As Good As Dead （A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #3）
Holly Jackson
Dead-eyed, that’s what they said, wasn’t it? Lifeless, glassy, empty. Dead eyes were a constant companion now, following her around, never more than a blink away. They hid at the back of her mind and escorted her into her dreams. His dead eyes, the very moment they crossed over from living to not. She saw them in the quickest of glances and the deepest of shadows, and sometimes in the mirror too, wearing her own face.
And Pip saw them right now, staring straight through her. Dead eyes encased in the head of a dead pigeon sprawled on the front drive. Glassy and lifeless, except for the movement of her own reflection within them, bending to her knees and reaching out. Not to touch it, but to get just close enough.
‘Ready to go, pickle?’ Pip’s dad said behind her. She flinched as he shut the front door with a sharp clack, the sound of a gun hiding in its reverberations. Pip’s other companion.
‘Y-yes,’ she said, straightening up and straightening out her voice. Breathe, just breathe through it. ‘Look.’ She pointed needlessly. ‘Dead pigeon.’
He bent down for a look, his black skin creasing around his narrowed eyes, and his pristine three-piece suit creasing around his knees. And then the shift into a face she knew too well; he was about to say something witty and ridiculous like – ‘Pigeon pie for dinner?’ he said.
Yep, right on cue. Almost every other sentence was a joke from him now, like he was working that much harder to make her smile these days. Pip relented and gave him one.
‘Only if it comes with a side of mashed rat-ato,’ she quipped, finally letting go of the pigeon’s empty gaze, hoisting her bronze rucksack on to one shoulder.
‘Ha!’ He clapped her on the back, beaming. ‘My morbid daughter.’ Another face shift as he realized what he’d said, and all the other meanings that swirled inside those three simple words. Pip couldn’t escape death, even on this bright late August morning in an unguarded moment with her dad. It seemed to be all she lived for now.
Her dad shook off the awkwardness, only ever a fleeting thing with him, and gestured to the car with his head. ‘Come on, you can’t be late for this meeting.’
‘Yep,’ Pip said, opening the door and taking her seat, unsure what else to say, her mind left behind as they drove away, back there with the pigeon.
It caught up with her as they pulled into the car park for Little Kilton train station. It was busy, the sun glinting off the regimented lines of commuter cars.
Her dad sighed. ‘Ah, that fuckboy in the Porsche has taken my spot again.’ Fuckboy: another term Pip immediately regretted teaching him.
The only free spaces were down the far end, near the chain-link fence where the cameras didn’t reach. Howie Bowers’ old stomping ground. Money in one pocket, small paper bags in the other. And before Pip could help herself, the unclicking of her seat belt became the tapping of Stanley Forbes’ shoes on the concrete behind her. It was night now, Howie not in prison but right there under the orange glow, downward shadows for eyes. Stanley reaches him, trading a handful of money for his life, for his secret. And as he turns to face Pip, dead-eyed, six holes split open inside him, spilling gore down his shirt and on to the concrete, and somehow it’s on her hands. It’s all over her hands and -
‘Coming, pickle?’ Her dad was holding the door open for her.
‘Coming,’ she replied, wiping her hands against her smartest trousers.
The train into London Marylebone was just as busy, standing shoulder to shoulder with other passengers, awkward closed-mouth smiles substituting sorrys as they bumped into one another. There were too many hands on the metal pole, so Pip was holding on to her dad’s bent arm instead, to keep her steady. If only it had worked.
She saw Charlie Green twice on the train. The first time in the back of a man’s head, before he shifted to better read his Metro. The second time, he was a man waiting on the platform, cradling a gun. But as he boarded their carriage, his face rearranged, lost all its resemblance to Charlie, and the gun was just an umbrella.
It had been four months and the police still hadn’t found him. His wife, Flora, had turned herself in at a police station in Hastings eight weeks ago; they’d somehow got separated on the run. She didn’t know where her husband was, but the rumours circulating online were that he’d managed to make it to France. Pip looked out for him anyway, not because she wanted him caught, but because she needed him found. And that difference was everything, why things could never go back to normal again.