𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐞 - 𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐢 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐡

Eight

‘What do you mean?’ RIver stared at him, open-mouthed.

Ravi answered by holding up the phone and shaking it gently.

‘That’s Sal’s?’ Pip said. ‘How do you have it?’

‘The police released it to us a few months after they closed Andie’s
investigation.’

A cautious electricity sparked up the back of River's neck. ‘Can I . . .’ she said, ‘can I look at it?’

‘Of course,’ he laughed, ‘that’s why I brought it round, you plonker.’

Unchecked, the excitement charged through her, nimble and dizzying.

‘Holy shit,’ she said, flustered and hurrying to unlock the door. ‘Let’s go and look at it at my workstation.’

Pip, River, and Barney bolted over the threshold, but a third set of feet didn’t follow. She spun back round.

‘What’s funny?’ River said. ‘Come on.’

‘Sorry, you’re just very entertaining when you’re extra serious.’

‘Quick,’ she said, beckoning him through the hallway and to the stairs.

‘Don’t drop it.’

‘I’m not going to drop it.’

Pip jogged up the steps, Ravi and River following far too slowly behind. Before they got there, she did a hasty check of her bedroom for potential embarrassment. She dived for a pile of just-laundered bras by her chair, scooped them up and shoved them in a drawer, slamming it shut just as Ravi walked in. She pointed him into her desk chair, too flappy to sit herself.

‘Workstation?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ she said, ‘while some people might work in their bedrooms, I
sleep in my workstation. It’s very different.’

‘Here you go then. I charged it last night.’

He handed Pip the phone and she took it in her cupped palms with as much deliberate dexterity and care as she did yearly when unwrapping her first father’s German-market Christmas baubles.

‘Can I have a turn holding it?’ River asked, sitting on the messy, unmade bed that had ‘R.A.’ engraved on the frame.

Ravi snorted quietly. ‘It's an old phone, Riv. Not a baby duckling.’

‘A duckling is a baby, dumby,’ she rolled her eyes playfully.

‘Have you looked through it before?’ Pio asked, sliding to unlock more carefully than she’d ever unlocked her own phones, even at their newest.

‘Yeah, of course. Obsessively. But go ahead, Sergeant. Where would you look first?’

‘Call log,’ she and River said, a moment of mystical sisterly telepathy taking over, tapping the green phone button.

Pip looked through the missed call list first, River looking over her shoulder like a child waiting for it's mother to be done texting her friend. There were dozens from the 24th April, the Tuesday he had died. Calls from Dad, Mum, Ravi, Naomi, Jake and unsaved numbers that must have been the police trying to locate
him.

Pip scrolled back further, to the date of Andie’s disappearance. Sal had two missed calls that day. One was from Max-y Boy at 7:19 p.m., probably a when-are-you-coming-over call from Max. The other missed call, she read with a skipped heartbeat, was from Andie<3 at 8:54 p.m.

‘Andie rang him that night,’ Pip said to herself and Ravi. ‘Just before nine.’

Ravi nodded. ‘Sal didn’t pick up, though.’