‘Er, this was on my route, just down the road.’ She pulled up the photo on her phone and held it out to Ravi. ‘Someone wrote that on the pavement in chalk.’

‘Dead Girl Walking,’ he muttered, and hearing it in someone else’s voice changed the meaning somehow. Made her see it differently. Proof that it did exist outside of her own head. ‘Do you think this was for you? Connected to the pigeons?’ he asked.

‘It was on my running route, right after the point where I normally start walking to cool down before home,’ she said. ‘If someone’s been watching me, they would know that.’

Why would someone be watching her, though? It sounded more ridiculous when she said it out loud.

Ravi shook his head. ‘OK, I really don’t like this.’

‘It’s fine, sorry, it’s probably nothing to do with me,’ Pip said. ‘Just being stupid.’

‘No, you’re not,’ he said, voice hardening. ‘OK, fine, we don’t know for sure if you have a stalker or not, but this tips it for me. I mean it now, and I know what you’re going to say, but I think you should go to the police.’

‘Wh—And they’ll do what, Ravi? Nothing, as usual.’ She could feel the anger spiking again. No, not with him, control yourself. She breathed and swallowed it down. ‘Especially when I don’t even know myself.’

‘If this is the same person emailing you, the same one who left the chalk and the pigeons, then this person is threatening you,’ he said, widening his eyes in the way that told her he was serious. ‘They might be dangerous.’ He paused. ‘It might be Max.’ Another pause. ‘Or Charlie Green.’

It wasn’t Charlie, could never be Charlie. But Pip had thought of Max, his face flashing into her mind when she’d first read the words. Who else would know her running route so well? And if Max hated her as much as she hated him, well then...

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But maybe they aren’t connected, and if they are it might just be someone messing with me.’ Her instincts told her that wasn’t true, even as she said it, she only wanted to take the worry out of his eyes, bring back the smile. And she didn’t want to go back to that police station; anything but that.

‘I guess it all depends,’ Ravi said.

‘On?’

‘On whether they just found those dead birds or... whether they killed them. There’s a world of difference there.’

‘I know,’ she exhaled, hoping he would keep his voice down, in case Josh could somehow hear. A new feeling in her gut now that Ravi and instinct were taking the same side against her. She didn’t want this to be real. She preferred the other option: that she was seeing a pattern where there was none, her brain too fine-tuned to danger, because that would soon be fixed along with everything else. Save Jane Doe, save herself.

‘We shouldn’t take the chance.’ Ravi ran his thumb across her collarbone. ‘You leave for uni in a couple of weeks, so I think everything will be OK and this will probably die down. But if it is the latter, if this person is dangerous, then this is not something you can deal with on your own. You need to report this. Tomorrow.’

‘But I can’t –’

‘You’re Pippa Fitz-Amobi,’ he smiled, brushed the flyaway hairs from her eyes, ‘there’s nothing you can’t do. Even if it’s biting your tongue and asking DI Hawkins for help.’

Pip growled, dropped her head to roll around her neck.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Ravi said, patting her on the back. ‘Well done. Now can you show me where this chalk was? I want to see it.’

‘OK.’

Pip turned to lead him away from the house, his hand grabbing for hers, fingers sliding into the gaps between her knuckles. Holding on. Hand in hand: the boy with a dimple in his chin, and the dead girl walking.

File Name:

Dead girl walking photo.jpg

Pip hated this place. As she stepped towards the entrance, catching sight of the blue-painted waiting room beyond, she could feel her skin recoiling from it, unwrapping from her flesh, begging her to turn back. Retreat. The voice in her head too. This was a bad place, a bad, bad place. She shouldn’t be here.

But she’d promised Ravi, and her promises still meant something to her. Especially with him.

And so she was here, Amersham Police Station. The Thames Valley Police shield glaring down at her, covered in a thin layer of windswept grime. The automatic doors jumped open and swallowed her whole.

She passed the regimented lines of cold metal chairs facing the reception desk. A man and a woman were sat against the back wall, swaying slightly, as though the police station were at sea. Drunk, clearly, at 11 a.m. Though Pip had had to take a Xanax to work up the nerve to even come here, so who was she to judge them?

Pip approached the desk, hearing the drunk man whisper an almost affectionate, ‘Fuck you,’ immediately parroted by the slurred voice of the woman. To each other, not Pip, though it might as well have been: everything inside this building was hostile, a bad memory, a fuck you – from the garish flickering bulbs to the scream of the polished floor beneath her shoes. It had squealed just the same way when she was here, months ago, asking Hawkins to look for Jamie Reynolds so she didn’t have to. Begging him. How different things would be now if only he had said yes.

Just as she reached the desk, Eliza the detention officer strolled out of the attached office with a sharp, ‘Right, you two!’ She looked up and jumped at the sight of Pip. Pip didn’t blame her; she must look terrible. Eliza’s face softened, a pitying smile as she fiddled with her grey hair. ‘Pip, darling, didn’t see you there.’

‘Sorry,’ Pip said quietly. But Eliza had seen her, and now Pip saw her too. Not here and now, in the reception area with the drunk couple behind, but on that night, back inside the belly of the police station. That very same pitying expression on Eliza’s face as she helped Pip peel off her blood-drenched clothes. Gloved hands packing them away into clear evidence bags. Pip’s top. Her bra. The pinkish smears of dead Stanley all over Pip’s skin as she stood there, bare and shivering, in front of this woman. A moment that bound them forever, hanging like a ghost at the corners of Eliza’s smile.

‘Pip?’ Eliza’s eyes had narrowed. ‘I said, what can I do for you today?’

‘Oh.’ Pip cleared her throat. ‘I’m here to see him again. Is he here?’

Eliza exhaled, or had it been a sigh? ‘Yes he is,’ she said. ‘I’ll go tell him you’re here. Please, take a seat.’ She gestured at the front row of metal chairs before disappearing through the back office.

Pip wouldn’t take a seat; that would be a surrender. This was a bad, bad place and she couldn’t let it have her.

The sound came sooner than she was expecting; the harsh grating buzz as the door to the back half of the station opened and DI Hawkins stepped through, in jeans and a light shirt. ‘Pip,’ he called, though he didn’t need to, she was already following him, through the door and into the worse, worse part of the station.

The door closed and locked behind her.

Hawkins glanced back with a jerk of his head that might have been a nod. Down this very same corridor, past Interview Room 1, the same journey she had walked back then, in new bloodless clothes. She never found out whose they were. She’d followed Hawkins then too, into a small room off to the right, with a man who never said his name, or he had and Pip never heard. But she remembered Hawkins’ grip on her wrist, to help her as she pressed each finger into the ink pad and then on to the correct square on the paper grid, the patterns of her fingerprints like never-ending mazes, made only to trap you. ‘It’s just to rule you out. To eliminate you.’ That’s what Hawkins had said, back then. And all Pip remembered saying was: ‘I’m fine.’ No one could have thought she was fine.