Day seventy-two.
Pip counted them, every single day, marking them off in her mind.
A mid-December day in Cambridge and the sun was already fading from the sky, staining it the pink of washed blood.
Pip gathered her coat around her and pushed on, walking the old streets, narrow and winding. In three days she’d be here again and it would be seventy-five days since, well on the way to one hundred.
No trial date set yet, in fact, she’d heard nothing for a while. Only something small yesterday: Maria Karras emailed her a photo of a grinning Billy decorating a Christmas tree, wearing a garish red jumper covered in reindeer. Pip had smiled back at him through the screen. Day thirty-one, that’s when they’d released Billy Karras, all charges dropped.
Day thirty-three had been the day the news broke about Jason Bell being the DT Killer.
‘Hey, isn’t that the guy from your town?’ someone had asked her in the common room of their halls, the news on the TV in the background. Most people didn’t talk to Pip; she kept herself to herself, but really she was keeping herself away from everyone else.
‘Yeah, it is,’ Pip had said, turning up the sound.
Jason Bell hadn’t just been the DT Killer, he’d also been the South-East Stalker, a rapist who’d operated in the south-east area of London between the years 1990-1994, connected by DNA evidence. Pip worked it out: 1994 was the year Andie Bell had been born. Jason stopped when his first daughter was born and they’d moved away to Little Kilton. The DT Killer claimed his first victim when Andie was fifteen, when she’d first started to look like the woman she might become. Maybe that’s why her father had done it. He stopped when she died – well, almost, but no one else would ever know about his sixth victim. Andie’s entire life had been bookended by the monster living in her home, by his violence. She hadn’t survived him, but Pip had, and Andie could come with her, wherever she went.
Pip turned the corner, cars shushing past her, re-adjusting her book-heavy rucksack on her shoulders. Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. Pip pulled it out and stared down at the screen.
Her dad was calling.
A knot in her gut and a hole in her heart. Pip pressed the side button to ignore the call, let it ring out in her pocket. She’d text him tomorrow, say sorry she’d missed his call, she’d been busy, maybe tell him she’d been in the library. Increase the gaps between every phone call, until they were long, long stretches, weeks between, then months. Texts unread and unreplied. Term had already finished and Pip had paid to keep her room over the break, telling her parents she wanted to get her assignments done. She’d have to think of something over Christmas, some reason she couldn’t go back to town. Pip knew it would break their hearts, it was breaking hers, but this was the only way. Separation. She was the danger, and she had to keep them away from her, in case any of it rubbed off on them.
Day seventy-two. Pip was only two and a half months into her exile, her purgatory, walking these old, cobbled streets over and over, round and round. She walked, every day, and she made promises. That’s what she did. Promises of how she would be different, how she would be better, how she would deserve her life back and everyone in it.
She would never complain ever again about taking Josh to one of his football matches, and she’d answer his every curiosity, big or small. Be his big sister, his teacher, the person he could look up to, until the day when he outgrew her and she looked up to him instead.
She’d be kinder to her mum, who had only ever wanted the best for her. Pip should have listened more, she should have understood. Pip had taken her for granted: her strength, the roll of her eyes and the reason for her pancakes, and she’d never do that again. They were a team – they had been from the start, from her very first breath – and if Pip could have her life back, they would be a team again, until her mum’s last. Holding hands, old skin on older skin.
Her dad. What she wouldn’t give to hear his easy laugh again, hear him call her his pickle. She would thank him every day, for choosing her and her mum, for everything he’d ever taught her. Tell him all the ways she was like him and so glad for it, how he’d shaped the person she’d become. She just had to become that person again. And if she could, maybe it would happen one day, her dad’s arm in hers as he walked her down that aisle, stopping halfway to tell her how proud he was.
Her friends. She’d always ask them how they were before they could ask her. She wouldn’t let anything get in the way, wouldn’t need them to be understanding because she would be instead. Laugh with Cara until it hurt in phone calls that lasted three hours, Connor’s bad puns and awkward arms, Jamie’s kind smile and big heart, Nat’s strength that she’d always admired so much, Naomi who’d been a big sister to her when Pip needed one most.
And Becca Bell, Pip made a promise to her: she would tell Becca everything when they were both free. Pip had had to cut her off too, missed visits, missed phone calls. But prison wasn’t Becca’s cage; her father had been her cage. He was gone now, but Becca deserved to know everything, about her dad and how he died, about Max, and the part Pip had played. But mostly she deserved to know about Andie. Her big sister who’d known about the monster in their house and did all she could to save Becca from him. She deserved to read Andie’s email and know how much she was loved, that those cruel things Andie said to her in her final moments was really her sister trying to protect her. Andie was terrified that one day their father would kill them both, and maybe she was scared that that would be the thing that made him snap. Pip would tell her all of it. Becca deserved to know that, in another life, she and Andie would have escaped their father, together.
Promises and promises.
Pip would earn them all back, if she got the chance.
It wasn’t Max’s trial she was waiting for, not really. It was hers. Her final judgement. The jury wouldn’t only decide Max’s fate, they would decide hers, whether she could have her life back and everyone in it.
Especially him.
She still spoke to Ravi every day. Not the real one, the one who lived in her head. She spoke to him when she was scared or unsure, asked him what he would do if he were there. He sat beside her when she was lonely, and she was always lonely, looking at old photos on her phone. He told her goodnight and kept her company in the dark while she learned how to sleep again. Pip wasn’t sure any more, if she was getting the timbre of his voice quite right, the exact way he had leaned into his words, whether they lilted or tilted. How had he said ‘Sarge,’ again? Had his voice dipped up or dipped down? She had to remember, she had to hold on, preserve him.
She thought about Ravi every day, almost every moment of every day, seventy-two days full of moments. What he was thinking, what he was doing, whether he’d like the sandwich she’d just eaten – the answer was always yes – whether he was OK, whether he missed her as much as she missed him. Whether that absence had grown into resentment.
She hoped, whatever he was doing, he would learn to be happy again. If that meant waiting for her, waiting for the trial, or if that meant waiting to find someone else, Pip would understand. It broke her heart to think of him doing that crooked smile for anyone else, making up new nicknames, new invisible ways of saying I love you, but that was his choice. All Pip wanted to know was that he was happy, that there was good in his life again, that was all. Her freedom for his, and it was a choice she would make over and over again.
And if he did wait, if he did wait for her and the verdict went their way, Pip would work every day to be the kind of person who deserved Ravi Singh.
‘You old softie,’ he said in her ear, and Pip smiled, a breath of laughter.
There was another sound, hiding beneath her breath, a faint whine, high and reeling, growing closer and closer.
A siren.
More than one.
Screaming up and down, clashing together.
Pip whipped her head around. There were three police cars at the end of the road, overtaking traffic, speeding towards her.
Louder.
Louder.
Blue lights spiralling, breaking up the twilight, flashing in her eyes and lighting up the street.
Pip turned away and shut her eyes, screwed them tight.
This was it. They’d found her. Hawkins had worked it out. It was over. They’d come for her.
She stood there and held her breath.
Louder.
Closing in.
Three.
Two.
One.
A scream in her ears. A rush of wind through her hair as the cars streamed past, one after the other, their sirens fading as they carried on down the road away from her. Left her behind on the pavement.
Pip peeled her eyes open, carefully, slowly.
They were gone. Their sirens dwindling to a whine again, then a hum, then nothing.
Not for her.
Not today.
One day they might be for her, but not today, day seventy-two.
Pip nodded, picked up her feet.
‘Just got to keep going,’ she told Ravi, and everyone else that lived in her head. ‘Keep going.’
Her judgement day would come, but for now, Pip walked and she promised. That’s all. One foot in front of the other, even if she had to drag them, even when that hole in her heart felt too big to keep standing. She walked and she promised and he was with her, Ravi’s fingers slotting in between hers in the way they used to fit, fingertips in the dips of his knuckles. The way they might again. Just one foot in front of the other, that was all. Pip didn’t know what was waiting for her at the end, she couldn’t see that far, and the light was failing, night drawing in, but maybe, just maybe, it would be something good.
3 minutes after the verdict was read in The Crown vs. Max Hastings:
