Pip’s eyes returned to Stanley. One of the paramedics had withdrawn, speaking into her radio. Pip could only catch a few words over the noise of the fire and all of that fog inside her head. ‘Medical control . . . twenty minutes . . . no change . . . call it . . .’
It took a moment for those words to work their way into her head and make any kind of sense.
‘Wait,’ Pip said, the world moving too slowly around her.
The paramedic nodded to the other. She sighed quietly and pulled her hands away from Stanley’s chest.
‘What are you doing? Don’t stop!’ Pip charged forward. ‘He’s not dead, don’t stop!’
She crashed towards Stanley, lying there, still and bloodied on the grass but Soraya caught her hand.
‘No!’ Pip screamed at her, but Soraya was stronger, pulling Pip into her arms and wrapping her up inside them. ‘Let me go! I need to –’
‘He’s gone,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s nothing we can do, Pip. He’s gone.’
And then things really came undone time skipping other words half-heard and half-understood: coroner and hello can you hear me?
Daniel is trying to talk to her and all she can do is scream at him.
‘I told you! I told you someone was going to end up dead.
Why didn’t you listen to me?’
Someone else’s arms on her. Stopping her.
Detective Hawkins is here now and where did he come from? His face doesn’t move much and is he dead too, like Stanley? Now he’s in the front of the car driving and Pip, she’s in the back watching the fire recede away as they drive. Her thoughts are no longer in straight lines, they
cascade
away from her
like ash.
The police station is cold, that must be why she is shivering. A back room she hasn’t seen before. And Eliza is here: ‘I need to take your clothes, darling.’
But they won’t come off when she pulls, they have to be peeled off, the skin underneath no longer hers, streaky and pink from blood. Eliza seals the clothes and all that’s left of Stanley inside a clear evidence bag. Looks at Pip. ‘I’m going to need your bra too.’
Because she’s right, that’s soaked red as well.
Now Pip’s wearing a new white T-shirt and grey jogging trousers but they aren’t hers and whose are they, then? And be quiet because someone is talking to her. It’s DI Hawkins: ‘It’s just to rule you out,’ he says, ‘to eliminate you.’ And she doesn’t want to say but she already feels eliminated.
‘Sign here.’
She does.
‘Just a gun powder residue test,’ says a new person Pip doesn’t know. And he’s placing something sticky, adhesive against her hands and her fingers, sealing them away in tubes.
Another sign here.
‘To rule you out, you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Pip says, letting them place her fingers into the soft ink pad and against the paper. Thumb, forefinger, middle, the swirling lines of her fingerprints like little galaxies of their own.
‘She’s in shock,’ she hears someone say.
‘I’m fine.’
A different room and Pip is sitting alone, a clear plastic cup of water between her hands but it ripples and shakes, warning her of an earthquake. Wait . . . we don’t get those here. But the earthquake comes all the same because it’s inside her, the shakes, and she can’t hold the water without spilling.
A door slams nearby but before the sound reaches her, it has changed.
It’s a gun. It fires two three six times and, oh, Hawkins is in the room again, sitting across from her but he can’t hear the gun. Only Pip can.
He asks questions.
‘What happened?’
‘Describe the gun.’
‘Do you know where Charlie Green went? He and his wife are gone. Their belongings look packed up in a hurry.’
He has written it all down too. Pip has to read it, re-remember it all.
Sign at the bottom.
And after, Pip asks a question of her own: ‘Did you find her?’
‘Find who?’
‘The eight-year-old abducted from her garden?’
Hawkins nods. ‘Yesterday. She’s fine, was with her father. Domestic dispute.’
And ‘Oh,’ is all Pip can say to that.
She’s left alone again listening to the gun no one else can hear. Until there’s a soft hand on her shoulder and she flinches. An even softer voice, ‘Your parents are here to take you home now.’
Pip’s feet follow the voice dragging the rest of her with them. Into the waiting room, too bright, and it’s her dad she sees first. She can’t think what to say to him or Mum but that doesn’t matter because all they want to do is hold her.
Ravi is behind them.
Pip goes to him and his arms pull her into his chest. Warm. Safe. It’s always safe here and Pip breathes out, listening to the sound of his heart. But oh no, the gun is in there too, hiding beneath every beat.
Waiting for her.
It follows Pip as they leave. Sits beside her in the dark car. It tucks itself up into bed with her. Pip shakes and she blocks her ears and she tells the gun to go away.
But it won’t go.
SUNDAY
16 DAYS LATER
Forty-Two
They were dressed in black, all of them, because that’s how it was supposed to be.
Ravi’s fingers were entwined with hers and if Pip held them any tighter, they would break, she was sure of it. Crack in half, like ribs.
Her parents were standing on her other side, hands clasped in front of them, eyes down, her dad breathing in time with the wind in the trees. She noticed everything like that now. On the other side were Cara and Naomi Ward, and Connor and Jamie Reynolds. Connor and Jamie were both wearing black suits that didn’t quite fit, too small here, too long there, as though they’d both borrowed them from their father.
Jamie was crying, his whole body shuddering with them inside that ill-fitting suit. Face reddening as he tried to swallow the tears down, glancing across at Pip, over the coffin.
A solid pine coffin with unadorned sides measuring eighty-four inches by twenty-eight by twenty-three, with white satin lining inside. Pip had been the one to choose it. He had no family, and his friends . . . they all disappeared after the story came out. All of them. No one stepped up to claim him, so Pip had, arranging the whole funeral. She’d chosen a burial, against the funeral director’s professional opinion. Stanley died with his ankles in her hands, scared and bleeding out while a fire raged around them. She didn’t think he’d want to be cremated, burned, like his father had done to those seven kids.
A burial, that’s what he would have wanted, Pip insisted. So they were outside, on the left hand-side of the churchyard, beyond Hillary F. Weiseman. The petals of the white roses shivering in the wind from atop his coffin. It was positioned over an open grave, inside a metal frame with straps and green carpeting like fake grass, so it didn’t look like exactly what it was: a hole in the ground.
Members of the police force were supposed to have been here, but Detective Hawkins had emailed her last night, saying he’d been advised by his supervisors that attending the funeral would be ‘too political’. So here they were, just the eight of them, and most only here for Pip. Not for him, the one lying dead in the solid pine coffin. Except Jamie, she thought, catching his rubbed-red eyes.