That must have been her, walking through the café door now, her head unsure upon her shoulders, swivelling this way and that.
Pip held up one hand and waved to her.
Harriet’s face broke into a relieved smile as she spotted the raised hand and followed it to Pip’s eyes. Pip watched her as she wound her way politely through all the tables and people rammed into this small Starbucks, round the corner from Amersham station. She couldn’t help but notice how much Harriet looked like Julia Hunter had, before the DT Killer stole her face and wrapped it up in tape. The same dark blonde hair and full, arching eyebrows. Why was it that sisters looked so much alike when one of them was dead? Andie and Becca Bell. Now Julia and Harriet Hunter. Two younger sisters, carrying around a ghost wherever they went.
Pip untangled herself from her laptop charger to stand as Harriet approached.
‘Hi, Harriet,’ she said, offering out her hand awkwardly.
Harriet smiled, shaking Pip’s hand, her skin cold from outside. ‘I see you’re already set up.’ She pointed down at Pip’s laptop, trailing wires connecting it to the two microphones, Pip’s headphones already cradled around her neck.
‘Yes, it should be quiet enough here in the back corner,’ Pip said, retaking her seat. ‘Thank you so much for meeting me on such short notice. Oh, I got you an Americano.’ She gestured to the steaming mug across the table.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said, shedding her long coat and taking the chair opposite. ‘I’m on my lunch break so we have about an hour.’ She smiled, but it didn’t quite lift into her eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching anxiously. ‘Oh,’ she said suddenly, digging around for something in her handbag. ‘I signed that consent form you sent.’ She passed it over.
‘That’s great, thank you,’ Pip said, slotting it into her rucksack. ‘Could I actually just check the levels?’ She slid one of the microphones closer to Harriet, and then held one of the cradles of her headphones against her own ear. ‘Can you say something? Just talk normally.’
‘Yes… um, hello my name is Harriet Hunter and I’m twenty-four years old. Is that…?’
‘Perfect,’ Pip said, watching the blue lines spike on her audio software.
‘So, you said you wanted to talk about Julia, and the DT Killer. Is this for another season of your podcast?’ Harriet asked, her fingers twisting the ends of her hair.
‘I’m just doing some background research at this stage,’ Pip said. ‘But, yes, potentially.’ And making sure she collected concrete evidence, if Harriet happened to give her DT’s name.
‘Oh right, of course,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s just, you know, with the other two seasons of your podcast, the cases were ongoing, or closed, but with this… with Julia, we know who did it and he’s in prison, facing justice. So, I guess I’m just not sure what your podcast would be about?’ Her voice trailed up, turning the sentence into a question.
‘I don’t think the story has ever been told in full,’ Pip said, skirting around the reason.
‘Oh, right, because there wasn’t a trial?’ Harriet asked.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Pip lied. They slid easily off her tongue now. ‘And what I really wanted to talk to you about was a statement you gave to a reporter from UK Newsday on the 5th of February 2012. Do you remember it? I know it was a long time ago now.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’ Harriet paused to take a sip of her coffee. ‘They all ambushed me outside the house on my way home from school. It was my first day back too, had only been a week or so since Julia was killed. I was young and stupid. I thought you had to talk to reporters. Probably told them a whole load of nonsense. I was crying, I remember that. My dad was furious after.’
‘Specifically, I wanted to ask you about two things you said on that occasion.’ Pip picked up a print-out of the article and passed it to Harriet, lines of bright pink highlighter at the bottom. ‘You mentioned some weird occurrences in the weeks leading up to Julia’s murder. The dead pigeons in the house, and those chalk figures. Could you tell me about those?’
Harriet nodded slightly as she scanned the page, reading back her own words. Her eyes looked heavier when she glanced up again, cloudier. ‘Yeah, I don’t know, it was probably nothing. Police didn’t seem that interested in it. But Julia definitely found it weird, enough to comment on it to me. Our cat was old then, basically housebound, used to shit in the living room instead of going outside. He definitely wasn’t in his hunting prime, put it that way.’ She shrugged. ‘So, killing two pigeons and dragging them through the cat flap did seem weird. But I guess it was probably one of the neighbour’s cats or something, leaving us a present.’
‘Did you see them?’ Pip asked. ‘Either of the dead birds?’
Harriet shook her head. ‘Mum cleared up one, Julia did the other. Julia only found out about the first one when she was complaining about having to mop the blood off the kitchen floor. Her one didn’t have a head, apparently. I remember my dad getting mad at her because she’d put the dead pigeon in the recycling bin,’ she said with a sad sniff of a smile.
Pip’s stomach lurched, thinking of her own headless pigeon. ‘And the chalk figures, what about those?’
‘Yeah, I never saw those either.’ Harriet took another sip, the microphone picking up the sound. ‘Julia said they were up on the street, near our drive. I guess they washed away before I got back. We lived near a young family then, so it was probably those kids.’
‘Did Julia mention seeing them again? Getting closer to the house, maybe?’
Harriet stared at her for a moment.
‘No, don’t think so. She did seem bothered by them though, like they were on her mind. But I don’t think she was scared.’
Pip’s chair creaked as she shifted. Julia should have been scared. Maybe she was, and she’d hid it from her little sister. She must have seen them, mustn’t she? Those three headless stick figures, creeping closer and closer to the house, to her, their number four. Did she think she was imagining them, like Pip had? Had she also questioned whether she was drawing them for herself when sleep-deprived and drugged up?
Pip had been silent too long. ‘And,’ she said, ‘those prank calls you mentioned, what were they?’
‘Oh, just calls from blocked numbers, not saying anything. It was probably just PPI or someone trying to sell her something. But, you know, these reporters were really pushing for me to tell them anything out of the ordinary in the last few weeks, put me on the spot. So, I just told them the first things that came to mind. I don’t think they were related to Bil—the DT Killer.’
‘Do you remember how many calls she got in that week?’ Pip leaned forward. She needed at least one more, one more to catch him.
‘I think it was three, maybe. At least. Enough for Julia to comment on,’ said Harriet, and her answer was a physical thing, coaxing up the hairs on Pip’s arms. ‘Why?’ she said. She must have noticed Pip’s reaction.
‘Oh, I’m just trying to work out whether the DT Killer had contact with his victims beforehand. Whether he stalked them, and that’s what those calls were, and the pigeons and the chalk,’ she said.
‘I dunno.’ Harriet’s fingers were lost inside her hair again. ‘He never said anything about that in his confession, did he? If he confessed to everything else, why wouldn’t he admit that too?’
Pip chewed her lip, running the scenarios through her head, how best to play this. She couldn’t tell Harriet that she thought it possible the DT Killer and Billy Karras were two different people: that would be irresponsible. Cruel, even. Not without concrete evidence.
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.
Pip scanned her eyes down the previews of each message, reading them out in Andie’s voice, bringing her back to life. Hello Harriet, you don’t know me but my name is Andie Bell. I go to Kilton Grammar, but I think we both know Chris Parks… Hi Harriet, thanks for getting back to me and for not thinking I’m a creepy weirdo for reaching out, I’m so sorry about your sister. I have a sister too… All the way down to the last one: Hey HH, would you want to talk on the phone instead of emailing, or even meet up some time…
Something stirred at the back of Pip’s mind, pushing her eyes back to those two letters: HH. She asked her mind what she was supposed to be seeing here; it was just Harriet’s initials.
‘I’m glad you found out the truth of what happened to her,’ Harriet interrupted her thoughts. ‘And that your podcast was kind to her. Andie was a complicated girl, I think. But she saved me.’
Even more complicated now, Pip thought, scribbling down Andie’s email address. Harriet was right; it was a strange email address, almost like it was obscure on purpose. Almost like it had been a secret. Maybe she’d made it for this very reason, just to communicate with Harriet Hunter. But why?
‘Are you going to talk to him?’ Harriet said, bringing Pip’s attention back to the room, this table, the microphones set out in front of them. ‘Are you going to talk to Billy Karras?’
Pip paused, ran her finger across the plastic of her headphones, round and round her neck. ‘I hope I get to speak to the DT Killer, yes,’ she answered. She’d meant it to be tactful, so she didn’t have to lie to Harriet, but there was something else beneath those words. Something creeping and ominous. A dark promise. To herself, or to him?
‘Listen,’ Pip said, clicking the stop button on her recording software. ‘We’re running out of time for today. Do you think we can schedule in another interview soon, where you can talk more about Julia, what she was like? You’ve given me lots to go on today for my research, so thank you for that.’
‘I have?’ Harriet said, the skin between her nose crinkling in confusion.
She had, but she didn’t know it. She’d given Pip a lead, in the most unlikely of places.
‘Yes, it’s been very informative,’ Pip said, unplugging the microphones, those two letters, HH, still playing on her mind, sounding them out in Andie’s voice, a voice she’d never even heard.
She and Harriet shook hands again as they said goodbye, and Pip hoped Harriet hadn’t noticed the tremor in her hands, the shiver that had made itself at home beneath her skin. And as Pip pushed the coffee shop door – holding it open for Harriet – the cold wind hit her, and so did one realization, tangible and heavy. That, even after all this time, Andie Bell still had one mystery left in her yet.
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