She reached up to see what it was… but, wait, she couldn’t do that either. Her hands were clasped behind her. Stuck there. Stuck together.
She twisted one hand as much as she could, folded down her index finger to feel what was bound around her wrists.
Duct tape.
She should have known that. There was a strip of it across her mouth. She couldn’t move her legs apart; her ankles must be wrapped up too, though she couldn’t see that far down, even when she lifted her head.
Something new, unravelling from the pit of her stomach. A primal feeling, ancient. A terror beyond any words that could contain it. It was everywhere: behind her eyes, beneath her skin. Too strong. Like all the million, million pieces of her disappearing and reappearing at once, flickering in and out of existence.
She was going to die.
Shewasgoingtodieshewasgoingtodieshewasdeadshewasdeadshewasgoingtodie.
She might just die from this feeling alone. Her heart so fast it no longer sounded like a gun, but it couldn’t keep going like this. It would give out. It would surely give out.
Pip tried to scream again, pushing the word help against the duct tape, but it pushed it right back. A hopeless cry in the dark.
But there was still a spark of herself inside of all that terror, and she was the only one here who could help. Breathe, just breathe, she tried to tell herself. How could she breathe when she was going to die? But she took a deep breath, in and out of her nose, and she felt herself rallying inside, gathering in numbers, pushing that too-strong feeling into the dark place at the back of her mind.
She needed a plan. Pip always had a plan, even if she was going to die.
The situation was this: it was a Saturday, around four o’clock in the afternoon, and Pip was in the boot of his car – the DT Killer. Daniel da Silva. He was driving her to the place he planned to kill her. Her hands were bound, her feet were bound. Those were the facts. And she had more; Pip always had more facts.
The next one was particularly heavy, particularly hard to hear, even if it came from her own mind. Something she’d learned from one of those many true crime podcasts, something she never thought she’d need to know. The voice in her head repeated it to her plainly, no pauses, no panic: if you are ever abducted, you must do everything you can to avoid them taking you to a secondary location. Once you are in a second location, your chances of survival go down to less than one per cent.
Pip was being taken to a second location right now. She’d missed her chance, that small window of survival in the first few seconds.
Less than one per cent.
But for some reason, that number didn’t bring back the terror. Pip felt calmer, somehow. A strange quieting, as though putting a number to it made it easier for her to accept.
It wasn’t that she was going to die, but that she was very, very likely to die. An almost certainty, not enough left over for hope.
OK, she breathed. So, what could she do about it?
She wasn’t at the second location yet.
Did she have her phone on her? No. She’d dropped it when he grabbed her, heard it crack on the road. Pip raised her head and surveyed the boot, juddering as they swung down a rougher road. There was nothing in here except her. He must have taken her rucksack. OK, what next?
She should have been trying to visualize the route they were taking, make a mental note of the turns the car made. She’d been taken at the far end of Cross Lane, where the trees grew thick. She’d heard him start the engine, and she hadn’t felt the car turning so he must have carried on down that road. But that terror, it had blinded everything else while she’d flickered in and out, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the journey. She would guess they’d been driving for five minutes already. They might not even be in Little Kilton any more. But Pip didn’t see how any of that could help her.
OK, so what could help her? Come on, think. Keep her mind busy, so it didn’t go looking for that dark place at the back, where the terror lived. But a different question occurred to her instead. That question.
Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Now she’d never know the answer, because she’d be dead. But, no, that wasn’t right, she told herself, shuffling on to her side to release the pressure on her arms. She did know the answer, a knowledge that was bone-deep, a knowledge that would outlive her. Ravi would look for her. Her mum. Her dad. Her baby brother. Cara, more a sister than a friend. Naomi Ward. Connor Reynolds. Jamie Reynolds, just as she’d looked for him. Nat da Silva. Becca Bell, even.
Pip was lucky. So lucky. Why hadn’t she ever stopped to think about how lucky she was? All those people who cared about her, whether she deserved them or not.