Hanging Hill

by Mo Hayder

  34

  When Sally came out of Millie’s room she was surprised to find Nial in the kitchen, standing awkwardly near the table, arms folded, head lowered. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘Yeah I … I sort of needed to make myself scarce.’ He gestured out of the window to where the van was parked. ‘They needed a bit of time. You know, before I drop Peter home.’

  She looked up and saw Peter and Sophie on the back seat of the van, locked together in a kiss. Peter must have been standing up because he looked much bigger and taller than Sophie, bearing down on her, pushing her into the seat with his mouth. Sophie wasn’t resisting. In fact, quite the opposite. She was clinging to his neck as if she was afraid he’d disappear. There were a few moments of uneasy silence. Then Nial cleared his throat, said in a small voice, ‘She’s in love with him, isn’t she?’

  ‘It certainly looks like it.’

  ‘I don’t mean Sophie, I mean Millie. Millie’s in love with Peter.’

  She turned woodenly to him, hardly believing what she thought he was saying. ‘Nial?’ she said curiously. ‘You don’t mean you …’

  He gave a weak, embarrassed smile. ‘Yeah, well – nothing I can do about it, is there?’

  She stared back at him. Good God, what a mess. No reciprocity – no returns. Sophie in love with Peter, Millie in love with Peter, and Nial in love with Millie. Poor little Nial. It was like watching elephants in a circus ring, each with its trunk linked round the tail of the animal in front, plodding on, blind to the futility of it all. Really and truly, life just wasn’t fair.

  She sighed. ‘Oh, God, you’re probably right. At the moment. But you wait. You wait.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One day, Nial, Millie will see you in a different light. I promise you that.’

  He blinked. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Oh, yes – oh, yes.’ And in saying it she prayed, with all the hope in the world, that she was right.

  35

  Zoë had taken a sleeping pill last night – she’d needed something, anything, to help escape the persistent voice in her head. At first it had been bliss, sending her sliding over the edge into oblivion. But she woke with a jolt five hours later, the first light of dawn at the window and the same clawing pain in her centre that she’d gone to sleep with. She didn’t look at her reflection when she got dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed and carefully wound a bandage around the wound on her arm, holding its end in her teeth. She selected a heavy black-cotton shirt with sleeves that buttoned securely at the wrists. She pushed her arm into it gingerly, not wanting to make it bleed again. She was an old hand at this.

  She drove across town with the radio on, trying to keep her mood up, but the sight of the battered sign in the doorway of Holden’s Agency, the steps up to it, covered with chewing gum and stained with God only knew what, sent her resilience for the day down another notch. She hesitated – suddenly reluctant. But it was too late. Through the wire-meshed glass the man inside had noticed her. He came to the door and swung it open. He was suntanned, in his sixties, wearing a cheap pinstriped suit and a neat white shirt that were both a size too small. He was obviously trying to beat the smoking habit, because he had a Nicorette inhalator tucked in his breast pocket and the faint tang of tobacco smoke lingering around him.

  ‘Hi.’ He gave her his hand to shake. It was huge and meaty and he had the big grin of a Texan car salesman. She expected him to say, ‘How can I be of assistance to you, ma’am?’

  ‘Zoë,’ she said.

  ‘Mike. Mike Holden. What can I do you for? You’re not looking for the health-food shop, are you? It’s round the corner.’

  ‘No – I—’ She fumbled for her warrant card. Gave it a quick flash. ‘I’m from CID. In Bath.’

  Holden paused at the sight of it. ‘Wendy? Is it Wendy? Has something happened to her? Just say it if it has. I’ve been preparing myself.’

  ‘Wendy? No. It’s an investigation. Something that happened in Bath. No bad news.’

  He took a step back, breathing slowly, calming himself. ‘That’s good. Good.’ He looked her up and down – seemed to notice her for the first time. ‘I’m sorry – no manners. You’d better come in.’

  The office was clean and less depressing than it was on the outside. It had the smell of a kitchen showroom, with industrial-grade brown carpet and a few pieces of furniture that looked a little lost in the large area. On one wall there was a line of framed black-and-white prints. Girls in bikinis, girls in swimsuits. Nothing topless.

  ‘You’re a model agency.’

  Holden nodded. He sat at his desk, gestured for her to take a chair and turned a book towards her. ‘Our portfolio.’

  She leafed through it and saw what the manager at Zebedee Juice had meant. These were nothing like the feral, challenging creatures on the morphing screen. These were pretty, sexy and well fed. Lorne would fit well in this portfolio. ‘Some of them are topless.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what we do. Everything from swimsuits to lingerie to page three. This year we’ve had two girls in the Pirelli calendar and we’ve had page three eighteen times. The West Country produces some of the best-looking girls in the land. It’s the warmth and the rain.’ He winked. ‘And the clotted cream. You know – all that fat.’

  ‘These girls, these models, do they go further than topless?’

  ‘Of course. The human body is a great instrument for artistic expression. If a girl is liberated, comfortable being naked, then she can get a lot of satisfaction from this sort of work. Most of them love it – really love it.’

  ‘Do you believe that? Or, rather, do you expect me to believe that? I mean, really they’re in it for the money.’

  He was silent. Only his jaw showed agitation: it moved, very slightly, from side to side, as if he was working a piece of food out from his teeth. At last he raised his hands. ‘You’re not stupid and neither am I. Of course not. They do it for the money. And most of the time it’s not cos they have to – it’s not cos they were trafficked, or cos they’re having to put food in the mouths of their disabled babies or their dying mothers or whatever. Not even to feed their drug addiction, because most of them are clean. No – in my experience most of the time they’re doing it cos it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day. Quicker and easier – and, honestly, you get more respect from the photographer than you do from your average shopper. And I say hats off to them. Not that I’ve ever, in my ten years in the business, ever seen a girl do something sensible with the money. No investing it or anything like that. They spend it on clothes and, frankly, tit jobs. So they can – what? Go on doing modelling. A bit of a mindless cycle, if you think about it – men getting what they think they want from women, women getting what they think they want from men.’

  Actually, Mr Holden, Zoë thought, not all of them spend their money on clothes and tit jobs. Some of them spend it on escaping something. Buying their freedom. ‘Have you been watching the news? The local news? There was a murder in Bath the other day.’

  ‘I know. Young girl. Pretty. Lorraine, was it? Lorraine someone.’

  ‘Lorne. Lorne Wood. The name doesn’t ring a bell?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t remember her coming to you?’

  ‘She was a schoolgirl, I thought.’

  ‘Yes, but she wanted to model. And she might not have used her real name.’

  She pulled from her satchel a laminated set of pictures that the reprographics unit had produced. A set of photos of Lorne. The billions poured into developing facial-recognition technology had done little more than raise an important issue: the human face is so multi-faceted that it can vary wildly just from the smallest change in angle and lighting. The chief constable had picked up on this and now the force was inclined to use a selection of photographs for identification purposes. On this sheet many of the photos collected from Lorne’s wall had been collaged. Zoë leaned half out of her chair a
nd placed the sheet under Holden’s nose.

  He looked at them. Frowned. Shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so. I get scores of photos from girls who think they’re going to be on page three, or the cover of FHM. The faces, I’ll be honest, merge into one eventually, but I don’t think I remember her.’

  She took the sheet back and sat for a moment, eyes on Lorne’s Hollywood smile. None of these looked anything like the photos on the camera chip. They were in a totally different mood. She reached into her pocket for her iPhone, to which she’d transferred all the photos from Lorne’s chip, and brought up one of Lorne in underwear on the bed. Not the topless one. She’d protect Lorne from that at least. ‘How about that?’

  This time Holden’s face changed. ‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘That alters things. I do recognize her.’ He went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, riffled through the photos and printed pages in it. ‘I would never have recognized her from the other photos – but seeing that, I remember.’ He pulled out a photo and held it up. It was one of the topless ones from the camera chip, printed out. ‘She emailed it to me – didn’t use that name, though. Called herself –’ he checked on the back ‘– Cherie. Cherie Garnett.’

  Zoë’s whole body felt tired. She wasn’t glad she’d been right, just enormously depressed. ‘And? What did you say?’

  ‘Nah. I thought there was something a bit suspicious about it, to be honest. I thought right away she was younger than she said she was.’

  ‘That stopped you, did it?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s a serious offence. You really can’t be too careful. I told her I’d keep her on file.’

  ‘So you told her no. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She looked at him, trying to get the measure of him. She thought he was telling the truth. ‘Do you think she’d have gone somewhere else when you turned her down?’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he got to his feet and opened a filing cabinet. He took out a written list and handed it to her. ‘Listen,’ he said seriously, ‘I don’t know you and you don’t owe me a thing. But if you tell any of them who put you in touch and it comes out it’s me – well, I’m just saying.’

  Zoë scanned the sheet. It had about fifty names printed on it with contact details. A lot of them seemed to be agents around the West Country, but several were lap-dance clubs. ‘Did you give her this list?’

  ‘I didn’t. I give you my word on that. But I’m not the only show in town. Someone else may have.’

  She folded the page of addresses, put it into her pocket and got to her feet. ‘Just one last thing,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you have any more thoughts on this don’t call the police station. None of the others are working on this lead so you need to speak to me direct.’ She pulled a business card out of her pocket and laid it on his desk. ‘And don’t leave any messages except on my personal voicemail. If you do that for me …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your name won’t be mentioned to anyone on this list.’

  36

  Sally found herself staring at David Goldrab as she cleaned his house that day. She kept trying to catch glimpses of him as he wandered around after his visit to the stables, opening a bottle of champagne, tapping his whip on his calf as if keeping rhythm with some song he was humming. She stood at the sink opposite him, in her rubber gloves, wiping the surface over and over, not looking at it but at him – his skin, his hands, his arms. The moving parts of him that made him living. Someone wanted him dead. Actually dead. Not pretend dead. Really.

  She finished her cleaning chores and went to the office to start entering the household expenses into the database. She’d been there for about ten minutes when she heard him go upstairs to the gym, which faced out over the front of the property. Soon she heard the familiar whirr of the treadmill, then the thud-thud-thud of him running. Her eyes drifted to the bank of computers on the other desk. His ‘business’ section. She thought about what Steve had said. Porn. But nasty porn. Something dark and enveloping. She bit her lip and tried to concentrate on the column of figures. Earlier she’d noticed a light on the other computer. It meant it was on standby – not actually switched off.

  After a while she couldn’t stop her attention wandering to it. She stood up and, tongue between her teeth, leaned over and touched the mouse. The computer whirred and began to come to life. Suddenly scared, she got up and went to the open door, looking up at the ceiling. Bang-bang-bang, came the noise from the treadmill.

  Quickly she went back into the office and to the computer. David hadn’t logged out of the session – everything on the screen was plain to see. The wallpaper for the desktop was a scanned newspaper page. It showed a man in his forties, heavy chin, thinning hair, dressed in a suit. The photo seemed to have been taken in the street somewhere: he was holding his hand up to the camera as if he’d been caught by photographers. The headline read: ‘Top MoD man Mooney heads Kosovan sex unit’. It looked as if the article had come from the Sun or the Mirror or another tabloid. She scanned the article – something about a unit that had been set up within the United Nations to stop women being brought in as prostitutes for the peace-keeping forces. Then she examined the man’s face. Mooney. Steve’s client. Did the fact it was on his computer mean David knew Mooney was watching him?

  She bit her lip and glanced up at the doorway. Overlying the photo on the screen there were ten icons on the desktop, each with the file extension ‘mov’. Videos. Still David was pounding on the treadmill. She let the mouse trail over the icons. It was ridiculous, when she thought about it, but she was thirty-five and she didn’t remember ever having seen a porn movie from beginning to end. She must have seen snippets, though, somewhere along the line, because if she really concentrated she had an idea of what to expect – very tanned women with blonde hair and bouncy breasts and lips painted pillar-box red. She thought of faces contorted in ecstasy. What she didn’t expect was what she saw when she got up the courage to click on the first icon.

  It was set in what looked like a large livestock pen, with whitewashed concrete walls and grid-shaped floodlights suspended overhead. At first all Sally could see were the backs of people gathered around, as if they were watching something on the floor in the centre of the pen. They were all men, dressed averagely enough from the neck down – jeans, shirts, sweaters. Their faces were covered – some wore scarves tied so that only their eyes showed, others had ski masks or balaclavas. A few wore rubber party masks: Osama bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Barack Obama. It would seem bizarre and even comical if it hadn’t been for the fact that all the men had their flies undone and were openly masturbating.

  The camera panned up, the picture became clearer, and Sally felt herself go numb. In the centre of the ring someone lay naked on a tattered mattress – a girl, though at first it was difficult to see her sex, she was so emaciated. Her tiny ankles were manacled to the floor, her legs forced apart. Her face wasn’t visible, but Sally could tell she was young. Very young. Not much older than Millie, maybe.

  A man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his face pushed his way through the crowd. He wore jeans and a tight T-shirt and, although his face was half covered, she immediately recognized him as Jake. It was the tan and the muscular arms that did it. He approached the girl and straddled her, one foot on either side of each shoulder, so he was looking down at her head. He began to unzip his flies – and as he did Sally realized the noise of the treadmill had stopped.

  She clicked off the video and hurriedly went to the shut-down button. And as she did she remembered it had been on standby, not shut down. Quickly she changed her mind. Chose Sleep. She jumped up from the seat and went to sit at the other desk, her back to the computer, willing it to close down faster – wishing she’d just unplugged it. But then David appeared in the office doorway, dressed in his jogging pants and trainers. The postman must have been because he had a glass of pink
champagne in one hand and a stack of letters in the other. More letters still were wedged under his chin. He was shuffling through the envelopes, murmuring under his breath, ‘Bill, begging letter, sell sell sell, fucking credit-card company shite.’

  Then he saw that the computer was alive and that Sally was sitting, stony and still, eyes locked on the database, her face flushed.

  Slowly, he lowered the handful of letters. ‘Uh, ’scuse me for pointing this out, but someone’s been titting with my computer.’ He stood in front of it, frowning, watching the screen whirr itself into darkness. There was a long silence, in which all Sally could think about was her heart thudding. Then David turned.

  ‘Sally?’

  She was silent.

  ‘Sally? I’m speaking to you. Look me in the eye.’ He reached over and pulled her shoulder. Reluctantly she turned. He made a bull’s horn with his pinkie and his thumb, jabbed his hand at his eyes. ‘Look me in the eye, and tell me why you did that.’ A vein was pulsing in his forehead. ‘Eh? When I told you to keep away from that side of the room.’

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She thought she might be sick, any moment.

  ‘Don’t give me that patronizing look. I’m not the lowlife shit on your shoes, Sally, it’s the other way round. Has it escaped your attention that I’m the one employing you? Just cos you speak like you got coughed out of some hoity-toity fucking finishing school that teaches you how not to flash your snatch when you’re getting out of a Ferrari doesn’t make you better than I am – you still gotta pretend to like me. Because you’re desperate and you—’

  He broke off. Something else had caught his attention. The TV monitor on the wall. He raised his chin, gazed at it, his mouth open. Shakily, Sally looked up and saw on screen, behind the electronic gate, the familiar metallic purple jeep. Jake was leaning out of the window, pushing the buzzer.

  ‘Well, that’s fucking mint.’ He slammed the post down. ‘That has really made my day.’ He snatched up a riding whip that was propped against the wall and strode into the hallway, bending every three steps to slap it furiously on the floor. The gate buzzer echoed through the hallway. David didn’t go upstairs to get the crossbow. Instead he went straight to the door and pressed the button to open the gates. Seeing her chance, Sally silently grabbed her bag and jacket and crept down the corridor. She came into the kitchen as she heard the jeep pulling into the driveway. She grabbed her cleaning kit from the work-surface, went quickly to the door that led out across the terrace, and put her hand on it, expecting it to open.