Elliot Ward would sit in prison for the rest of his life, but was he an evil man? A monster? Pip didn’t think so. He wasn’t the danger. He’d done a terrible thing, several terrible things, but she believed him when he said some of it was done out of love for his daughters. It wasn’t all wrong and it certainly wasn’t all right, it was just… there. Drifting messily in the middle somewhere.
And Max Hastings? Pip saw no grey here at all: Max Hastings was black and white, clear-cut. He was the danger, the danger that had outgrown the shadows and now made its home behind an expensive, disarming smile. Pip clung to this belief like she would fall off the world if she didn’t. Max Hastings was her cornerstone, the upturned mirror by which she defined everything, including herself. But it was meaningless, twisted, because Max had won; he would never see the inside of a prison cell. The black and white smudged back out to grey.
Becca Bell still had fourteen months left of her custodial sentence. Pip wrote a letter to her, after Max’s trial, and Becca’s scrawled reply had asked if she wanted to come visit. Pip had. She’d been three times now, and they spoke on the phone every week at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. Yesterday they’d talked about cheese for the full twenty minutes. Becca seemed to be doing OK in there, maybe even close to happy, but did she deserve to be there at all? Did she need to be locked up, kept away from the rest of the world? No. Becca Bell was a good person, a good person who was thrown into the fire, into the very worst of circumstances. Anyone might have done what she did if pressure was applied to just the right place, to each person’s secret breaking point. And if Pip herself could see that, after what she and Becca went through, why couldn’t anyone else?
And then, of course, came the greatest knot in her chest: Stanley Forbes and Charlie Green. Pip couldn’t think about them too long, or she would unravel, come apart at the seams. How could both positions be both wrong and right at the very same time? An impossible contradiction that she would never settle. It was her undoing, her fatal flaw, the hill she would die and decay on.
If that was the cause – all these ambiguities, these contradictions, these grey areas that spread and engulfed all sense – how could Pip rectify that? How could she cure herself from the after effects?
There was only one way and it was maddeningly simple: she needed a new case. And not just any case – a case built only from black and white. No grey, no twisting. Straight, uncrossable lines between the good and the bad and the right and the wrong. Two sides and a clear path running through them for her to tread. That would do it. That would fix her, set things right. Save her soul, if she’d believed in those sorts of things. Everything could go back to normal. She could go back to normal.
It had to be just the right case.
And here it was: an unknown woman between twenty and twenty-five found naked and mutilated just outside of Cambridge. No one had looked for her when she disappeared. Never claimed so never missed. It couldn’t have been clearer: this woman deserved justice for the things done to her. And the man who had done them, he could never be anything other than a monster. No grey, no contradictions or confusion. Pip could solve this case, save Jane Doe, but the most important point was that Jane Doe would save her.
One more case would do it, put everything right.
Just one more.
Pip didn’t see them until she was standing right on top of them. She might never have seen them if she hadn’t stopped to re-tie the laces on her trainers. She lifted her foot and stared down. What the…
There were faint lines, drawn in white chalk, right at the top of the Amobis’ driveway, where it met the pavement just beyond. They were so faded that maybe they weren’t chalk at all, maybe they were salt marks left behind from the rain.
Pip rubbed her eyes. They were scratchy and dried out from staring at her ceiling all night. Even though yesterday evening with Ravi’s family had gone well and her face actually ached from smiling, she hadn’t earned back her sleep. There’d been only one place to find it, in that forbidden second drawer down.
She removed her balled-up fists from her eyes and blinked, her gaze just as gritty as before. Unable to trust her eyes, she bent to swipe a finger through the nearest line, held it up against the sun to study it. Definitely seemed like chalk, felt like it too, between the bulbs of her fingers. And the lines themselves, they didn’t seem like they could be natural. They were too straight, too intentional.
Pip tilted her head to look at them from another angle. There seemed to be five distinct figures; a repeating pattern of crossing and intersecting lines. Could they… could they be birds maybe? Like how children drew birds from a distance; squashed out Ms mounting cotton-candy skies? No, that wasn’t right, too many lines. Was it some kind of cross? Yeah, it looked like a cross maybe, where the longer stem split into two legs nearer the bottom.