‘Ravi, I know things. How do you not know by now that I know things?’
‘Well,’ Ravi glanced up at the sky, ‘it’s kinda chilly out tonight. Can’t be more than fifteen degrees outside. So, if we just need the car to cool ten degrees or so… yeah, yeah, I’d say that’s feasible.’
A shift in Pip’s ribcage, a feeling like relief that opened out her chest, gave her a little more space to breathe. They could do this. They might actually do this. Play god. Bring a man back to life for a few hours, so another could kill him.
‘And,’ she said, ‘when we get back here later –’
‘Turn on the heaters to the hottest setting, full blast,’ Ravi took over the sentence for her, speaking fast.
‘Bring his body temperature back up,’ Pip finished it.
Ravi nodded, eyes darting left to right as he ran it through his head again. ‘Yes. This is going to work, Pip. You’re going to be OK.’
She might, she just might. But they hadn’t even started yet, and time was ticking away from them.
‘Remember the last time we did this?’ Ravi asked her, pulling on the pair of work gloves he’d found in the office building, in a cupboard full of spare uniform parts bearing the company logo.
‘Moved a dead body?’ Pip asked, clapping her gloves together, small clumps of mud disintegrating into dust before her eyes.
‘No, we haven’t actually done that before,’ Ravi sniffed. ‘I meant, the last time we wore gardening gloves to commit a crime. Breaking and entering into the Bells’ house, his house.’ He nodded back in the direction of the chemical storeroom. ‘That, er…’ he drew off.
‘Don’t,’ Pip told him, giving him a stern look.
‘What?’
‘You were going to make a that escalated quickly joke, Ravi. I can always tell.’
‘Ah, I forgot,’ he said. ‘You know things.’
She did. And she knew that humour was Ravi’s tic, his way of coping.
‘OK, let’s do this,’ she said.
She crouched and pulled up one edge of the tarp covering the overgrown mower. The black plastic crinkled as she threw it up and over the machine, Ravi dragging it off from the other side. It came free, and Ravi folded it up roughly in his arms.
Pip guided him out of the large room, back into the chemical storeroom, the weedkiller fumes still strong, a headache starting to make itself known.
Ravi laid the tarp out over the concrete, beside Jason’s body, avoiding the blood.
Pip could read the tension in the way he held his mouth, that faraway look she was sure she had too.
‘Don’t look at him, Ravi,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to look at him.’
Ravi stepped towards her, as though to help her with the next part.
‘No,’ she said, sending him away. ‘You don’t touch him. You don’t touch anything unless you have to. I don’t want any traces of you here.’
That would be far worse than the unthinkable. If she went down for murder, but if Ravi went down with her. No, this could not touch him, and so he could not touch the scene. If they failed, it would all be on her, that was the deal. Ravi knew nothing. Saw nothing. Did nothing.
Pip bent to her knees on the other side of Jason, and slowly she reached out, gripping on to his shoulder and his arm. He wasn’t stiff yet, but rigor would start to set in soon.
She leaned forward and pushed, rolling Jason and his broken-open head on to his front. His face was untouched. Pale and slack, but he almost looked like he could be sleeping. Pip reset her grip and rolled him again, face down on the edge of the tarp, and again, face up in the middle.
‘OK,’ she said, pulling up one side of the tarp and wrapping it over him. Ravi did the same on the other side.
Jason was gone, tidied away. The remnants of the DT Killer; just a dark red puddle and a rolled-up tarp.
‘He needs to be lying on his back in the car, for the lividity,’ Pip said, positioning herself where Jason’s shoulders should be. ‘And then when we come back, we turn him on his front. The blood will re-settle, make it look like those hours never happened.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Ravi nodded, bending down and gripping Jason’s ankles, through the tarp. ‘One, two, three, lift.’
He was heavy, too heavy, Pip’s grip under his shoulders awkward through the sheet of plastic. But together they had him, walking slowly out the metal door, Ravi moving backwards, glancing down to check he wasn’t trekking through the blood.