Oh, wait. It might have been on Twitter. She pressed the blue icon to open the app, tapping into the advanced search options. She typed in the question again, in the field for this exact phrase, and her podcast handle in the to these accounts section.
She pressed search, her eyes spooling along with the loading circle.
The page filled with results: fifteen separate tweets sent to her, asking her that exact question. The most recent from just seven minutes ago, with the same ps. as the email. And at the bottom of the page was the very first time: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Sent on Sunday the 29th of April, in response to Pip’s tweet announcing the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: The Disappearance of Jamie Reynolds. That was it. The beginning. Over four months ago.
That felt so long ago now. Jamie had been missing for only one day. Stanley Forbes was walking around, alive, without six holes in him; Pip had spoken to him that very day. Charlie Green was just her new neighbour. There’d been no blood on her hands, and sleep didn’t always come easy, but it had come, nonetheless. Max was on trial and Pip had believed, down into the very deepest part of who she was, that he would face justice for what he’d done. So many beginnings on that bright April morning, beginnings that had led her here. The first steps along a path that had turned on her, twisting around itself until it only led down. But had something else begun on that exact day, too? Something that had been growing for four months and was only now rearing its head?
Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Pip pushed to her feet, back in her room now, the abandoned farmhouse locked away at the back of her mind. She sat on her bed. The question, the chalk figures, the two dead birds. Could they be connected? Could this be about her? It was tenuous at best, but had there been anything else? Anything she’d thought strange at the time, but her mind had abandoned it to chance? Oh… there had been that letter several weeks ago. Well, not even a letter. It had been just an envelope, Pippa Fitz-Amobi scribbled on the front in scratchy black ink. She remembered thinking there was no address, no stamp, so someone must have pushed it through the front door. But when she’d opened it – Dad standing beside her asking whether it was ‘old-fashioned nudes from Ravi’ – there’d been nothing inside at all. Empty. She’d put it in the recycling bin and never thought about it again. The mystery letter had been forgotten as soon as another letter had arrived with her name on it: the letter of demand from Max Hastings and his lawyer. Was it possible that envelope had been connected to all this?
And now she was thinking, maybe there’d been something else before that. The day of Stanley Forbes’ funeral. When the ceremony was over and Pip returned to her car, she’d found a small bouquet of roses tucked inside her wing mirror. Except every flower head had been picked off, red petals strewn over the gravel below. A bouquet of thorns and stems. At the time, Pip thought it must have been one of the protesters at the funeral, who hadn’t disbanded until the police were called. But maybe it wasn’t any of the protestors, not Ant’s dad or Mary Scythe or Leslie from the shop. Maybe it had been a gift, from the same person who wanted to know who would look for her when she disappeared.
If it was – if these incidents were connected – then this had been going on for weeks. Months, even. And she hadn’t realized. But maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe she was reading too much into everything now, all because of that second dead bird. Pip didn’t trust herself and she didn’t trust her fear.
Only one thing was clear: if these all were from the same person – from dead flowers to dead pigeons – then it was escalating. Both in severity but also occurrence. Pip needed to track it somehow, collect all the data points and see if there were any connections, if she really did have a stalker or if she was finally losing it. A spreadsheet, she thought, imagining the smirk on Ravi’s face. But it would help to see it all neatly laid out: help her work out if this was real or only real in the dark place at the back of her head, and if it was real, where it all might lead, what the end game was.
Pip made her way across the room to her desk, stepping over the tipped-out contents of the drawer; she would tidy that up later. She pulled her laptop open, double-clicked Google Chrome and pulled up an empty tab. She typed stalker into the search bar and pressed enter, scrolling down the list of results. Report a stalker on a government website, a Wikipedia page, a site about types of stalkers and Inside the mind of a stalker, psychology sites and crime statistics. Pip clicked on the first result and started to read through it all, turning to a fresh page in her notebook.