Darkness consumed her, the last chink of sunlight through the curtains glowing down her face before Ravi pulled them shut, tucking one half behind the other to be extra sure.
‘Keep these closed, OK?’ he said, just a shadow in the blacked-out room until he crossed the room to switch on the light. Unnaturally yellow, a poor imitation of the sun. ‘Even during the day. In case someone is watching you. I don’t like the idea of someone watching you.’
Ravi stopped by her elbow, placed his thumb under her chin. ‘Hey, you OK?’
Did he mean about Ant and Lauren, or the little chalk figures climbing up to her room?
‘Yeah.’ Pip cleared her throat. Such a meaningless half-word.
She was sitting at her desk, fingers resting on the keyboard of her laptop. She’d just saved a copy of the photo she’d taken of the chalk figures. Finally, she’d got there before the rain or tyres or feet could wash them away, disappear them. Evidence. She herself might be the case this time, but she still needed evidence. And, more than that, it was proof. Proof that she wasn’t haunting herself; that she couldn’t be the one drawing the figures and killing those pigeons during the foggy sleepless nights, could she?
‘Maybe you can come stay at mine for a few nights,’ Ravi said, spinning her chair until they were face on. ‘Mum wouldn’t mind. I’d have to leave early from Monday, but that’s OK.’
Pip shook her head. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’ She wasn’t fine, but that was the whole point. There was no running away from this; she’d asked for it. She needed it. This was how she would make herself fine again. And the scarier it got, the more perfect the fit. Out of the grey area, into something she could comprehend, something she could live with. Black and white. Good and bad. Thank you.
‘You’re not fine,’ Ravi said, running his fingers through his dark hair, long enough now that it had started to curl at the ends. ‘This isn’t fine. I know it’s easy to forget, after all the fucked-up things we’ve been through, but this isn’t normal.’ He stared at her. ‘You know this isn’t normal, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know that. I went to the police yesterday like you wanted, I tried to do the normal thing. But I guess it’s down to me again, to fix it.’ She pulled a line of loose skin by one fingernail, a bubble of blood greeting her from the deep. ‘I’ll fix it.’
‘How are you going to do that?’ Ravi asked, a harder edge in his voice. Was that doubt? No, he couldn’t lose faith in her too. He was the last one left. ‘Does your dad know about this?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘He knows about the dead birds; we found the first one together. Mum told him it was the Williamses’ cat, though; that’s the logical solution. I told him about the chalk marks but he never saw them. They were gone by the time he got home; think him driving over them was why they disappeared, even.’
‘Let’s go show him now,’ Ravi said, the edge in his voice more slippery now, more urgent. ‘Come on.’
‘Ravi,’ she sighed. ‘What’s he going to do about it?’
‘He’s your dad,’ he said, with an exaggerated shrug like it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘And he’s six foot six. I’d definitely want him on my team in any fight.’
‘He’s a corporate lawyer,’ she said, turning, catching sight of her far-off eyes in the sleeping face of her laptop. ‘If this were a problem about mergers and acquisitions, yeah, he’d be the guy. But it’s not.’ She took a deep breath, watched the dark-mirrored version of herself do the same. ‘This is for me. This is what I’m good at. I can do this.’
‘This isn’t a test for you,’ Ravi said, scratching the phantom itch at the back of his head. He was wrong; that’s exactly what it was. A trial. A final judgement. ‘This isn’t a school project, or a season of the podcast. This isn’t something you can win or lose.’
‘I don’t want to argue,’ she said quietly.
‘No, hey, no.’ He bent down until his eyes were level with hers. ‘We’re not arguing. I’m just worried about you, OK? I want to keep you safe. I love you, always will. No matter how many times you almost give me a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. It’s just…’ he drew off, his voice guttering out. ‘It’s scary, to know that someone might want to hurt you, or make you scared. You’re my person. My little one. My Sarge. And I’m supposed to protect you.’
‘You do protect me,’ she said, holding his eyes. ‘Even when you’re not here.’ He was her life raft, her cornerstone for what good truly meant. Didn’t he know that?
‘Yeah OK and that’s great,’ he said, clicking finger guns at her. ‘But it’s not like I’m a muscle man with biceps the size of tree trunks and a secret Olympic-standard knife-throwing habit.’
A smile stretched into her mouth, fully formed without her say-so. ‘Oh, Ravi,’ she clipped her finger under his chin, the same way he always did to her. Pressed a kiss into his cheek, brushing the side of his mouth. ‘You know brains always beat brawn, any day of the week.’
He straightened up. ‘Well, I just squatted for too long, so I probably have glutes of steel now anyway.’
‘That’ll show the stalker.’ She laughed, but it became a hollow, raspy sound as her mind wandered away from her.
‘What?’ Ravi asked, noticing the shift.
‘It’s just… it’s clever, isn’t it?’ She laughed again, shaking her head. ‘So clever.’
‘What?’
‘All of it. The faint, almost-not-there chalk figures that fade as soon as it rains, or someone drives over them. The first two times, I didn’t take photos before they were gone, so when I told Hawkins about them, he thought I was insane or seeing things that aren’t there. Discrediting me right from the get-go. I even wondered whether I was seeing things. And the dead birds.’ She clapped her hands against her thigh. ‘So clever. If it were a dead cat, or a dead dog,’ she flinched at her own words, Barney flashing into her mind, ‘it would be a different story. People would pay attention. But it’s not, it’s pigeons. No one cares about pigeons. Almost as common to us dead as they are alive. And of course, the police would never do anything about a dead pigeon or two, because it’s normal. No one else can see it but me, and you. They know all this, they designed it that way. Things that look normal and explainable to everyone else. An empty envelope; just an accident. And the Dead Girl Walking down the road, not at my house. I know it was for me, but I’d never be able to convince anyone else, because if it really was for me, it would have been at my house. So subtle. So clever. The police think I’m crazy and my mum thinks it’s nothing: just a cat and some dirty tyres. Cutting me off, isolating me from help. Especially because everyone already thinks I’m fucked up. Very clever.’
‘Kinda sounds like you admire them,’ Ravi said, sitting back on Pip’s bed, arm out for balance. His face looked uneasy.
‘No, I’m just saying it’s clever. Thought out. Like they know exactly what they are doing.’
Her next thought was only natural, only logical, and she could see from Ravi’s eyes that he had arrived at the same idea, chewing on it, the muscles tensing in his cheek.
‘Almost like they’ve done this before,’ she said, completing the thought, the slightest nod of agreement from Ravi.
‘Do you think they have done this before?’ He sat up.
‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘Likely, even. The statistics certainly indicate that serial stalking is common, particularly if the stalker is a stranger or an acquaintance, rather than a current or former partner.’
She’d read through pages and pages of information on stalkers last night, hour after hour instead of sleep, scrolling through numbers and percentages and nameless, countless cases.
‘A stranger?’ Ravi doubled down on the word.
‘It’s unlikely to be a stranger,’ Pip replied. ‘Nearly three out of four stalking victims know their stalker in some capacity. This is someone who knows me, someone I know, I can feel it.’ She knew more statistics too, could reel them off the top of her head, burned into the backs of her eyes from the white light of her laptop screen. But there were some she couldn’t tell Ravi, especially not the one that said more than half of female homicide victims reported stalking to the police before they were killed by their stalkers. She didn’t want Ravi to know that one.
‘So, it’s someone you know, and they are pretty likely to have done this to someone else before?’ Ravi asked.
‘I mean, yes, if we go along with the statistics.’ Why hadn’t she thought of this herself? She was too inside her own head, too fixated on the idea of her against them that she hadn’t considered the involvement of anyone else. Not all about you, said the voice that lived in her head, beside the gun. It’s not always about you.
‘And you always favour a science-based approach, Sarge.’ He doffed an imaginary cap at her.
‘Yes, I do.’ Pip chewed her lip, thinking. Her mind guided her hands to the laptop, checking in with her only after she’d already awoken the computer and brought up Google. ‘And the first stage in a science-based approach is… research.’
‘The most glamorous part of crime-solving,’ Ravi said, pushing up from the bed to come and stand behind her, hands resting on her shoulders. ‘And, also, my cue to go get snacks. So… like, how are you going to research this?’
‘Yeah, not really sure, actually.’ She hesitated, fingers hovering above the keys while the cursor blinked at her. ‘Maybe just…’ She typed in chalk lines chalk figure dead pigeon stalker stalk Little Kilton Buckinghamshire. ‘It’s a stab in the dark,’ she said, thumbing the enter button, and the page of results filled her screen.
‘Oh excellent,’ Ravi said, pointing at the top result. ‘We can go clay pigeon shooting at Chalk Farm in Chalfont St Giles for only eighty-five pounds each. What a bargain.’
‘Shhhh.’
Pip’s eyes scanned the entry below; a story from last year, about GCSE results from a nearby school where two teachers just happened to be called Miss Chalk and Mr Stalker.
She felt Ravi’s breath on her neck as he leaned closer, head against hers as he said, ‘What’s that one?’ and the low vibrations of his voice felt like they were coming from within her. She knew which one he meant, fifth result down.
DT Killer Still At Large After Claiming Fourth Victim
It had four matches to her search items: Buckinghamshire, pigeon, stalks, chalk lines. Small snippets from the UK NEWSDAY article, truncated sentences separated by three little dots.
‘The DT Killer,’ Ravi read aloud, voice catching on something in his throat. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘It’s nothing, that’s an old story. Look.’ Pip underlined the date with her finger: the article was from 5th February 2012. Over six and a half years ago. This wasn’t news; Pip knew this case, how it had ended. She could tell you at least two true crime podcasts that had covered it in the last few years. ‘You don’t know this story?’ she asked, reading the answer from his dread-widened eyes. ‘It’s OK,’ she laughed at him, nudging him with her elbow. ‘He’s not still at large. He killed another woman after this, a fifth victim, and then they caught him. He confessed. Billy, um, something. He’s been in prison since.’
‘How do you know that?’ he asked, his grip loosening a little.
‘How do you not?’ She looked up at him. ‘It was big news when it was going on. Even I remember and I was, like, eleven, twelve. Oh – I,’ she stuttered, stroked the bones in his hand. ‘It was around the time that Andie and Sal…’ She didn’t need to finish.
‘Right,’ he said quietly. ‘I was a little distracted at the time.’
‘It all happened pretty close by,’ Pip said. ‘The towns where the victims were from, the places where their bodies were found. In fact, almost everywhere nearby except Little Kilton.’
‘Had our own murders going on back then,’ he said flatly. ‘What does DT Killer even mean?’
‘Oh, it was the media’s name for him. You know, a serial killer’s got to have a creepy name, sells more papers. Short for the Duct Tape Killer.’ She paused. ‘The local newspapers used to refer to him as the Slough Strangler, keep it close to home, y’know, but that never caught on with the national press. Not as catchy,’ she smirked. ‘Also, not very accurate seeing as only two victims were found near-ish Slough, I think.’
And just saying those words, Slough Strangler, took her back to the last time she’d said them. Sitting in this very chair, on a call with Stanley Forbes, interviewing him about Andie Bell’s coroner’s inquest. She’d brought up the article he’d recently written about the Slough Strangler, marking five years since his arrest. Stanley down the end of the phone, alive, but not for long because his blood is dripping out of the edges of her phone, covering her hands and –
‘Pip?’
She flinched, wiping her bloody hands on her jeans. Clean, they’re clean. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Pip hunched her back, folding her chest around her hummingbird heart.
‘I said click on it, then. The article.’
‘But… it’s got nothing to do with –’
‘It’s matched four of your search terms,’ he said, grip tightening again. ‘Pretty coincidental for a stab in the dark. Just click on it and see what it says.’
Police release composite sketch of the DT Killer
