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.

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.