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.’

‘I know, but –’

Pip cut him off. ‘So, you’re going to go establish your alibi now, for the whole evening. In case our timings don’t work out and we don’t delay the time of death by enough. What are you going to do?’ She wanted to hear him say it again: airtight, iron-clad.

‘I’m going home to grab my phone, then driving to Amersham to pick up my cousin, Rahul,’ Ravi said, staring ahead. ‘Use the A-roads, so the traffic cams pick me up. Going to take out some cash from an ATM, so the camera there also gets me. Then we’re going to go to Pizza Express, or another chain, and order food, pay with my card. Be loud, draw attention to us, so people remember us being there. Take photos and videos on my phone, showing us there. Make a call too, probably to Mum to tell her what time I’ll be home. I’m going to text you and ask you how your evening is going because I don’t know you lost your phone yet and we haven’t seen each other all day.’ He took a quick breather. ‘Then we’ll go to the pub where all my cousin’s friends hang out, lots of witnesses. Stay until eleven thirty. Then I drop Rahul home, and I drive back, fill up with petrol on the way, so another CCTV camera gets me. Go home, pretend to go to bed.’

‘Good, yes,’ Pip said, glancing at the clock on the car’s dashboard. It had just gone ten past eight. ‘Meet me at midnight?’

‘Meet you at midnight. And you’ll call me?’ he asked. ‘From your burner phone, if anything goes wrong.’

‘It won’t go wrong,’ Pip answered, trying to convince him with her eyes.

‘Be careful,’ he said, tightening his grip on the wheel, a substitute for her hand. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you,’ she said, another last time. But it wouldn’t be the last; she’d see him in a few hours.

Pip closed the door and waved to Ravi as he indicated and peeled off down the road. She took one deep breath, to prepare herself, and then she turned and walked down her driveway to the front door.

She saw her family through the front window, the frames of the TV dancing across their faces. She watched them for a moment, out here in the dark. Josh was folded up on the rug in his pyjamas, awkward and small, playing with his Lego. Her dad was laughing at something on the TV, and Pip could feel its vibrations even out here. Her mum tutted, slapped a hand against his chest, and Pip heard her saying, ‘Oh, Victor, that’s not funny.’

‘It’s always funny when people fall over,’ came his booming reply.

Pip felt her eyes prickling, a catch in her throat. She thought she’d never see them again. Never smile with them, or cry, or laugh, never grow old as her parents grew older, their traditions becoming hers, like the way her dad made mashed potato, or the way her mum decorated the tree at Christmas. Never see Josh grow into a man, or know what his forever-voice sounded like, or what made him happy. All those moments, a lifetime of them, big and small. Pip had lost them, and now she hadn’t. Not if she could pull this off.

Pip cleared her throat, dislodging the lump, and unlocked the front door as quietly as she could.

She crept inside, shutting the door behind her with a barely audible click, hoping the noise of an audience clapping from the TV would cover it. Keys gripped too hard in her fist so they wouldn’t make a sound.

Slowly, carefully, holding her breath, she passed the living-room door, glancing at the backs of their heads against the sofa. Her dad moved and Pip’s heart dropped, freezing her to the spot. No, it was OK, he was just shifting his position, placing his arm around her mum’s shoulders.

Up the stairs, quiet, quieter. The third stair creaked under her weight.

‘Pip?! Is that you?’ her mum called, shuffling on the sofa to turn around.

‘Yeah,’ Pip called back, bounding up the stairs quickly before her mum got a good look. ‘It’s me! Sorry I’m just desperate for a wee.’

‘We have a toilet downstairs, you know,’ her dad shouted as she rounded the top of the stairs into the hallway. ‘Unless by wee, you really mean a p—’

‘Thought you were staying at Ravi’s?’ Her mum now.

‘Two minutes!’ Pip shouted in response, running straight for the bathroom, closing the door behind her, locking it. She’d have to clean that door handle too.

That was close. But they were acting normally; they hadn’t seen anything, not the flecks of blood, or her ripped-up hair, or the raw skin on her face. And those were Pip’s first tasks.

She pulled her hoodie off over her head, shutting her mouth and shutting her eyes, so none of the drying blood would stray inside. She dropped it carefully, inside out on the tiles. She kicked off her trainers, and her socks, then peeled off her dark leggings. She couldn’t see any blood against the material, but she knew it was there, hiding somewhere in the fibres. And then her sports bra, a small, rusted stain near the middle where some of the blood had transferred through her hoodie. She left the clothes in a pile and turned on the shower.

Warm. Hot. Hotter. So hot that it hurt to step inside under the stream. But it needed to be hot, to feel like it was scouring away the top layer of her skin. How else would she ever feel clean of DT? She scrubbed at herself with shower gel, watching as the pinky blood-dyed water ran off her legs, between her toes and down the drain. She scrubbed and scrubbed again, finishing off the half-full shower gel, cleaning under her fingernails too. She washed her hair, three separate times, the strands feeling thinner, more brittle now. Shampoo stinging the graze on her cheekbone.

When she finally felt clean enough, Pip stepped out into a towel, leaving the water running for a while longer, to wash away any residue of blood on the shower tray. She’d clean that later too.

With the towel tucked under her armpits, she grabbed the flip-lid bathroom bin nestled beside the toilet and pulled out the plastic bucket liner from inside. There were just two empty toilet rolls in it, and Pip removed these, stacking them on the windowsill instead. In the cabinet under the sink she found the toilet bleach, unscrewed the lid and poured some into the plastic bucket. More. All of it. She straightened up and filled the bucket halfway with warm water from the tap, diluting the bleach, the smell strong and noxious.

She’d have to make two journeys to her bedroom, but her family were all downstairs, it should be clear. Pip hoisted up the bucket, heavy now, holding it with one arm against her chest as she unlocked the bathroom door. She staggered out, across the landing, and into her bedroom, placing the bucket down in the middle, water sloshing dangerously close to the upper rim.