Max Hastings got home at 3:27 a.m. after killing Jason Bell.
Pip pulled up into the drive outside the Hastings house, parking the car exactly where it had been before, at the start of the night. She switched off the engine; the headlights blinked off and the darkness crept in.
Ravi pulled himself up from the back seat, stretched out his neck. ‘Glad the petrol light came on, just to give this night one last jolt of adrenaline. Really needed one last hit.’
‘Yeah,’ Pip exhaled, ‘that was a fun little plot twist.’
They couldn’t have stopped to fill up the car, of course; they were supposed to be Max Hastings, and petrol stations were covered in security cameras. But they’d made it home – Pip’s eyes constantly flicking to the warning light – and now it didn’t matter any more.
‘I should go in alone,’ Pip said, grabbing her rucksack and pulling out the car keys. ‘Be quick and quiet as possible. I don’t know how deep he’ll still be. You can walk home.’
‘I’ll wait,’ Ravi said, climbing out the door and carefully pushing it shut. ‘Make sure you’re OK.’
Pip stepped out, studied his face in the darkness, a streak of red in his eyes as she blipped the fob to lock Max’s car.
‘He’s unconscious,’ she said.
‘He’s still a rapist,’ Ravi replied. ‘I’ll wait. Go on, get it done.’
‘OK.’
Pip moved silently up to the front door, a glance at the taped-up cameras either side. She slid the house key into the lock and stepped inside the dark, sleeping house.
She could hear Max’s breaths from the sofa, deep and rattling, moving forward with each in and out to hide her steps beneath the sound. She wiped the car keys on Max’s hoodie; neither of them had touched them with their bare hands, but she wanted to be sure.
Upstairs first, her steps light and cautious, trekking mud from the crime scene into the carpet. She flicked on the light in Max’s bedroom, and dropped her bag to the floor, removing Max’s cap from her head and peeling his hoodie away from the one she was wearing underneath, careful not to dislodge her beanie. Pip checked the grey material for any of her dark hairs that might have caught. It was clear.
She studied the sleeves, to find the one with the bloodstain. Moved silently across the landing to the bathroom. Light on. Tap on. Dipped the bloody sleeve under the water, rubbed at it with her gloved fingers until the blood faded to a muted brown mark. She took it back to his bedroom with her, over to the wash basket where she’d found it. Pushed aside the towering pile of clothes and dumped the grey hoodie in, shoving it down to the very bottom.
She unlaced Max’s shoes, her own feet looking oversized and ridiculous in their five extra pairs of socks. The zigzag soles of his trainers were still caked in mud, clumps falling away as Pip placed them at the very back of his wardrobe, building up another pile of shoes around them, to hide them. From Max, not from the people who really mattered, the forensic team.
She went back for the cap, replacing it where she’d found it, balancing atop the hangers, and then closed the wardrobe. She returned to her bag, putting her own shoes on and reached inside for the sandwich bag with Max’s phone. Crept back down the stairs with it gripped in her hand.
Pip shuffled down the hallway, closer to him, closer, when all she wanted was to recoil, hide, in case two bright eyes snapped open in the middle of that angular face. The face of a killer; that’s what everyone had to believe.
One more step and she caught sight of Max over the back of the sofa, in the exact same position she’d left him more than six hours ago. Cheek crushed against the arm of the sofa and a thawed bag of peas, a string of saliva connecting him to it. Bruise darkening around his eye. Breaths so deep they shuddered his entire body.
He was out cold still. Pip checked, nudging the sofa, ready to duck if he stirred. He didn’t.
She stepped forward and slid his phone out of the sandwich bag, back on to the coffee table. She picked up his blue water bottle, took it over to the dark kitchen to wash it out several times and refill it, so there were no traces, no dregs of the drugs along the bottom.
She placed it back on the coffee table, spout open, her eyes snapping to Max’s face as he took a particularly heavy, shaking breath, sounding almost like a sigh.
‘Yeah,’ Pip whispered, looking down at him. Max Hastings. Her cornerstone. The upturned mirror by which she defined herself, everything he was and everything she wasn’t. ‘It sucks when someone puts something in your drink and then ruins your life, huh?’
She walked away and back out into the night, hiding her eyes from the too-bright stars.
‘You good?’ Ravi asked her.
A sound escaped her, a punch of breath that was almost a laugh. She knew what he’d meant, but the question hit deeper, reverberating around her gut, tucking itself in. No, she wasn’t good. She could never be again after today.
‘I’m tired,’ she said, her lower lip quaking. She shook it off, retook control. Couldn’t give in yet. Not done, but so close now. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Just got to remove the tape from the cameras.’
Ravi waited down the road while she did it. The same way she’d placed the duct tape earlier, sidling up against the front of the house, pulling it off, looping around the back of the house this time to remove the other. But it wasn’t her doing that, of course, it was Max Hastings. And this was the very last time she had to be him. She didn’t like it there, in his head, or him in hers. He wasn’t welcome there.
Pip clambered over the front fence and found Ravi on the moonlit street. Neither of them had left her yet, the moon still showing her the way.
They finally pulled off their latex gloves, the skin on both their hands wrinkled and damp as Pip slid her fingers in between his, where they belonged, hoping they still did. Ravi walked her home, and they didn’t speak, they just held hands, like they’d given everything already and there were no words left. Only three of them, the only three that mattered as Ravi said goodbye at her front drive.
His arms wrapped around her, too tight, like his holding her was the only thing stopping her from disappearing. Because she had already once today; she’d disappeared, and she’d said her final goodbyes to him. Pip burrowed her face into the place where his neck met his shoulder, warm, even when it had no reason to be.
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘I love you,’ he said back.
Pip kept those words close, forced the Ravi in her head to echo them as she silently unlocked her front door and crept inside.
Up the stairs, over the creaky one, back into her bedroom and the smell of bleach.
The first thing she did was cry.
Dropped on to her bed and wrapped a pillow around her face, taking it away just as DT had. Silent, aching sobs that retched, tearing at her throat, unpicking threads in her chest, leaving them unravelled and bare.
She cried and she let herself cry, a few minutes to grieve for the girl she could never be again.
And then she pushed herself up, and pushed herself back together, because she wasn’t finished yet. An exhaustion like she’d never known before, stumbling across her carpet like a dead girl walking.
She carried the bucket with the bleach mixture carefully out of her room, stepping with the loud outward breaths of her dad down the hall, disguising her movements beneath them. Into the bathroom and the shower, slowly tipping the mixture out and down the drain. The clothes and tape left behind were sodden, white bleach marks starting to leach the colour out of them.
Pip took the bucket and everything inside back to her room, pushing her door close-to but not clicking it shut; she’d be in and out over the next few hours.
From her rucksack, she laid out one of the larger plastic freezer bags – now empty – to protect the carpet and tipped out the wet, bleached things from the bucket. On top of those she added everything else from her rucksack that she needed to dispose of. Destroy and get rid of, so they could never be tied back to her. She knew just how to do it.
From the top drawer of her desk, she pulled out a pair of large scissors, sliding her fingers in through the red plastic handle. She stood over the pile and surveyed it all, creating new columns of boxes to tick off in her head. Small, manageable tasks, one at a time.
□ Sports bra
□ Leggings
□ Hoodie
□ Trainers
□ Rubber tube
□ Green Scene gloves x2
□ Used latex gloves x3
□ Nisha Singh’s mittens
□ Cleaning cloths
□ Rohypnol pills
□ Spare underwear
□ Spare T-shirt
□ Duct tape
□ Burner phone
□ Jason’s burner phone
She started with the first item, picking up the sloppy, stained-white mess of the sports bra she’d been wearing, the rusted bloodstain gone to the naked eye, but there would always be traces of it.
‘Was my favourite sports bra, you fucker,’ she muttered to herself as she took the scissors to them, cutting the stretchy material into small strips, and then into smaller squares. She did the same to her leggings, and her hoodie and all the clothes that had come into contact with Jason Bell or his blood. The cleaning cloths too. Cutting and snipping, and as she did, imagining a scene ten miles away, the fire brigade arriving at an out-of-control fire at a medium-sized grounds maintenance and cleaning company, summoned by a call from a concerned neighbour, not close enough to hear screams, but close enough to hear the sound of explosions in the night, wondering if they were fireworks.
A wet pile building up in front of her, mismatched squares of material.
The gloves next, cutting the latex ones into two-inch pieces. The material of the Green Scene work gloves was thicker, harder to cut, but Pip persisted, making sure to decimate the logo. Ravi’s mum’s mittens too, not tied to the crime scene, but Ravi had worn them when picking up Max’s car, and there might be fibres left inside; they had to be destroyed too. No room for errors or mistakes, even a microscopic one could mean the undoing of the plan and the undoing of Pip.
She cut the duct tape into two-inch pieces, finding where the gap in her left eyebrow had come from, the small hairs stuck into the tape that had wrapped her face. And finally, she snipped the rubber tube into tiny pieces, pushing the trainers and the two burner phones aside; she’d have to get rid of those some other way.
But the rest of it, this pile in front of her, it was all going one place: down the toilet.
Thank fuck for central sewage systems. As long as she didn’t block the pipes in the house – and she’d cut the pieces small to make sure that didn’t happen – everything here, all of this incriminating evidence, would end up at a public sewage treatment centre, no possible way to ever trace it back to her, or this house. Not that they would ever be found anyway; people flushed all sorts of things. It would all be filtered out of the sewage and end up in some landfill somewhere, or even incinerated. As close to disappearing as it was possible to get. No traces. Air-tight, iron-clad. It never happened.
Pip grabbed the clear bag of the remaining Rohypnol pills first; she didn’t like the way they were looking at her, and she didn’t trust herself around them. She grabbed a small handful of cut-up material too and, treading quietly, she walked across to the bathroom, closed the door, lowered her hands into the toilet bowl and dropped it all in.
She flushed, and watched it disappear, the pills the last thing to be sucked away by the whirlpool. Her family shouldn’t wake; they slept like the dead. And the flush was quiet, especially with the bathroom door shut.
The toilet bowl refilled as normal. Good. She shouldn’t try to push it, keep it to a small handful each time, and leave several minutes between every flush, so there was no build up anywhere in the pipes.
Pip quickly worked it out in her head. She had this toilet here, in the upstairs family bathroom, and the one downstairs near the front door. Two toilets, small handfuls, that large pile of evidence. This was going to take a while. But she had to be done before her family woke up. On the flip side, she couldn’t let her exhaustion make her rush, take too much at a time and cause a blockage in the pipes.
Pip went back for a second handful, sharing it between her cupped hands as she crept down the stairs – skipped the third step – and flushed it down the toilet.
Alternating trips, to the bathroom, and to the downstairs toilet, leaving enough time between each to refill. Doubting herself every time she flushed, that brief second of panic where it seemed like the toilet wasn’t refilling and oh shit she must have blocked it, she was finished, it was over, but the water always came back.
She wondered if the fire service had called the police in as soon as they saw the burned-out car and smelled the accelerant. It was a clear case of arson. Or would they wait, until they had the fire under control, and could see the bloody concrete floor in the ruined building?
Another handful. Another flush. Pip resting her mind in the repetition, just letting her hands do all the work for her, all the thinking. Up and down, to the pile and out.
At 6 a.m., her mind stirred back to life behind her dried-out eyes, wondering if the police were now just arriving at the smoky scene, nodding as the firefighters pointed out the obvious signs of foul play. It was clear someone had been badly hurt here, maybe even killed. Look at that hammer, we think that might have been the weapon. Were they starting their searches of the surrounding area? It wouldn’t take long for them to find the tarp, and the dead man inside it.
Would a detective be called to the scene then? Would it be DI Hawkins, disturbed from his Sunday lie-in, pulling on his dark green jacket while he made a call to the crime scene technicians and told them to meet him there right away?
Down the stairs. Flush. Up the stairs. Handful.
‘Secure the crime scene,’ Hawkins would be barking, the too-early morning chill biting at his face and his eyes. ‘Where’s the ME? No one else go near the body until I have photographs and a cast of those footwear impressions.’
Flush.
Time had positioned itself, halfway between six and seven. The medical examiner should be at the scene now, wearing a forensic plastic suit. Which would they do first? Take the temperature of the body? Feel his muscles for the state of rigor? Press their thumb into the skin of Jason’s back to see if the skin discolouration was still blanchable? Warm, stiff, blanchable; Pip repeated it in her head like a mantra. Warm. Stiff. Blanchable.
Were they right now, at this very second, doing those tests, working out the possible time frame in which this man died? Making initial observations, taking photographs? Hawkins watching it all from a distance. Was it happening now? Ten miles away and the person it all came down to, the one who decided whether Pip got to live or whether she didn’t.
Down the stairs. Flush.
Had they worked out who the dead man was yet? DI Hawkins knew him – acquaintances, maybe even friends – he should recognize his face. When would he tell Dawn Bell? When would he call Becca?
Pip’s fingers scrabbled against the clear plastic bag on the carpet. This was it, there were just four pieces left. One that looked like it was once part of her leggings, two pieces of latex glove and a swatch of her hoodie.
Pip straightened up and took a ceremonial breath before she flushed, watching that very last swirl of the water, taking everything away, disappearing it.
It was all gone.
It had never happened.
Pip stripped off her clothes and showered again. There was nothing on her skin, but it still felt unclean, marked in some way. She put her black hoodie and leggings at the top of her wash basket; there shouldn’t be anything incriminating on them, but she would still wash them on high, to be sure.
She pulled on a pair of pyjamas and rolled herself up in her duvet, shivering beneath it.
She couldn’t close her eyes. It was all she wanted to do, but she knew she couldn’t, because any second now…
Pip heard the sounds of the alarm from her parents’ bedroom, that squawking birdsong that was meant to be gentle, but it wasn’t because her mum had the volume on her phone too loud. Pip thought it sounded like the end of the world, a swarm of headless pigeons throwing themselves against the window.
It was 7:45 a.m. Far too early for a Sunday. But Pip’s parents had promised to take Joshua to Legoland.
Pip would not be going to Legoland.
She couldn’t, because she’d spent all night throwing up and sitting on the toilet. Alternating between the two as her stomach cramped and shuddered. Flushing a hundred times and ending up right back there, leaning over the toilet. That’s why the bucket from the bin was in her room, why it smelled of bleach. She’d tried to drown the vomit smell out of it.
Pip heard murmuring down the hall, as her mum woke up Josh, a small yap of excitement from him as he remembered the reason for the early morning. Voices back and forth, the sound of her dad rolling out of bed, that loud sigh he did as he stretched.
A gentle rap of knuckles on Pip’s door.
‘Come in,’ Pip said, her voice scratchy and foul. She didn’t even need to try to sound ill; she sounded broken. Was she broken? She thought she already had been before the longest day had begun.
Her mum poked her head inside, and her face wrinkled up immediately.
‘Smells like bleach in here,’ she said, confused, her eyes circling the bucket positioned by Pip’s bed. ‘Oh no, darling, have you been unwell? Josh said he heard the toilet flushing throughout the night.’
‘Been puking since about 2 a.m.,’ Pip sniffed. ‘And the other thing. Sorry, I was trying not to wake anyone. Brought the bucket in here but it smelled like sick so I cleaned it with toilet bleach.’
‘Oh no, sweetie.’ Her mum came over to sit on her bed, pressed the back of her hand against Pip’s forehead.
Pip almost broke right there and then, at her touch. At the devastating normality of this scene. At a mother who didn’t know how close she’d come to losing her daughter. And maybe she still would, if the plan went wrong, if the numbers the medical examiner was telling Hawkins right now weren’t what she needed them to be. If she’d overlooked something that the autopsy would find.
‘You do feel warm. You think it’s a bug?’ she said, her voice as soft as her touch, and Pip was so glad to be alive to hear it again.
‘Maybe. Or maybe something I ate.’
‘What did you eat?’
‘McDonalds,’ Pip said, with a closed-mouth smile.
Her mum widened her eyes in a there you go. She glanced behind her, at the door. ‘I told Josh we’d go to Legoland today,’ she said uncertainly.
‘You guys should still go,’ Pip said. Please go.
‘But you’re not well,’ her mum said. ‘I should stay and take care of you.’
Pip shook her head. ‘Honestly, I haven’t been sick in a while now. I think it’s over. I just want to get some sleep. Really. I want you guys to go.’ She watched her mum’s eyes flicker as she considered. ‘And just think about how annoying Josh will be if you don’t.’
Her mum smiled, tapped Pip under the chin, and Pip hoped she hadn’t felt the way it had quivered. ‘Can’t argue with you there. You sure you’ll be OK, though? Maybe I can get Ravi to come check in on you.’
‘Mum, really, I’m OK. I’m just going to sleep. Day-sleeping. Practising for university.’
‘OK. Well, let me at least get you a glass of water.’
Her dad had to come in as well, of course, after being told she wasn’t well and not coming.
‘Oh no, not my little pickle,’ he said, sitting beside her and making the entire bed sink, Pip almost rolling on to his lap because there was no strength left in her. ‘You look terrible. Soldier down?’
‘Soldier down,’ she replied.
‘Drink lots of water,’ he said. ‘Plain food only, even though it pains me to say that. Plain toast, rice.’
‘Yeah, I know, Dad.’
‘OK. Mum says you lost your phone, and apparently you told me that last night, but I remember no such thing. I’ll call the house phone in a few hours, check you’re still alive.’
He was about to walk out her door.
‘Wait!’ Pip sat up, scrabbling against the duvet. He hesitated at the threshold. ‘Love you, Dad,’ she said quietly, because she couldn’t remember the last time, and she was still alive.
A grin broke his face.
‘What do you want from me?’ he laughed. ‘My wallet’s in the other room.’
‘No, nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just saying.’
‘Ah, well, I’ll just say it too, then. Love you, pickle.’
Pip waited until they left, the sound of the car peeling up the drive, cracking the curtains to watch as they drove away.
Then with the very last of her strength, she pushed herself up and stumbled across the room, feet dragging beneath her. Picked up the damp trainers she’d hidden back in her rucksack, and the two burner phones.
Three boxes left to tick, she could do this, crawling towards that finish line, the Ravi in her head telling her that she could make it. She slipped the back cover off her burner phone. Pulled out the battery and the SIM card. Snapped the small plastic card between her thumbs, through the middle of the chip, just as she’d done with Jason’s. Carried it all downstairs.
Into the garage, to her dad’s toolkit. She replaced his duct-tape roll with another ‘Fucking duct tape,’ under her breath. Then she picked up his drill, pressing the trigger to watch the head spin for a moment, twisting the particles of air. She drove it through the small Nokia phone that used to live in her drawer, right through the screen, shattering it, black plastic scattering around the new hole. And again, to the phone that had belonged to the DT Killer.
One black bin bag for the trainers, tied up tight. Another for the SIM cards and batteries. Another for the small smashed-up burner phones.
Pip grabbed her long coat, hanging on the rack by the front door, slipped on her mum’s shoes, even though they didn’t fit.
It was still early, hardly anyone was out and about town yet. Pip stumbled down the road with the bin bags in one hand, holding the coat tight around her with the other. She could see Mrs Yardley up ahead, walking their dog. Pip turned the other way.
The moon was gone, so Pip had to guide herself, but there was something wrong with her eyes, the world moving strangely around her, stuttering, like it hadn’t loaded properly.
So tired. Her body close to giving up on her. She couldn’t really pick up her feet, only shuffle, tripping on the edges of the pavement.
Up on West Way, Pip picked a random house: number thirteen. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so random. To the wheelie bins at the end of their drive, the black one, for general rubbish. Pip opened it and checked there were already black sacks inside. Then she pulled the top one out, a waft of something rotten, and placed the bag with the trainers underneath, burying it under the other rubbish.
To Romer Close, the road where Howie Bowers had lived. Pip walked up to his house, though it could no longer be his house, and she opened the wheelie bin, shoving in the black bag with the SIM cards and batteries.
The last bag, the Nokia 8210 and some other kind of Nokia, with holes drilled through their middles, Pip put that in the bin outside that nice house on Wyvil Road, the one with the red tree in the front garden that Pip liked.
She smiled up at that tree as she ticked the final box in her head. The entire night of them, done, now falling to pieces inside her mind.
The bins were collected on a Tuesday. Pip knew that because every Monday evening her mum would call through the house, ‘Oh, Victor, you’ve forgotten to take the bins out!’
In two days, the burner phones and those trainers would find themselves on the way to a landfill site, disappeared along with everything else.
She was free of them, and she was done.
Pip returned home, tripping through the front door as her legs tried to give out under her. She was shaking now, shaking and shivering and maybe this is just what bodies did, in the aftermath of a night like that, destroyed by the adrenaline that had kept them going when they most needed to.
But there was no more doing. No more going.
Pip fell across her bed, too weak to even get her head to the pillows. Here would do, here was comfortable and safe and still.
The plan was over, for now. On pause.
There wasn’t anything more Pip could do. In fact, she was supposed to do nothing, live life as though she had just gone out for junk food with her friends and then to bed, nothing else. Call Ravi from the home phone later to tell him about her lost phone, so there was a record of that conversation, because of course she hadn’t seen him. Go replace the phone on Monday.
Just live. And wait.
No googling his name. No driving by the house just to see. No impatiently refreshing the news sites. That’s what a killer would do, and Pip couldn’t be one of those.
The news would come in its own time. Jason Bell found dead. Homicide.
Until then, she just had to live, see if she remembered how to.
Her eyes fell closed, breaths deepening in her hollowed-out chest, as a new darkness crept in, disappearing her.
Pip finally slept.
