She changed tactic.
‘So,’ she said, ‘was Julia single around the time she was killed?’
Harriet nodded. ‘No boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Only one ex and he was in Portugal the night she was killed.’
‘Do you know if she was seeing anyone? Dating?’ Pip pressed.
A non-committal croak from Harriet’s throat, a corresponding jump in the blue audio line on-screen. ‘I don’t think so, really. Andie always asked me that question too, at the time. Julia and I didn’t talk much about boys at home, because Dad would always hear and want to be included to try embarrass us. She was going out for dinner with friends a lot around then, maybe that was code for something. But it obviously wasn’t Billy Karras; the police would have found a trail on her phone. Or his even.’
Pip’s mind stuttered, stumbling over one word. She hadn’t heard anything else Harriet said after that.
‘I’m sorry, did you just say A-Andie?’ she asked, with a nervous laugh. ‘You don’t mean Andie B—’
‘Yeah, Andie Bell.’ Harriet smiled sadly. ‘I know, it’s a small world, huh? And what are the chances that two different people in my life were murdered. Well, sort of, I know Andie was an accident.’
Pip felt it again; that creeping feeling up her spine, cold and inevitable. Like everything was playing out the way it was always supposed to, from the start. Coming full circle. And she was simply a passenger inside her own body, watching the show play out.
Harriet was eyeing her, a concerned look on her face. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Y-yes, fine,’ Pip coughed. ‘Just trying to work out how you knew Andie Bell. It’s thrown me a little, sorry.’
‘Yeah, no,’ her mouth flicked up sympathetically, ‘it kind of threw me too, came a bit out of nowhere. It was after Julia died, a couple of weeks after, and I got this email out of the blue, from Andie. I didn’t know her before then. We were the same age, at different schools, but we had a few mutual friends. I think she got my email from my Facebook profile, back when everyone was on Facebook. Anyway, it was a really sweet message, saying how sorry she was about Julia, and if I ever needed someone to talk to, I could talk to her.’
‘Andie said that?’ Pip asked.
Harriet nodded. ‘So, I replied and we started talking. I didn’t really have a best friend at the time, someone who I could talk to about my feelings, about Julia, and Andie was really great. We became friends. We scheduled in phone calls about once a week, and we used to meet up, in here actually,’ she said, glancing around the coffee shop, her eyes catching on a table over by the window. That must have been where they used to sit. Harriet Hunter and Andie Bell. Pip still couldn’t wrap her head around it, this strange convergence. Why would Andie have reached out to Harriet out of the blue? That didn’t sound much like the Andie Bell she’d grown to know five years after her death.
‘And what did you used to talk about?’ said Pip.
‘Everything. Anything. She was like my sounding board, and I hope I was one for her too, although she didn’t talk about herself much. We talked about Julia, about the DT Killer, how my parents were, et cetera. She died the same night Billy Karras killed Tara Yates, did you know that?’
Pip gave her a slight nod.
‘Weird, horrible coincidence,’ Harriet said, biting her lip. ‘We talked about it so much, and she didn’t live to find out who he was. She was desperate to know too, I think, for my sake. And I feel terrible, I didn’t know about all the stuff going on in her life.’
Pip’s eyes flicked side to side, as her mind tried to catch up with this unexpected path, splintering from DT back to Andie Bell again. Another connection: her dad’s company and now this friendship with Harriet Hunter. Had the police known about this convergence at the time, this strange link between two ongoing cases? If it was an email account Andie’s family knew about, then DI Hawkins must have known, unless…
‘D-do you know the email address Andie first used to contact you?’ she said, her chair creaking as she leaned forward.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Harriet said, reaching into the pocket of her jacket, slung over the chair. ‘It was a weird one, all random letters and numbers. I initially thought it was an automated bot or something.’ She swiped at her phone. ‘I starred the emails, after she died, so I’d never lose them. Here, this is them, before we exchanged numbers.’
She slid her phone across the table, the Gmail app open, with a row of emails lined up the screen. Sent from [email protected], with the subject line Hi.