Faceless. Dark. Quiet. Too quiet. Pip could no longer hear the hiss of Jason’s breath, nor smell the metallic tang of his sweat as she breathed rattling breaths in and out of her nose. He must have moved away from her.
Pip stopped breathing, sounding out the room with her covered ears, feeling out the concrete around her with her doubled-up legs. She heard a scuffled footstep, far away from her, back towards the door he’d dragged her through.
She listened.
Metal clanging as a door opened. A shriek of old hinges. More footsteps, crunching on the gravel outside. Another shriek of the hinges and the door clicking shut. Silence, for a few in-and-out breaths, and then a much smaller sound: a key scraping against the lock. Another clunk.
Had he just left? He’d just left, hadn’t he?
Pip strained, listening for the faint sounds of shoes and cascading gravel. A familiar sound: a car door slamming. The growl of an awakening engine and the wheels reversing away from her.
He was leaving. He was gone.
He’d left her here, locked her in, but Jason was leaving. DT was gone.
She sniffed. Wait. Maybe he wasn’t gone. Maybe this was some kind of test, and he was sitting in the room with her still, watching her. Holding his breath so she couldn’t hear him. Waiting for her to make any kind of wrong move. Hiding there in the dark underside of her eyelids, taped down.
Pip made a sound in her throat, testing it out. Her voice vibrated against the duct tape, tickling her lips. She groaned again, louder, trying to make sense of the impenetrable darkness around her. But she couldn’t. She was helpless here, restrained to this tall metal shelving unit, her face
disappeared, wrapped up in tape. Maybe he was still in the room with her, she couldn’t rule it out. But she had heard the car, hadn’t she? It couldn’t have been anyone but Jason. And another memory, shaking loose from her broken-down brain. The typed words of a transcript. DCI Nolan asking Billy Karras why he left his victims alone for a period of time, proved by wear and tear in the duct-tape restraints. The DT Killer did leave. This was part of it, his routine, his MO. Jason was gone. But he would be back and that’s when Pip would die.
OK, she was alone, Pip settled on that, but she couldn’t linger in that momentary relief. Now on to the next problem. The terror wasn’t locked up, like she was, in the back of her head. It was everywhere. It was in her taped-down eyes and her taped-up ears. In every beat of her overused heart. In the raw skin of her wrists and the uncomfortable bend of her shoulders. In the pit of her stomach and the deep of her soul. Pure and visceral; fear as she’d never known it before. Inevitable. The segue between being alive and not.
Her breaths were coming shorter, too short, panicked spurts in and out. Oh fuck. Her nose was blocking up, she could feel it, every breath rattling more than the last. She shouldn’t have cried, she shouldn’t have cried. The air was struggling, scraping its way through two tightening holes. Soon they would block up entirely and she would suffocate. That’s how it would all end. Dead girl walking. Dead girl not breathing. At least that way DT wouldn’t get to kill her, not his way at least, with a blue rope around her neck. Maybe it was better this way, something out of his control and closer to hers. But, oh god, she didn’t want to die. Pip forced the air in and out, feeling light-headed, though she no longer had a head, just two shrinking nostrils.
A new chorus in her mind. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
‘Hey, Sarge.’ Ravi was back, inside her head. Whispering into her taped-up ear.
‘I’m going to die,’ she told him.
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, and Pip knew he was saying it with the trace of a smile, a dimple carved into one cheek. ‘Just breathe. Slower than that, please.’
‘But look.’ She showed him the restraints: her ankles, her hands tied to a cold metal pole, the mask around her face.
Ravi already knew all that, he’d been there for it too. ‘I’m staying with you, until the very end,’ he promised, and Pip wanted to cry again but she couldn’t, her eyes were forced shut. ‘You won’t be alone, Pip.’
‘That helps,’ she told him.
‘That’s what I’m here for. Always. Team Ravi and Pip.’ He smiled behind her eyes. ‘And we made a good team, didn’t we?’
‘You did,’ she said.
‘And you did too.’ He took her hand, bound behind her back. ‘Of course, I supplied all the devilish good looks,’ he laughed at his own joke, or hers, she supposed. ‘But you were always the brave one. Meticulous, annoyingly so. Determined to the point of recklessness. You always had a plan, no matter what.’
‘I didn’t plan for this,’ Pip said. ‘I lost.’
‘That’s OK, Sarge.’ He gave her hand a squeeze, her fingers starting to fizz from the awkward angle. ‘You just need a new plan. That’s what you’re good at. You’re not going to die here. He’s gone, and now you have time. Use that time. Come up with a plan. Wouldn’t you like to see me again? See everyone you care about?’
‘Yes,’ she told him.
‘Then you better get started.’ Better get started.
She took a deep breath, her airway clearer now. Ravi was right; she’d been given time and she had to use it. Because as soon as Jason Bell walked back through that door with the shrieking hinges, there was no longer a chance. None. She was dead. But this Pip, left alone and bound here to these metal shelves, she was only very likely dead. Not much of a chance, but more than that near-future Pip had.
‘OK,’ she said to Ravi, but really to herself. ‘A plan.’
She couldn’t see, but she could still check her surroundings. There hadn’t been anything in her vicinity before DT taped over her sight, but maybe he’d left something nearby after the mask was done. Something she could use. Pip swiped her bound legs in an arc, to one side and the other,
straining her arms to reach further out. No, there was nothing here, just concrete and the dipped-down channel running beneath the shelves.
That’s fine, she hadn’t expected there to be anything, don’t sink back down into despair. Ravi wouldn’t let her anyway. OK, so, she couldn’t move, she was stuck here to these shelves. Was there anything there that could help her? Vats of weedkiller and fertilizer that were useless to her, even if she could reach them. Fine, so what could she reach? Pip flexed her fingers, trying to bring the feeling back to them. Her arms were bent behind her back, pulled up higher than they should be. Her wrists were taped to the front metal pole of the shelving unit, just above the lowest shelf. She knew all that, had taken it in before her face was taken. Pip shifted her wrists against the tape and explored with two fingers. Yes, she felt the cold metal of the pole, and if she stretched her middle finger down, she could just feel the intersection of the shelf, where it attached to the pole.
That was it. All she could reach. All the help she had in the world. ‘Maybe it’s enough,’ Ravi said.
And maybe it was. Because somewhere, in that intersection between shelf and pole, there had to be a screw, to hold them together. And a screw could be freedom. Pip could use that screw. Pinch it between her thumb and finger and pierce holes in the tape at her wrists. Keep piercing and ripping until she could tear herself free.
OK, that was it. That was the plan. Get the screw from the shelf.
Pip had that feeling again, like there was a presence in the unknown around her. And not just the Ravi in her head. Something malignant and cold. But time didn’t wait for anybody and it definitely wouldn’t wait for her. So, how was she going to get the screw?
Pip could only just touch the top of the shelf with one finger; she needed to somehow move her wrists lower, so she could reach the underneath of the shelf. The duct tape was wrapped around her wrists, sticking them to this exact part of the pole. But if she shifted maybe, just maybe, she might get the tape to unstick from the metal. It was just on one side. Only an inch or two of contact. If she could unstick the tape there, then she could slide her hands up or down the pole. She’d struggled and she’d left herself a little room inside the tape, inside Jason’s grip. She could do it. Pip knew she could.
She walked her legs in so she could push her weight back against the tape. Shoved her hands further into the shelves, fingertips brushing the plastic edge of one of the vats. She pushed and she strained and she shifted and she could feel it give. Felt one side of the tape coming unstuck from the metal.
‘Yes, keep going, Sarge,’ Ravi urged her on.
She pushed harder, she strained harder, the tape cutting into her skin.
And slowly, slowly, the tape came free from the pole. ‘Yes,’ she and Ravi hissed together.
They shouldn’t have, because she wasn’t free. Pip was still stuck to this pole, her wrists bound tight around it, still very likely dead. But she had gained something: movement up and down between two shelves, her restraints sliding against the pole.
Pip wasted no more time, dropping her wrists as far as they could go, resting just above that lower shelf. She felt her way around the corner of the shelf with her fingers and there on the inside, she felt something: small and hard and metal. It must be the nut, secured to the end of the screw. Pip pressed her finger hard against it. She could feel the end of the screw, emerging from the nut. It wasn’t as sharp as she’d like, but it would work. She could still use it to hack away at the duct tape.
Next step: remove the nut. It wasn’t going to be easy, Pip realized, as she shifted her hands again. There was no way she could get either of her thumbs around that side of the pole, they were stuck here on the outside. She would have to use two of her fingers instead. Her right hand, obviously. It was stronger. She positioned her middle and forefinger around the nut, clamped them together and tried to twist. Fuck, it was screwed on tight. And which was the right way to loosen it, anyway? Was it to the left, so her right?
‘Don’t panic, just try,’ Ravi told her. ‘Try until it gives.’
Pip did try. And she tried. It wasn’t working, it wouldn’t budge. She was dead again.
She shifted and tried the other way, struggling with the angle. This would never work. She needed her thumbs: how could anyone do this without their thumbs? She pushed her fingers together around the metal and twisted. It hurt, right into the bones, and if she broke the fingers… well, she had more of them. The nut shifted. Barely, but it had shifted.
Pip paused to stretch out her aching fingers, to tell Ravi about it.
‘Good, that’s good,’ he said to her. ‘But you’ve got to keep going, you don’t know how long he’ll be gone.’
It might have already been half an hour since Jason left, Pip had no way of knowing, and the terror moved time in strange ways. Lifetimes in seconds, and the other way. The nut had hardly loosened at all; this was going to take a while and she couldn’t lose focus.
She shifted her fingers again, clamped around the protruding metal nut and pulled it round. It was stubborn, moving only after she’d given it everything, and hardly moving at that. Every time it gave, she had to reposition her fingers around it.
Shift. Clamp. Turn. Shift. Clamp. Turn.
It was only a tiny movement, in one hand, and yet Pip could feel the sweat running down the inside of her arms, into the fabric of her hoodie. Sliding against the tape at her temples and her upper lip. How long had it been now? Minutes. More than five? More than ten? The nut was loosening, giving a little more each turn.
Shift. Clamp. Turn.
It must have made a full turn by now, growing looser against the screw, against her fingers. She could turn it in quarter-circles now.
Half-circles.
A full turn.
Another.
The nut came free of the screw, resting on the ends of her fingers.
‘Yes,’ Ravi hissed in her head as Pip let the nut drop to the floor, a small tinkle of metal in the great, dark unknown.
Now to remove the screw and hack away the tape at her wrists. She was only likely dead now, not very. But she might live. She might just. Hope discolouring some of the terror’s dark edges.
‘Careful,’ Ravi said to her, as she felt for the end of the screw. Pip pushed it, driving it back through the hole. She had to push hard, the weight of the shelf and all those vats leaning down on the screw. She pushed again and the end disappeared inside the hole.
OK, breathe. She shifted her hands once more, reaching for the front side of the metal pole. This was better: she could use her thumb now. Pip felt for the protruding screw, found it with her finger and hooked on, holding it between her finger and thumb.
Don’t let go.
She tightened her grip and pulled out the screw, a grinding sound of metal on metal.
The shelf tilted forward, losing its front support. Something hard and heavy slid down it, knocking into her shoulder.
Pip flinched.
Her grip loosened, just for a second. The screw fell from her hand.
A small clatter of metal on concrete, bouncing once, twice, rolling away. Away into the dark unknown.
 |
Breaths rattled in and out of her nose, hissing against the edges of the tape.
Pip swiped with her legs, feeling out the unknown, this way and that. There was nothing around her but concrete. The screw was gone, out of reach. And she was dead again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told the Ravi in her head. ‘I tried. I really did. I wanted to see you again.’
‘It’s OK, Sarge,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you. Plans change all the time. Think.’
Think what? That had been her last chance, the last sliver of hope, and now the terror was feeding itself on that too.
Ravi sat with her, back to back, but he was actually the heavy vat of weedkiller leaning against her, pushing down on the loose corner of the shelf. The metal groaned, bending out of shape.
Pip tried to take Ravi’s hand behind her and felt the drooping corner of the shelf instead. Felt the tiniest gap between the lopsided shelf and the pole it was supposed to be attached to. Tiny. But enough to slide her fingernail through. And if it was big enough for that, then it was big enough for the width of the duct tape wrapped around her wrists.
Pip held her breath as she tried. Lowering her hands, forcing that empty side of tape through the gap. It caught on the shelf, so she shifted and jerked, and it came free. She slipped her binds below the shelf, and now she was attached only to the lowest part of the shelving unit. Just this small length of pole and the ground it rested on, that was all that was keeping her
here now. If she could somehow raise the leg of the pole, she could slip her restraints down over the end and off.
She shuffled her bound feet, feeling around the area, careful to keep blocking the vat so it didn’t fall. Her legs dipped down, into the lowered channel running through the concrete floor. That was an idea. If she could drag the shelf forward to that gutter, there would be space beneath the pole leg for her to slip out. But how was she going to drag it? She was attached to it by the wrists, arms locked behind her. If she hadn’t been able to fight off Jason Bell with her arms, there was no way she could lift this heavy shelving unit with them. She wasn’t that strong, and if she was going to survive, she had to understand her limits. That wasn’t her way out of here.
‘So, what is?’ Ravi prompted.
One idea: the duct tape had snagged against the uneven shelf as she’d lowered her hands. If she kept passing the tape through that small gap, kept snagging, maybe it would start to tear small holes in her binds. But that would take a while, a while she’d already spent loosening the nut and removing the screw. DT could be on his way back at any time. Pip must have been alone for over an hour now, maybe more. Alone, even though Ravi was right here. Her thoughts in his voice. Her lifeline. Her cornerstone.
Time was a limitation. The strength of her arms another. What was left? Her legs. Her legs were free. And unlike her arms, they were strong.
She’d been running from monsters for months. If she was too weak to drag
or lift the shelves, maybe she was strong enough to push them.
Pip explored the unknown with her legs again, stretching out to the back pole of the shelving unit. Through the fabric of her trainers, she could feel that the back side of the shelves wasn’t against the wall. It stood a few inches in front of it, at least the width of her foot. Not a lot of room, but it was enough. If she could push the shelves back, they would over-tip, landing against the wall. And the front legs would stick up, like an insect on its back. That was the plan. A good plan. And maybe she really would live to see everyone again.
Pip swung her legs forward and dug in her heels, using the lip of the gutter to push against. She propped up her shoulders against the front of the shelf, still blocking the nearest vat from sliding off.
She pushed down, into her heels, and raised herself from the floor.
Come on, she told herself, and she didn’t need to hear it in Ravi’s voice any more. Hers was enough. Come on.
Pip screeched with the effort of it, the muffled sound filling up her death mask.
She threw her head back against the pole and pushed with it too. Movement. She felt movement, or hope was only tricking her.
She shuffled one foot closer, and the other, and she drove them into the gutter, shoulders ramming against the shelves. The muscles up the back of her legs shuddered, and it felt like her stomach was tearing open. But she knew it was this or death and she pushed and she pushed.
The shelves gave way.
They tipped back. The sound of metal meeting brick. A crash as the vat of weedkiller finally slid free, cracking open against the concrete. Others sliding, thumping against the back wall. A sharp chemical smell, and something soaking into her leggings.
But none of that mattered.
Pip lowered her binds down the metal pole. And there, at its end, was freedom. It stood up only about an inch from the concrete, that’s what it felt like, and that was more than enough. She slipped the tape over the end and she was free.
Free. But not all the way.
Pip shuffled away from the shelves, from the liquid pooling around her. She lay on her side, tucked her knees into her chest, and slipped her bound hands over her feet, arms now in front of her.
The tape came off easily, one hand slipping out of the space left by the pole, then freeing the other.
Her face. Her face next.
Blindly, she felt around her duct tape mask, searching for the end DT had left. There it was, by her temple. She pulled it, the tape undoing with a loud rip. It pulled at her skin, pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows, but Pip tore it off, hard and quick, and she opened her eyes. Blinked in the cold storeroom and the destruction of the shelves behind her. She kept going, pulling and tearing, and the pain was agonizing, her skin raw, but it was a good pain, because she was going to live. She held on to her hair to try to
stop it pulling out from the root, but small clumps of it came away with the tape.
Unwinding and unwinding.
Up her head, and down her nose. Her mouth came free and she breathed through it and breathed hard. Her chin. One ear. Then the other.
Pip dropped her unravelled mask to the floor. The duct tape long and meandering, scattered with hair and small spots of blood it had claimed from her.
DT had taken her face, but she had taken it back.
Pip leaned over and unravelled the tape still binding her ankles, then she stood up, her legs shaking, almost buckling under her weight.
Now the room. Now she just had to get out of the room and she would be alive, as good as. She skittered over to the door, treading on something on the way. She glanced down; it was the screw she’d dropped. It had rolled almost all the way to the door through the unknown. Pip rammed the door handle down, knowing it was useless. She’d heard Jason lock her in. But there was a door at the other end of the storeroom. It wouldn’t lead outside, but it would lead somewhere.
Pip sprinted to it. She lost control as her trainers scuffed on the concrete, skidding into a workbench beside the door. The workbench jumped, with a sound of colliding metal from a large toolbox on top. Pip righted herself and tried the door handle. It was also locked. Fuck. OK.
She returned to the other side, to her vat of weedkiller, the dark liquid draining into the gutter like a cursed river. A bright line was reflected in the liquid, but it wasn’t from the overhead lights. It was from the window, high up in front of her, letting in the last of the evening light. Or the first of it. Pip didn’t know the time. And her tipped-back shelves, they reached right up to the window, almost like a ladder.
The window was small, and it didn’t look like it opened. But Pip could fit through it, she was sure she could. And if she couldn’t, she would make herself fit. Climb through and drop down on the outside. She just needed something to break it with.
She checked around. Jason had left the roll of duct tape on the floor by the door. Beside it was a coiled length of blue rope. The blue rope, she
realized with a shiver. The rope DT was going to use to kill her. Was. But would still, if he came back right now.
What else was in the room? Just her and lots of weedkiller and fertilizer. Oh wait, her mind jumped back to the other side of the storeroom. There was a toolbox down there.
She ran to the other side again, an ache in her ribs and a pain in her chest. There was a Post-it note stuck to the top of the toolbox. In slanting scribbles, it said, J – Red team keep taking tools assigned to Blue team. So I’m leaving this in here for Rob to find. – L
Pip undid the clips and pulled open the lid. Inside was a jumble of screwdrivers and screws, a tape measure, pliers, a small drill, some kind of wrench. Pip dug her hand inside. And underneath it all, was a hammer. A large one.
‘Sorry, Blue team,’ she muttered, tightening her grip around the hammer, pulling it out.
Pip stood before the tipped-over shelves, her shelves, and looked back once more at the room where she’d known she would die. Where the others had died, all five of them. And then she climbed, balancing her feet on the lowest shelf like a rung, pulling herself up to the next level. There was still strength left in her legs, moving adrenaline-fast.
Feet planted on the top shelf, she crouched, balancing herself in front of the window. A hammer in her hand, and an unbroken window in front of her; Pip had been here before. Her arm knew what to do, it remembered, arching back to pick up momentum. Pip swung at the window and it cracked, a spiderweb splintering through the reinforced glass. She swung again, and the hammer went through, glass shattering around it. Shards still clung to the frame, but she knocked them out one by one, so she wouldn’t cut herself open. How far was it to the ground? Pip dropped the hammer through and watched it tumble to the gravel below. Not far. She should be fine if she bent her legs.
And now it was just her and a hole in the wall, and something was waiting on the other side. Not something. Everything. Life, normal life, and Team Ravi and Pip and her parents and Josh and Cara and everyone. They might even be looking for her now, though she hadn’t disappeared for long. Some parts of her might be gone, parts she might never get back, but she was still here. And she was coming home.
Pip gripped the window frame and pulled herself forward, sliding her legs out ahead of her. She held on as she dipped her shoulders and head and manoeuvred them out too. She stared down at the gravel, at the hammer, and she let go.
Landed. Hard on her feet, the force ricocheting up her legs. A pain in her left knee. But she was free, she was alive. A breath came out too hard that it was almost a laugh. She’d done it. She’d survived.
Pip listened. The only sound was the wind in the trees, some of it finding the new holes in her too, blowing through her ribcage. Pip bent down and picked up her hammer, holding it at her side, just in case. But as she rounded the corner of the building, she could see that the complex was empty. Jason’s car wasn’t here and the gate was locked again. The metal fence at the front was high, too high, she’d never be able to climb it. But the back of the yard was bordered by woods, and the fence was unlikely to encircle those too.
New plan: she just had to follow the trees. Follow the trees, find a road, find a house, find someone, call the police. That was all. The easy parts left, just one foot in front of the other.
One foot in front of the other, the crunch of gravel. She walked past the parked vans, and large bins and machines, trailers with ride-on mowers, and a small fork-lift over there. One foot in front of the other. Gravel became dirt became the crunch of leaves. The last of the daylight was gone, but the moon was out early, watching over Pip. She was surviving: one foot in front of the other, that’s all it took. Her trainers and the leaves crunching beneath them. She dropped the hammer and carried on through the trees.
A new sound stopped her in her tracks.
The distant drone of a car engine. The slam of a car door far behind her.
The shrieking of a gate.
Pip darted behind a tree and stared back into the complex.
Two yellow headlights, winking at her through the branches, as they pulled forward. Wheels on gravel.
It was DT. Jason Bell. He’d returned. He was back to kill her.
But he wouldn’t find her there, only the parts she’d left behind. Pip was out, she’d escaped. All she had to do was find a house, find a person, call the police. The easy parts. She could do that. She turned, leaving the
headlights in the unknown behind her. Moving on, picking up her pace. She just had to call the police and tell them everything; that DT had just tried to kill her and she knew who he was. She could even call DI Hawkins directly, he’d understand.
She faltered, one foot hovering above the ground. Wait.
Would he understand?
He never understood. Not any of it. And it wasn’t even a question of understanding, it was a question of believing. He’d come right out and said it to her face, said gently but said all the same: that she was imagining it. She didn’t have a stalker, she was just seeing things, seeing danger around every corner because of the trauma she’d lived through. Even though he’d been part of that trauma, because he hadn’t believed her when she went to him about Jamie.
It was a repeating pattern. No, not a pattern, it was a circle. That’s what this all was, everything winding up, coming full circle. The end was the beginning. Hawkins hadn’t believed her before, twice, so why did she think he’d believe her now?
And the voice in her head wasn’t Ravi any more, it was Hawkins. Said gently, but said all the same. ‘The DT Killer is already in prison. He’s been there for years. He confessed.’ That’s what he’d say.
‘Billy Karras isn’t the DT Killer,’ Pip would counter. ‘It’s Jason Bell.’
Hawkins shook his head inside hers. ‘Jason Bell is a respectable man. A husband, a father. He’s already been through so much, because of Andie. I’ve known him for years, we play tennis sometimes. He’s a friend. Don’t you think I’d know? He’s not the DT Killer and he’s not a danger to you, Pip. Are you still talking to someone? Are you getting help?’
‘I’m asking you for help.’
Asking him again and again, and when would she finally learn? Break the circle?
And if her worst fears were right, if the police didn’t believe her, didn’t arrest Jason, then what? DT would still be out there. Jason might take her again, or someone else. Take someone she cared about to punish her, because she was too loud and had to be silenced some way. He’d get away with it. They always got away with it. Him. Max Hastings. Above the law
because the law was wrong. A legion of dead girls and dead-eyed girls left behind them.
‘They won’t believe me,’ Pip told herself, in her own voice now. ‘They never believe us.’ Out loud so she would truly listen this time, understand. She was on her own. Charlie Green wasn’t the one with all the answers; she was. She didn’t need to hear it from him to know what to do this time.
Break the circle. It was hers to break, here and now. And there was only one way to do that.
Pip turned, leaves bunching, clinging to the white soles of her shoes. And she walked back.
Returned through the darkening trees. A glint of young moonlight across the surface of the dropped hammer, showing her the way. She bent to pick it up, testing out her grip.
Dried-out leaves to grass, to dirt, to gravel, easing her steps, pressing her feet down with no sound. Maybe she was too loud for him, but he’d never hear her coming now.
Ahead, Jason was out of his car, walking up to the metal door he’d dragged her through, his steps disguising hers. Closer and closer. He stopped and she did too, waiting. Waiting.
Jason slid his hand down into his pocket, returning with the ring of keys. A rustle of tinkling metal and Pip took a few slow steps, hiding beneath the sound.
Jason found the right key, long and jagged. He pushed it into the lock, metal scraping metal, and Pip moved closer.
Break the circle. The end was the beginning and this was both, the origin. Finish it where it had all begun.
He twisted the key, and the door unlocked with a dark click, the sound echoing in Pip’s chest.
Jason pushed open the door into the yellow-lit storeroom. He took one step over the threshold, looked up, then took one back, staring ahead. Taking in the scene: tipped-over shelves, smashed-open window, a river of spilled weedkiller, lengths of unwound duct tape.
Pip was right behind him. ‘What the –’ he said.
Her arm knew what to do.
Pip pulled it back and swung the hammer. It found the base of his skull.
A sickening crunch of metal on bone. He staggered. He even dared to gasp. Pip swung again.
A crack.
Jason dropped, falling forward on to the concrete, catching himself with one hand.
‘Please –’ he began.
Pip pulled her elbow back, a spray of blood hitting her in the face. She leaned over him and swung again.
Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.
Until nothing moved. Not a twitch in his fingers, or a jerk in his legs.
Only a new river, a red one, slowly leaking out of his undone head.
