A Good Girl's Guide to Murder(29)

No one spoke much as they did a speedy clean-up of the empty drink cans and food packets into a bin bag, clearing space for their sleeping bags. They dropped all the sides of the marquee, safe within its four white canvas walls, their only view of the trees distorted through the mock plastic sheet windows.

The boys were already starting to joke about their midnight sprint through the trees. Lauren wasn’t ready for jokes yet.

Pip moved Lauren’s sleeping bag between hers and Cara’s and helped her into it when she could no longer bear to watch her drunkenly fumble with the zip.

‘I’m guessing no Ouija board then?’ Ant said.

‘Think we’ve had enough scares,’ said Pip.

She sat next to Cara for a while, forcing water down her friend’s throat while she distracted her by talking idly about the fall of Rome. Lauren was already asleep, Zach too on the other side of the marquee.

When Cara’s eyelids began to wilt lower with each blink, Pip crept back to her own sleeping bag. She saw that Ant and Connor were still awake and whispering, but she was ready for sleep, or at least to lie down and hope for sleep. As she slid her legs inside, something crinkled against her right foot. She pulled her knees up to her chest and reached inside, her fingers closing round a piece of paper.

Must have been a food packet that fell inside. She pulled it out. It wasn’t. It was a clean white piece of printer paper folded in half.

She unfolded the paper, eyes skipping across it.

In a large formal font printed across the page were the words: Stop digging, Pippa.

She dropped it, eyes following as it fell open. Her breath time-travelled back to running in the dark, snapshots of trees in the flashing torchlight. Disbelief staled to fear. Five seconds there and the feeling crisped at the edges, burning into anger.

‘What the hell?’ she said, picking up the note and storming over to the boys.

‘Shh,’ one of them said, ‘the girls are asleep.’

‘Do you think this is funny?’ Pip said, looking down at them as she brandished the folded note. ‘You are unbelievable.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Ant squinted at her.

‘This note you left me.’

‘I didn’t leave you a note,’ he said, reaching up for it.

Pip pulled away. ‘You expect me to believe that?’ she said. ‘Was this whole stranger-in-the-woods thing a set-up too? Part of your joke? Who was it, your friend George?’

‘No, Pip,’ Ant said, staring up at her. ‘Honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. What does the note say?’

‘Save me the innocent act,’ she said. ‘Connor, care to add anything?’

‘Pip, you think I would have chased that pervert so hard if it was just a bloody prank? We didn’t plan anything, I promise.’

‘You’re saying neither of you left me this note?’

They both nodded.

‘You’re full of shit,’ she said, turning back to the girls’ side of the marquee.

‘Honestly, Pip, we didn’t,’ Connor said.

Pip ignored him, clambering into her sleeping bag and making more noise about it than was necessary.

She laid down, using her scrunched-up jumper as a pillow, the note left open on the groundsheet beside her. She turned to watch it, ignoring four more whispered ‘Pip’s from Ant and Connor.

Pip was the last one awake. She could tell by the breathing. Alone in wakefulness.

From the ashes of her anger a new creature was born, creating itself from the cinders and dust. A feeling that fell between terror and doubt, between chaos and logic.

She said the words in her head so many times that they became rubbery and foreign-sounding.

Stop digging, Pippa.

It couldn’t be. It was just a cruel joke. Just a joke.

She couldn’t look away from the note, her eyes sleeplessly tracing back and forward over the curves of the black printed letters.

And the forest in the dead of night was alive around her. Crackling twigs, wingbeats through the trees and screams. Fox or deer, she couldn’t tell, but they shrieked and cried and it was and wasn’t Andie Bell, screaming through the crust of time.

Stop digging, Pippa.





Twelve



Pip was fidgeting nervously under the table, hoping that Cara was too busy jabbering to notice. It was the first time ever that Pip had to keep things from her and the nerves were puppet-stringing Pip’s fiddling hands and the knot in her stomach.

Pip had gone over after school on the third day back, when teachers stopped talking about what they were going to teach and actually started teaching. They were sitting in the Wards’ kitchen pretending to do homework, but really Cara was unspooling into an existential crisis.

‘And I told him that I still don’t know what I want to study at uni, let alone where I want to go. And he’s all “time’s ticking, Cara” and it’s stressing me out. Have you had the talk with your parents yet?’

‘Yeah, a few days ago,’ Pip said. ‘I’ve decided on King’s College, Cambridge.’

‘English?’

Pip nodded.

‘You are the worst person to vent to about life plans,’ Cara snorted. ‘I bet you already know what you want to be when you grow up.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I want to be Louis Theroux and Heather Brooke and Michelle Obama all rolled into one.’