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.
Pip waited.
The raw skin started to heal on her face and around her wrists, and she waited.
It didn’t come on Monday; Pip sitting on the sofa while the ten o’clock news played out, her mum shouting over it to remind her dad to take the bins out.
It didn’t come Tuesday either. Pip had BBC News on in the background all day while she set up her replacement phone. Nothing. No bodies found. Kept it on even when Ravi came round in the evening, talking with the haunted looks in their eyes, and the brief touches of their hands, because they couldn’t use words. Not until they were behind the closed door of her bedroom.
Had they not found him? That was impossible: the fire, the blood. Surely employees at Green Scene must know, they must have been told something was wrong, why they couldn’t go into work: the fire, the crime scene. Pip could just look them up – No. She couldn’t look anything up. That would leave a trace, a trail.
She just had to wait, fight that impulse to know. It would get her caught.
Sleep was difficult; what had she expected? She had nothing to take, and maybe she needed it even more now, because every time she closed her eyes she was scared they’d never re-open again, that they were taped down, and so was her mouth when she tried to breathe. Gunshot heartbeats. It was only the exhaustion that ever settled her.
‘Hello, sleepy,’ Pip’s mum said to her, Wednesday morning, as she made her way unsteadily downstairs, skipping the third one down out of habit now. ‘Couple of my showings cancelled this morning so I’ve made us coffee and breakfast.’
Pancakes.
Pip sat at the kitchen island and took a deep sip of her coffee, too hot in her still-ragged throat.
‘I’m going to miss you when you go off to uni, you know,’ her mum said, sitting across from her.
‘You’ll still see me all the time,’ Pip said, around a mouthful, not hungry, but she wanted to make her mum happy.
‘I know, but it’s not quite the same, is it? So grown up now, time goes like that.’ She snapped her fingers, glancing down at her phone as it pinged from its place on the counter. ‘That’s weird,’ she said, picking it up. ‘Siobhan from work has just texted me, telling me to put on the news.’
Pip’s chest closed around her heart, filling her head with the sound of cracking ribs. Her neck too cold, her face too warm. This was it, wasn’t it? What else could Siobhan mean? She kept her face neutral, digging her fork through the pancakes to have something to do with her hands. ‘Why?’ she said casually, watching her mum’s downturned face.