Who Killed Andie Bell
You’re reading this because you got to the last chapters of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and have questions, so let’s go through them.
I read the whole book, the last fifth of it in full. If you haven’t finished, go and finish. The ending also contains drugging, sexual assault and a strangling, so please take care. I’ll keep the details light.
So, who killed Andie Bell? Not who the town thought, and not who Pip thought for most of the book. The answer takes two reveals, and the first one is a trap.
Where the Story Stands
Quick recap. Five years before the story, seventeen year old Andie Bell vanished on the twentieth of April, twenty twelve. Her body was never found. Her boyfriend, Sal Singh, was found dead in the woods the following Tuesday, in what looked like suicide, after a confession text was sent to his father, and the town decided he had done it.
Pip, in her final year of school, does a project to prove he was innocent. She works with Sal’s younger brother, Ravi. By the end she has a murder board full of suspects and a pile of threatening messages from a number saved as Unknown. And by the end, her best friend’s father is at the center of it.
It Was Elliot Ward
The first answer is Elliot Ward. He is the history teacher, and the father of Pip’s best friend, Cara. Pip works it out partly by following his phone location on the Find My Friends app, which she does by hiding her phone under the back seat of his car.
He drives north out of town to a house in Wendover, number forty-two on Mill End Road. It is where the family lived before moving to Kilton. Pip calls the police and goes in, and Elliot knows it is over. He tells her everything.
This is what he says. In early twenty twelve, grieving his wife Isobel, he started seeing Andie, who was seventeen, at a hotel called the Ivy House. It happened twice. When he tried to end it, Andie threatened to ruin him. So he threatened her right back, by calling her father about her bullying.
What Happened Between Elliot and Andie
On the night of the twentieth, Elliot says Andie came to his house furious. She smashed paintings that his dying wife had made. He pushed her, she fell and hit her head on his desk, and he went to fetch a first aid kit. When he came back, she was gone.
Over the weekend he panicked, convinced that she had wandered off and died. He believed her body would lead police back to him. So he decided to give them somebody else.
That somebody was Sal. And the way he found his way in was through Naomi’s diary. Naomi is Cara’s older sister, and Elliot had been reading her therapy diaries. He learned about a hit-and-run that Max Hastings and their friends, Naomi included, had covered up, and he used it. He made them take away Sal’s alibi, so Sal had nobody to say where he had been.
What Elliot Did to Sal
Here is the part that is hardest to read. On the Tuesday, Elliot took Sal into the woods. He gave him sleeping pills, forced more on him, and suffocated him with a plastic bag. Then he sent the confession text from Sal’s phone, put some of Andie’s dried blood under his nails, and left Andie’s phone in his pocket.
Elliot also wrote the threatening notes Pip got. In the printed ones he calls her Pippa, and the threats are quiet and implied. He broke into her house to scare her.
When Pip tells him this and says the police are on the way, he doesn’t deny any of it. He holds out his wrists. He even says it is finally over. He is no hero. He killed a kind boy to save himself, and to protect his daughters, and he knows it.
The Girl in the Loft
Then comes the strangest twist. Elliot tells Pip that Andie is alive. In July, he says, he found her on the road, hungry and confused, and took her to the Wendover house to hide her. He has kept her in the loft ever since.
Pip runs upstairs and opens the hatch. And there is a girl on a bed, watching TV, wearing penguin pyjamas, who says her name is Andie.
But she isn’t. Up close, Pip can see that her lips, her eyes and her cheekbones are different. It is not Andie Bell. Later, the police name her as Isla Jordan, a twenty-three year old woman from Milton Keynes who was on the missing persons register. She has a learning disability, and she had come to believe she was Andie, because that was what pleased the man holding her.
How did Elliot not know? The book offers Pip’s own explanation. He was so terrified that Andie would come back that a blonde girl on the side of a road was enough to make him believe it. She was, as Pip says, a girl with the wrong hair and the wrong face when the wrong man drove past.
Two Different Killers
So Pip has solved the Sal case and found the wrong girl. For one evening she lets herself stop, and Ravi’s family come over with flowers to thank her. She is told it is over.
But back at her murder board, Pip notices something. When she told Elliot that he had killed Barney, her dog, he looked confused. He said he didn’t know what she was talking about. It wasn’t remorse. It was confusion.
Then she lays the printed notes beside the texts from Unknown. They are from two different people. The notes call her Pippa and hint. The texts call her names and make real threats, and they were the ones that came after Barney was taken.
So there were two killers in Little Kilton. One believed he had killed Andie and killed Sal to cover it up. And another actually killed Andie, and did everything else.
Becca Bell
Who was the last person to see Andie alive? Pip realizes she has had the answer all along. It was Andie’s younger sister, Becca.
Before she goes, Pip makes one phone call. She rings Max Hastings, one of Sal’s friends, and gets him to admit that he drugged Becca at a party in twenty twelve. He admits it and tries to excuse it. Max had been buying a drug called Rohypnol from Andie.
Then Pip goes to Becca’s house. And Becca tells her what happened. She woke up after the party knowing something was wrong but not remembering anything. She went looking for who had done it, and the trail led back to her sister’s second phone. On the twentieth of April, she found Max’s name in the messages.
When Andie came home, Becca told her. Andie didn’t care. She said Becca should be grateful that someone wanted her. They shoved each other, and Andie fell. Then Andie, already injured from her fall at Elliot’s, was sick and began to choke.
Becca says she froze. She stood there and watched her die. That is the truth of Andie’s death. It was not a plan, and it was not exactly an accident. It was a girl who let her sister die in a moment of rage, and who has spent five years living with it.
Barney, the Texts and the Tea
Becca hid Andie’s body in the septic tank of an old farmhouse on Sycamore Road. She drove Andie’s car away, which is who the CCTV saw, and left it near the house of Andie’s dealer, Howie Bowers, to point police at him. When Sal was blamed, she thought it was a sign she had been forgiven.
Then, five years later, Pip starts digging. Becca gets Pip’s number from the journalist Stanley Forbes, and she starts the Unknown texts to make her stop. She says she let Barney go, and that he must have fallen in the river. She didn’t mean him to die.
And now we reach the last scene. Pip comes to warn her to run. And Becca puts Rohypnol in the tea, left over from Max’s stash.
The Woods
Pip drinks it. She gets out of the house and runs towards the fireworks, with her head spinning, into the woods. Becca catches her and starts to strangle her. Pip thinks she’s going to die.
But Becca stops. She says she can’t. Then Pip’s dad arrives, and Ravi, who had followed her location on the phone app. Pip, barely conscious, says they have to let Becca go, that it’s not fair. She tells Ravi where Andie’s body is.
It is one of the most intense endings I’ve read in YA. It makes you hold two thoughts at once: that Becca did something terrible, and that so much was done to her.
Where Everyone Ends Up
So who pays? In an epilogue, Pip lists the charges. Elliot Ward pleaded guilty to the murder of Sal Singh, to the kidnap of Isla Jordan, and to perverting the course of justice. Becca Bell will stand trial for manslaughter by gross negligence, preventing a lawful burial and perverting the course of justice. Max Hastings is charged with sexual assault and rape. Howie Bowers pleaded guilty to supplying a controlled drug.
Pip does keep one secret, to protect Cara. It is the hit-and-run. She does not tell the police.
Pip’s school presentation is the last scene. She does not call the story simple. She says Andie was a bully, who also grew up being told her value was how she looked. She says Sal was good until the end. And she says that it was the town, in the end, that turned a beautiful life into a monster. She brings Ravi on stage, so that finally everyone listens to him.
What the Ending Means
Here’s my read, flagged as an opinion for you to argue with. The book spends its whole length making you want a villain. Then it gives you two, and neither one fits.
Elliot hurt the most and tried to save himself. Becca did the thing that is hardest to forgive, and the book makes you sit in it. Pip’s closing speech is the point: people and their different shades of desperation, crashing into each other.
If you want to know what happens next, Pip’s story carries on in Good Girl, Bad Blood.
Tell me in the comments who you think is most to blame. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
