They didn’t talk much on the drive. Didn’t know what to say, what they were allowed to say, or even how much to move. Cara sat in the passenger seat, her hands tucked in between her legs, shoulders arched and stiff, taking up as little space as she could.
Naomi was in the back, sitting up too straight, her back not even touching the seat. Pip glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw streaks of headlights and streetlights striped over Naomi’s face, bringing life back into her eyes.
Pip concentrated on the road instead of the silence. She’d driven the A-roads, trying to hit as many traffic cameras as possible. This time she wanted them to see her; that was the whole point. Air-tight, iron-clad. If it came to it, the police could follow the route Pip and her car had taken, through the eyes of all these cameras, retrace her steps. Proof she was right here and not somewhere else, killing a man.
‘How’s Steph?’ Pip said, when the quietness in the car got a little too loud. She’d turned the radio off a while ago; it was too eerie, too aggressively normal in what was the most unnormal drive the three of them would ever take.
‘Um.’ Cara gave a small cough, watching out the window. ‘Yeah, she’s good.’ That was it, silence again. Well, what had Pip expected, involving them in this? Asking too much of them.
Pip’s eyes drew up, catching sight of the McDonalds sign up ahead; her headlights lighting up the golden M until it glowed. It was in a motorway service station, just outside of Beaconsfield. That’s why she and Ravi had picked it. Cameras everywhere.
Pip exited the roundabout and pulled into the service station, into the huge car park that was still heaving with people and cars, even though it had just gone ten.
She rolled forward, waiting for a space near the front, right by the huge grey and glass building. Pulled in, turned off the car.
The silence was even louder, now the engine wasn’t hiding it. Saved by a group of men, clearly drunk, squawking as they stumbled in front of the car and through the doors into the well-lit station.
‘Started early,’ Cara said, nodding at the group, reaching out across the silence.
Pip grabbed at it, with both hands.
‘Sounds like my kind of night out,’ she said. ‘In bed by eleven.’
‘My kind of night out too,’ Cara said, turning around, a small smile on her face. ‘If it ends in chips.’
Pip laughed then, a guttural, hollow laugh that split open into a cough. She was so glad they were here with her, even though she hated herself for having to ask. ‘I’m sorry, for this,’ she said, staring forward at the other groups of people. People on long trips away, or long trips home, or not-very-long trips either way. People on family visits with small, sleepy children, or nights out, or even nights in, picking up food on the way. Normal people living their normal lives. And then the three of them in this car.
‘Don’t be,’ Naomi spoke up now, resting a hand on Pip’s shoulder. ‘You’d do it for us.’
And Naomi was right; she would and she had. She’d kept the secret of the hit-and-run Naomi had been involved in. Pip had found another way to clear Sal’s name, so Cara didn’t lose her father and her sister at the same time. But that didn’t make her feel any better about what she’d asked of them now. The kind of favour you hoped would never need returning.
But hadn’t Pip realized yet? Everything was returning; that full circle, dragging them all back around again.
‘Exactly,’ Cara said, pressing her finger lightly to the badly covered graze on Pip’s cheekbone, as though touching it would tell her what had happened, the thing she’d never know for sure. ‘We just want you to be OK. Just tell us what to do. Lead the way and tell us what to do.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Pip said. ‘We don’t need to do anything, really. Just act normal. Happy,’ she sniffed. ‘Like something bad hasn’t happened.’
‘Our dad killed your boyfriend’s older brother and kept a girl in his loft for five years,’ Cara said quickly with a glance back at Naomi. ‘You have yourself two experts at acting normal.’
‘At your service,’ Naomi added.
‘Thank you,’ Pip said, knowing deep down how inadequate those two words were. ‘Let’s go.’
Pip opened the door and stepped out, taking the rucksack that Cara was handing across to her. She shouldered it and looked around. There was a tall street lamp behind her, lighting up the car park with an industrial yellow glow. Halfway up the pole, Pip could see two dark cameras, one pointed their way. Pip made sure to look up, study the stars for a second, so the camera could capture her face. A million, million lights in the gaping blackness of the sky.
‘OK,’ Naomi said, shutting the back door and gathering her cardigan around herself.
Pip locked the car and they walked together, the three of them, through the automatic doors and into the service station.
It still had that buzz, that same energy all service stations had: that clash of those too heavy-eyed and those too wired, the nearly-theres and the just-beguns. Pip wasn’t either of them. The end wasn’t in sight yet – this long night would be longer still – but she was past the middle of the plan, leaving the ticked boxes behind in the back of her mind. Burying them deep. She just had to keep going. One foot in front of the other. Two hours until she had to meet Ravi.
‘This way,’ she said, leading Cara and Naomi over to the McDonalds at the back end of the cavernous building.
The drunk men were already there, at a table in the middle. Still squawking, but around mouthfuls of chips now.
Pip picked a booth close to them, but not too close, dumping her bag down on one chair. She opened it to pull out her purse, and then zipped it back up, before Naomi and Cara saw anything they shouldn’t.
‘Sit,’ Pip said to them, smiling for the cameras that she couldn’t see but knew would be here somewhere. Cara and Naomi slid themselves along the shiny, plastic-covered booth, the material screaming against their clothes. ‘I’ll get the food. What do you guys want to eat?’
The sisters looked at each other.
‘Well, we already ate dinner, at home,’ Cara said tentatively.
Pip nodded. ‘So, veggie burger for you, Naomi. And chicken nuggets for Cara, of course, don’t even need to ask. Cokes?’
They nodded.
‘OK, perfect. Be back in a sec.’
Pip strolled past the table of drunk men, purse swinging from her hand, up to the counter. There was a queue, three people in front of her. Pip stared ahead, clocking the security cameras posted on the ceiling behind the tills. She side-stepped a few inches, so they had a good view of her, waiting in line. She tried to act normal, natural, like she didn’t know she was being watched. And she couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what normal was for her now: an act. A lie.
Pip stuttered when it was her turn at the front, smiling at the cashier to cover the hesitation. She didn’t want to eat, just as much as Cara and Naomi didn’t. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. This was all a show, a performance for the cameras, a believable narrative in the traces she was leaving behind.
‘Hi,’ she smiled, recovering. ‘Can I please have a veggie burger meal, and… um, two chicken nugget meals, please. All with Coke.’
‘Yep, sure,’ the cashier said, plugging something into the screen in front of him. ‘Want any sauces with that?’
‘Um… just ketchup, please.’
‘Sure,’ he said, scratching at his head beneath the cap. ‘Is that everything?’
Pip nodded, trying not to glance up at the camera behind the cashier’s head as he called the order to a colleague. Because she would be looking directly into the eyes of the detective who might be watching this footage in the weeks to come, daring them not to believe her this time. It would likely be Hawkins, wouldn’t it? Jason was from Little Kilton, so his murder would probably be dealt with by the Thames Valley Police officers based at the Amersham station. A new game with new players: her against DI Hawkins, and Max Hastings was her offering.
‘Hello?’ the cashier stared at her, narrowing his eyes. ‘I said that comes to fourteen pounds, eight pence.’
‘Sorry.’ Pip unzipped her purse.
‘Paying by card?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, almost too forceful, straying out of character for a moment. Of course she had to pay by card; she had to leave an indisputable trace of her being here at this time. She pulled out her debit card and tapped it against the contactless card reader. It beeped and the cashier handed her a receipt. She should keep that too, she thought, folding it neatly and tucking it inside her purse.
‘It’ll just be a minute,’ the cashier said, gesturing her aside so he could take the order of the man standing behind her.
Pip stood off to the left, leaning against the backlit menu, still in sight of the cameras. She arranged her face for Hawkins, slack and unthinking, but really she was thinking about him studying the position of her feet, the arch of her shoulders and the look in her eyes. She tried not to fiddle too much as she waited, in case he thought she looked nervous. She wasn’t nervous; she was just here to eat some junk food with her friends. She glanced over to Cara and Naomi and gave them a small wave. See, Hawkins? Just getting food with her friends, nothing to see here.
Someone handed Pip her order and she thanked them, smiling for the cameras, for Hawkins. She gripped the three paper bags in one hand and balanced the cardboard tray of drinks on the other, walking carefully back to their table.
‘Here we go.’ Pip passed the drinks tray to Cara and slid the food bags across the table. ‘That’s you, Naomi,’ she said, handing her the one at the front.
‘Thanks,’ Naomi said, hesitating to open it. ‘So…’ She broke off, studying Pip’s eyes for answers. ‘We just eat and talk?’
‘Exactly.’ Pip grinned back, with a small laugh, as though Naomi had said something funny. ‘We just eat and talk.’ She unrolled her paper bag and reached inside, pulling out her box of six nuggets and her chips, a few lying abandoned and soggy at the bottom of the bag. ‘Oh, I’ve got the ketchups,’ she said, passing one each to Naomi and Cara.
Cara took the small pot from her, staring down at Pip’s outstretched arm, her sleeve sliding back towards her elbow.
‘What happened to your wrists?’ she asked quietly, uncertainly, her eyes on the raw, ragged skin the duct tape had left behind. ‘And your face?’
Pip cleared her throat, pulling the sleeve back down over her hand. ‘We don’t talk about that,’ she said, avoiding Cara’s eyes. ‘We talk about everything except that.’
‘But if someone hurt you, we can –’ Cara began, but it was Naomi who cut her off this time.
‘Cara, could you go grab us some straws?’ she asked, an older-sister edge to her voice.
Cara’s gaze flicked between the two of them. Pip nodded.
‘OK,’ she said, pushing up from the booth and over to a counter a few tables away with a straw dispenser and napkins. She returned with a few of each.
‘Thanks,’ Pip said, piercing the straw through the lid of her Coke, taking a sip. It burned in her throat, in the gouges left by her screams.
She picked up one nugget. She didn’t want to eat it, she couldn’t eat, but she put it in her mouth and chewed all the same. The texture felt rubbery, her tongue coating itself with saliva. She forced it down, noticing that Cara hadn’t started her own food, was staring too hard at Pip.
‘It’s just,’ Cara said, voice dipping into whispers, ‘if someone hurt you, I would kill th—’
Pip choked, swallowing the regurgitated food back down. ‘So, Cara,’ she said when she recovered. ‘Have you and Steph decided where you’re going on your travels? I know you said you really wanted to do Thailand?’
Cara checked with Naomi before answering. ‘Um, yeah,’ she said, finally opening her box of nuggets, dipping one into the ketchup. ‘Yeah. We want to do Thailand, do our scuba diving there, I think. Steph really wants to go to Australia too, maybe do some kind of tour.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ Pip said, turning to her chips instead, forcing a few down. ‘You’ll remember to pack sun cream, won’t you?’
Cara sniffed. ‘Such a Pip thing to say.’
‘Well,’ Pip smiled, ‘I’m still me.’ She hoped that was true.
‘You’re not going to do skydiving or bungee jumping, are you?’ Naomi said, taking another bite of her veggie burger, chewing uncomfortably. ‘Dad would freak out if he knew you were throwing yourself off a bridge or out of a plane.’
‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ Cara shook her head, staring down at her own hands. ‘I’m sorry, this is just really strange, I don’t –’
‘You’re doing really well,’ Pip said, taking a sip of Coke to force down another bite. ‘Really well.’
‘I want to help, though.’
‘This is helping.’ Pip locked her eyes on Cara’s, trying to tell her with her mind. They were saving her life right now. They were sitting in a service station McDonalds forcing down chips, having stilted, awkward conversation, but really they were saving her life.
There was a crash behind Pip. She whipped her head around, saw one of the drunken men had tripped over a chair, knocked it to the ground. But that’s not what the sound was, by the time it reached Pip’s ears. And she was surprised, in a way, that the sound wasn’t the crack of Jason Bell’s skull breaking open. It was still a gunshot, blowing an unfixable hole through Stanley Forbes’ chest. Staining the sweat on her hands a deep, deep, violent red.
‘Pip?’ Cara called her back. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffed, wiping her hands on a spare napkin. ‘Fine. Fine. You know what?’ She leaned forward, pointed at Cara’s phone lying face down on the table. ‘We should take some pictures. Videos too.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of us,’ Pip said. ‘Hanging out, looking normal. The meta-data will have a record of the time and be geo-tagged. Come on.’
Pip got up from her chair and moved over to the booth, sidling in beside Cara. She picked up Cara’s phone and flicked it on to the camera. ‘Smile,’ she said, holding the camera out to take a selfie of the three of them, Naomi holding up her McDonalds cup in a mock-cheers.
‘Yeah, that was good, Naomi,’ Pip said, studying the photo. She could tell the smiles weren’t real, none of them. But Hawkins wouldn’t.
Pip had another idea, the hairs rising up her arms as she realized where it had come from. She might just be putting one foot in front of the other, getting through the plan, but her steps weren’t in a line. They were curving back on themselves, right to the start of everything.
‘Naomi,’ she said, holding up the camera again. ‘In the next one, can you be looking down at your phone, angling the screen this way, so we can see it in the photo. On the lock screen, so it displays the time.’
Both of them stared at her for a second, eyes flickering with recognition. And maybe they could feel it too, that all-seeing circle reeling them back along. They knew where the idea came from too. It was exactly how Pip had worked out that Sal Singh’s friends had taken his alibi away from him. A photo taken by Sal, and in the background had been an eighteen-year-old Naomi, looking down at her phone’s lock screen, the time on it giving everything away. Proving that Sal had been there, long after his friends originally said he left. Proving that he had never had enough time to kill Andie Bell.
‘Y-yeah,’ Naomi said shakily. ‘Good idea.’
Pip watched the three of them in the front camera of Cara’s phone, waiting for Naomi to get her positioning right, lining up the shot. She took the photo. Shifted her smile and her eyes and took another, Cara fidgeting beside her.
‘Good,’ she said, studying it, her eyes drawn to the little white numbers on Naomi’s home screen, telling them the photo had been taken at 10:51 p.m. exactly. The numbers that had helped her crack a case once before, and now they were helping her make one. Concrete evidence. Try not believing that, Hawkins.
They took more photos. Videos too. Naomi filming Cara as she attempted to see how many chips she could fit in her mouth at once, spitting them into the bin while the table of drunk men cheered her on. Cara zooming in on Pip’s face while she sipped her Coke, zooming and zooming, until the shot was only of Pip’s nostril, while she innocently asked, ‘Are you filming me?’ A line they had prepared.
It was a performance. Hollow, orchestrated. A show for Detective Inspector Hawkins days from now. Weeks, even.
Pip forced down another chicken nugget, her gut protesting, foaming and simmering. And then she felt it, that metallic coating at the back of her tongue.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, standing up abruptly, the others looking up at her. ‘Gotta pee.’
Pip hurried across the concourse, her trainers shrieking against the just-mopped tiles as she headed towards the toilets.
She pushed through the door, almost crashing into someone drying their hands.
‘Sorry,’ Pip just about managed to say, but it was coming, it was coming. Rising up her throat.
She darted into a cubicle, slamming the door behind her but no time to lock it.
She dropped to her knees and leaned over the toilet just in time.
She vomited. A shudder down to the very deepest parts of her as she vomited again. Her body convulsing, trying to rid itself of all that darkness. But didn’t it know, that was all inside her head? She threw up again, undigested bits of food, and again, until it was just discoloured water. Until she was empty, retching with nothing more to come, but the darkness remained.
Pip sat back beside the toilet, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She pulled the flush and sat there for a moment, breathing hard, her neck resting against the cool tiles of the bathroom wall. Sweat trickled down her temples and the insides of her arms. Someone tried to push into her cubicle, but Pip kicked it shut with one foot.
She shouldn’t stay in here too long. She had to hold it together. If she broke down then the plan did too and she wouldn’t survive it. Just a few more hours, a few more boxes to tick in her head, and then she would be clear. Safe. Get up, she told herself, and the Ravi inside her head said it too, so she had to listen.
Pip pushed up to her feet, shakily, and pulled open the cubicle. Two women around her mum’s age stared at her as she walked over to the sink to wash her hands. Wash her face too, but not too hard that it cleared away the foundation covering the tape marks beneath. She swilled cold water around her mouth and spat it out. Took one tentative sip.
Their stares hardened, disgust in the way they held their upper lips.
‘Too many Jägerbombs,’ Pip said, shrugging at them. ‘You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,’ she told one of the women before leaving the bathroom.
‘Alright?’ Naomi asked her as she sat back down.
‘Yeah.’ Pip nodded, but her eyes were still watering. ‘No more for me.’ She pushed the food away and reached for Cara’s phone to check the time. It was 11:21 p.m. They should probably leave in the next ten minutes. ‘How about a McFlurry before we go?’ she said, thinking of that final charge on her card, another breadcrumb in the trail she was leaving for Hawkins.
‘I really couldn’t eat anything else.’ Cara shook her head. ‘I’ll be sick.’
‘Two McFlurries coming up.’ Pip stood, grabbing her purse. She added, under her breath, ‘To go. Or go in the bin when I drop you home.’
She waited in line again, shuffling a few steps forward at a time. She ordered the ice creams, told the cashier she didn’t care which flavour. She tapped her card to pay for them, that beep reassuring her. The machine was on her side, telling the world that she’d been right here, until gone eleven thirty. Machines didn’t lie, only people did.
‘Here we are,’ Pip said, passing the too-cold McFlurries into their hands, glad to be away from the smell of them. ‘Let’s go.’
They didn’t talk much on the way back either, driving the same A-roads in reverse. Pip wasn’t there with them any more, she’d moved forward in time, back to Green Scene Ltd and the river of blood on the concrete. Working through everything she and Ravi still had to do. Memorizing the steps, so nothing got forgotten. Nothing could be forgotten.
‘Bye,’ she said, almost laughing at how ridiculous and small the word sounded, as Cara and Naomi stepped out of her car, untouched ice creams still clutched in their hands. ‘Thank you. I… I can never thank you enough for… but we can never talk about it again. Never mention it. And remember, you don’t need to lie. I came here, made one phone call, then we drove to McDonalds, and I dropped you home after at,’ Pip checked the time on the dashboard, ‘11:51 p.m. That’s all you know. That’s all you say, if anyone ever asks you.’
They nodded. They got it now.
‘Will you be OK?’ Cara asked, her hand hesitating on the passenger door.
‘I think so. I hope so.’ The truth was, there were still so many things that could go wrong, then all of this would have been for nothing, and Pip would never be OK again. But she couldn’t tell them that.
Cara was still hesitating, waiting for a firmer answer, but Pip couldn’t give her one. She must have realized, reaching back inside to give Pip’s hand a squeeze before closing the door and walking away.
The sisters watched as Pip reversed out of their drive, one final wave.
OK, Pip nodded to herself, turning down the hill. Alibi: done.
She followed the moon and the plan, and in that moment, they were one and the same, taking her back home and to Ravi.
