After the last year we have had, it would seem a glaring omission for me to not express my overwhelming gratitude and admiration to all NHS workers. Your everyday heroism and bravery during the Covid-19 pandemic at times made my contribution to society feel very small （typing away made-up stories about made-up people）， but I want to thank you for being so inspiring and compassionate, and for looking after us all during this horrific year. You truly are heroes and the national health service is an incredible privilege that we should protect at all costs.
Thank you to my writer friends, as always, for helping me navigate the tricky waters of publishing, especially during these lockdown releases. And for Zoom game sessions so I could virtually escape my flat and my deadlines （temporarily）。 Thank you to my Flower Huns for keeping me sane （remotely） during the pandemic. I look back fondly on those weekly quizzes. I can’t wait to do more IRL playing this year – although no more quizzes, yeah?
Thank you to my mum and dad as always for their unwavering support and for believing in me when no-one else did. I think you probably always knew I was going to be a writer from a young age, but thank you for fostering my love of stories by letting me have a childhood full of books, and video games, and TV and films. Not a second of it was wasted. Also thank you Dad for your first reader comments, and for understanding the book perfectly. And thanks Mum for telling Dad that you ‘felt sick’ when reading the book – that’s when I knew it was doing exactly what I wanted it to do!
Thank you to my sisters Amy and Olivia for their constant support, and for showing me just how important sisters are. Pip has had to find her own sisters （Cara, Naomi, Nat and Becca）， but I was lucky enough to have two from the very start. I’m sure your influence will be all over every example of sibling banter / bickering I ever write, so thank you for that!
To my nephew, George, who says I am his favourite author, despite being ten+ years too young to read my books, top marks for you! To my new niece, Kaci, for supplying the cuteness to keep me going during a dreadful year of deadlines, and for also being a badass pandemic baby. And especially to my niece Danielle, who is almost old enough to read these books now. Several years ago, when Danielle was about nine years old, she was studying creative writing at school, and she told me that all the best stories end in a dot dot dot… Well, Danielle, I have finished my first ever trilogy with a dot dot dot - I hope you’re proud （and I hope you’re right!）。
Thank you to Peter, Gaye and Katie Collis as ever for being my early readers and for being the best second family one could ask for.
To Ben, who is my cornerstone, my forever partner-in-crime. Without you, none of this would have been possible and Pip would never have seen the light of day, let alone made it to the end of book three. Thank you.
After writing a series that is so heavily influenced by true crime, it would seem strange for me to end without one comment on the criminal justice system and the areas in which it fails us. I feel a helpless despair when I look at the statistics of rape and sexual assault in this country and the abysmal rate of reporting and conviction. Something isn’t right here. I hope the books themselves do the talking for me on this front, and I think it’s clear that parts of these stories come from an angry place, both personal anger at the times when I have been harassed and not believed, and frustration at a system of justice that sometimes doesn’t feel very just.
But finally, to end on a lighter note, I want to thank all of you who have followed me through every page right to the end of book three. Thank you for trusting me, and I hope you found the ending you were looking for. I certainly did.
Pip knew where they lived.
Everyone in Little Kilton knew where they lived.
Their home was like the town’s own haunted house; people’s footsteps quickened as they walked by and their words strangled and died in their throats. Shrieking children would gather on their walk home from school, daring one another to run up and touch the front gate.
But it wasn’t haunted by ghosts, just three sad people trying to live their lives as before. A house not haunted by flickering lights or spectral falling chairs, but by dark spray-painted letters of Scum Family and stone-shattered windows.
Pip had always wondered why they didn’t move. Not that they had to; they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she didn’t know how they lived like that.
Pip knew a great many things; she knew that hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia was the technical term for the fear of long words, she knew that babies were born without kneecaps, she knew verbatim the best quotes from Plato and Cato, and that there were more than four thousand types of potato. But she didn’t know how the Singhs found the strength to stay here. Here, in Kilton, under the weight of so many widened eyes, of the comments whispered just loud enough to be heard, of neighbourly small talk never stretching into long talk any more.