One last check.
Ravi leaned in close across the handbrake, studying her, his breath sweet but sharp on her face.
‘There’s still some on your face that’s dried. And on your hands.’ He glanced down. ‘And there’s spots on your jumper. You’ll have to get upstairs quickly, before they see you.’
Pip nodded. ‘Yeah, I can do that,’ she said.
She’d laid her spare T-shirt out on the seat, so no blood would transfer on to Ravi’s car. And she’d used her spare pair of underwear, pouring a little water from her bottle, to try to wipe the blood from her face and her hands while Ravi drove the back roads. It would have to do.
Pip opened the car door with her elbow and stepped out, leaning back in to stuff the T-shirt she’d sat on in her bag too, zipping it up. House keys in the other hand.
‘Are you sure?’ Ravi asked her again.
‘Yes,’ she told him. They’d been over the plan again. Over and over in the car. ‘I can do this part on my own. Well, you know what I mean.’
‘I can help,’ Ravi said, a hint of desperation in his voice.
Pip looked at him, took in every inch and left none behind. ‘You’ve already helped, Ravi, more than you know. You helped me stay alive in there. You came to get me. I can do this part alone. What will help me is you being safe. That’s what I want. I don’t want any of this to come back on you, if it goes wrong.’
‘I know, but –’
Pip cut him off. ‘So, you’re going to go establish your alibi now, for the whole evening. In case our timings don’t work out and we don’t delay the time of death by enough. What are you going to do?’ She wanted to hear him say it again: airtight, iron-clad.
‘I’m going home to grab my phone, then driving to Amersham to pick up my cousin, Rahul,’ Ravi said, staring ahead. ‘Use the A-roads, so the traffic cams pick me up. Going to take out some cash from an ATM, so the camera there also gets me. Then we’re going to go to Pizza Express, or another chain, and order food, pay with my card. Be loud, draw attention to us, so people remember us being there. Take photos and videos on my phone, showing us there. Make a call too, probably to Mum to tell her what time I’ll be home. I’m going to text you and ask you how your evening is going because I don’t know you lost your phone yet and we haven’t seen each other all day.’ He took a quick breather. ‘Then we’ll go to the pub where all my cousin’s friends hang out, lots of witnesses. Stay until eleven thirty. Then I drop Rahul home, and I drive back, fill up with petrol on the way, so another CCTV camera gets me. Go home, pretend to go to bed.’
‘Good, yes,’ Pip said, glancing at the clock on the car’s dashboard. It had just gone ten past eight. ‘Meet me at midnight?’
‘Meet you at midnight. And you’ll call me?’ he asked. ‘From your burner phone, if anything goes wrong.’
‘It won’t go wrong,’ Pip answered, trying to convince him with her eyes.
‘Be careful,’ he said, tightening his grip on the wheel, a substitute for her hand. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you,’ she said, another last time. But it wouldn’t be the last; she’d see him in a few hours.
Pip closed the door and waved to Ravi as he indicated and peeled off down the road. She took one deep breath, to prepare herself, and then she turned and walked down her driveway to the front door.
She saw her family through the front window, the frames of the TV dancing across their faces. She watched them for a moment, out here in the dark. Josh was folded up on the rug in his pyjamas, awkward and small, playing with his Lego. Her dad was laughing at something on the TV, and Pip could feel its vibrations even out here. Her mum tutted, slapped a hand against his chest, and Pip heard her saying, ‘Oh, Victor, that’s not funny.’
‘It’s always funny when people fall over,’ came his booming reply.
Pip felt her eyes prickling, a catch in her throat. She thought she’d never see them again. Never smile with them, or cry, or laugh, never grow old as her parents grew older, their traditions becoming hers, like the way her dad made mashed potato, or the way her mum decorated the tree at Christmas. Never see Josh grow into a man, or know what his forever-voice sounded like, or what made him happy. All those moments, a lifetime of them, big and small. Pip had lost them, and now she hadn’t. Not if she could pull this off.
Pip cleared her throat, dislodging the lump, and unlocked the front door as quietly as she could.
She crept inside, shutting the door behind her with a barely audible click, hoping the noise of an audience clapping from the TV would cover it. Keys gripped too hard in her fist so they wouldn’t make a sound.
Slowly, carefully, holding her breath, she passed the living-room door, glancing at the backs of their heads against the sofa. Her dad moved and Pip’s heart dropped, freezing her to the spot. No, it was OK, he was just shifting his position, placing his arm around her mum’s shoulders.
Up the stairs, quiet, quieter. The third stair creaked under her weight.
‘Pip?! Is that you?’ her mum called, shuffling on the sofa to turn around.
‘Yeah,’ Pip called back, bounding up the stairs quickly before her mum got a good look. ‘It’s me! Sorry I’m just desperate for a wee.’
‘We have a toilet downstairs, you know,’ her dad shouted as she rounded the top of the stairs into the hallway. ‘Unless by wee, you really mean a p—’
‘Thought you were staying at Ravi’s?’ Her mum now.
‘Two minutes!’ Pip shouted in response, running straight for the bathroom, closing the door behind her, locking it. She’d have to clean that door handle too.
That was close. But they were acting normally; they hadn’t seen anything, not the flecks of blood, or her ripped-up hair, or the raw skin on her face. And those were Pip’s first tasks.
She pulled her hoodie off over her head, shutting her mouth and shutting her eyes, so none of the drying blood would stray inside. She dropped it carefully, inside out on the tiles. She kicked off her trainers, and her socks, then peeled off her dark leggings. She couldn’t see any blood against the material, but she knew it was there, hiding somewhere in the fibres. And then her sports bra, a small, rusted stain near the middle where some of the blood had transferred through her hoodie. She left the clothes in a pile and turned on the shower.
Warm. Hot. Hotter. So hot that it hurt to step inside under the stream. But it needed to be hot, to feel like it was scouring away the top layer of her skin. How else would she ever feel clean of DT? She scrubbed at herself with shower gel, watching as the pinky blood-dyed water ran off her legs, between her toes and down the drain. She scrubbed and scrubbed again, finishing off the half-full shower gel, cleaning under her fingernails too. She washed her hair, three separate times, the strands feeling thinner, more brittle now. Shampoo stinging the graze on her cheekbone.
When she finally felt clean enough, Pip stepped out into a towel, leaving the water running for a while longer, to wash away any residue of blood on the shower tray. She’d clean that later too.
With the towel tucked under her armpits, she grabbed the flip-lid bathroom bin nestled beside the toilet and pulled out the plastic bucket liner from inside. There were just two empty toilet rolls in it, and Pip removed these, stacking them on the windowsill instead. In the cabinet under the sink she found the toilet bleach, unscrewed the lid and poured some into the plastic bucket. More. All of it. She straightened up and filled the bucket halfway with warm water from the tap, diluting the bleach, the smell strong and noxious.
She’d have to make two journeys to her bedroom, but her family were all downstairs, it should be clear. Pip hoisted up the bucket, heavy now, holding it with one arm against her chest as she unlocked the bathroom door. She staggered out, across the landing, and into her bedroom, placing the bucket down in the middle, water sloshing dangerously close to the upper rim.
More eerie sounds of a TV audience applauding her as Pip returned to the bathroom, grabbing the pile of bloodied clothes and her rucksack.
‘Pip?’ came her mum’s voice from the stairs.
Fuck.
‘Just showered! I’ll be down in a minute!’ Pip called back, hurrying into her room and closing the door behind her.
She dropped the pile of clothes beside the bucket, and then, on her knees, she turned to the discarded pile, and gently, one by one, lowered them into the bleach mixture, stuffing them down. Her trainers too, bobbing half in at the top.
From her rucksack, she added the lengths of duct tape that had bound her face and her hands and her ankles, pushing them down into the diluted bleach. She pulled out Jason’s burner phone, sliding the back off to remove the SIM card. She snapped the little card in half and dropped the disassembled phone into the water. Then the underwear she’d used to wipe the blood from her face, and the spare T-shirt she’d sat on. Finally, the branded Green Scene gloves she and Ravi had used – perhaps most incriminating – she pushed them right to the bottom. The bleach would deal with the visible bloodstains, and probably the dye of the fabrics too, but it was just a precaution: everything in here would be gone forever by this time tomorrow. Another job for later.
For now, Pip dragged the bucket across the carpet and hid it inside her wardrobe, poking her trainers back in. The smell of bleach was strong, but no one would be coming into her bedroom.
Pip dried herself and dressed, in a black hoodie and black leggings, and then turned to the mirror to deal with her face. Her hair hung down in feeble, wet strands, her scalp too sore to run a brush through. She could see a small bald patch on the crown of her head, where she’d ripped out her hair with the tape. She’d have to cover it. Pip dragged her fingers through and secured her hair into a high ponytail, tight and uncomfortable. She layered two more hair ties on her wrist, for later, when she and Ravi returned to Green Scene. Her face still looked raw and blotchy, and then slightly sickly as she piled foundation over to cover it. Concealer on the worst parts. She looked pale and the texture of her skin looked rough, peeling in places, but it would do.
She emptied out her rucksack to repack it, ticking off items from the mental list she and Ravi had assembled, seared into her brain like a mantra. Two beanie hats, five pairs of socks. Three of the burner phones from her desk drawer, turning them all on. The small pile of cash she kept in that secret compartment too, taking it all, just in case. In the pocket of her smartest jacket, hanging in her wardrobe over the bucket of bleach, she found the embossed card she hadn’t touched since that mediation meeting, and placed it carefully in the front pocket of her bag. Darting quietly into her mum and dad’s en suite, she grabbed a handful of the latex gloves her mum used to dye her hair, at least three pairs each. She repacked her purse on top of everything, checking her debit card was inside; she would need it for her alibi. And her car keys.
That was it, everything from upstairs. She ran it through again, double-checking she had everything needed for the plan. There were a few more items to get from downstairs, somehow avoiding the watchful gaze of her family, and a younger brother who made everyone’s business his own.
‘Hey,’ she said breathlessly, skipping down the stairs. ‘Just had to shower because I’m heading out and went on a run earlier.’ The lie came out too fast, she needed to slow it down, remember to breathe.
Her mum turned her head against the backrest of the sofa, looking at her. ‘I thought you were going to Ravi’s for dinner and staying over.’
‘A sleepover,’ Joshua’s voice added, though Pip couldn’t see him beyond the couch.
‘Change of plans,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘Ravi had to go see his cousin, so I’m hanging out with Cara instead.’
‘No one asked me about any sleepover,’ added her dad.
Pip’s mum narrowed her eyes, studying her face. Could she see, could she tell what was hiding just beneath the make-up? Or was there something different in Pip’s eyes, that haunted faraway look? She’d left the house still her mum’s little girl, and she’d returned as someone who knew what it was to die violently, to cross over that line and somehow come back from it. And not only that; she was a killer now. Had that changed her, in her mother’s eyes? In her own? Reshaped her?
‘You haven’t had an argument, have you?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Pip said, confused. ‘Me and Ravi? No, we’re fine.’ She attempted a light-hearted sniff, dismissing the idea. How she wished for anything as normal, as quiet, as an argument with her boyfriend. ‘I’m just grabbing a snack from the kitchen then heading out.’
‘OK sweetie,’ her mum said, like she didn’t believe her. But that was fine; if her mum wanted to believe she and Ravi had had an argument, that was fine. Good, even. Far better than anything near the truth; that Pip had murdered a serial killer and was now, at this very moment, heading out to frame a rapist for the crime she’d committed.
In the kitchen, Pip opened the wide drawer at the top of the island, the drawer where her mum kept the foil and baking paper, and the plastic sandwich bags. Pip grabbed four of the resealable sandwich bags, and two of the larger plastic freezer bags, stuffing them on top of her rucksack. From the bits-and-bobs drawer on the other side of the kitchen, Pip retrieved the candle lighter and packed it in too.
And now for the last item on the list, which wasn’t really a specific item, more a problem to be dealt with. Pip thought inspiration would have struck her by now, but she was coming up empty. The Hastings family had fitted two security cameras either side of their front door, since Pip vandalized their house months ago, after the verdict. She needed something to deal with those cameras, but what?
Pip opened the door into the garage, the air cold in here, almost nice against her skin, still adrenaline-hot. She surveyed the room, her eyes flicking over her parents’ bikes, to her dad’s toolkit, to the mirrored dresser that her mum kept insisting they’d find room for. What could Pip use to disable those cameras? Her eyes lingered over her dad’s toolkit, pulling her over, across the room. She opened the lid and looked inside. There was a small hammer lying on top. She supposed she could sneak up and break the cameras, but that would make a sound, might alert Max inside. Or those wire-cutters, if the cameras had exposed wiring. But she’d been hoping for something less permanent, something that better fitted the narrative.
Her eyes caught on something else, head-height on the shelf above the toolbox, staring at her in that way inanimate objects sometimes did. Pip’s breath caught in her throat, and she sighed, because it was perfect.
A near-full roll of grey duct tape.
That was exactly what she needed.
‘Fucking duct tape,’ Pip muttered to herself, grabbing it and shoving it inside her bag.
She left the garage and froze in the doorway. Her dad was in the kitchen, half inside the fridge, picking at the leftovers and watching her.
‘What are you doing in there?’ he asked, lines criss-crossing his forehead.
‘Oh, um… looking for my blue Converse,’ Pip said, thinking on her feet. ‘What are you doing in there?’
‘They’re in the rack by the door,’ he said, indicating down the hall with his head. ‘I’m just getting your mother a glass of wine.’
‘Oh, and the wine’s kept under that plate of chicken?’ Pip said, walking past, shouldering her bag.
‘Yes. I’ll have to heroically eat my way to it,’ he replied. ‘What time will you be home?’
‘Half eleven-ish,’ Pip said, calling bye to her mum and Josh, her mum telling her not to stay out too late because they were heading to Legoland in the morning, and there was a small whoop of excitement from Josh. Pip said she wouldn’t, the normalness of the scene like a punch in her gut, doubling her over, making it hard to even look at her family. Would she ever belong in a scene like this again, after what she did? Normal was all she’d wanted, what all of this was for, but was it now out of reach forever? It definitely would be, if she went down for Jason’s murder.
Pip closed the front door behind her and exhaled. She didn’t have time for these questions; she needed to focus. There was a body ten miles away, and she was in a race against it.
It was 8:27 p.m. now, already behind schedule.
Pip unlocked her car and climbed inside, placing the rucksack on the passenger seat. She turned the key in the ignition and pulled away, her leg shaking against the pedal, stage one complete behind her.
On to the next.
