A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

The following poems and extracts from longer texts all offer representations of guilt. They are arranged chronologically by date of publication. Read all the material carefully, and then complete the task below.

The ticking of the clock was a snare-drum echo in her head. She opened her answer booklet and looked up one last time. The exam invigilator was sitting with his feet up on a table, his face stuck into a paperback with a craggy spine. Pip was on a small and wobbling desk in the middle of an empty classroom made for thirty. And three minutes had already ticked by.

She looked down, brain talking to block out the sound of the clock, and pressed her pen on to the page.

When the invigilator called stop, Pip had already been finished for forty-nine seconds, her eyes following the second hand of the clock as it strutted on in a near-complete circle. She closed the booklet and handed it to the man on her way out.

She’d written about how certain texts manipulate the placing of blame by using the passive voice during the character’s guilty act. She’d had almost seven hours’ sleep and she thought she’d done OK.

It was nearly lunchtime and, turning into the next corridor, she heard Cara calling her name.

‘Pip!’

She remembered only at the last second to put the limp back into her tread.

‘How did it go?’ Cara caught up with her.

‘Yeah, fine I think.’

‘Yay, you’re free,’ she said, waving Pip’s arm in celebration for her. ‘How’s your ankle?’

‘Not too bad. Think it’ll be better by tomorrow.’

‘Oh, and,’ Cara said, shuffling around in her pocket, ‘you were right.’ She pulled out Pip’s phone. ‘You had somehow left it in Dad’s car. It was wedged under the back seat.’

Pip took it. ‘Oh, don’t know how that happened.’

‘We should celebrate your freedom,’ Cara said. ‘I can invite everyone round mine tomorrow and have a game night or something?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

Pip waited and when there was finally a lull she said, ‘Hey, you know my mum’s doing a viewing of a house in Mill End Road in Wendover today. Isn’t that where you used to live?’

‘Yeah,’ Cara said. ‘How funny.’

‘Number forty-four.’

‘Oh, we were forty-two.’

‘Does your dad still go there?’ Pip asked, her voice flat and disinterested.

‘No, he sold it ages ago,’ Cara said. ‘They kept it when we moved because Mum had just got a huge inheritance from her grandma. They rented it out for extra income while Mum did her painting. But Dad sold it a couple of years after Mum died, I think.’

Pip nodded. Clearly Elliot had been telling lies for a long time. Over five years, in fact.

She sleepwalked through lunch. And when it was over and Cara was heading off the other way, Pip limped up and hugged her.

‘All right, clingy,’ Cara said, trying to wriggle out. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Pip. The sadness she felt for Cara was black and twisting and hungry. How was any of this fair? Pip didn’t want to let her go, didn’t think she could. But she had to.

Connor caught her up and helped Pip up the stairs to history, even though she told him not to. Mr Ward was already in the classroom, perched on his desk in a pastel green shirt. Pip didn’t look at him as she staggered past her usual seat at the front and went to sit right at the back.

The lesson would not end. The clock mocked her as she sat watching it, looking anywhere but at Elliot. She would not look at him. She couldn’t. Her breath felt gummy, like it was trying to choke her.

‘Interestingly,’ Elliot said, ‘about six years ago, the diaries of one of Stalin’s personal doctors, a man called Alexander Myasnikov, were released. Myasnikov wrote that Stalin suffered from a brain illness that might have impaired his decision-making and influenced his paranoia. So –’

The bell rang and interrupted him.

Pip jumped. But not because of the bell. Because something had clicked when Elliot said ‘diaries’, the word repeating around her head, slowly slotting into place.

The class packed up their notes and books and started to file towards the door. Pip, hobbling and at the back, was the last to reach it.

‘Hold on, Pippa.’ Elliot’s voice dragged her back.

She turned, rigid and unwilling.

‘How did the exam go?’ he said.

‘Yeah, it was fine.’

‘Oh good,’ he smiled. ‘So now you can relax.’

She returned an empty smile and limped out into the corridor. When she was out of Elliot’s sight she dropped the limp and started to run. She didn’t care that she had a final period of politics now. She ran, that one word in Elliot’s voice chasing her as she went. Diaries. She didn’t stop until she slammed into the door of her car, fumbling for the handle.