Later that day, Ellie and I sat in our room. We weren’t talking, just thinking about what had happened at the beach. After the eye opening meeting, we had gone back to the group and tried to carry on as it had been before, but we couldn’t. Everything had changed. I couldn’t look at any of them. Knowing that one had done it. The seriousness of what we were doing had finally hit us. It wasn’t just a fun, exciting detective game that would soon end with our happy family still intact. The outcome of what we were doing was going to break this family, even more than it had been already. It would give everyone closure, a sense of relief and all the answers we so desperately needed. It would fix so much. But at the same time we knew what it would break. What it would hurt. And that was us. We could either avenge our grandad and find out what had happened, or we could just leave it and live the rest of our lives not knowing anything. And I knew I had to go with the first option, because that was what was going to save my dad. It was definitely going to jeopardise someone else, but if we were right and they did kill our grandad, it needed to happen. Everyone needed to know what they‘d done.

I glanced over at Ellie. She caught my eye. I knew she could read my mind and that right now, she agreed. She didn’t want to sit around sulking either.“Pool?!” we said in unison. We hadn’t taken a swim since the day we had arrived, no one had. But that didn’t mean we didn’t want to. We pulled our swimming cossies off the towel racks where they had been drying for the last few days, put them on speedily, raced downstairs and leapt into the pool. Our heads bobbed up from underwater, hair soaked and eyes shining as we grinned at each other. It felt good to properly enjoy ourselves again. We dived back under and swam all the way across the pool. The water felt cool and smooth on my skin. It felt amazing to just let everything go. All the emotions, all the stress, all the desperate looking for clues. It just felt so good. Like I was finally free. For once, I could just forget about all this and put it behind me. I jumped back up out of the water and grinned at Ellie again before landing, hard. “Ow!” I shrieked.

“Oh Sienns you’re so clumsy. What’d you do this time?”Ellie giggled, mocking me.

“I’m serious, El, it really hurts. I just landed on something really sharp, I’m bleeding!” She frowned before clasping her nose and diving back under to see what it was. She came back up a few moments later, the frown lines now even deeper etched into her face.

“What? What is it?” I asked. She pulled her hand out of the water. On her palm lay a dark black, smashed phone. I recognised it instantly. It was grandad’s. The phone that had been missing from the scene of the crime. I gasped. “Wha-, what do we do with it?” she asked.

“I- I don’t know. But whatever’s on there must be really important for the murderer to have smashed it and thrown it in here.” I said.

“Can we even get any information off it anymore now that it's, like, well… this.” she said, lifting it up into the sunlight. I frowned, unsure.

“I don’t know.” I began, before an idea popped into my head, “But you know who will?”

“Conrad, of course!” she said. We hopped back out of the pool with the mangled phone and ran, dripping wet, up to Conrad’s room. I swung open the door to see him sitting there, staring intently at his computer. He heard us and immediately shut it and put it aside.

“Hello?,” he said, before looking up at us and having a double take,“Woah, you two took a dip in the pool? You look like a pair of drowned rats!”

I rolled my eyes and said, “Thanks, but we really need you.”

“Oh, okay then. How can I help?” he said. I showed him the phone. He gasped a little and looked taken aback. “Is that… Grandad’s phone?”

“Uh huh,” Ellie said, “You know how we can get any information off it?”

“Oh, yeah sure, the police do it, we can give it to them now.”

“Oh, okay, that's great, let's do it!” I said excitedly. And just like that we went off to the police station. They thanked us for the extra evidence and said they’d get back to us about it soon. I couldn’t wait until they did!

A few hours later, the results came back. And they were not at all what I had been expecting or hoping for. “Caller ID Unknown!” Elllie, Renuka and I exclaimed in unison, our steely glares of confusion focused on Conrad. He looked a little bit scared as he brought his hands up, level to his face, in surrender.

“I promise, that's what they said. And I double checked too. But it's true. I guess the murderer was just clever...” he trailed off. We kept our accusatory gazes on him for a few seconds longer before sighing and looking down at our laps.

“They are looking into it, though,” he resumed, calmer and with more confidence this time, “And until they find out, we can try ourselves, can't we?”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly becoming more upbeat, “Why not? We can work this out ourselves, can't we?” We all nodded, and, despite the minor setback, the game was, once again, afoot.