britain in 2019
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Text copyright © 2019 Holly Jackson
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2019
ISBN 978 1 4052 9318 1
Ebook ISBN 978 1 4052 9384 6
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
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run by responsible suppliers.
To Mum and Dad,
this first one is for you.
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
One
Production Log – Entry 1
Transcript of interview with Angela Johnson from the Missing
Persons Bureau
Two
Production Log – Entry 2
Three
Production Log – Entry 3
Transcript of interview with Stanley Forbes from the Kilton Mail
newspaper
Four
Production Log – Entry 4
Transcript of interview with Ravi Singh
Production Log – Entry 5
Five
Production Log – Entry 7
Transcript of interview with Max Hastings
Six
Production Log – Entry 8
Transcript of interview with Elliot Ward
Seven
Eight
Nine
Production Log – Entry 11
Transcript of interview with Chloe Burch
Ten
Eleven
Part II
Twelve
Production Log – Entry 13
Transcript of second interview with Emma Hutton
Thirteen
Production Log – Entry 15
Transcript of second interview with Naomi Ward
Fourteen
Production Log – Entry 17
Production Log – Entry 18
Fifteen
Production Log – Entry 19
Production Log – Entry 20
Transcript of interview with Jess Walker (Becca Bell’s friend)
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Production Log – Entry 22
Nineteen
Twenty
Production Log – Entry 23
Twenty-One
Production Log – Entry 24
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Production Log – Entry 25
Production Log – Entry 26
Twenty-Four
Production Log – Entry 27
Production Log – Entry 28
Production Log – Entry 29
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Part III
Production Log – Entry 31
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Production Log – Entry 33
Thirty-One
Production Log – Entry 34
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
The Months Later
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
About the Author
One
Pip knew where they lived.
Everyone in Little Kilton knew where they lived.
Their home was like the town’s own haunted house; people’s footsteps
quickened as they walked by and their words strangled and died in their
throats. Shrieking children would gather on their walk home from school,
daring one another to run up and touch the front gate.
But it wasn’t haunted by ghosts, just three sad people trying to live their
lives as before. A house not haunted by flickering lights or spectral falling
chairs, but by dark spray-painted letters of Scum Family and stone-shattered
windows.
Pip had always wondered why they didn’t move. Not that they had to;
they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she didn’t know how they lived like
that.
Pip knew a great many things; she knew that
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia was the technical term for the fear of
long words, she knew that babies were born without kneecaps, she knew
verbatim the best quotes from Plato and Cato, and that there were more than
four thousand types of potato. But she didn’t know how the Singhs found the
strength to stay here. Here, in Kilton, under the weight of so many widened
eyes, of the comments whispered just loud enough to be heard, of
neighbourly small talk never stretching into long talk any more.
It was a particular cruelty that their house was so close to Little Kilton
Grammar School, where both Andie Bell and Sal Singh had gone, where Pip
would return for her final year in a few weeks when the August-pickled sun
dipped into September.
Pip stopped and rested her hand on the front gate, instantly braver than
half the town’s kids. Her eyes traced up the path to the front door. It might
only look like a few feet but there was a rumbling chasm between where she
stood and over there. It was possible that this was a very bad idea; she had
considered that. The morning sun was hot and she could already feel her
knee pits growing sticky in her jeans. A bad idea or a bold idea. And yet,
history’s greatest minds always advised bold over safe; their words good
padding for even the worst ideas.
Snubbing the chasm with the soles of her shoes, she walked up to the
door and, pausing for just a second to check she was sure, knocked three
times. Her tense reflection stared back at her: the long dark hair sun-dyed a
lighter brown at the tips, the pale face, despite a week just spent in the south
of France, the sharp muddy green eyes braced for impact.
The door opened with the clatter of a falling chain and a double-locked
click.
‘Hello?’ he said, holding the door half open, his hand folded over the
side. Pip blinked to break her stare, but she couldn’t help it. He looked so
much like Sal: the Sal she knew from all those television reports and
newspaper pictures. The Sal fading from her adolescent memory. Ravi had
his brother’s messy black side-swept hair, thick arched eyebrows and oaken-
hued skin.
‘Hello?’ he said again.
‘Um . . .’ Pip’s put-on-the-spot charmer reflex kicked in too late. Her
brain was busy processing that, unlike Sal, he had a dimple in his chin, just
like hers. And he’d grown even taller since she last saw him. ‘Um, sorry, hi.’
She did an awkward half-wave that she immediately regretted.
‘Hi?’
‘Hi, Ravi,’ she said. ‘I . . . you don’t know me . . . I’m Pippa Fitz-Amobi.
I was a couple of years below you at school before you left.’
‘OK . . .’
‘I was just wondering if I could borrow a jiffy of your time? Well, not a
jiffy . . . Did you know a jiffy is an actual measurement of time? It’s one
one-hundredth of a second, so . . . can you maybe spare a few sequential
jiffies?’
Oh god, this is what happened when she was nervous or backed into a
corner; she started spewing useless facts dressed up as bad jokes. And the
other thing: nervous Pip turned four strokes more posh, abandoning middle
class to grapple for a poor imitation of upper. When had she ever seriously
said ‘jiffy’ before?
‘What?’ Ravi asked, looking confused.
‘Sorry, never mind,’ Pip said, recovering. ‘So I’m doing my EPQ at
school and –’
‘What’s EPQ?’
‘Extended Project Qualification. It’s a project you work on
independently, alongside A levels. You can pick any topic you want.’
‘Oh, I never got that far in school,’ he said. ‘Left as soon as I could.’
‘Er, well, I was wondering if you’d be willing to be interviewed for my
project.’
‘What’s it about?’ His dark eyebrows hugged closer to his eyes.
‘Um . . . it’s about what happened five years ago.’
Ravi exhaled loudly, his lip curling up in what looked like pre-sprung
anger.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because I don’t think your brother did it – and I’m going to try to prove
it.’
Pippa Fitz-Amobi EPQ 01/08/2017
Production Log – Entry 1
Interview with Ravi Singh booked in for Friday afternoon (take prepared questions).
Type up transcript of interview with Angela Johnson.
The production log is intended to chart any obstacles you face in your research, your progress and the aims of your final
report. My production log will have to be a little different: I’m going to record all the research I do here, both relevant and
irrelevant, because, as yet, I don’t really know what my final report will be, nor what will end up being relevant. I don’t know
what I’m aiming for. I will just have to wait and see what position I am in at the end of my research and what essay I can therefore
bring together. [This is starting to feel a little like a diary???]
I’m hoping it will not be the essay I proposed to Mrs Morgan. I’m hoping it will be the truth. What really happened to
Andie Bell on the 20th April 2012? And – as my instincts tell me – if Salil ‘Sal’ Singh is not guilty, then who killed her?
I don’t think I will actually solve the case and discover the person who murdered Andie. I’m not a police officer with access
to a forensics lab (obviously) and I am also not deluded. But I’m hoping that my research will uncover facts and accounts that will
lead to reasonable doubt about Sal’s guilt, and suggest that the police were mistaken in closing the case without digging further.
So my research methods will actually be: interviewing those close to the case, obsessive social media stalking and wild,
WILD speculation.
[DON’T LET MRS MORGAN SEE ANY OF THIS!!!]
The first stage in this project then is to research what happened to Andrea Bell – known as Andie to everyone – and the
circumstances surrounding her disappearance. This information will be taken from news articles and police press conferences
from around that time.
[Write your references in now so you don’t have to do it later!!!]
Copied and pasted from the first national news outlet to report on her disappearance: ‘Andrea Bell, 17, was reported missing
from her home in Little Kilton, Buckinghamshire, last Friday.
She left home in her car – a black Peugeot 206 – with her mobile phone, but did not take any clothes with her. Police say
her disappearance is “completely out of character”.
Police have been searching woodland near the family home over the weekend.
Andrea, known as Andie, is described as white, five feet six inches tall, with long blonde hair. It is thought that she was
wearing dark jeans and a blue cropped jumper on the night she went missing.’ 1
After everything happened, later articles had more detail as to when Andie was last seen alive and the time window in
which she is believed to have been abducted.
Andie Bell was ‘last seen alive by her younger sister, Becca, at around 10:30 p.m. on the 20th April 2012.’ 2
This was corroborated by the police in a press conference on Tuesday 24th April: ‘CCTV footage taken from a security
camera outside STN Bank on Little Kilton High Street confirms that Andie’s car was seen driving away from her home at about
10:40 p.m.’ 3
According to her parents, Jason and Dawn Bell, Andie was ‘supposed to pick (them) up from a dinner party at 12:45 a.m.’
When Andie didn’t show up or answer any of their phone calls, they started ringing her friends to see if anyone knew of her
whereabouts. Jason Bell ‘called the police to report his daughter missing at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning.’ 4
So whatever happened to Andie Bell that night, happened between 10:40 p.m. and 12:45 a.m.
Here seems a good place to type up the transcript from my telephone interview yesterday with Angela Johnson.
I found these statistics online:
80% of missing people are found in the first 24 hours. 97% are found in the first week. 99% of cases are resolved in
the first year. That leaves just 1%.
1% of people who disappear are never found. But there’s another figure to consider: just 0.25% of all missing person
cases have a fatal outcome. 5
And where does this leave Andie Bell? Floating incessantly somewhere between 1% and 0.25%, fractionally increasing and
decreasing in tiny decimal breaths.
But by now, most people accept that she’s dead, even though her body has never been recovered. And why is that?
Sal Singh is why.
Two
Pip’s hands strayed from the keyboard, her index fingers hovering over
the w and h as she strained to listen to the commotion downstairs. A crash,
heavy footsteps, skidding claws and unrestrained boyish giggles. In the next
second it all became clear.
‘Joshua! Why is the dog wearing one of my shirts?!’ came Victor’s
buoyant shout, the sound floating up through Pip’s carpet.
Pip snort-laughed as she clicked save on her production log and closed
the lid of her laptop. It was a time-honoured daily crescendo from the
moment her dad returned from work. He was never quiet: his whispers could
be heard across the room, his whooping knee-slap laugh so loud it actually
made people flinch, and every year, without fail, Pip woke to the sound of
him tiptoeing the upstairs corridor to deliver Santa stockings on Christmas
Eve.
Her stepdad was the living adversary of subtlety.
Downstairs, Pip found the scene mid-production. Joshua was running
from room to room – from the kitchen to the hallway and into the living
room – on repeat, cackling as he went.
Close behind was Barney, the golden retriever, wearing Pip’s dad’s
loudest shirt: the blindingly green patterned one he’d bought during their last
trip to Nigeria. The dog skidded elatedly across the polished oak in the hall,
excitement whistling through his teeth.
And bringing up the rear was Victor in his grey Hugo Boss three-piece
suit, charging all six and a half feet of himself after the dog and the boy, his
laugh in wild climbing scale bursts. Their very own Amobi home-made
Scooby-Doo montage.
‘Oh my god, I was trying to do homework,’ Pip said, smiling as she
jumped back to avoid being mowed down by the convoy. Barney stopped for