The sound came sooner than she was expecting; the harsh grating buzz as the door to the back half of the station opened and DI Hawkins stepped through, in jeans and a light shirt. ‘Pip,’ he called, though he didn’t need to, she was already following him, through the door and into the worse, worse part of the station.
The door closed and locked behind her.
Hawkins glanced back with a jerk of his head that might have been a nod. Down this very same corridor, past Interview Room 1, the same journey she had walked back then, in new bloodless clothes. She never found out whose they were. She’d followed Hawkins then too, into a small room off to the right, with a man who never said his name, or he had and Pip never heard. But she remembered Hawkins’ grip on her wrist, to help her as she pressed each finger into the ink pad and then on to the correct square on the paper grid, the patterns of her fingerprints like never-ending mazes, made only to trap you. ‘It’s just to rule you out. To eliminate you.’ That’s what Hawkins had said, back then. And all Pip remembered saying was: ‘I’m fine.’ No one could have thought she was fine.
‘Pip?’ Hawkins’ voice brought her back to now, back into this even heavier body. He had stopped walking, was holding the door open to Interview Room 3.
‘Thank you,’ she said flatly, ducking under the archway of his outstretched arm and into the room. She wouldn’t sit in here either, just in case, but she slid the straps of her rucksack from her shoulders and placed it down on the table.
Hawkins crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.
‘You know I will call you when it happens, right?’ he said.
‘What?’ Pip narrowed her eyes.
‘Charlie Green,’ Hawkins said. ‘We have no more information on his whereabouts. But when we do catch him, I will call you. You don’t have to come here to ask.’
‘It’s not… That’s not why I’m here.’
‘Oh?’ he said, the sound from his throat rising, turning it into a question.
‘It’s something else, really, that I thought I should tell you… report to you.’ Pip shifted awkwardly, pulled her sleeves down to cover her naked wrists. Leave nothing bare or exposed, not in this place.
‘Report something? What is it? What happened?’ Hawkins face rearranged; all sharp lines from his raised eyebrow to his tightened lips.
‘It’s… well, it’s possible I have a stalker,’ Pip said, the final syllable clicking in her throat. She was only imagining it, but it felt like she could hear that click bounding around the room, ricocheting off the plain walls and the dull metal table.
‘A stalker?’ Hawkins said, and the click had got into his throat too somehow. His face shifted again; new lines and a new curve to his mouth.
‘A stalker,’ Pip repeated, reclaiming the click as her own. ‘I think.’
‘OK.’ Hawkins sounded unsure too, scratching his greying hair to buy him some time. ‘Well, in order for us to look into this, there needs to have been –’
‘A pattern of two or more behaviours,’ Pip interrupted him. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve done my research. And there have been. More than that, in fact. Both online and… in real life.’
Hawkins coughed into his hand. He pushed off the wall and crossed the room, his shoes sliding across the floor, hissing like they had a secret message just for Pip. He perched against the metal table and crossed his legs.
‘OK. What were these incidents?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ Pip said, reaching for her bag. Hawkins watched her as she opened it and dug inside. She shifted her bulky headphones out of the way and pulled out the folded sheets of paper. ‘I made a spreadsheet of all the potential incidents. And a graph. A-and there’s a photo,’ she added, opening out the pages and handing them to Hawkins.
Now it was her turn to watch him, studying his downturned eyes as they flicked across the spreadsheet, up and down and up again.
‘There’s quite a lot here,’ he said, more to himself than her.
‘Yeah.’
‘Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?’ Hawkins read out the burning question, and the hairs rose up the back of Pip’s neck, hearing it out loud in his voice. ‘So, it started online, did it?’
‘Yes,’ she said, pointing at the top half of the page. ‘It started with just that question online, and quite infrequently. And then, as you can see, the incidents have become more regular, and then things started happening offline. And if they are connected then it is escalating: first the flowers on my car, and it has progressed to the –’