A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Holly Jackson

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       Four

      There was a song in her. A sickly beat troubling the skin on her wrists and neck, a crackling chord as she cleared her throat and the jagged trill of her breath. Next, the terrible realization that once she noticed her breathing she couldn’t, for the life of her, un-notice it.

      She stood before the front door and willed it open. Every second grew syrupy and thick as the door stared her down, the minutes unrolling themselves into forever. How long had it been since she’d knocked? When Pip could stand it no longer, she picked the sweating Tupperware of fresh muffins out from under her arm and turned to walk away. The ghost house was closed to visitors today and the disappointment burned.

      Only a few steps away, she heard the sound of scraping and clicking and turned back to see Ravi Singh in the doorway, his hair ruffled and his face drawing tight in confusion.

      ‘Oh,’ Pip said in a high-pitched voice that wasn’t her own. ‘Sorry, I thought you told me to come back Friday. Today’s Friday.’

      ‘Um, yeah, I did,’ Ravi said, scratching his head with his eyes somewhere around Pip’s ankles. ‘But . . . honestly, though . . . I thought you were just taking the piss. A prank. I wasn’t expecting you to actually come back.’

      ‘That’s, um, unfortunate.’ Pip tried her best to not look hurt. ‘No prank, I promise. I’m serious.’

      ‘Yeah, you seem like the serious type.’ The back of his head must have been exceptionally itchy. Or maybe Ravi Singh’s itchy head was the equivalent of Pip’s useless facts: armour and shield when the knight inside was squirming.

      ‘I’m irrationally serious,’ Pip smiled, holding the Tupperware box out to him. ‘And I made muffins.’

      ‘Like bribery muffins?’

      ‘That’s what the recipe said, yeah.’

      Ravi’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. Pip only then appreciated how hard his life must be in this town, the spectre of his dead brother reflected in his own face. It was no wonder smiling was hard for him.

      ‘So I can come in?’ Pip said, tucking up her bottom lip and over-stretching her eyes in her best pleading expression, the one her dad said made her look constipated.

      ‘Yes, fine,’ he said after an almost devastating pause. ‘Only if you stop making that face.’ He stepped back to let her in the house.

      ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ Pip said quickly and tripped over the front step in her eagerness.

      Raising an eyebrow, Ravi shut the door and asked if she’d like a cup of tea.

      ‘Yes please.’ Pip stood awkwardly in the hallway, trying to take up as little space as possible. ‘Black please.’

      ‘I’ve never trusted someone who takes their tea black.’ He gestured for her to follow him through into the kitchen.

      The room was wide and exceptionally bright; the outside wall was one giant panel of sliding glass doors that opened into a long garden exploding with the blush of summer and fairy-tale winding vines.

      ‘How do you take it then?’ Pip asked, resting her rucksack down on one of the dining chairs.

      ‘Milk till it’s white and three sugars,’ he said over the sputtering-inferno sounds of the kettle.

      ‘Three sugars? Three?’

      ‘I know, I know. Clearly I’m not sweet enough already.’

      Pip watched Ravi clatter around the kitchen, the boiling kettle excusing the silence between them. He dug through an almost empty jar of teabags, tapping his fingers on the side as he went about pouring and sugaring and milking. The nervous energy was contagious, and Pip’s heart quickened to match his tapping fingers.

      He brought the two mugs over, holding Pip’s by the scorching base so she could take it by the handle. Her mug was adorned with a cartoon smile and the caption: When’s the best time to visit the dentist? Tooth hurty.

      ‘Your parents aren’t in?’ she asked, setting the mug down on the table.

      ‘Nope.’ He took a sip and Pip noted, thankfully, that he wasn’t a slurper. ‘And if they were, you wouldn’t be. We try not to talk about Sal too much; it upsets Mum. It upsets everyone actually.’

      ‘I can’t even imagine,’ Pip said quietly. It didn’t matter that five years had passed; this was still raw for Ravi – it was written all over his face.

      ‘It’s not just that he’s gone. It’s that . . . well, we’re not allowed to grieve for him, because of what happened. And if I were to say “I miss my brother”, it makes me some kind of monster.’

      ‘I don’t think it does.’

      ‘Me neither, but I’m guessing you and I are in the minority there.’

      Pip took a sip of her tea to fill the silence but it was far too hot and her eyes prickled and filled.

      ‘Crying already? We haven’t even got to the sad parts.’ Ravi’s right eyebrow peaked up on his forehead.

      ‘Tea hot,’ Pip gasped, her tongue feeling fluffy and scorched.

      ‘Let it cool down for a jiffy, or, you know, one one-hundredth of a second.’

      ‘Hey, you remembered.’

      ‘How could I possibly forget that introduction of yours? So what questions did you want to ask me?’

      Pip looked down at the phone in her lap and said, ‘Firstly, do you mind if I record us, so I can type it up accurately later?’

      ‘Sounds like a fun Friday night.’

      ‘I’ll СКАЧАТЬ