‘Oh, right, because there wasn’t a trial?’ Harriet asked.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Pip lied. They slid easily off her tongue now. ‘And what I really wanted to talk to you about was a statement you gave to a reporter from UK Newsday on the 5th of February 2012. Do you remember it? I know it was a long time ago now.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’ Harriet paused to take a sip of her coffee. ‘They all ambushed me outside the house on my way home from school. It was my first day back too, had only been a week or so since Julia was killed. I was young and stupid. I thought you had to talk to reporters. Probably told them a whole load of nonsense. I was crying, I remember that. My dad was furious after.’
‘Specifically, I wanted to ask you about two things you said on that occasion.’ Pip picked up a print-out of the article and passed it to Harriet, lines of bright pink highlighter at the bottom. ‘You mentioned some weird occurrences in the weeks leading up to Julia’s murder. The dead pigeons in the house, and those chalk figures. Could you tell me about those?’
Harriet nodded slightly as she scanned the page, reading back her own words. Her eyes looked heavier when she glanced up again, cloudier. ‘Yeah, I don’t know, it was probably nothing. Police didn’t seem that interested in it. But Julia definitely found it weird, enough to comment on it to me. Our cat was old then, basically housebound, used to shit in the living room instead of going outside. He definitely wasn’t in his hunting prime, put it that way.’ She shrugged. ‘So, killing two pigeons and dragging them through the cat flap did seem weird. But I guess it was probably one of the neighbour’s cats or something, leaving us a present.’
‘Did you see them?’ Pip asked. ‘Either of the dead birds?’
Harriet shook her head. ‘Mum cleared up one, Julia did the other. Julia only found out about the first one when she was complaining about having to mop the blood off the kitchen floor. Her one didn’t have a head, apparently. I remember my dad getting mad at her because she’d put the dead pigeon in the recycling bin,’ she said with a sad sniff of a smile.
Pip’s stomach lurched, thinking of her own headless pigeon. ‘And the chalk figures, what about those?’
‘Yeah, I never saw those either.’ Harriet took another sip, the microphone picking up the sound. ‘Julia said they were up on the street, near our drive. I guess they washed away before I got back. We lived near a young family then, so it was probably those kids.’
‘Did Julia mention seeing them again? Getting closer to the house, maybe?’
Harriet stared at her for a moment.
‘No, don’t think so. She did seem bothered by them though, like they were on her mind. But I don’t think she was scared.’
Pip’s chair creaked as she shifted. Julia should have been scared. Maybe she was, and she’d hid it from her little sister. She must have seen them, mustn’t she? Those three headless stick figures, creeping closer and closer to the house, to her, their number four. Did she think she was imagining them, like Pip had? Had she also questioned whether she was drawing them for herself when sleep-deprived and drugged up?
Pip had been silent too long. ‘And,’ she said, ‘those prank calls you mentioned, what were they?’
‘Oh, just calls from blocked numbers, not saying anything. It was probably just PPI or someone trying to sell her something. But, you know, these reporters were really pushing for me to tell them anything out of the ordinary in the last few weeks, put me on the spot. So, I just told them the first things that came to mind. I don’t think they were related to Bil—the DT Killer.’
‘Do you remember how many calls she got in that week?’ Pip leaned forward. She needed at least one more, one more to catch him.
‘I think it was three, maybe. At least. Enough for Julia to comment on,’ said Harriet, and her answer was a physical thing, coaxing up the hairs on Pip’s arms. ‘Why?’ she said. She must have noticed Pip’s reaction.
‘Oh, I’m just trying to work out whether the DT Killer had contact with his victims beforehand. Whether he stalked them, and that’s what those calls were, and the pigeons and the chalk,’ she said.
‘I dunno.’ Harriet’s fingers were lost inside her hair again. ‘He never said anything about that in his confession, did he? If he confessed to everything else, why wouldn’t he admit that too?’
Pip chewed her lip, running the scenarios through her head, how best to play this. She couldn’t tell Harriet that she thought it possible the DT Killer and Billy Karras were two different people: that would be irresponsible. Cruel, even. Not without concrete evidence.