As Good as Dead: Part 1: Chapter 8

She stood there for a moment, numb to everything, except the violence erupting beneath her skin. Great thunderclaps of gunshots and cracking bones, the sucking sound of blood between her fingers, and a scream: hers. The words rupturing at the edges as they threw themselves around her head: Charlie, please don’t do this. I’m begging you.

The cream walls of her room peeled away, revealing burning and blackened timbers, collapsing in on themselves. The abandoned farmhouse resurrected in her bedroom, filling her lungs with smoke. Pip closed her eyes and told herself she was here and now, she wasn’t there and then. But she couldn’t do it, not alone. She needed help.

She staggered through the fire, arm up to shield her eyes. To her desk, fingers fumbling, finding the second drawer on the right. She pulled it out, completely, tipped the drawer out on the burning floor. Red string unravelled away from her, papers fluttered, pins scattered, tangling in white headphone wires. The cardboard bottom that hid her secrets flipped away, and out came the six burner phones, falling from their carefully structured order. Last out was the small, clear bag.

Pip ripped it open with shaking fingers. How were there so few left already? She tipped out one pill and swallowed it dry, her eyes watering as it scraped her throat.

She was here and now. Not then and there. Here and now.

It wasn’t blood, it was just sweat. See? Wipe it on your leggings and see.

Not then and there.

Here and now.

But was here and now any better? She stared at her phone, abandoned on the floor over there. Kill two birds with one stone. Two dead pigeons on the driveway, one with dead all-seeing eyes, and one with none. That wasn’t a coincidence, was it? Maybe it wasn’t a cat, maybe someone really had put them there, along with those chalk figures drawing closer and closer. The same someone who was desperate for Pip to answer that one question: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Someone who knew where she lived. A stalker?

She’d been looking out for trouble, and so it had found her.

No, no, stop. She was doing it again, taking things too far, seeking danger where maybe there was none. Kill two birds with one stone. It was a very common phrase. And she’d been receiving that question from anon for a long time, and nothing had happened to her so far, had it? She was here, she hadn’t disappeared.

She crawled along the floor and overturned her phone, the device recognizing her face and unlocking. Pip swiped into her emails, clicking into the search bar. She typed in, who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? + anon.

Eleven emails, twelve including the one she just got, all from different accounts, all asking her that same question. Pip scrolled up. She’d received the first one on the 11th of May, the messages starting out further apart, getting closer and closer together, only four days between the final two. May 11th? Pip shook her head; that didn’t seem right. She remembered getting the first one earlier than that, around the time Jamie Reynolds had disappeared and she’d been the one looking for him. That’s why the question had stuck out to her.

Oh, wait. It might have been on Twitter. She pressed the blue icon to open the app, tapping into the advanced search options. She typed in the question again, in the field for this exact phrase, and her podcast handle in the to these accounts section.

She pressed search, her eyes spooling along with the loading circle.

The page filled with results: fifteen separate tweets sent to her, asking her that exact question. The most recent from just seven minutes ago, with the same ps. as the email. And at the bottom of the page was the very first time: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Sent on Sunday the 29th of April, in response to Pip’s tweet announcing the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: The Disappearance of Jamie Reynolds. That was it. The beginning. Over four months ago.

That felt so long ago now. Jamie had been missing for only one day. Stanley Forbes was walking around, alive, without six holes in him; Pip had spoken to him that very day. Charlie Green was just her new neighbour. There’d been no blood on her hands, and sleep didn’t always come easy, but it had come, nonetheless. Max was on trial and Pip had believed, down into the very deepest part of who she was, that he would face justice for what he’d done. So many beginnings on that bright April morning, beginnings that had led her here. The first steps along a path that had turned on her, twisting around itself until it only led down. But had something else begun on that exact day, too? Something that had been growing for four months and was only now rearing its head?

Pip pushed to her feet, back in her room now, the abandoned farmhouse locked away at the back of her mind. She sat on her bed. The question, the chalk figures, the two dead birds. Could they be connected? Could this be about her? It was tenuous at best, but had there been anything else? Anything she’d thought strange at the time, but her mind had abandoned it to chance? Oh… there had been that letter several weeks ago. Well, not even a letter. It had been just an envelope, Pippa Fitz-Amobi scribbled on the front in scratchy black ink. She remembered thinking there was no address, no stamp, so someone must have pushed it through the front door. But when she’d opened it – Dad standing beside her asking whether it was ‘old-fashioned nudes from Ravi’ – there’d been nothing inside at all. Empty. She’d put it in the recycling bin and never thought about it again. The mystery letter had been forgotten as soon as another letter had arrived with her name on it: the letter of demand from Max Hastings and his lawyer. Was it possible that envelope had been connected to all this?

And now she was thinking, maybe there’d been something else before that. The day of Stanley Forbes’ funeral. When the ceremony was over and Pip returned to her car, she’d found a small bouquet of roses tucked inside her wing mirror. Except every flower head had been picked off, red petals strewn over the gravel below. A bouquet of thorns and stems. At the time, Pip thought it must have been one of the protesters at the funeral, who hadn’t disbanded until the police were called. But maybe it wasn’t any of the protestors, not Ant’s dad or Mary Scythe or Leslie from the shop. Maybe it had been a gift, from the same person who wanted to know who would look for her when she disappeared.

If it was – if these incidents were connected – then this had been going on for weeks. Months, even. And she hadn’t realized. But maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe she was reading too much into everything now, all because of that second dead bird. Pip didn’t trust herself and she didn’t trust her fear.

Only one thing was clear: if these all were from the same person – from dead flowers to dead pigeons – then it was escalating. Both in severity but also occurrence. Pip needed to track it somehow, collect all the data points and see if there were any connections, if she really did have a stalker or if she was finally losing it. A spreadsheet, she thought, imagining the smirk on Ravi’s face. But it would help to see it all neatly laid out: help her work out if this was real or only real in the dark place at the back of her head, and if it was real, where it all might lead, what the end game was.

Pip made her way across the room to her desk, stepping over the tipped-out contents of the drawer; she would tidy that up later. She pulled her laptop open, double-clicked Google Chrome and pulled up an empty tab. She typed stalker into the search bar and pressed enter, scrolling down the list of results. Report a stalker on a government website, a Wikipedia page, a site about types of stalkers and Inside the mind of a stalker, psychology sites and crime statistics. Pip clicked on the first result and started to read through it all, turning to a fresh page in her notebook.

She wrote who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Underlined it three times. She couldn’t help but feel the quiet rage embedded in that sinister question. She did think about disappearing sometimes, running away and leaving Pip behind. Or disappearing inside her own head, in those rare moments when her mind was quiet, an absence she could just float in, free. But what did disappear mean, really, when it came down to it? Define disappear.

Sometimes people came back from being disappeared. Jamie Reynolds was one example, and Isla Jordan, the young woman Elliot Ward had kept for five years thinking she was someone else. They had un-disappeared. But then Pip’s mind went back to the beginning, back to Andie Bell, to Sal Singh, to the victims of Scott Brunswick ‘the Monster of Margate’, to Jane Doe, to every true crime podcast and documentary she’d ever lost herself in. And in most cases, disappear meant dead.

‘Pip, dinner!’

‘Coming!’