As Good as Dead: Part 2: Chapter 31

Twelve minutes was all it took. Pip knew because she’d checked the time on the burner phone as she and Ravi talked it through. She thought it would have taken much longer, it should have taken much longer, a plan to set someone up for murder. Agonizing hours and a cascade of details, tiny yet critical. That’s what you’d think, what Pip would’ve thought. But twelve minutes and they were done. Ideas back and forth, picking holes in them and plugging the gaps when they found them. Who and where and when. Pip didn’t want to involve anyone else, but Ravi made her see it couldn’t be done, not without help. The entire thing almost unravelled until Ravi came up with the mobile phone tower idea, from a case he was working on at the firm, and Pip knew exactly what call to make. Twelve minutes, and there the plan was, like a physical thing between them. Precious and solid and clear and binding. They could never go back from this, go back to who they were before. It would be difficult, and it would be tight; they could make no wrong turns, no delays. No room for error.

But the plan worked, in theory. How to get away with murder.

Jason Bell was dead, but he wasn’t dead yet; he would be in a few hours. And Max Hastings would be the one who killed him. Finally locked away where he belonged.

‘They deserve it,’ Pip said, standing back. ‘They both deserve it, don’t they?’ It was too late for Jason, but Max… She hated him, down to the very core of who she was, but was that blinding her, leading her?

‘Yes,’ he reassured her, though she knew he hated him just as much. ‘They’ve hurt people. Jason killed five women; he would have killed you. He started everything that led to Andie and Sal dying. So did Max. Max will carry on hurting people if we do nothing. We know that. They deserve this, both of them.’ He gently tapped his finger in that safe space under her chin, pulling her face up to look at him. ‘It’s a choice between you or Max, and I choose you. I’m not losing you.’

And Pip didn’t say but she couldn’t help thinking of Elliot Ward, who’d made a choice exactly like this, making Sal a killer to save himself and his daughters. And there Pip was too, in that messy, confusing grey area, dragging Ravi in with her. The end and the beginning.

‘OK,’ she nodded, talking herself back into it. The plan was binding and they were in it now, and time was not on their side. ‘A few things still left to work out, but the most important is the –’

‘Refrigerating and heating up the dead body,’ Ravi finished the sentence for her, glancing again at those abandoned feet. He still hadn’t seen the body up close, seen what Pip had done to Jason. Pip hoped Ravi wouldn’t change his mind when he did, wouldn’t look at her any different. He pointed to the brick building behind them, separate to the corrugated-iron building with the chemical storeroom off its side. ‘That building there looks more like an office building, where the office staff work. There’s probably a kitchen in there, right? With a fridge and a freezer?’

‘Yeah, there probably is.’ Pip nodded. ‘But not humansized.’

Ravi blew out a mouthful of air, his face tight and tense. ‘Again, why couldn’t Jason Bell have owned a meat-processing factory with giant fridges?’

‘Let’s go have a look around,’ Pip said, turning back to the open metal door, and Jason’s feet lying across the threshold. ‘We have his keys.’ She nodded at them, still in the lock where Jason had left them. ‘He’s the owner, he must have a key to every door here. And he told me the security alarms were disabled everywhere, and the CCTV cameras. He told me he had all weekend, if he wanted it. So, we should be fine.’

‘Yeah, good idea,’ Ravi said, but he didn’t take a step forward, because stepping towards that door also meant stepping towards the dead body.

Pip went first, holding her breath as she walked over, eyes stalling on Jason’s broken-open head. She blinked, dragging her gaze away, and pulled the heavy ring of keys out the door. ‘We need to make sure we remember everything we’ve touched – I’ve touched – so we can wipe it down later,’ she said, cradling the keys in her hand. ‘Come on, this way.’

Pip stepped over Jason, avoiding the halo of blood around his head. Ravi followed close behind and Pip saw his eyes lingering, blinking hard as though he might wish it all away.

A small cough as he picked up his pace behind her.

They didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

It took a few attempts for Pip to find the right key for the door at the end of the storeroom, by the workbench. She pushed it open into a dark and cavernous room.

Ravi pulled his sleeve up over his fingers and flicked on the light switch.

The room came into view in flickers, as the overhead lights settled into their buzzy glow. This building must have once been a barn, Pip realized, staring up into its impossibly high ceiling. And laid out before them were rows and rows and rows of machines. Lawnmowers, strimmers, leaf blowers, machines she didn’t even understand, and tables with smaller tools like hedge cutters. Over on the right were large machines Pip assumed must be ride-on mowers, covered over with black tarp. There were shelves with more metal tools, glinting in the light, and red jerry cans, and bags of soil.

Pip turned to Ravi, his eyes taking in the room, feverish and fast. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed to a bright orange machine, tall, with a funnel-shaped top.

‘I think that’s a shredder,’ she said. ‘Or a wood-chipper, whatever it’s called. Branches go in and it shreds them to tiny little pieces.’

Ravi pursed his lips to one side, like he was considering something.

‘No,’ Pip said firmly, knowing exactly what it was.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ he countered. ‘But there are clearly no giant fridges in here, are there?’

‘But,’ Pip’s gaze alighted on the rows and rows of mowers, ‘lawnmowers run on petrol, don’t they?’

Ravi eyes picked up hers, widened in recognition. ‘Ah, for the fire,’ he said.

‘Even better,’ Pip added. ‘Petrol doesn’t just burn. It explodes.’

‘Good, that’s good,’ Ravi nodded. ‘But that’s the very last step, and we have a long night ahead of us before then. All of it’s pointless if we can’t work out how to cool him down.’

‘And warm him up,’ Pip said, and she felt it catching from the look in Ravi’s eyes. Despair. The plan might be over before it began. Her life in the balance, and the scales were tipping away from them. Come on, think. What could they use? There had to be something.

‘Let’s check the office building,’ Ravi said, taking charge, leading Pip away from the regimented lines of mowers, back through the chemical storeroom, picking their way through the spilled weedkiller and the spilled blood. Around the dead body, more dead each time, treading around him on feather-light steps, like this was just a childhood game.

Pip glanced back at the storeroom, at the coils of duct tape with tufts of her hair and spots of her blood. ‘My DNA is all over this room,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the duct tape with me, dispose of it with my clothes. But we’re going to have to clean those shelves too. Clean it all before we burn it.’

‘Yes,’ Ravi said, taking the ring of keys from her. ‘And these.’ He jangled them. ‘There should be cleaning supplies in the office, I’d say.’

Pip caught sight of herself again, reflected in the window of Jason’s car as they passed. Her eyes too dark, the pupils overgrown, eating away at the thinning border of hazel green. She shouldn’t stare too long, in case her reflection stayed in Jason’s window, forever leaving a mark of her there. That’s when she remembered.

‘Fuck,’ she said, and Ravi’s footsteps crunched to a halt.

‘What?’ he said, joining her reflection in the window, his eyes too big and too dark as well.

‘My DNA. It’s all over the boot of his car.’

‘That’s OK, we can deal with that as well,’ Ravi’s reflection said, and Pip saw the mirror version of him reach for her hand, before he remembered and pulled back.

‘No, I mean it’s all over the boot,’ she said, panic rising again. ‘Hair, skin. My fingerprints, which the police already have on file. I left as much as I could. I thought I was going to die and I was trying to help. Leave a trail of evidence so you could find him, catch him.’

A new look in Ravi’s eyes, desolate and quiet, and a quiver in his lip like he was trying not to cry. ‘You must have been so scared,’ he said quietly.

‘I was,’ she said. And as scary as this was, the plan, and what would happen if they failed, nothing came close to the terror she’d felt in that boot or in that storeroom, taped up in her death mask. Its traces still there, all over her skin, in the craters of her eyes.

‘We will sort it, OK?’ he said loudly, speaking over the tremor in his voice. ‘We will deal with the car later, when we’re back. First we need to find something to –’

‘Cool him down,’ Pip sounded out the words, staring beyond herself, into the inside of Jason’s car. ‘Cool him down and then heat him up,’ she said, her eyes circling the control panel beside the steering wheel. The idea started small, as a simple what if, growing and growing, gorging itself on Pip’s attention until it was all she could think. ‘Oh my god,’ she hissed, and again, louder, ‘Oh my god!’

‘What?’ Ravi asked, instinctively checking over his shoulders.

‘The car!’ Pip turned to him. ‘The car is our fridge. This is a new-ish car, fancy SUV, how cold do you think the air-con gets?’

The idea pulled in Ravi too, she could see it in his eyes, something close to excitement. ‘Pretty cold,’ he said. ‘On the coldest setting, full blast from all the vents, enclosed space. Yeah, pretty fucking cold,’ he said with a near-smile.

‘A standard fridge is about four degrees Celsius; you think we can get it to that?’

‘How do you know what a standard fridge temperature is?’ he asked.

‘Ravi, I know things. How do you not know by now that I know things?’

‘Well,’ Ravi glanced up at the sky, ‘it’s kinda chilly out tonight. Can’t be more than fifteen degrees outside. So, if we just need the car to cool ten degrees or so… yeah, yeah, I’d say that’s feasible.’

A shift in Pip’s ribcage, a feeling like relief that opened out her chest, gave her a little more space to breathe. They could do this. They might actually do this. Play god. Bring a man back to life for a few hours, so another could kill him.

‘And,’ she said, ‘when we get back here later –’

‘Turn on the heaters to the hottest setting, full blast,’ Ravi took over the sentence for her, speaking fast.

‘Bring his body temperature back up,’ Pip finished it.

Ravi nodded, eyes darting left to right as he ran it through his head again. ‘Yes. This is going to work, Pip. You’re going to be OK.’

She might, she just might. But they hadn’t even started yet, and time was ticking away from them.

‘Moved a dead body?’ Pip asked, clapping her gloves together, small clumps of mud disintegrating into dust before her eyes.

‘No, we haven’t actually done that before,’ Ravi sniffed. ‘I meant, the last time we wore gardening gloves to commit a crime. Breaking and entering into the Bells’ house, his house.’ He nodded back in the direction of the chemical storeroom. ‘That, er…’ he drew off.

‘Don’t,’ Pip told him, giving him a stern look.

‘What?’

‘You were going to make a that escalated quickly joke, Ravi. I can always tell.’

‘Ah, I forgot,’ he said. ‘You know things.’

She did. And she knew that humour was Ravi’s tic, his way of coping.

‘OK, let’s do this,’ she said.

She crouched and pulled up one edge of the tarp covering the overgrown mower. The black plastic crinkled as she threw it up and over the machine, Ravi dragging it off from the other side. It came free, and Ravi folded it up roughly in his arms.

Pip guided him out of the large room, back into the chemical storeroom, the weedkiller fumes still strong, a headache starting to make itself known.

Ravi laid the tarp out over the concrete, beside Jason’s body, avoiding the blood.

Pip could read the tension in the way he held his mouth, that faraway look she was sure she had too.

‘Don’t look at him, Ravi,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to look at him.’

Ravi stepped towards her, as though to help her with the next part.

‘No,’ she said, sending him away. ‘You don’t touch him. You don’t touch anything unless you have to. I don’t want any traces of you here.’

That would be far worse than the unthinkable. If she went down for murder, but if Ravi went down with her. No, this could not touch him, and so he could not touch the scene. If they failed, it would all be on her, that was the deal. Ravi knew nothing. Saw nothing. Did nothing.

Pip bent to her knees on the other side of Jason, and slowly she reached out, gripping on to his shoulder and his arm. He wasn’t stiff yet, but rigor would start to set in soon.

She leaned forward and pushed, rolling Jason and his broken-open head on to his front. His face was untouched. Pale and slack, but he almost looked like he could be sleeping. Pip reset her grip and rolled him again, face down on the edge of the tarp, and again, face up in the middle.

‘OK,’ she said, pulling up one side of the tarp and wrapping it over him. Ravi did the same on the other side.

Jason was gone, tidied away. The remnants of the DT Killer; just a dark red puddle and a rolled-up tarp.

‘He needs to be lying on his back in the car, for the lividity,’ Pip said, positioning herself where Jason’s shoulders should be. ‘And then when we come back, we turn him on his front. The blood will re-settle, make it look like those hours never happened.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Ravi nodded, bending down and gripping Jason’s ankles, through the tarp. ‘One, two, three, lift.’

He was heavy, too heavy, Pip’s grip under his shoulders awkward through the sheet of plastic. But together they had him, walking slowly out the metal door, Ravi moving backwards, glancing down to check he wasn’t trekking through the blood.

The gentle hum of an engine greeted them outside. They already had Jason’s car up and running, the air-con on the coldest setting, every vent in the car opened up fully. Doors closed to keep in the chill. Ravi had found some ice packs in the freezer in the office building, presumably for workplace accidents. But now they were dotted around the inside of the car, close to the vents, cooling it even more.

‘I’ll get the door,’ Ravi said, leaning down to place Jason’s feet gently on the gravel. Pip stuck her leg forward, buttressed against Jason’s back to take some of the weight.

Ravi opened the door to the back seat.

‘Already pretty cold in there,’ he said, returning to the other end of Jason and picking him up with a grunt.

Carefully, half-steps at a time, they manoeuvred the rolled-up tarp through the car door, dropping Jason on to the back seat and sliding him through.

It was already cold in here, like leaning inside a fridge, and Pip could see the foggy billows of her breath in front of her as she tried to push Jason further in. His head, his undone head, wouldn’t fit inside.

‘Hold on,’ Pip said, running round the back of the car to open the other door. She reached through the opening at the end of the tarp, gripped Jason’s ankles and pushed them up to bend his knees, using the extra room to drag him all the way in. Holding him in position as she slowly closed the door, the sound of his feet knocking against it, like he was trying to kick his way free.

Ravi closed the door on the other side, and stepped back, clapped his hands together with a tense outward breath.

‘And it will keep running for hours, while we’re gone?’ Pip checked again.

‘Yeah, he has almost a full tank. It will keep going, long as we need it to,’ Ravi replied.

‘Good, that’s good,’ she said, another word she knew to be meaningless. ‘So, now we go. Back home. The plan.’

‘The plan,’ Ravi parroted her. ‘Feels scary, leaving it like this, invisible traces of you all over it.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s secure; no one is coming here. Jason said so himself. He planned to kill me here, and he had all night, all weekend. No cameras or alarms. So, we have the same. Everything will be the same when we get back. And then we remove those traces, plant new ones.’ She glanced through the car window, at the rolled-up black tarp, and the dead man inside who wasn’t dead yet. Not if everything worked out.

Ravi removed his gloves. ‘You taking your rucksack?’

‘Yes,’ Pip said, pulling her gloves off too, placing them and Ravi’s pair inside her unzipped bag. Her duct-tape binds were in here too, removed from the storeroom: ankles, wrists, unwound mask with her ripped-out hair.

‘And you have everything in there, everything you came with?’

‘Yes, it’s all in here,’ she said, zipping it up. ‘Everything I packed in it this afternoon. Now the gloves, the used duct tape. Jason’s burner phone. I’ve left nothing behind.’

‘And the hammer?’ Ravi asked.

‘That can stay here.’ She straightened up, shouldering the bag. ‘We can clean my prints off it later. Max will need a murder weapon too.’

‘OK,’ Ravi said, taking the lead, heading towards his car abandoned by the open Green Scene gate. ‘Let’s go home.’