Hanging Hill (36 page)

3

As soon as Zoë got into the car she saw that Sally had been right: Ben really was in a mood. His expression was solemn. Guarded.

‘What?’ She buckled the seat-belt and glared at him. ‘Because I went to his funeral? Well, I know why now. We wanted to show strength, not cowardice, like he did. Is that a sin?’

He took off the sunglasses and started the car. ‘It’s not that.’ He checked the rear-view mirror and pulled out of the parking space. ‘Not that at all.’

‘Then what? For Christ’s sake.’

‘We’ve got to talk. About all of this.’ He waved a hand behind him to indicate the church. ‘Something’s gone seriously awry.’

Zoë stared at him. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. ‘Awry?’ she said carefully. ‘What does “awry” mean?’

‘I’ve been going through the stuff from Kelvin’s place. We weren’t just looking for things to connect him to Lorne, we were looking to see if he had anything to do with David Goldrab’s disappearance.’

‘I know.’

‘It would be such a lovely tick in the box on our clear-up rates.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Not what we expected. We found something that turned everything around.’

‘What? What have you found? Something I left? My phone?’

‘Not a trace of you. No, we found something that …’ he moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth ‘… something that just doesn’t make sense. However I look at it.’

4

Sally stood next to the window in the utility room at Peppercorn Cottage, washing a lace blouse in the sink, her eyes raised to the perfect blue sky, crisscrossed with vapour trails. The awful silences that had gathered around Peppercorn after David’s death had gone and now it felt like a proper home. Steve was in the garage, hammering back some weatherboarding that had come loose. Next to the garage Nial and Millie were swarming around the VW camper-van, piling things into it. A cooler that Nial had adapted to run from the cigarette-lighter socket was stuffed with beer – no food or anything of any nutritional value as far as Sally could tell. There were rolls of bedding and Millie’s dresses arranged on hangers in the windows. She was already frantic – Nial had accidentally dropped her mobile phone into the washing-up bowl: it now lay in pieces on the dashboard, drying off in the sun with two of her blouses, a pair of denim shorts and some underwear that hadn’t come out of the wash in time.

‘You just don’t get it, Mum. If we don’t get there like
radically
early we’re so stuffed. The best pitches go in the first ten minutes – even in the camper-van fields. Honestly, we should have packed before the funeral. Peter and his brother’s mates will already be there.’

Sally gently wrung out the blouse and hung it up in the window, where it would catch the rest of the day’s heat. Outside, the yellow smudges of kerria and forsythia had long gone, and now the thick, heady summer blooms were beginning, delphiniums and poppies, bees swarming around them. Millie passed the window on the way to the van, arms full of clothes, and stuck her tongue out at her mother. Sally smiled. How incredible, when all along she thought she was the one protecting them, that
they
’d been protecting
her
. Nial put some music on the van’s sound system – Florence and the Machine – making the van shake. Not kids any more. No – they were adults.

She straightened the cuffs on the blouse. She’d wear it tonight and let Steve take it off her. They were going out to dinner. They would talk for hours. They’d get silly drunk. She’d tell him about the job she’d been offered by the hippies who’d bought her tarot cards – chief designer for a whole new product line they were launching. He’d tell her he loved her, and, maybe for the hundredth time, he’d make her a promise she didn’t want to accept. He’d say that if anything about David Goldrab ever came out, he was going to take the blame. He kept saying over and over again that he’d made the decision and that, if it came to it, Sally’s name was never going to be mentioned.

5

Ben drove Zoë home in silence. He wouldn’t say any more until he had her in the living room and had closed the doors. She half expected him to close the curtains too, he was in such a sombre, secretive mood.

‘What did you find? Something to do with Goldrab?’

‘Sit down.’

Shit, she thought. Sally had been right. Kelvin
had
taken photos of her that night.

‘Ben – just tell me. What have you found? Is it Goldrab?’

‘There was a contract out on Goldrab – you knew that. The SIB have taken Mooney in. He’s not talking.’

‘And?’

‘We found Goldrab’s teeth – buried in Kelvin’s back garden.’

She let her breath out. ‘OK,’ she said cautiously. ‘So it was Kelvin, then, who killed Goldrab?’

‘Looks like it. But that’s not what’s worrying me. It’s something else. What happened was that while we were searching we found a bunch of paperwork. I’ve been going through it all this week. And now …’

‘Now what?’

‘I’ve decided he didn’t kill Lorne.’

She gaped at him. ‘Didn’t
kill
her?’

‘Or rape her.’

‘Jesus. What the hell did you find?’

‘OK, OK. Listen. He did what he did to you and, Zoë, that was the worst thing I could imagine happening. Ever. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to be about it – and I still don’t know what it’s doing to you. Not exactly. But I’ve got to look past all that. Because none of it means he raped Lorne too.’

‘Hang on – what about all the things you found at his house? Her fleece. Her mobile phone.’

‘That was what really got me thinking. He’d gone to a lot of trouble hiding any evidence that you’d been there – there wasn’t a trace of you. So why didn’t he get rid of Lorne’s phone too? The lipstick?’

Zoë shook her head, mystified.

‘I’ll tell you why. It’s simple. He didn’t hide it because
he didn’t know it was there
…’

‘
What?
’

‘Look. After he got caught up with the accident those bomb-disposal guys had in Basra, the work they had to do to put him back together again was awesome. He spent three months in the Selly Oak military hospital in Birmingham while they stabilized him, then another two months recovering from a cranioplasty. They put a titanium plate in his skull, but it was causing him trouble. On the seventh of May he was having a scan to see what was wrong.’

Zoë frowned. She wasn’t getting it.

‘Lorne was killed while he was in hospital. I’ve checked. I’ve seen the admission records, I’ve spoken to the staff who were on duty. It’s solid, Zoë, solid. Kelvin Burford was in the hospital all of the seventh and on to the eighth. Under sedation. He could not have killed Lorne Wood.’

She sat down abruptly. Her head was buzzing. ‘But …’ she began. ‘But …’

‘I know. It was easy to jump to conclusions.’

Easy to jump to conclusions
… At those words something dark and nasty skittered across Zoë’s head. Something that had been waiting there since the day Kelvin had attacked her, something she’d avoided all along. She remembered lying on the bed at Kelvin’s. Remembered saying, ‘Just do it. I want you to.’ All those years ago when Kelvin had watched her from the shadows at the back of the club, she’d known what he’d wanted. And lying on the bed that day, she’d told him he could. If she was totally clear-eyed about it, totally honest and rational, he’d only done what she’d asked him to do. He’d battered her. Brutalized her. But the rest? Was it rape? Technically?

‘No,’ she murmured, almost inaudibly, ‘he killed Lorne. He had to have.’

Ben held her eyes solemnly. ‘I know you think all I do is go around looking for miscarriages of justice. But, Zoë, rapist and all-round shit though Kelvin was, I think he was set up. I’ve got something to show you. Wait there.’

He went into the kitchen. Started opening cupboards. She stared numbly at the open doorway, letting it all filter through her. Kelvin in hospital the night of the rape? Someone else in the frame?

Ben reappeared in the doorway, holding a bundle of papers in a blue plastic wallet. ‘The analysis of Lorne’s phone. And some photos.’

He sat next to her and began to pull out the sheets – page after page of request forms and data-protection forms from the Intelligence Bureau to the phone company. He got to a separate folder. Hesitated. ‘Not nice, this part.’

‘Fuck off, Ben, I’m a police officer too.’

He shrugged and pulled out the photos. Four of them. They showed Lorne splayed out on the ground in the nettles. In the first she was alive, her eyes on the person taking the photo. She was holding out her hand, a universal pleading gesture. Tears ran down the sides of her face and her nose was thick and crusted with blood. In the second picture she was still alive, but the silver gaffer tape holding the ball in her mouth was there, and her expression had changed utterly. In this one she knew she was dying.

‘These were taken on her own phone. He didn’t even bother to hide them. But …’ Ben shuffled the papers ‘… something
was
hidden on the phone. You’ve heard of data-recovery software? The boys in High Tech use it to find all the kiddie-porn the perverts think they’ve got rid of by hitting
Delete
. We used it on the phone. Didn’t find much that had been hidden. Except three texts that had been deleted the morning after she died.’

He held out the paper to Zoë, pointed to the places that had been highlighted in pink. She read:
Hi L. Good 2 cu 2day. U looked hot. Spk soon

Then, lower down:
don’t u fucking bother to acknowledge ur mates any more? I’m not a rapist u know - grin - not going to lay a hand on u. U looked lovely. i think u r lovely i love u. 4 true

And on the last page:
This is pain like I never knew you give me pain babe. Don’t ever think it isn’t true

‘These were deleted?’

‘Yes. Nothing exactly incriminating in them, is there? Apart from the fact they were deleted. Which kind of puts a red light over them.’

Zoë couldn’t drag her eyes away from the photo of Lorne looking into the camera. Her expression looked as if she still wasn’t sure whether this was a joke or not. As if she was thinking,
He’s not serious. He’s going to stop it and let me go
.

‘You think this person – the text person—’

‘He set Kelvin up. Planted the fleece, the phone and the earring at his house. Probably cannot believe his luck that Kelvin’s dead – that he’s not around to deny it all.’

‘Is there a name?’ She shuffled through the pages. ‘He doesn’t sign the texts. Is there a name?’

‘A number – look here.’ He put a finger on a number that had been highlighted in green. ‘But no name. The computer geeks think the address list was copied over – nothing they can do to recover it.’

Zoë pushed the papers aside. She put her hands to her temples, thinking hard. The words Kelvin had said when he found her in his house came back:
Don’t think you’ll get away with this again
. As if he’d known someone had broken into his house before her. Damn it all to hell, why hadn’t she thought of all this before? Someone else out there? Someone who had done this unspeakable thing to Lorne? And Kelvin just set up? Kelvin just the lout, the one capable of assault and battery, maybe, of doing what he’d done to her, but not capable of killing a teenage girl?

‘OK,’ she said, after a while. ‘We dial it.’

Ben smiled. ‘I love you. Here’s the phone.’

She took it from him, set it to speaker, tapped in *67 to block her phone from registering on caller ID, then dialled the number. She gazed out of the window as the call connected. There was a line of puffy clouds moving across the horizon above Bath. A pigeon sat on the window-ledge, watching her beadily. The phone rang and rang in the silence. They were just starting to expect an answerphone message when the phone clicked and a voice said, ‘Hello?’

Ben held a finger to his lips, but Zoë cancelled the call and sat back, dropping the phone on the table with a clatter. She was cold. So cold she was shaking. She’d been wrong. All along she had been wrong and Debbie and Ben had been right.

‘Why did you do that?’ Ben said, standing up. ‘Why the hell did you hang up? He might never answer again.’

‘We don’t need to call again. I know whose voice that was.’

6

Sally was helping Millie sort out the containers of juice and crisps and the hopeful bags of fruit she’d insisted on putting in. They got the picnic hamper half into the camper, then found it wouldn’t go any further. Sally looked to the front of the van for Nial to help. He was at the offside wheel, prodding the tyre with his foot, his phone up to his ear.

‘Hello?’ He went to the driver’s seat and leaned inside to turn off the music. ‘Hello?’ he said into the phone.

‘Who is it?’ called Millie. ‘Peter?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nial gave the screen a look. He switched the phone off and put it in the back pocket of his jeans.

‘Nial?’ Sally said. ‘Any chance you could help us back here …?’

He came round to them, took the hamper and gave it a good shove inside. Then the three of them piled all the sleeping bags and cagoules on top of it. Nial slammed the door and smiled. ‘I suppose that’s us, then.’

‘Wait.’ Sally fished in the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a pack of cards. ‘Since you’re going to be hippies for the whole weekend, I thought you might like these.’

Millie swooped on them. ‘Your
tarots
? Mum – you can’t. They took ages.’

‘It’s OK. My new company have copies of them. In fact, next year you might even see them on the stalls at Glasto. Please.’ She pushed them at her. ‘I want you to have them. Enjoy them.’

‘Oh,
Mum
. Mum!’ Millie jumped up and down like a three-year-old. She tipped them out of the box and began shuffling through them, holding them out for Nial to see. ‘Do you remember these? Look – there’s me. The Princess of Wands.’

‘What happened to it?’ Nial frowned at the card. ‘Her face is ruined.’

Sally smiled, thinking of how scared that image had made her when she’d first seen it. She’d painted a new card for the printers, but she hadn’t got rid of the original. It had no power over her now. ‘I don’t know. It’s nothing. There are others of her.’

‘The Magus and the Priestess.’ Millie was still happily flicking through the cards. ‘And – oh, my God, that’s Dad, isn’t it? Dad, and –
bleck
– Melissa. And Sophie, and Pete. And look – here’s you, Nial.’

Nial took the card from her and studied it.

‘Do you like it?’ Sally asked.

‘It’s great.’ He turned the card to the light and inspected it, looked at the places the pegs had left a mark where it had been hung up to dry. ‘The Prince of Swords. What does it mean?’

‘It means clever,’ said Millie.

‘And intelligent,’ Sally added.

‘Except,’ Millie said, ‘if you turn it upside down it means treacherous and untrustworthy. The trickster.’ She laughed the open-mouthed little-kid’s laugh she still hadn’t ironed out, no matter how cool she tried to be. ‘See? Mum, you always had Nial sussed. The trickster.’

‘That’s me,’ Nial said, handing back the two cards. ‘The trickster.’

Millie pushed all the cards back into their box and put them on the dashboard. In the house the phone was ringing.

‘Aren’t you going to get that?’ Nial said. ‘Cos we’ve got to go. Got to get that space. The ravers, they are a-coming.’

‘I’ll get it later – they can leave a message.’

Nial got into the van and put the key in the ignition. Millie clambered into the passenger seat next to him. She’d found a ridiculous Stetson somewhere and now she opened the window and waved it out. ‘Yee-hah, Mum. Yee-hah.’

Sally shook her head, half smiling. She stood next to the window, looking at Nial. He was wearing one of his faded seventies band T-shirts. Baggy shorts. His legs were already tanned. She could smell the freshly cleaned clothes, and the not-so-fresh sleeping bags all tumbled into the back. She could smell the sandwiches they’d packed for lunch and she could smell their skin. She felt jealous. Just for a moment.

‘You know something, Mrs Cassidy?’ he said.

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know if I’ll ever let you get away with it.’

Sally’s smiled faded. The words had cut her dead. And there was something ugly in Nial’s face. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said,’ he spoke slowly, enunciating every word as if she was stupid, ‘I’ll never let you get away with making it so difficult. For me to take Millie to Glasto.’

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. They stood, eyes locked. Then, like the sun breaking through the clouds, he smiled. Laughed. ‘I mean, I really won’t. I never thought you’d let me.’

Sally hesitated. She looked at Millie, who had stopped waving the hat and was sitting scowling at her hands. Feeling a little stupid, a little confused, Sally forced a laugh. ‘Well, you’ll have to promise to take some photos of her.’

‘I will.’ Nial put his hand on hers. ‘I’ll send them to you on the phone. They’ll be the best you’ve ever seen.’ He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

This time Sally smiled for real. She held his face as he pulled away. ‘Thank you,’ she said warmly. ‘Look after her.’

‘I will.’

Sally walked around the front of the camper-van as Nial started it up. She leaned in the window and kissed Millie on the cheek.

‘Yeah, OK, Mum,’ Millie said, rolling her eyes. ‘Respect the makeup.’ She pulled down the sun visor. Checked the mirror and rubbed the place she’d been kissed. Then, in a sudden rush, she leaned out of the window and threw her arms round Sally’s neck. ‘I love you, Mum. I love you.’

‘I love you too. You’re going to have the best time. The time of your life. Never forget it.’

Nial revved the van. Sally stepped back. A plume of smoke came out of the exhaust pipe. Steve came out of the garage and stood, his arm around Sally, to wave the teenagers goodbye. The van jolted once, then the tyres bit and off it went, out of the driveway, past the hedgerow where the first tea roses were coming out. Millie stuck her arm out of the window. It was long and slender. By the time she got back from Glastonbury it would be burned to a crisp, Sally thought, folding her arms. That suntan lotion would stay in the rucksack.

Steve put his arm round her. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say it would all work itself out in the end?’ He kissed the top of her head, and murmured into her hair, ‘I told you there’d be no punishment.’

The van turned left. Not right, the way she would have gone. ‘You’ll never get to Glastonbury that way,’ she wanted to shout. And then she caught herself: trying to interfere. She had to smile. Leave them alone, she thought, dropping her head against Steve’s chest as the van disappeared over the hill, going in completely the wrong direction, the strains of Florence and the Machine fading until there was nothing but birdsong left in the garden. You just can’t go on worrying about your children for ever.