‘No, you’re fucking not,’ Ravi said to her, his voice cracking down the line, his breath fast and panicked.
Pip gripped the phone too hard against her ear. One of her burner phones; she didn’t trust her real phone for this conversation. All those traces, those ties to Ravi.
‘I have to,’ she said, picturing the look in his eyes, staring off into that middle space as the world fell down around them.
‘I asked you multiple times,’ he said, a flash of anger now, crackling in his voice. ‘I said did you check you had everything in your bag. I said that, Pip! I said did you check!’
‘I know, I’m sorry, I thought I did.’ She blinked, tears pooling at the crack in her mouth, her gut twisting to hear him like this. ‘I forgot about them. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault, that’s why I have to confess, so it’s only me –’
‘But you have an alibi,’ he said, and he was trying not to cry now, Pip could tell. ‘The pathologist thinks Jason died between half nine and twelve and you’re covered for that whole time. It’s not over, Pip. The headphones are circumstantial, we can think of something.’
‘It’s a direct link between me and Jason,’ she said.
‘We can think of something,’ Ravi said louder, speaking over her. ‘Come up with a new plan. That’s what you do, what we do.’
‘Hawkins caught me in a lie, Ravi. He caught me in a lie and that and the headphones give him probable cause. That means they can probably get a warrant to collect my DNA, if they want to. And if we accidentally left any hairs, anything behind at the scene, then it’s over. The plan only worked if there was never a connection to me, only indirectly through my call to Epps that night and the podcast. It’s over.’
‘It isn’t over!’ he shouted, and he was scared, Pip could feel it through the phone, catching her too, burrowing under her skin like a living thing. ‘You’re giving up.’
‘I know,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘I am giving up. Because I can’t have you go down with me. Or the Reynoldses or the Wards or Nat. That was the deal. If it went wrong, I was the only one who would take the fall. It went wrong, Ravi, I’m sorry.’
‘It hasn’t gone wrong.’ She heard shuffling down the line, the sound of his fist punching out against a pillow. ‘It worked. It fucking worked and you have an alibi. How can you confess when you were somewhere else at the time?’
‘I’ll tell them what I did with the car air-con, the same trick, it just didn’t work as well. Your alibi covers you from 8:15 that night, so maybe I tell them I killed him at around eight, that leaves you totally in the clear. I put him in the car and I went to fake my alibi with Cara and Naomi. They didn’t know anything. They’re innocent.’ Pip wiped her eyes. ‘They’ll stop looking if I do this. A confession is the single most prejudicial piece of evidence, we know that from Billy Karras. They won’t need to keep looking. I’ll tell Hawkins who Jason was, what he was going to do to me. I don’t think they’ll believe me, unless there’s any evidence Jason was DT, but maybe there is, somewhere. There’s the trophies. Self-defence is out the window, especially with the whole elaborate scheme to cover it up, but maybe a good lawyer would be able to argue the charge down from murder to voluntary manslaughter and I ca—’
‘No!’ Ravi said, desperate and angry. ‘You’ll be in prison for decades, maybe your whole life. I won’t let that happen. Max killed Jason, not you. There is so much more evidence that points to him than you. We can do this, Pip. It can still be OK.’
It hurt too much to hear him like this. How was she going to be able to say goodbye when he was actually right there in front of her? Her ribs closed in on her heart, squeezing until it gave out, thinking about not being able to see him every day ever again, only fortnightly visits across a cold metal table, guards watching to make sure they didn’t touch. That wasn’t a life, not one she wanted for herself or for him.
Pip didn’t know what to say, she couldn’t fix this.
‘I don’t want you to,’ Ravi said quietly. ‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘If it’s a choice between me and you, I choose you,’ Pip whispered.
‘But I choose you too,’ Ravi said.
‘I’ll come over to say goodbye before I go.’ She sniffed. ‘I’m going to go downstairs and have one last normal family dinner. Say goodbye to them, even though they won’t know. Just one last bit of normal. And then I’ll come say goodbye to you. Then I go.’
Silence.
‘OK,’ Ravi finally said, his voice thicker now, and something else in it that Pip didn’t recognize.
‘I love you,’ she said.
The phone clicked off, dead tone ringing in her ears.
