His voice was all Pip heard, for the second night in a row, staring up at the dark shadows on her ceiling, moulding them into shapes with her mind while Hawkins spoke. Eyes wide open, so they couldn’t be taped shut. The gun firing in her heart.
I suppose if you were ever involved in anything like this, you’d know exactly how to get away with it.
In her head, Pip lifted and dipped the words, just as he had, laid the same pressure on the same syllables.
Hawkins hadn’t brought it up again, when he and Pip sat in Interview Room 1 and she showed him her research into Jason, handed over the photos and the log-in details for Andie’s email account. He told her, indirectly, that they had already found this connection to the DT Killer and it was being looked into, but that her information was helpful, thank you. He’d shaken her hand before seeing her out. Had his hand lingered over hers just a little too long, though? Like he was trying to feel for something?
Pip tried the sentence out again, filling herself with his voice, analysing it from every angle, staring into every gap and intake of breath.
It was a joke, on the surface, that was all. But he hadn’t said it like that, more stuttering, more uncertain, breathy from the laugh to take the sting out of it.
He knew.
No, he couldn’t know. They had their killer. He had no evidence and she had an alibi.
OK, well, if he didn’t know, then there was a small part of him – tiny, minuscule even, the part he might lock away at the back of his mind – and that part had its doubts. It was ridiculous, it was nonsensical; Pip had an iron-clad alibi somewhere else and the case against Max was strong. But was it too strong – just a little too easy and a little too clumsy? asked the small voice in the back of his head. A lingering suspicion he didn’t know he could trust. That’s what he’d been studying her eyes for, searching for traces of that doubt.
Max had been arrested and charged and the police were re-investigating the DT Killer case. Billy Karras would be released. Pip had survived. She was free and safe, and so was everyone she cared about. Ravi had laughed and cried and held her too tight when she told him. But… but if that was winning, why did it not feel like it? Why was she still sinking?
I’ll come find you when I’m done, the Hawkins in her head told her. She knew what he’d meant at the time, that he would come get her for their talk when he was finished processing Max. But that’s not what he meant in this echo in her head. It was a promise. A threat. I’ll come find you when I’m done.
He knew or he didn’t, he suspected or he didn’t, he thought and he over-thought and he shook it off and he came back to it. It didn’t matter which; somewhere, somehow, the idea was in his head, however small, however ridiculous and irrational. It was there. Hawkins had let her in for one second and she’d seen it planted there.
She and Hawkins, the last ones standing, staring at each other from their opposite corners. He hadn’t picked up on the truth before, with Sal Singh and Andie Bell, or with Jamie Reynolds’ disappearance. But Pip had grown and changed and maybe Hawkins had too. And that one thought, that one small doubt hiding at the back of his head was her undoing.
Pip cried and she cried until she was empty because she knew. She couldn’t rest, she couldn’t have her normal life back, the one thing she wanted above all else. The one thing all of this had been for. That was it, the price she’d have to pay. She spent hours talking it through with herself, running scenarios, asking ifs and whens, and she only saw one way through this, one way to keep everyone safe from her. One more plan.
She knew what had to be done. But it might just kill her to do it.
