Page 215 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

She ran down the stairs, almost stumbling as she swung the heavy bag up on to her back. She slipped on her walking boots and coat and grabbed her car keys from the side table in the hall. There was no time to think this through. If she stopped to think, she’d falter and lose him forever.

Outside, the wind was cold against her neck and fingers. She ran to the car and climbed in. Her grip was sticky and shaky on the steering wheel as she pulled out of the drive.

It took her five minutes to get there. She would have been quicker if she hadn’t got stuck behind a slow driver, tailgating and flashing them to hurry up out of the way.

She turned into the car park beyond the tennis courts and pulled into the nearest bay. Grabbing her rucksack from the passenger seat, she left her car and headed straight for the trees that bordered the car park.

Before stepping from concrete on to mud, Pip paused for just a moment to look over her shoulder. There was some kids’ club on the tennis courts, shrieking and whacking balls into the fence. A couple of mums with young and squawking toddlers standing beside a car, chatting away. There was no one there with their eyes fixed on her. No car she recognized. No person. If she was being watched, she couldn’t tell.

She turned back to the trees and started to walk. She counted in her head each step she took, panicking that her strides were either too long or too short and she wouldn’t end up where they wanted her to.

At thirty paces her heart throbbed so hard that it jolted her breath.

At sixty-seven the skin on her chest and under her arms prickled as sweat broke the surface.

At ninety-four she started muttering, ‘Please, please, please,’ under her breath.

And then she stopped one hundred steps into the trees. And she waited.

There was nothing around her, nothing but the stippled shade from half-bare trees and leaves from red to pale yellow padding the mud.

A long, high whistling sounded above her, trailing into four short bursts. She looked up to see a red kite flying over her, just a sharp wide-winged outline against the grey sun. The bird flew out of sight and she was alone again.

It was almost a whole minute later that her phone shrieked from her pocket. Fumbling, she pulled it out and looked down at the text.

Destroy everything and leave it there. Do not tell anyone what you know. No more questions about Andie. This is finished now.

Pip’s eyes flicked over the words, forward and back. She forced a deep breath down her throat and put away the phone. Her skin seared under the gaze of the killer’s eyes, watching her from somewhere unseen.

On her knees, she slid her rucksack to the ground, took out the laptop, its charger and the two memory sticks. She laid them out on the autumn leaves and pulled open the laptop lid.

She got to her feet and, as her eyes filled and the world blurred, she stamped down on the first memory stick with her boot heel. One side of the plastic casing cracked and sprang away. The metal connector part dented. She stamped again and then turned her left boot on to the other stick, jumping on them both as their parts cracked and splintered off.

Then she turned to her laptop, the screen looking at her with a line of dim sunlight glinting back. She watched her dark silhouette reflected in the glass as she drew up her leg and kicked out at it. The screen flattened over its hinge, lying in the leaves prone with its keyboard, a large crack webbed across it.

The first tear dropped to her chin as she kicked again, at the keyboard this time. Several letters came away with her boot, scattering into the mud. She stamped and her boots cracked right through the glass on the screen, pushing out into the metal casing.

She jumped and jumped again, tears chasing each other as they snaked down her cheeks.

The metal around the keyboard was cracked now, showing the motherboard and the cooling fan below. The green circuit board snapped into pieces beneath her heel, and the little fan severed and flew away. She jumped again and stumbled on the mangled machine, falling on her back in the soft and crackling leaves.

She let herself cry there for a few short moments. Then she sat upright and picked up the laptop, its broken screen hanging limply from one hinge, and hurled it against the trunk of the nearest tree. With another thud, it came to rest on the ground in pieces, lying dead among the tree roots.

Pip sat there, coughing, waiting for the air to return to her chest. Her face stinging from the salt.

And she waited.

She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now. She’d done everything they asked; was Barney about to be released to her here? She should wait and see. Wait for another message. She called his name and she waited.

More than half an hour passed. And nothing. No message. No Barney. No sound of anyone but the faint screams of the kids on the tennis court.

Pip pushed on to her feet, her soles sore and lumpy against the boots. She picked up her empty rucksack and wandered away, one last lingering look back at the destroyed machine.

‘Where did you go?’ Dad said when she let herself back into the house.

Pip had sat in the car for a while in the tennis car park. To let her rubbed-red eyes settle before she returned home.

‘I couldn’t concentrate here,’ she said quietly, ‘so I went to do my revision in the cafe.’

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