The gentle hum of an engine greeted them outside. They already had Jason’s car up and running, the air-con on the coldest setting, every vent in the car opened up fully. Doors closed to keep in the chill. Ravi had found some ice packs in the freezer in the office building, presumably for workplace accidents. But now they were dotted around the inside of the car, close to the vents, cooling it even more.
‘I’ll get the door,’ Ravi said, leaning down to place Jason’s feet gently on the gravel. Pip stuck her leg forward, buttressed against Jason’s back to take some of the weight.
Ravi opened the door to the back seat.
‘Already pretty cold in there,’ he said, returning to the other end of Jason and picking him up with a grunt.
Carefully, half-steps at a time, they manoeuvred the rolled-up tarp through the car door, dropping Jason on to the back seat and sliding him through.
It was already cold in here, like leaning inside a fridge, and Pip could see the foggy billows of her breath in front of her as she tried to push Jason further in. His head, his undone head, wouldn’t fit inside.
‘Hold on,’ Pip said, running round the back of the car to open the other door. She reached through the opening at the end of the tarp, gripped Jason’s ankles and pushed them up to bend his knees, using the extra room to drag him all the way in. Holding him in position as she slowly closed the door, the sound of his feet knocking against it, like he was trying to kick his way free.
Ravi closed the door on the other side, and stepped back, clapped his hands together with a tense outward breath.
‘And it will keep running for hours, while we’re gone?’ Pip checked again.
‘Yeah, he has almost a full tank. It will keep going, long as we need it to,’ Ravi replied.
‘Good, that’s good,’ she said, another word she knew to be meaningless. ‘So, now we go. Back home. The plan.’
‘The plan,’ Ravi parroted her. ‘Feels scary, leaving it like this, invisible traces of you all over it.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s secure; no one is coming here. Jason said so himself. He planned to kill me here, and he had all night, all weekend. No cameras or alarms. So, we have the same. Everything will be the same when we get back. And then we remove those traces, plant new ones.’ She glanced through the car window, at the rolled-up black tarp, and the dead man inside who wasn’t dead yet. Not if everything worked out.
Ravi removed his gloves. ‘You taking your rucksack?’
‘Yes,’ Pip said, pulling her gloves off too, placing them and Ravi’s pair inside her unzipped bag. Her duct-tape binds were in here too, removed from the storeroom: ankles, wrists, unwound mask with her ripped-out hair.
‘And you have everything in there, everything you came with?’
‘Yes, it’s all in here,’ she said, zipping it up. ‘Everything I packed in it this afternoon. Now the gloves, the used duct tape. Jason’s burner phone. I’ve left nothing behind.’
‘And the hammer?’ Ravi asked.
‘That can stay here.’ She straightened up, shouldering the bag. ‘We can clean my prints off it later. Max will need a murder weapon too.’
‘OK,’ Ravi said, taking the lead, heading towards his car abandoned by the open Green Scene gate. ‘Let’s go home.’
One last check.
Ravi leaned in close across the handbrake, studying her, his breath sweet but sharp on her face.
‘There’s still some on your face that’s dried. And on your hands.’ He glanced down. ‘And there’s spots on your jumper. You’ll have to get upstairs quickly, before they see you.’
Pip nodded. ‘Yeah, I can do that,’ she said.
She’d laid her spare T-shirt out on the seat, so no blood would transfer on to Ravi’s car. And she’d used her spare pair of underwear, pouring a little water from her bottle, to try to wipe the blood from her face and her hands while Ravi drove the back roads. It would have to do.
Pip opened the car door with her elbow and stepped out, leaning back in to stuff the T-shirt she’d sat on in her bag too, zipping it up. House keys in the other hand.
‘Are you sure?’ Ravi asked her again.
‘Yes,’ she told him. They’d been over the plan again. Over and over in the car. ‘I can do this part on my own. Well, you know what I mean.’
‘I can help,’ Ravi said, a hint of desperation in his voice.
Pip looked at him, took in every inch and left none behind. ‘You’ve already helped, Ravi, more than you know. You helped me stay alive in there. You came to get me. I can do this part alone. What will help me is you being safe. That’s what I want. I don’t want any of this to come back on you, if it goes wrong.’