‘McDonalds,’ Pip said, with a closed-mouth smile.

Her mum widened her eyes in a there you go. She glanced behind her, at the door. ‘I told Josh we’d go to Legoland today,’ she said uncertainly.

‘You guys should still go,’ Pip said. Please go.

‘But you’re not well,’ her mum said. ‘I should stay and take care of you.’

Pip shook her head. ‘Honestly, I haven’t been sick in a while now. I think it’s over. I just want to get some sleep. Really. I want you guys to go.’ She watched her mum’s eyes flicker as she considered. ‘And just think about how annoying Josh will be if you don’t.’

Her mum smiled, tapped Pip under the chin, and Pip hoped she hadn’t felt the way it had quivered. ‘Can’t argue with you there. You sure you’ll be OK, though? Maybe I can get Ravi to come check in on you.’

‘Mum, really, I’m OK. I’m just going to sleep. Day-sleeping. Practising for university.’

‘OK. Well, let me at least get you a glass of water.’

Her dad had to come in as well, of course, after being told she wasn’t well and not coming.

‘Oh no, not my little pickle,’ he said, sitting beside her and making the entire bed sink, Pip almost rolling on to his lap because there was no strength left in her. ‘You look terrible. Soldier down?’

‘Soldier down,’ she replied.

‘Drink lots of water,’ he said. ‘Plain food only, even though it pains me to say that. Plain toast, rice.’

‘Yeah, I know, Dad.’

‘OK. Mum says you lost your phone, and apparently you told me that last night, but I remember no such thing. I’ll call the house phone in a few hours, check you’re still alive.’

He was about to walk out her door.

‘Wait!’ Pip sat up, scrabbling against the duvet. He hesitated at the threshold. ‘Love you, Dad,’ she said quietly, because she couldn’t remember the last time, and she was still alive.

A grin broke his face.

‘What do you want from me?’ he laughed. ‘My wallet’s in the other room.’

‘No, nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just saying.’

‘Ah, well, I’ll just say it too, then. Love you, pickle.’

Pip waited until they left, the sound of the car peeling up the drive, cracking the curtains to watch as they drove away.

Then with the very last of her strength, she pushed herself up and stumbled across the room, feet dragging beneath her. Picked up the damp trainers she’d hidden back in her rucksack, and the two burner phones.

Three boxes left to tick, she could do this, crawling towards that finish line, the Ravi in her head telling her that she could make it. She slipped the back cover off her burner phone. Pulled out the battery and the SIM card. Snapped the small plastic card between her thumbs, through the middle of the chip, just as she’d done with Jason’s. Carried it all downstairs.

Into the garage, to her dad’s toolkit. She replaced his duct-tape roll with another ‘Fucking duct tape,’ under her breath. Then she picked up his drill, pressing the trigger to watch the head spin for a moment, twisting the particles of air. She drove it through the small Nokia phone that used to live in her drawer, right through the screen, shattering it, black plastic scattering around the new hole. And again, to the phone that had belonged to the DT Killer.

One black bin bag for the trainers, tied up tight. Another for the SIM cards and batteries. Another for the small smashed-up burner phones.

Pip grabbed her long coat, hanging on the rack by the front door, slipped on her mum’s shoes, even though they didn’t fit.

It was still early, hardly anyone was out and about town yet. Pip stumbled down the road with the bin bags in one hand, holding the coat tight around her with the other. She could see Mrs Yardley up ahead, walking their dog. Pip turned the other way.

The moon was gone, so Pip had to guide herself, but there was something wrong with her eyes, the world moving strangely around her, stuttering, like it hadn’t loaded properly.

So tired. Her body close to giving up on her. She couldn’t really pick up her feet, only shuffle, tripping on the edges of the pavement.

Up on West Way, Pip picked a random house: number thirteen. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so random. To the wheelie bins at the end of their drive, the black one, for general rubbish. Pip opened it and checked there were already black sacks inside. Then she pulled the top one out, a waft of something rotten, and placed the bag with the trainers underneath, burying it under the other rubbish.

To Romer Close, the road where Howie Bowers had lived. Pip walked up to his house, though it could no longer be his house, and she opened the wheelie bin, shoving in the black bag with the SIM cards and batteries.

The last bag, the Nokia 8210 and some other kind of Nokia, with holes drilled through their middles, Pip put that in the bin outside that nice house on Wyvil Road, the one with the red tree in the front garden that Pip liked.

She smiled up at that tree as she ticked the final box in her head. The entire night of them, done, now falling to pieces inside her mind.

The bins were collected on a Tuesday. Pip knew that because every Monday evening her mum would call through the house, ‘Oh, Victor, you’ve forgotten to take the bins out!’

In two days, the burner phones and those trainers would find themselves on the way to a landfill site, disappeared along with everything else.

She was free of them, and she was done.

Pip returned home, tripping through the front door as her legs tried to give out under her. She was shaking now, shaking and shivering and maybe this is just what bodies did, in the aftermath of a night like that, destroyed by the adrenaline that had kept them going when they most needed to.

But there was no more doing. No more going.

Pip fell across her bed, too weak to even get her head to the pillows. Here would do, here was comfortable and safe and still.

The plan was over, for now. On pause.

There wasn’t anything more Pip could do. In fact, she was supposed to do nothing, live life as though she had just gone out for junk food with her friends and then to bed, nothing else. Call Ravi from the home phone later to tell him about her lost phone, so there was a record of that conversation, because of course she hadn’t seen him. Go replace the phone on Monday.

Just live. And wait.

No googling his name. No driving by the house just to see. No impatiently refreshing the news sites. That’s what a killer would do, and Pip couldn’t be one of those.

The news would come in its own time. Jason Bell found dead. Homicide.

Until then, she just had to live, see if she remembered how to.

Her eyes fell closed, breaths deepening in her hollowed-out chest, as a new darkness crept in, disappearing her.

Pip finally slept.

Pip waited.

The raw skin started to heal on her face and around her wrists, and she waited.

It didn’t come on Monday; Pip sitting on the sofa while the ten o’clock news played out, her mum shouting over it to remind her dad to take the bins out.

It didn’t come Tuesday either. Pip had BBC News on in the background all day while she set up her replacement phone. Nothing. No bodies found. Kept it on even when Ravi came round in the evening, talking with the haunted looks in their eyes, and the brief touches of their hands, because they couldn’t use words. Not until they were behind the closed door of her bedroom.