A cat and tyre marks. Those made sense, perfect sense. What was wrong with her? Why did she need it to be something bad, like she was looking for trouble? She held a breath. Just one more case. Save Jane Doe and save yourself. That’s all it would take, and she wouldn’t be like this any more: misplaced inside her own head. She had a plan. Just stick to the plan.

Pip quickly checked her phone. A text from Ravi: Would it be weird to have chicken nuggets ON TOP of pizza?

And an email from Roger Turner: Hi Pip, Should we have a chat sometime this week, now you’ve had a chance to think about the offer from the mediation? Best wishes, Roger Turner.

Pip exhaled. She felt sorry for Roger, but her answer was the same. Over her dead body. What was the most professional way of saying that?

She was about to open the email when a new notification slotted in beneath. Another message had come through the form on her website, to [email protected]. The preview read: Who will look for you... and Pip knew exactly what the full text would say. Yet again.

She opened up the message from anon to delete it. Maybe she could set up some kind of blocker that would send them straight to spam? The message opened and Pip’s thumb hovered over the bin icon.

Her eyes stopped her just in time, catching on one word.

She blinked.

Read the message in full.

Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?

PS. Remember to always kill two birds with one stone.

The phone slipped from her hands.

The soft thud of her phone falling to the carpet was the shot of a gun, aiming through her chest. Echoing five times, until her heart captured the sound and carried it on.

She stood there for a moment, numb to everything, except the violence erupting beneath her skin. Great thunderclaps of gunshots and cracking bones, the sucking sound of blood between her fingers, and a scream: hers. The words rupturing at the edges as they threw themselves around her head: Charlie, please don’t do this. I’m begging you.

The cream walls of her room peeled away, revealing burning and blackened timbers, collapsing in on themselves. The abandoned farmhouse resurrected in her bedroom, filling her lungs with smoke. Pip closed her eyes and told herself she was here and now, she wasn’t there and then. But she couldn’t do it, not alone. She needed help.

She staggered through the fire, arm up to shield her eyes. To her desk, fingers fumbling, finding the second drawer on the right. She pulled it out, completely, tipped the drawer out on the burning floor. Red string unravelled away from her, papers fluttered, pins scattered, tangling in white headphone wires. The cardboard bottom that hid her secrets flipped away, and out came the six burner phones, falling from their carefully structured order. Last out was the small, clear bag.

Pip ripped it open with shaking fingers. How were there so few left already? She tipped out one pill and swallowed it dry, her eyes watering as it scraped her throat.

She was here and now. Not then and there. Here and now.

It wasn’t blood, it was just sweat. See? Wipe it on your leggings and see.

Not then and there.

Here and now.

But was here and now any better? She stared at her phone, abandoned on the floor over there. Kill two birds with one stone. Two dead pigeons on the driveway, one with dead all-seeing eyes, and one with none. That wasn’t a coincidence, was it? Maybe it wasn’t a cat, maybe someone really had put them there, along with those chalk figures drawing closer and closer. The same someone who was desperate for Pip to answer that one question: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Someone who knew where she lived. A stalker?

She’d been looking out for trouble, and so it had found her.

No, no, stop. She was doing it again, taking things too far, seeking danger where maybe there was none. Kill two birds with one stone. It was a very common phrase. And she’d been receiving that question from anon for a long time, and nothing had happened to her so far, had it? She was here, she hadn’t disappeared.

She crawled along the floor and overturned her phone, the device recognizing her face and unlocking. Pip swiped into her emails, clicking into the search bar. She typed in, who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? + anon.

Eleven emails, twelve including the one she just got, all from different accounts, all asking her that same question. Pip scrolled up. She’d received the first one on the 11th of May, the messages starting out further apart, getting closer and closer together, only four days between the final two. May 11th? Pip shook her head; that didn’t seem right. She remembered getting the first one earlier than that, around the time Jamie Reynolds had disappeared and she’d been the one looking for him. That’s why the question had stuck out to her.

Oh, wait. It might have been on Twitter. She pressed the blue icon to open the app, tapping into the advanced search options. She typed in the question again, in the field for this exact phrase, and her podcast handle in the to these accounts section.

She pressed search, her eyes spooling along with the loading circle.

The page filled with results: fifteen separate tweets sent to her, asking her that exact question. The most recent from just seven minutes ago, with the same ps. as the email. And at the bottom of the page was the very first time: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Sent on Sunday the 29th of April, in response to Pip’s tweet announcing the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder: The Disappearance of Jamie Reynolds. That was it. The beginning. Over four months ago.

That felt so long ago now. Jamie had been missing for only one day. Stanley Forbes was walking around, alive, without six holes in him; Pip had spoken to him that very day. Charlie Green was just her new neighbour. There’d been no blood on her hands, and sleep didn’t always come easy, but it had come, nonetheless. Max was on trial and Pip had believed, down into the very deepest part of who she was, that he would face justice for what he’d done. So many beginnings on that bright April morning, beginnings that had led her here. The first steps along a path that had turned on her, twisting around itself until it only led down. But had something else begun on that exact day, too? Something that had been growing for four months and was only now rearing its head?

Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?

Pip pushed to her feet, back in her room now, the abandoned farmhouse locked away at the back of her mind. She sat on her bed. The question, the chalk figures, the two dead birds. Could they be connected? Could this be about her? It was tenuous at best, but had there been anything else? Anything she’d thought strange at the time, but her mind had abandoned it to chance? Oh... there had been that letter several weeks ago. Well, not even a letter. It had been just an envelope, Pippa Fitz-Amobi scribbled on the front in scratchy black ink. She remembered thinking there was no address, no stamp, so someone must have pushed it through the front door. But when she’d opened it – Dad standing beside her asking whether it was ‘old-fashioned nudes from Ravi’ – there’d been nothing inside at all. Empty. She’d put it in the recycling bin and never thought about it again. The mystery letter had been forgotten as soon as another letter had arrived with her name on it: the letter of demand from Max Hastings and his lawyer. Was it possible that envelope had been connected to all this?