‌There was something stuck to her shoe. Clacking against the pavement with every step, the gummy pull unbalancing her tread.
Pip slowed to a jog, then a walk, right down to a stop, wiping her forehead on her sleeve. She raised the leg to inspect the underside of her trainer. There was a crinkled piece of duct tape stuck to the middle of her heel. The silver finish on the tape had muddied to a dirty grey. Pip must have run over it somewhere on her route, unknowingly picked it up.
She pinched her fingers around the filthy piece of tape, peeling it off as the tacky side clung to the dark sole of her shoe. It came free, leaving little specks of gluey white behind, specks she could still feel as she picked up her pace and started running again.
‘Great,’ she hissed to herself, trying to get her breathing in order again.
In, step, two, three, out, step, two, three.
She was taking her longer route this evening, up around Lodge Wood. Long. Fast. Exhaust herself so maybe she wouldn’t need to take anything to fall asleep. This plan never worked out, never had and probably never would, and she believed her own lies even less now. The last two nights had been the worst for a long time. That doubt keeping her awake, that niggling idea that someone might be out there watching her. Someone who might even be counting down the days until she disappeared. No, stop. She’d come on a run to get away from those thoughts. Pip pushed herself even harder, out of control, rounding the corner too fast.
And there he was.
On the other side of the road. Blue water bottle gripped in one hand. Max Hastings.
And just as she saw him, he saw her. Their eyes met, only the width of one road between them as they approached each other.
Max slowed his pace, pushing his blonde hair back from his face. Why was he slowing down? Shouldn’t he want to get this over and done with too, the moment they had to pass each other? Pip pushed her legs harder, a pain in her ankle, and their mismatched steps became a kind of music, a chaotic percussion that filled the unknowing street, accompanying the high- pitched howl of the wind in the trees. Or did that sound come from inside her head?
There was a tightening in her chest as her heart outgrew its cage, unrolling under her skin, filling her with angry red until it was all behind her eyes. She watched him draw close and her view shifted to red, the scene speeding up before her. Something takes over, pulls Pip by the hand across the road, guiding her feet. And she isn’t scared any more, she is only rage. Only red. And this is right, this is supposed to be, she knows it.
She’s over the road in six strides, and up on to his side. He’s just feet away when he stops, stares at her.
‘What are you do—’ he begins to ask. She doesn’t let him finish.
Pip closes the gap between them and her elbow crashes into Max’s face. She hears a crack, but it isn’t Stanley’s ribs this time, it’s Max’s nose. The sound is the same, it’s all she knows. Max bends double and howls into his hands as the nose falls crooked on his face. But she isn’t finished. Pip rips his hands away and hits him again, slamming her fist into his sharp cheekbones. His blood, it slides between her knuckles on to her palm, right where it belongs.
And still she isn’t finished. There’s a lorry coming; there are never lorries on this small country lane, they wouldn’t fit. But this one is almost here, and now is her chance. Pip grabs Max, twisting her hands into the fabric of his sweat-stained top. And in that passing moment, Max’s eyes widen in fear and they both know it: she has won. The lorry’s horn screams but Max doesn’t have a chance to. Pip throws him out into the road in front of the too-big lorry and he explodes, raining red down on her as she stands there, smiling.
A car passed, in real life, and the sound brings her back. The red falls from her eyes and Pip returned to herself. To here and now. Running down this path. Max was over there on his side of the road, and she here on hers. Pip looked down and blinked, trying to shake loose the violence inside her own head. If she should be scared of anything, it was of that.
She glanced up again at Max, keeping her eye on him as he regained his speed, water bottle pumping at his side. The moment was coming, the moment they would pass each other, cross paths, overlap. They were still running towards each other and then it happened, the pass, the split second of convergence, and then they were running away from each other, their backs turned.
At the end of the lane, Pip checked back over her shoulder. Max was gone and she could breathe a little easier, without his steps haunting hers.
She was getting worse; she could step outside of herself and recognize that. The panic attacks, the pills, the rage so hot it might just burn the world down with it. She was slipping ever further from that normal life she was so desperate to crawl back to. To Ravi, to her family, her friends. But it would be OK, because she had a plan for how to get there. To fix everything. Save Jane Doe, save herself.
But there might be a new obstacle now, she realized as she looped down the far end of Martinsend Way, past the broken lamp post, her usual marker to slow for the wind-down walk home. If she really did have a stalker, whoever they were, whatever they wanted to do to her – whether it was just scare her, or whether they really did want her to disappear – they were now in her way too. Or maybe it was Pip getting in her own way. What had Epps called it? A self-destructive spiral. Maybe there was no stalker, maybe there was just her and an overspill of violence from that dark place at the back of her head. Finding danger only because she was looking for it.
That’s when she walked over it, on the pavement between the Yardleys’ house and the Williamses’, her own still in the distance. She caught it as a blur in the corner of her eye, white intersecting lines and a large smudge of chalk, but she had to back-step before she realized what it really was. There across the width of the pavement, smeared by her own trainers, were three large words written in chalk:
DEAD GIRL WALKING
Pip’s head whipped around. She was alone on the street, and the neighbourhood was dinner-time quiet. She turned back to study the words beneath her feet. Dead Girl Walking. She had been the one to walk over them. Was this for her? It wasn’t on her driveway, but it was on her route. A feeling in her gut, an instinct. It was a message for her, Pip knew it.
She was the dead girl walking.
No, don’t be ridiculous. It wasn’t even on her drive, it was on a public street. This could have been left for anyone, by anyone. And why was she listening to her instincts anyway? They put blood on her hands and a gun in her heart and danger in shadows when there was nothing there. But part of her felt she shouldn’t dismiss it either, torn in two, between Stanley and Charlie, between having a stalker and inventing one herself. Pip struggled with the strap on her arm, releasing her phone. She straightened up to take a photo of the words, a sliver of her trainers at the bottom of the frame. Evidence, just in case. She didn’t have one of the chalk figures; they’d been gone by the time she finished her shower the other day, wiped away by the wheels of her dad’s car. But she had a photo now, another data point for the spreadsheet. Just in case. Data was clean and it didn’t take sides. And if this really were a message for her, this would be assigned a higher number, an eight maybe a nine; it could even be considered a direct threat.
And with that, Pip felt closer to this unknown person who might or might not exist, felt she understood them a little better. They agreed on something: disappear meant dead. At least they had cleared that up.
Ahead, she saw a car turning into her drive. Ravi. Her other cornerstone. Pip stepped over the chalk words and hurried along the pavement. Step after step towards home, and she couldn’t help being what the words wanted her to be, the dead girl walking. But if she sped up, she would be running instead.
‘Oh, hello!’ Ravi’s voice found her as she turned on to the drive, lowering her headphones to her neck. He climbed out of his car. ‘Look who it is: my sporty girlfriend!’ He smiled and flexed his arms, chanting sports, sports, sports until she reached him. ‘You OK?’ he asked, running his hand around her waist. ‘Good run?’
‘Um, well, I saw Max Hastings again. So… no.’
Ravi gritted his teeth. ‘Another run-in? He’s still alive, I presume,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Only just,’ Pip shrugged, afraid that Ravi could see into her head, see all those violent things that swirled inside it. But he should be able to see in there; he was the person who knew her best. And if he loved her, then she couldn’t be all bad. Right?
‘Hey, what’s up?’ he said. Oh no, he could definitely tell. But that was good, she reminded herself, she shouldn’t keep secrets from him. He was her person. Except those secrets she was most ashamed of, the ones that lived in the second drawer down in her desk.
‘Er, this was on my route, just down the road.’ She pulled up the photo on her phone and held it out to Ravi. ‘Someone wrote that on the pavement in chalk.’
‘Dead Girl Walking,’ he muttered, and hearing it in someone else’s voice changed the meaning somehow. Made her see it differently. Proof that it did exist outside of her own head. ‘Do you think this was for you? Connected to the pigeons?’ he asked.
‘It was on my running route, right after the point where I normally start walking to cool down before home,’ she said. ‘If someone’s been watching me, they would know that.’
Why would someone be watching her, though? It sounded more ridiculous when she said it out loud.
Ravi shook his head. ‘OK, I really don’t like this.’
‘It’s fine, sorry, it’s probably nothing to do with me,’ Pip said. ‘Just being stupid.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said, voice hardening. ‘OK, fine, we don’t know for sure if you have a stalker or not, but this tips it for me. I mean it now, and I know what you’re going to say, but I think you should go to the police.’
‘Wh—And they’ll do what, Ravi? Nothing, as usual.’ She could feel the anger spiking again. No, not with him, control yourself. She breathed and swallowed it down. ‘Especially when I don’t even know myself.’
‘If this is the same person emailing you, the same one who left the chalk and the pigeons, then this person is threatening you,’ he said, widening his eyes in the way that told her he was serious. ‘They might be dangerous.’ He paused. ‘It might be Max.’ Another pause. ‘Or Charlie Green.’
It wasn’t Charlie, could never be Charlie. But Pip had thought of Max, his face flashing into her mind when she’d first read the words. Who else
would know her running route so well? And if Max hated her as much as she hated him, well then…
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But maybe they aren’t connected, and if they are it might just be someone messing with me.’ Her instincts told her that wasn’t true, even as she said it, she only wanted to take the worry out of his eyes, bring back the smile. And she didn’t want to go back to that police station; anything but that.
‘I guess it all depends,’ Ravi said. ‘On?’
‘On whether they just found those dead birds or… whether they killed them. There’s a world of difference there.’
‘I know,’ she exhaled, hoping he would keep his voice down, in case Josh could somehow hear. A new feeling in her gut now that Ravi and instinct were taking the same side against her. She didn’t want this to be real. She preferred the other option: that she was seeing a pattern where there was none, her brain too fine-tuned to danger, because that would soon be fixed along with everything else. Save Jane Doe, save herself.
‘We shouldn’t take the chance.’ Ravi ran his thumb across her collarbone. ‘You leave for uni in a couple of weeks, so I think everything will be OK and this will probably die down. But if it is the latter, if this person is dangerous, then this is not something you can deal with on your own. You need to report this. Tomorrow.’
‘But I can’t –’
‘You’re Pippa Fitz-Amobi,’ he smiled, brushed the flyaway hairs from her eyes, ‘there’s nothing you can’t do. Even if it’s biting your tongue and asking DI Hawkins for help.’
Pip growled, dropped her head to roll around her neck.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Ravi said, patting her on the back. ‘Well done. Now can you show me where this chalk was? I want to see it.’
‘OK.’
Pip turned to lead him away from the house, his hand grabbing for hers, fingers sliding into the gaps between her knuckles. Holding on. Hand in hand: the boy with a dimple in his chin, and the dead girl walking.
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