Hanging Hill (35 page)

47

As she’d walked across the fields, come down the quarry edge and approached the house, something had happened to Sally. The thing that had been coming up inside her for weeks at last reached the surface. It was the thing that had been able to say no to Steve when he’d offered her money, to say no when he’d said he was coming home from Seattle. The thing that had been able to keep filming Jake that night in Twerton, and had been able to cut David Goldrab into a million pieces. The thing was skinless and sharp-toothed, with the long face of a dragon, and had just shaken itself free of the old Sally, leaving her perfectly calm, perfectly focused. She was going to go in and get Millie out. Simple as that.

She examined the torch, flicked the switch back and forward, checking it carefully. Then she lifted the axe in the other hand, holding it over her shoulder like a woodcutter. Her face fixed, her heart beating slowly, she stepped into the hallway and crunched along the glass in the hall to the doorway where the noise was coming from.

She poked her head round the door, quite cool and unhurried now. There was no need for a torch – the moon from the window opposite lit up the room, wet and filthy. It was full of old furniture: a sideboard and a sofa that someone had tried to set fire to, a broken standard lamp leaning crookedly up against the wall. Scrappy blackened curtains hung at the window, which looked out at the cliff behind and, on the other side of the cracked glass, lit eerily by the moon, a man’s dark, oval face. Kelvin. Banging his head monotonously into the glass, raw intent in his face. She didn’t bolt back, just stood rooted in the doorway, staring at him. He wasn’t looking at her. He hadn’t even registered her presence, his eyes were so shuttered and blank in his brute need to get into the house.

He was smaller than she’d expected. He must be kneeling there, so close to the window, his hands out of sight below the sill. Whatever she’d imagined in his face – cunning or malice – it wasn’t there. It was dull. Flaccid. She made up her mind right there and then. She was going to kill him. She’d done it to David Goldrab, but this was going to be easier. Much easier.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Zoë had crept up behind her and was looking over her shoulder. ‘He looks weird. Is he drunk?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘It’s good. He’s useless.’ She put the dragon lamp on the floor and raised the axe. There was bile in her mouth. This was it, then. This was the moment. ‘Don’t look.’

‘Wait.’ Zoë grabbed her arm. ‘Hang on. Something’s wrong.’

Sally lowered the axe and Zoë hefted up the dragon lamp from the floor. It powered blindingly across the tiny room, illuminating the sofa and the sideboard and the tatty curtains, putting Kelvin’s face into sharp relief against the rock. He didn’t react to the light. Not at all. He remained in the same position, his lolling head banging rhythmically into the frame. There was a mark on his forehead where it was making contact, but no blood. And the banging was lackadaisical. More of a spasm than an intention.

‘Why’s he so low down?’

Sally shook her head, transfixed by his face. ‘Isn’t he kneeling?’

‘No. It’s something else.’

Together the two women took a step into the room. Zoë shook the torch, moved it randomly to create a strobe effect. Then she took another step forward and shone it straight into his eyes. Still he didn’t react. His eyes stared forward, black and blank, as if focused on something in the window-frame.

Sally let out all her breath, walked to the window and put the axe straight through the glass. Kelvin’s body swayed a little, but he didn’t look up at her. His head jerked forward and made contact with the frame again, just inches from her face, then snapped back. She saw his eyes under the lowered lids. Saw the blackness. Saw the scar in his skull that snaked down from his ear into the collar of his checked shirt. His face was pulled back in a grimace. There was some blood on the front of his shirt, as if maybe it had come from his mouth.

‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Dead.’

She leaned out of the broken window, angled the torch down, and saw he wasn’t kneeling at all. It was just that he had no legs. What had once been his lower body had concertinaed here. Into a bag of broken limbs half held together by his jeans. A tree branch growing out of the rock had caught him – suspended him there like a puppet, moving him back and forward into the window. Slowly, she raised the torch to the rockface. Saw a tree hanging half out of the rock, pale yellow earth spilling down. A long scar as if someone had tumbled down. She saw it all now – Kelvin and Nial struggling. A long, scrambling fall.

She pulled back from the window, and picked her way back across the litter of beer cans into the hallway. She dropped to a crouch next to Nial, where the ground was tacky with blood. She put her hand on his side, feeling it rapidly rise and fall under her fingers. His body was hot. As if the effort of the struggle with Kelvin was still being released.

He had a tiny ribcage, not much bigger than Millie’s. She pulled his shirt down to cover him. ‘Can you hear me? Where’s Millie?’

He lifted his hands to his face and groaned. He half turned on to his back.

‘Nial? It’s OK. You can tell me – I’m prepared.’

‘She’s OK.’ His voice was thick. ‘She’s safe. I did it.’

‘Did it? Did what?’

‘I saved her. I saved Millie.’

Sally rocked back and sat down, among the beer cans, litter and broken glass. She sat there, holding her ankles, the floor and walls all moving around her. ‘Where, Nial?’ she heard Zoë say behind her. ‘Where is she?’

‘I locked her in the Glasto van. Up near the house. She hasn’t got her phone – it all happened too fast. You must have driven right past her.’

Part Three

1

Ben couldn’t understand why Zoë wanted to go to Kelvin Burford’s funeral. What did she think she was going to gain from it? Did she feel sorry for his family? Or did she simply want to be sure he was really dead and gone? Zoë couldn’t answer the question, she just didn’t know, but she went all the same: her, Sally and Steve. Millie, Nial and Peter had come too, still adamant they wanted to be there. So it was six of them that shuffled into a pew that day in the tiny chapel, each a little uncomfortable and awkward, fidgeting in their formal clothing, hoping the service wouldn’t be too long and drawn out.

It was midsummer. The coroner had taken five weeks to call the final inquest on Kelvin Burford’s death and reach the verdict of death by misadventure. The investigation into Lorne Wood’s death, meanwhile, hadn’t officially been closed, but Kelvin might as well have been tried and convicted of it because the whole world knew what he’d done. The scarf at the canal was positive for his DNA, and when his house was searched not only had Lorne’s pink fleece and mobile phone been discovered under the bed, but also, in the desk drawer downstairs, the lipstick used to write on her body and the distinctive filigree earring that had been ripped from her ear. Ironic, really, when Zoë thought of all the planning she, Sally and Ben had put into getting Kelvin nailed – assuming he’d have disposed of the evidence at his cottage and would have to be nailed some other way.

There’d been story after story about the ‘monster’ Burford in the paper, detailing Kelvin’s past, his injury in Basra, his assault on the girl in Radstock. There weren’t many of his friends and family brave enough to turn up to the funeral so the congregation was small. Zoë glanced around – a few police, one or two colleagues who’d served with him in Basra wedged into the uncomfortable pews, not meeting anyone’s eyes, as if they were ashamed. Then she realized with a jolt that the pew they’d chosen was directly behind Kelvin’s sister. She stopped moving around then and, as silence fell in the chapel, studied the back of the woman’s head. Fair hair curling out from under a black straw pillbox hat. It occurred then to Zoë that maybe guilt had sent her here. Shame at the number of ways she’d stepped outside the subtle moral framework of truth and lies that the police were supposed to know and respect. As well as Kelvin, David Goldrab’s disappearance was on her conscience – repeatedly she’d reassured the family that everything possible was being done, while in truth she was silently helping the case to slide further and further down the force’s must-do list.

Air wheezed into the organ pipes, a chord sounded. She picked up the order of service and fanned herself lightly, raising her eyes to the rafters overhead. The cobwebs and the dust. Maybe the eyes of God were beyond all that, peering down at her, seeing all these secrets. She’d been wrong that Lorne was just the tip of the iceberg, that Kelvin had already killed. There had been no traces of human remains anywhere in the house or in the Land Rover – and the photo from Iraq had been downloaded from a website that had got thousands of hits before it had been wiped from the server. Yes, she thought, she’d been wrong about a lot of things in the last few weeks. But some right had come out of it too. Her connection to Sally, to Millie. And maybe, through that, a new way of connecting to the rest of the world. A new dimension in the pattern she was leaving.

The doors at the back of the church opened and the funeral director’s pall-bearers began the long walk up the aisle. Zoë looked down and saw Sally’s hand resting on her lap. She looked to her left and saw Millie’s hand on hers. On an impulse she reached out and took both, and as she did, the answer to Ben’s question about the funeral popped into her head.

Solidarity. That was what it was. She was here to show the world, and Kelvin’s memory, that this family, her family, wouldn’t be pushed apart again. Ever.

2

When the service was over, the teenagers ran on ahead, though the adults lingered a while, waiting for Kelvin’s sister to go before they got up and left by the east entrance, which led into the graveyard. They didn’t want to bump into the press who were ranked outside the west gate, gathering around Kelvin’s sister.

The three of them went to the bench under the buddleia tree to wait it out. Sally sat on Steve’s knee, Zoë stood in front of them, smiling, a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. She looked gorgeous, Sally thought, like an Amazon. Dressed in white from head to foot, with an incredible tan she’d picked up just from being on her bike. Her face had healed completely and she wore a solid cherry-red lipstick that hadn’t smudged or faded.

‘I like your dress,’ Sally said. ‘And the hat.’

‘Thanks.’ Zoë pulled off the hat and sat next to them. Tried to shake a crease out of the skirt. ‘It’s not really my thing. You know, dresses and hats. Still – proves I scrub up OK.’

‘Ben’s not here?’

‘Yes – he’s waiting in the car until the press go. See him?’

Sally looked across the graves and the cypress trees and saw a dark-blue Audi pulled up in the patchy sunlight. Ben was inside it, wearing sunglasses. ‘He’s staring at us. He doesn’t look happy.’

‘Ignore him. He reckoned we shouldn’t have come to the funeral. Thinks we’re nuts.’

Behind Ben, Nial and Peter’s Glastonbury vans were parked. Peter had got into his and now Nial was unlocking the side door of his and pulling it back to let in some cooler air. In the days since the inquest Nial had painted yellow flowers and skulls on it. He’d stencilled a line around the middle, a Plimsoll line in pale blue, with the words ‘Projected Glasto mud level 2011’.

‘They’re going to Glastonbury tonight,’ Steve told Zoë. ‘Sleeping in the van for three days. Nice.’

‘The Pilton mudbath? Oh, Christ, I feel so jealous. You’re happy to let her go? After everything?’

Sally watched Millie lean into the cab of Nial’s camper and attach something – a charm or a ribbon – to the mirror. She saw Nial loosen his tie – he still had a brownish mark on the side of his face where he’d scraped it in the tumble down the cliff. Both of them looked awkward and wrong in their formal outfits – a white blouse and black skirt for Millie, bare legs in black pumps, which looked vulnerable and out of place, Nial in a suit that was a little short in the legs, his hands dangling out of the sleeves. He was growing into himself, just as Sally had known he would eventually. There’d been story after story about him in the papers. Nial – little Nial, suddenly pushed into the shoes of the hero – leading Kelvin to Pollock’s Farm away from Millie, whom he’d hidden in the camper-van. The tarot had been wrong that Millie was going to die. A warning, of Kelvin and what was to come, but not a warning of death. ‘I’m not worried.’ Sally smiled. ‘She’ll be all right with Nial.’

‘He’s totally in love with her,’ Steve said.

Zoë laughed. ‘He might be in love with her, but what about Millie? Has it worked? He’s a hero now – is she in love with him?’

‘No.’ Sally sighed. ‘Of course not. Poor Nial.’

‘No?’

‘It’s Peter. It’s always been Peter.’

Zoë narrowed her eyes at Peter, who was sitting in his van fastening his seatbelt. ‘That waste of space? I never liked him, not from the moment I set eyes on him – he’s too full of himself.’

‘I know. He’s split up from Sophie now, though, so you never know.’ She shook her head. ‘One day Millie’ll look back and see what she missed in Nial. I just hope it’s not too late.’

Sally meant it. She was sure Nial was the right one for Millie. It wasn’t just the heroics of the night, it was something that had happened the day Nial was released from the hospital. He and Millie had come to Sally with serious faces and told her a different version of the events at Pollock’s Farm. Even now she was still turning this new version round and round in her head, trying to decide where to put it, what to think of it, whether she should be angry with them. They had told her that, coming home from school the previous night, Millie had been terrified about what Sally might be doing and whether she was going to confront Kelvin. They both knew what he was capable of, so Nial had taken the situation in hand.

Kelvin hadn’t followed Millie out to Pollock’s Farm at all. In fact, quite the opposite. He’d been lured there by Nial, who had decided, as part of his heroic fantasy, that he was going to take Kelvin on. Fight him face to face like a man. Millie hadn’t known anything about it, Nial insisted valiantly, until at the very last minute. All she knew was that twenty minutes after they’d got home Nial had stepped outside to make a private call. Minutes later he’d come hurrying back inside, telling her to hide quickly in the Glasto van. Of course he hadn’t foreseen the awful outcome, the long, clumsy chase that had taken them over the edge of the cliff. He’d only done it because, above everything, he and Millie had wanted to protect her, Sally.

She’d smiled quizzically at him when he said that, flattered, but puzzled. She wondered why anyone would ever want to protect her. She felt like a lion. She didn’t think she’d ever need protecting again. She thought life was very wild, and weird, and wonderful.

‘Zoë,’ she said now, ‘do you think it’s OK to do the wrong thing for the right reason?’

Her sister put her head back and roared with laughter. ‘Good God! What do you think I think?’

‘But what about the pattern?’

Zoë smiled and let her eyes wander over to Ben’s car. ‘The pattern?’ she said softly. ‘Oh, that always works itself out in the end.’

Sally smiled at that, and blushed, and looked down at Steve’s hands, linked across her lap. She thought about the three of them, she and Zoë and Millie, locked for ever to one person by a secret. For Zoë it was Ben and for her it was Steve. And that was OK. They were the people they wanted to be locked to. But for Millie …?

Well, for Millie it would happen eventually. One day she’d look at Nial and know she’d met the one.