But she couldn’t do this on her own, without him. That was unthinkable too. A loneliness too dark and deep.
Her legs felt weak as she stepped over Jason’s body and stumbled outside on to the gravel. Fresh air. She breathed in the fresh twilit air, but it was tainted somehow, by the metallic smell of blood.
She walked, six, seven steps away, towards his car, but that smell, it followed her, held on to her. Pip turned to look at herself, her dark reflection in the window of the car. Her hair was matted and torn. Her face raw and inflamed from the tape. Her eyes faraway and yet also right here. And those freckles there, they were new. Cast-offs of Jason’s blood.
Pip felt her vision dip in and out, knees buckling underneath her. She looked at herself and then looked into herself, through the dark of her eyes. And then past herself: there was something beyond the window drawing her eye, a moonlit glint on its surface, showing her the way again. It was her bag. Her bronze-coloured rucksack, sitting in the back seat of Jason’s car.
He’d taken it when he’d taken her.
It wasn’t much but it was hers, and it felt like an old friend.
Pip scrabbled for the door handle and pulled. It opened. Jason must have left the car unlocked, his keys still waiting there in the ignition. He had meant to finish it quickly, but Pip had finished it first.
She reached in and pulled out her bag, and she wanted to hug it to her chest, this part of her old self before she’d almost died. To borrow some of its life. But she couldn’t do that, she’d get his blood on it. She lowered it to the gravel and undid the zip. Everything was still here. Everything she’d packed when she’d left the house that afternoon: clothes for staying at Ravi’s, her toothbrush, a water bottle, her purse. She reached in and took a long draw from the water bottle, her mouth dried out from all those taped-up screams. But if she drank any more, she’d be sick. She replaced the bottle and stared at the bag’s contents.
Her phone wasn’t here. She’d already known that, but hope had partially hidden the memory from her. Her phone was smashed; dropped and abandoned in the road down Cross Lane. There was no way Jason had brought it with him for that very same reason: an irrevocable link to the victim. He’d got away with this for a long time; he knew things like that, just as she knew them.
Pip almost sank to her knees, but a new thought caught her in time, and the moon again, glinting on something in the front passenger seat. Yes, the DT Killer did know things like that, that’s why they’d never caught him. And that’s why he must have used a burner phone to call his victims, otherwise his connection to the case would have been discovered right after the first victim. Pip knew this now because she could see it, right there. Discarded in the front passenger seat. A small, boxy Nokia, like hers, the screen reflecting the moonlight to catch her eye, showing her the way. Pip opened the car door and stared down at it. Jason Bell had a burner phone. Paid in cash, untraceable to her, or Ravi, unless someone found the phone. But they wouldn’t find it; she would destroy it after.
Pip reached down, her fingers alighting on its cold plastic edge. She pressed the middle button and the green back-lit screen glared up at her. It still had battery. Pip glanced up and thanked the moon, almost crying with relief.
The numbers on the screen told her it was 6:47 p.m. That was it, that was all. She’d been in the boot of that car for days, in that storeroom for months, trapped inside the tape for years, and yet it had all happened in under three hours. 6:47 p.m.: a normal early evening in September, with a pink-tinged twilight and a chill in the breeze, and a dead body behind her.
Pip navigated through the menu to check the recent call list: at 3:51 p.m., this phone had received a call from No Caller ID, from her. And right before that, it had called Pip’s number. She would have to destroy the phone anyway, because of that connection between her and the dead man on the floor over there. But this was it; her path to Ravi, to help.
Pip typed Ravi’s number in the keypad, but her thumb hesitated over the call button. She backspaced and deleted it, replacing it with the landline for his house. That was better, less of a direct link to him, if they ever found the burner phone. They won’t find the burner phone.
Pip clicked the green button and held the small phone to her ear.
It rang. Only through the phone this time. Three chimes and then a click. Rustling.
‘Hello, Singh residence,’ said a bright, high voice. It was Ravi’s mum.
‘Hi, Nisha, it’s Pip,’ she said, her voice rasping at the edges.