Hanging Hill (14 page)

27

Sally had put the dinner in the oven and was making chocolate fudge for Isabelle to take home, cutting it into squares and putting it on greaseproof paper. Isabelle was outside but now she came in through the back door, huffing and puffing and kicking at the grass clippings that clung to her bare feet. Sally smiled at her, but Isabelle put a finger to her mouth and shook her head seriously.

‘What?’

She turned to reveal Nial and Millie standing behind her in the doorway, sheepish expressions on their faces. Sally set down the knife, wiped her apron and made herself smile at them. She was thinking of the conversation earlier – Isabelle insisting the teenagers were keeping a secret. ‘Millie?’ she said warily. ‘What is it?’

‘Look, Sally.’ Isabelle closed the door behind the teenagers and crossed to the table, holding Sally’s eyes seriously. ‘There’s a problem.’

‘Is it Lorne?’

‘No. Thank God, no.’ She raised her eyebrows at her son in the doorway. ‘Nial? Come on – explain.’

Nial came forward and sat down, casting a tentative glance at Sally. Millie followed hurriedly, pulling up a chair next to him – sitting with her shoulder touching his, her hands between her knees, her eyes lowered. She might be in love with Peter, but Isabelle was right: when it came to knights in shining armour Nial was always there, hoping all the girls would want to hide behind him. Of course, he’d puff himself up to make himself look as big as he could and they’d walk straight past him, their arms open to drape around Peter’s neck.

‘What happened,’ Isabelle said, ‘is they got their Glastonbury tickets a couple of months ago. You knew that, didn’t you? With Peter’s big brother?’

‘Of course. That’s what you’re painting the vans up for, isn’t it? Why? What’s the problem?’

Isabelle dug her finger into the wood grain of the table. Gave Millie an embarrassed sideways glance. ‘Millie hasn’t paid for her ticket.’

‘Her
ticket
?’ Sally turned her eyes to Millie. ‘What
ticket
? Millie, we talked about this. You were never going to have a ticket – you weren’t going with them.’

‘Mum, please. Don’t go off on one.’ She looked as if she might cry. ‘Peter paid for them online. Now I’ve got to give him my share of the money.’

‘But …’ Sally sat down, shaking her head. ‘Sweetheart, I’ve told you over and over again, I just can’t afford for you to go to Glastonbury. We talked about this.’

‘Everyone else’s parents are paying.’

‘Yes, but everyone else’s parents …’ She stopped herself. She’d almost said: ‘Everyone else’s parents know what they’re doing.’

Isabelle put her hand on Sally’s arm. ‘Nial and I want to pay for it. That’s why we’re here. Seriously – I’m happy. If you’re happy for her to go, then I’m happy to pay.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t. You’ve already helped me out more than I deserve.’

‘But think of everything you’ve done for me over the years. You’ve helped me – given me so much. I’ve lost count of the number of presents you’ve given me, all the paintings you’ve done for us. You must let me help you out.’

Sally gave a long sigh. She bit her lip and looked out of the window. The second time in less than twenty-four hours that she’d sat here and insisted she could do this alone. She turned back to where Isabelle and Nial were watching her with expectant faces. ‘I can’t take your money,’ she said. ‘Thank you for offering, but I really can’t. Millie will have to find a way of earning it. Or she’ll have to send the ticket back.’

‘
Mum!
I can’t
believe
you sometimes.’

Millie pushed her chair back and ran out of the cottage, slamming the door. Isabelle and Nial sat in silence, eyes lowered.

‘Sally,’ Isabelle said eventually. ‘Are you sure we can’t help?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve got to find my own way through it.’

She got up and carried the glasses to the sink, turning her back to them. Her shoulders were sagging with tiredness. God, she thought bitterly, I’m even starting to bore myself saying it.

28

One of the cats that crowded around Zoë’s back door had injured its foot. She noticed it as she stood there late that night after work, sipping a long-overdue Jerry’s rum mixed with ginger, watching them all swarming around her, eager for the food she put out every night. The little one hung back from the group, peering nervously at her. It looked skinny, as if it hadn’t been eating.

She drained the Jerry’s, went back inside for more cat biscuits and coaxed it out of the shadows. She managed to catch it and take it inside to examine under the light. It had a rubber band looped around its back legs. No wonder it couldn’t walk. The band had rubbed, but it hadn’t yet broken the skin. She cut it carefully, and peeled it away. Then she put her hands under the cat’s front legs and held it up in front of her to check it everywhere else. It gazed back at her, its legs dangling idiotically.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, and put it on the floor. She found a litter tray and some cat litter in the back of the shed and put it with a bowl of food and some water on the floor in the downstairs loo. Then she carried the cat over and placed it next to the food. ‘One night only, just until you’re better. Don’t even think about getting used to it – this is not a hotel.’

The cat ate hungrily. Zoë straightened to leave and, as she did, caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the washbasin. She stopped and stared at herself. Red shaggy hair. High cheekbones and sun-damaged skin. She looked half wild. Eighteen years ago in the clubs she had worn her hair cut short and white-blonde. Only one person had known her real name – the manager of the club, who was long gone, overseas somewhere. No one would recognize DI Benedict as the girl on that stage all those years ago. She was the master of disguise. She could hide anything she chose to.

She pushed up her sleeve, and stared at all the welts and scars. Unevenly shaped wounds made by her own nails. Something else she’d been clever at hiding. Ben had never noticed these all the time they’d been together. She’d covered them with makeup, made sure he never got a good look at the worst ones. The marks were the evidence of a trick she’d learned at boarding-school in her first term: whenever she thought of Mum and Dad and Sally, the way they could sit contentedly next to a fire, arms around each other, the feelings that came up in her used to make her cry softly into the pillow. Slowly she found that the only way to make the awful raw spot in her chest go away was to hurt another part of her body. She’d do it anywhere Matron wouldn’t notice – the tops of her thighs, her stomach. Sometimes there would be blood on her pyjamas in the morning, and then she’d make an excuse to creep off to the showers, where she’d stand, shivering, soaping away the evidence. The habit had never left her.

Stop it, she thought, yanking the sleeve down.
Stupid stupid stupid
. Stop it. This wasn’t her. She was the person who’d survived boarding-school, who’d fought her way across continents, who’d worked her way up the ranks in a male-dominated world. It didn’t matter that tonight was the second in a row Ben had suddenly become ‘too busy’ to come back to hers. She didn’t own him. It really didn’t matter. And none of her past was going to come back to get her just because of those photos of Lorne.

She switched off the light, closed the door on the cat, washed her dinner plate and the pots, then went to bed. She lay for a long time in the darkness, resisting the urge to touch her arms. When she did at last sleep, it was uneasy, ruptured, infected with dreams and discomfort.

She dreamed of clouds and mountains and rushing rivers. She dreamed of falling buildings and of a barge, tilting on its side, taking on water. And then, as the sun rose and her bedroom began to fill with light, she dreamed of a room like a Victorian nursery, with children’s number and letter charts on the wall and a rocking horse in the corner. Outside, an old-fashioned street-light cast its yellow glow on the snow that was being driven by a wind, the flakes racing in horizontal streaks past the panes. Although there was nothing familiar about the setting, somehow she knew this was the childhood bedroom she had shared with Sally. And she also knew, with absolute clarity, that it was the day of the ‘accident’. The day she’d come upstairs and found, to her fury, her bed, her toys and all her belongings painted by Sally with idiotic yellow flowers. A ‘surprise’. To please her.

But in the dream Zoë didn’t feel rage. Instead she felt fear. Real terror. Something about the snow and the nursery and the numbers on the wall was crowding at her, trying to close in on her. And behind her a child was screaming. She turned and saw it was Sally, her face a mask of terror, something red leaking from her hand. With the other hand she was pointing anxiously at the numbers on the wall, as if it was of vital importance that Zoë saw them. ‘Look,’ she was screaming. ‘Look at the numbers. Number one, number two, number three.’

Zoë looked again at the number chart and saw it had changed. Now it wasn’t numbers written out for children to learn: it was the sign at the Zebedee Juice Agency, No. 1 Milsom Street.

No. 1 … No. 1.

She sat up quickly, gulping air, her heart racing. It took her a moment to realize where she was – in her bed at home.

It was light outside and sunlight dappled the ceiling.
No. 1. Number one
. Now she got it. It had niggled at her when she was at Zebedee Juice and now she understood why. It was what the killer had written on Lorne’s stomach. She snatched up her phone. The display read ten to eight. She’d been asleep for seven hours. There was a team meeting in forty minutes. But this time it wasn’t going to be Debbie Harry speaking at the front of the room. It was going to be Zoë.

She raced through the shower, guzzled two cups of coffee, let the cat out, shooing it when it tried to nuzzle her ankle, and got to work at exactly half past to find the meeting had already started. Someone had blown up a series of photos – all registered sex offenders under the age of twenty-five who lived in the area – and had pinned them to the wall. One of the DSs was talking the team through the history of each one. When Zoë came in, flushed, hair still wet from the shower, clutching her bike helmet, the DS stopped talking and stared at her dumbly.

‘Sorry, mate,’ She dumped the helmet and her keys on a chair and came to the front of the room. ‘I’ve got to say something. Just before you go any further.’ She uncapped a marker pen and drew a circle on the whiteboard. ‘We’re looking at it all wrong.’

In the circle she carefully wrote:
No. One
.

Then she moved one of Lorne’s post-mortem pictures – the one with the message on her stomach – and stuck it on the board next to the words. ‘Look at the picture,’ she said. ‘Look at her belly button. Right here, after the “No”.’

The team gawped at the whiteboard, not a flicker of recognition in their faces.

‘It doesn’t mean no one understands him. It doesn’t mean that Lorne is no one to him. He’s telling us she is
number one
. Just one of many. He means there are going to be more. A number two. A number three.’

There was a long, stunned silence. Then, at the edge of the room, the superintendent cleared his throat. ‘Great – thanks, Zoë. Everyone – take that on board, OK? You hear me? Now.’ He nodded at the DS. ‘Have you finished, mate? Because I want to get on to this thing with British Waterways. I want a complete list of anyone who was mooring in the canal on Saturday so we can—’

‘Hang on, hang on.’ Zoë held up her hand. ‘I’m still here, you know. I haven’t left the room.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m still here. Or are you going to ignore what I just said?’

‘I haven’t ignored it. I’ve told everyone to keep it in mind.’

‘Would you like me to
finish
what I was going to say? Or shall I not bother?’

The superintendent looked at her, a baleful light in his eyes. But he knew Zoë of old, knew sometimes it was easier to roll over, and eventually he took a step back, holding his hands up in surrender.

‘OK.’ She turned back to the team. She knew the blood had come to her face and that Ben was watching her steadily from the corner. ‘We’ve got to take this seriously, because – who knows? – I might even be right. He could intend doing this again. It could
already
have happened. Has anyone gone to Intelligence to find out if there’re any other forces dealing with anything like this?’

‘We’d know if there were,’ said the superintendent.

‘Would we? What if the body hasn’t been found?’

‘There’d be a missing-persons case.’

‘No – that’s rubbish. How many women in their late teens, early twenties, go missing every month?’

‘Yes – but you’re not talking about girls like Lorne.’

Zoë looked back at him with a level gaze. She knew what he meant – that the girls who went missing without making headlines were the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the runaways, the strippers and the dregs. She’d get it through to them if she showed them the photos of Lorne. But she couldn’t. Just couldn’t do it.

‘You mean,’ the superintendent said, lowering his chin and looking over his glasses at her, ‘there’s a pile of dead bodies somewhere? Just no one’s noticed?’

‘No. I’m saying that up to now we’re pushing this investigation towards it being someone she knows, a teenager. I’m asking you to reconsider. I’m asking you to think outside those parameters. And to do it quickly – because, honestly, I think this could be a warning.’

Debbie Harry, who had been sitting at the back of the room in silence, gave a delicate little cough. She looked very young and fresh and pretty, dressed in a white lace blouse, her hair tied back. ‘While speculation is a good thing, it is just that. Speculation.’

‘More speculative than saying “all like her” means everyone likes her? What if it means he’s going to go after anyone who’s like Lorne?’

‘Well,’ Debbie said, suddenly soothing, ‘I’ve always been very clear in stating my case in this forum: that my opinions are only guidance. That you really, really –
all of you
– must form your own conclusions. And always keep an open mind.’

‘Yes. And I heard you say that. But I might be the only one who did, because I look around and I see a whole room full of investigators all too happy to accept a bit of guidance from you because it means they don’t need to use their brains. Sorry, guys, it’s true. You’ve accepted her parameters, so if we’re really going to work this case like a psychology seminar, then let’s go for it. Let’s all of us write up a thousand interpretations of these sentences. Then have a seance to decide which is right.’

‘Hang on, hang on.’ The superintendent held up his hand. ‘There’s vindictiveness creeping in here. It’s the last thing we need.’

‘Vindictiveness?’

Debbie nodded regretfully. As if it hurt her to be attacked, but that she, the adult, was prepared to be grown-up about it. She gave Zoë a sympathetic smile. ‘Well, I didn’t want to be the one to say it, but I have wondered if I’m stirring things up for you, Detective Benedict. Just a feeling that something about me is tapping into something very painful for you.’

Zoë opened her mouth to answer, then saw that everyone was staring at her. She got it. They all thought she was jealous. Jealous of this idiotic jumped-up psychology student with her one-size-too-tight blouses and her soft hair. She shot Ben a look, half expecting, or hoping, he’d say something in her defence, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. He had focused his eyes on the photos of the sex offenders on the board as if he was far more interested in them.

‘Jesus.’ Bad-temperedly she snatched up her keys and her helmet. ‘Welcome to the new age of policing. Anyone in here who gives a shit about justice, you’d better start saying your prayers.’ She saluted the superintendent, clicked her heels together and, the team staring at her as if she was completely mad, left the room, slamming the door behind her.