Hanging Hill (15 page)

29

Sally had decided that Millie had to go to school, whatever happened. She had some free slots at work that morning, so she drove her to Kingsmead, and promised to pick her up next to the sports hall at home time. Jake the Peg’s purple jeep was nowhere to be seen. Even so, she watched Millie all the way until she’d gone into the building.

Her job that morning was just around the corner from the school – in one of the most expensive streets in the city. Most of the houses were elegant detached villas, built in Victorian times. The Farrow and Ball paint fad had arrived here, and all the doors and windows seemed to be painted in muted greys and greens; bay trees in
faux
-lead pots lined either side of neat gravel paths while pots of woody lavender and rosemary were dotted everywhere. Steve had a house at the other end of the road from Sally’s cleaning job, so on Wednesdays she’d got into the habit of going on to his afterwards. Sometimes they’d eat lunch. More often they’d end up in bed.

His house was a little smaller than the others in the street, but otherwise very similar – a stone-flagged doorstep, an old-fashioned bell with a wire pulley that rang a proper chime inside. At one o’clock she stood outside, listening to the bell in the hallway and thinking about David and what had happened with Jake. She was ready to tell Steve all about it. But the moment he opened the front door, she saw the mood was all wrong.

‘Hi, gorgeous.’ He kissed her briefly, but it was a distracted kiss. Just a peck on the side of the face before he turned and went back down the corridor towards the kitchen.

She followed him thoughtfully, watching his retreating back. He was dressed in shorts and a paint-spattered T-shirt with ‘Queensland: beautiful one day, perfect the next’ printed across the back. There was something heavy about his shoulders, which wasn’t right. ‘Are you OK?’ she said, when they got into the kitchen.

‘Hmm?’

‘I said, is everything all right?’

‘Yes, yes. I was going to make you lunch – there’s tuna in the fridge – but I got busy sorting out all the tools you need for the house. And while I was going through them I got hit.’ He slapped the back of his neck, as if a mosquito had landed there. ‘Right here, by the bloody carpentry muse.’ He gestured to the adjoining living room, where dustsheets lay on the floor covered with curls of planed wood. A nail gun had been balanced on a Black & Decker Workmate and a toolkit sat under it. ‘Trying to fix that doorframe, but I’m just making a cock-up of it.’

‘I’ll cook.’ Sally unfastened her HomeMaids tabard. ‘You get on with it.’

‘Sally, I—’

‘What?’

He shook his head. Turned away. ‘Nothing. There’s, uh …’ he waved a hand vaguely at the cupboards ‘… sesame oil in the one at the end, if you want it.’

He went back to the living room. Sally folded the tabard and put it on the worktop, watching him carefully. He stopped in the doorway, looped up a professional-style tool-belt, bristling with chisels and hammer handles, and strapped it to his waist. Then he picked up the nail gun, switched it on, and began firing nails into the doorframe. He didn’t once turn to look at her. Over the months she’d learned that, from time to time, Steve had moods like this, when something would preoccupy him. One or two clients would leave him quiet and introspective for days, as if he’d peeped into a world he wished he hadn’t known about. Maybe now he was thinking about an upcoming trip he was supposed to be making on Saturday – a client in Seattle he needed to visit. That, or maybe the meeting he’d had yesterday in London: he’d been anxious about that before he’d left, before Millie had got up. He’d been vague about who he was meeting – perhaps it had been Mooney. The one whose name she was supposed to forget.

She went back to the fridge. Tuna steaks in greaseproof paper oozed red on the middle shelf. There was a pot of basil that looked to have been bought from the farmers’ market, some gherkins and, when she delved deep, an old jar of capers. She’d make
salsa verde
. She took the ingredients out and began to chop, her eyes sliding across the room to Steve as she worked. Every time he drove a nail into the doorframe she jumped.

She’d finished the sauce and was heating the oil in the pan with her back to the room when the sound of a nail being fired was followed by a loud clatter. She put down the pan and turned. He was standing with his side to her, his left hand placed high on the doorframe, the other pressed against the wall. The nail gun was on the floor where it had fallen, turning slowly on its axis. He had his head down and was perfectly still, except for his left leg, which was moving spasmodically up and down as if he was kicking himself. He looked sideways at her, his face grey, pinched.

‘Think I’ve fucked my hand, Sally, if you’ll forgive the expression.’ His teeth were clenched. He jerked his head in the direction of his left hand, not raising his eyes to it. ‘Gun hit a knot, slipped. I’ve got to assume I’ve really fucked it. Would you have a look?’

She turned off the gas and hurried across to him. The hand looked normal at first glance, just as if it was resting there, the fingers pointing up to the ceiling, but, closer to it, she saw what had happened. He’d skewered himself to the wall. She stood on tiptoe and examined it.

‘What?’ he said tightly. ‘What can you see?’

She could see the steely gleam of a nail head poking out from the fleshy pad below his thumb. She could see a single, oily line of blood running from the site of the wound to the wrist, where it split into a delta that continued down through the hair on his arm. And she could picture more – she could imagine the musculature and bone structure inside, because it was what she’d seen almost thirty years ago on the X-ray of her own hand after the accident with Zoë. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to get past that image. It always made her feel inescapably sad. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about these things.’

‘OK.’ He wiped his face with his free hand. ‘See that hacksaw?’

She crouched and rummaged through the toolkit. ‘This?’

‘No. That one.’

‘What?’ She picked it up shakily. ‘What’ve I got to do?’

‘Cut the nail. Between my hand and the wall.’

‘Cut it?’

‘
Yes
. Please, Sally, just do it. I’m not asking you to cut my hand off.’

‘OK, OK.’ She went quickly to the cupboard under the sink and pulled out two rolls of kitchen towel. She got a chair, scraped it up to where he stood and climbed on it to inspect the wound. Tongue between her teeth, she pressed the area around it. Steve winced and sucked in a breath, rolled his head around once or twice as if he was trying to release a crick in his neck. The skin on his thumb was stretched sideways: the nail had only pierced the side of the muscle. It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought.

‘OK.’ Her heart was thumping. ‘I don’t think it’s too serious.’

‘Just do it.’

Her hands were slippery with sweat but she pushed her fingers between the wall and his flesh and gently pulled at it, pushing it along the nail away from the wall, until about a centimetre of the shaft was visible between skin and wall.

‘
Jesus
.’ He dropped his head, teeth clenched, and his foot kicked harder. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

Tentatively she raised the hacksaw, edging the blade into the space between the wall and the hand, lowering it until it bit into the shaft of the nail. Steve stopped talking and went still. His eyes rested on her face. She moved the saw back and forth experimentally once or twice. He’d gone curiously quiet. She adjusted the blade and felt it lock into the metal, knew it was right, and began to saw.

‘Sally,’ he whispered suddenly, while she worked, ‘I really need you.’

Her eyes shot to him and she saw something she’d never seen in them before – something naked and scared. When he had said ‘need’ he had meant more than just needing her to cut him away from the wall. It was a bigger ‘need’ than that. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could the blade slipped through the metal and the nail came apart. Steve’s hand dropped and the head of the nail fell out of it. He took a couple of steps back and she jumped off the chair and caught him, lifted the hand and held wads of kitchen towels round it to stem the blood. She made him sit down, his hand positioned on his shoulder.

‘Take deep breaths.’

He shook his head. His T-shirt had dark circles of sweat at the neck and under the arms. There was a fine spatter of blood on the floor and the tools were scattered all over the place. After a minute or two, he spoke. ‘Yesterday was the most fucking awful day, Sally.’

‘Yes.’ She crouched, peering up into his grey face. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

He looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to find a steady place to rest his eyes and keep everything together. ‘It’s work. Fucking
crap crap crap
.’

‘Is it America?’

‘No. God, no – that’s a breeze. It was the meeting. In London. With … You know who I was meeting.’

Mooney, she thought. I was right. ‘What happened?’

There was a long silence. Then he turned his grey eyes back to her and looked at her seriously. ‘I got offered a novel way to earn thirty K. No tax. Would solve all your problems in the blink of an eye.’

‘What?’

‘Killing David Goldrab.’

She put her head to one side and gave a small smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right. I’ll kill him and you steal all his champagne.’

Steve didn’t laugh, just went on staring at her.

‘What? You look weird, Steve. Don’t scare me.’

‘But I’m serious. That’s what they offered me at the meeting yesterday. I sat in the Wolseley in Piccadilly drinking two-hundred-quid-a-bottle champagne and got offered thirty K to off David Goldrab. I told you it was going to be dark.’

They stared at each other, stony-faced with shock.

After a moment he shook his head. ‘No – forget it. I didn’t say that.’

‘Yes, you did.’ She straightened, groped blindly for the sofa behind her. Sat down with a bump on the arm. ‘It’s not true – is it?’

His eyes flickered across her face. ‘Good God, Sally, what the hell have I wandered into?’ His shoulders slumped wearily. ‘It’s like being in a bloody Tarantino movie.’

‘You’re serious? You’re really serious?’

‘Fuck, yes.
Yes
.’

‘Do people really do things like that? In real life?’

He shrugged, as mystified as she was. ‘Apparently. I mean, Christ, I always kind of knew it happened from time to time to people in my job. You’d hear about it – this and that bent PI giving some ex-IRA guy ten K to drive a Range Rover over someone’s wife in their driveway. Just like I always knew the really shit stuff in life existed. The reality of all the bastards who walk the streets unchallenged. They’re not stopped because they’re dressed in Armani suits, drive high-end Audis and get called “sir”, but they’re psychos just the same, for their ruthlessness and for the scalps they take. I knew all that – that lives were being destroyed under the veneer. I knew complete and utter bare-faced greed really existed. And on some level I knew things like this must happen. People must get killed – for a price.’ He leaned back in the chair, clutching his hand. ‘I just never,
ever
, thought it would come near me.’

Sally let all her breath out. She gazed up at the ceiling, spent time fitting this into her head. After a while, when neither of them had moved, she said, ‘Steve?’

‘What?’

‘Those people. Weren’t they nervous when you said no?’

He was silent for a moment. Then he unwrapped his hand and inspected the wound. Licked his finger and rubbed at the blood.

She lowered her chin and squinted at him. ‘Steve?’

‘What?’

‘You did say no. Didn’t you?’

‘Of course I did.’ He didn’t meet her eyes. ‘What else do you think I’d have said?’

30

Zoë strode down the corridor from the incident room to find five teenagers standing moodily outside her office. The three boys had spiked hair and wore their school trousers belted under their skinny buttocks. The girls were straight out of St Trinian’s, with school skirts rolled up at the waist to show their legs and shirts tied at the waist like Daisy Duke.

‘Auntie Zoë?’ said the smaller of the two girls. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’

That stopped Zoë in her tracks. She leaned a little closer, peering at the girl. ‘
Millie?
Jesus. I didn’t recognize you.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Millie put both hands on her hair, as if to check it was still there. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. I just …’ She’d only ever seen Millie in photos Mum and Dad had sent, and twice in the flesh, in the street, just in passing. But she was pretty – really pretty. It took a moment for Zoë to gather her wits. ‘What do you want? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’

‘The headmaster let us come here. We’ve been waiting to speak to you. Can we do it in private?’

‘Yes. Of course. Come in, come in.’ She unlocked her office and kicked the door open, scanned the room quickly for anything the kids shouldn’t see – post-mortem photos or notes on Lorne’s case. ‘There aren’t any chairs. Sorry about that.’

‘’S OK,’ said the tallest boy. ‘We won’t be staying.’

Zoë closed the door. Then she sat on the desk and regarded them all carefully. She had to stop herself staring directly at Millie, though she monitored her out of the corner of her eye. Was it her imagination or did Millie look more like her, Zoë, and less like Sally? ‘What can I do for you all?’

‘We need some help,’ said the tall boy. He was blond and good-looking. You could tell from the body language of the rest of the group that he was the alpha male. That he threw his weight around and generally got what he wanted. ‘It’s about Lorne Wood.’

‘Right.’ Zoë glanced cautiously from face to face. ‘OK. And I take it from the way we’re all standing here, the way that you approached me, that you want, for the time being, to have a private chat?’

‘For the time being.’

‘That’s fair enough. But before we start I’d like to get your names. I give you my word it won’t go any further. Here.’ She pulled out a spiral-bound jotter and handed the bigger boy a pen. He studied it for a moment, unsure. Zoë nodded. ‘You have my word,’ she repeated. ‘You really do.’

Reluctantly he took it, bent over the desk and wrote
Peter Cyrus
. He handed the pen to Millie, who glanced at Zoë, looked about to say something, but instead bent over and wrote
Millie Benedict
. Benedict, Zoë noticed, not Cassidy. So it was true what she’d heard: Sally really had divorced Julian. And here was Millie – using Sally’s name instead of her father’s. What did that say about the separation?

The other teenagers lined up and took turns to write on the pad.

Nial Sweetman, Sophie Sweetman, Ralph Hernandez
.

Ralph Hernandez.

Zoë stared at the name, moving her jaw from side to side. She put on a calm smile and raised her head to him. She hadn’t taken much notice of him until now. He was slight, medium height, with wiry dark hair and olive skin. Apart from his tie, which was knotted the way they all seemed to these days, puffed up and wide, like some seventies TV cop’s, he was dressed more conventionally than the others, in that at least his trousers appeared to almost fit him and the spikes in his hair weren’t totally outlandish. His fierce brown eyes were bloodshot.

‘So.’ She forced her voice to sound casual. ‘What can I do for you all?’

There was a moment’s silence. Then the one called Nial nudged the one called Peter. Sophie and Millie kept still, their eyes on the floor. Ralph rubbed the back of his sleeve nervously across his forehead.

‘It’s like this,’ said Peter. ‘Ralph’s scared.’

‘Concerned,’ Ralph corrected. ‘A little concerned. That’s all.’

‘I see. And why are you concerned?’

‘I was …’ He scratched his arms. ‘I was …’

‘He was with Lorne,’ Peter said, ‘the night she was killed.’

Zoë cupped her chin with her fingers. Gave the teenagers a ruminative look. In her chest her heart was knocking like a tomtom. Here was Debbie and Ben’s ‘killer’. All five foot ten of him. And meanwhile, if she was right about that message on Lorne, the real killer was out there somewhere. Maybe thinking about number two. ‘OK,’ she said calmly. ‘And obviously there was a reason you didn’t mention this before.’

‘I’ve never told my parents I’d got a girlfriend. And Lorne never told anyone about me either. It was supposed to be a secret.’

‘His parents are Catholic. They find that sort of thing a bit – you know.’

‘Can you help him?’ Nial asked. ‘He doesn’t know what to do.’

‘Help? I’m not sure about help. This is serious. I know you know that – you’re not stupid. But we’ll take this slowly. Ralph, Lorne was your girlfriend. How long had you been seeing her?’

‘Only a couple of weeks. But I loved her. I mean that. She was the one for me.’ There was something tight in his voice that said he wasn’t lying. ‘Please,’ he said, and for a moment he sounded like a little kid. A kid left out in the rain and begging to come inside. ‘Please, I just don’t know what to do.’ He straightened against the wall and put his head back against the plaster, shaking it. ‘Honestly, I think I’d be better off dead.’

‘Come on,’ she said, leaning forward, ‘let’s take a deep breath, shall we?’ Technically she should be thinking about calling in the child-protection units, with a minor saying things about wanting to die, but she’d never get the story out of him if she did that. ‘OK? You OK?’

After a moment or two he licked his lips and muttered, ‘Yeah.’

‘And calmly now, Ralph, just calmly, knowing how awful you feel about all of this, and knowing how much you want to help us catch whoever did this to Lorne, take me through what happened that night.’

The room fell quiet. All the other teenagers had their attention on him. He lowered his eyes to his hands, which he held in tight fists. ‘She told her mum she was shopping, but actually she was meeting me. Up near Beckford’s Tower. Where we always met.’

Beckford’s. The great Victorian monument that drunken farmers were supposed to have used to find their way home at night, with its neoclassical belvedere, its gilded lantern. It stood in a cemetery at the top of Lansdown and could be seen from all across the city. It was also on one of the bus routes that came through the stop near the canal. Zoë sighed. Lorne must have been on the bus because she’d been up at Beckford’s with Ralph. ‘So, what time was that?’

‘About five thirty, I think.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘I’m really not sure. It could have been an hour. It could have been an hour and a half.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I didn’t check my watch. I just didn’t. Otherwise I’d tell you.’

So, up to ninety minutes maximum. Add to that the ten minutes or so bus ride to the centre of town and there was still the outside chance Lorne had gone somewhere after leaving Ralph – before going to the canal.

‘And then?’

‘And then she left. And I walked into town. I met up with, uh –’ he rubbed his arms again ‘– with Peter and Nial.’

‘We went out for a beer,’ Nial said hurriedly. ‘The school had won a cricket match the day before so we felt like having a little celebrate.’

‘The three of you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you old enough to be cruising round the local pubs?’

‘Well – no. Not really. We kind of used fake IDs.’

‘Kind of?’

‘Yes. Why? Are you going to give us a lecture on it?’

Zoë raised her eyebrows at him. Impressed by his guts. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not. In the scheme of things it’s not exactly the crime of the century. So what time did your little fake-ID celebration finish?’

Nial shot Peter a look. Peter scratched his head. ‘What time was it? About midnight?’

‘About that, yeah.’

‘Where did you go, Ralph?’

‘Home. Weston.’

‘How did you get there?’

‘I walked.’

‘Did anything unusual happen on the way? Did you see anyone you knew?’

‘No.’

‘So let’s backtrack a bit. You met Lorne. What happened while you were together?’

There was a silence. Ralph’s head was quite still but his hands weren’t. They made little trembling movements. His shoulders were shaking. He shook his head imploringly – as if he couldn’t trust himself to speak without crying.

Zoë met Peter’s eyes. She jerked a thumb at the door. ‘Give us a few moments here?’ she mouthed. ‘Some privacy.’

The other two boys and the two girls exchanged glances. Then, as if they were a single organism, capable of reaching decisions without words, they filed out. In the corridor they stood with their hands in their pockets, each with one foot up against the wall. Like the cover of a Ramones album. It never went out of style to be skinny and sullen.

Zoë kicked the door closed, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the window-sill and turned back to Ralph. He had slid down the wall and was in a little huddled squat, his hands over his face. ‘OK, OK.’ She crouched next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth of his skin through the thin shirt. The tremor of his breath coming in and out. ‘Look, you’ve done the right thing by coming to me.’ She handed him a tissue. He took it and crammed it against his face. ‘You can be proud of that.’

He nodded and wiped his nose. His breathing was thick and nasal.

‘But I need to get it all clear in my thoughts, Ralph. I asked you if something particular happened at Beckford’s Tower and that seemed to upset you.’

He nodded miserably. ‘We had an argument. She wanted to tell everyone about us and I …’ He had to take deep breaths to calm himself. ‘We split up. We split up and she said she never wanted to see me again and … And … And that’s what happened. And it’s all my fucking fault. All because I’m scared of my fucking parents.’

‘It’s not your fault, Ralph. It’s really not your fault.’

‘What’s going to happen? Do I have to go to court? Are my parents going to know about it? My father’ll be furious. He thinks lying should be counted as a mortal sin.’

She rested her arm on his shoulders. He really was just a little boy. She could see the faint white of his scalp at the neat parting of his black hair. ‘I think, Ralph, that most parents would be more concerned about your welfare. And that you’ve had the courage to tell the truth.’

‘Christ.’ He’d used up the tissues so he wiped his nose on the shoulder of his shirt. ‘I wish you were my mother.’

‘Oh, no, no. I’d be a terrible mother. You can trust me on that one. Now, coming here was a huge decision for you, but it was the right one. This information is really, really important. With it we can build a picture of what happened to Lorne. But there’s not a lot I can do with the information if I can’t share it with my colleagues. If I gave you a guarantee that nothing will be said to your parents until you’re happy for them to hear, would you come and tell the rest of the team? The ones who can make a difference? You could stop this happening again. To someone else.’

There was a silence. It took her a moment to realize he was nodding.