Hanging Hill

by Mo Hayder

  A noise from the front of the house. Nothing much, just a vague whisper. Moving silently she closed the drawer, straightened and went to peer down the hall to the front door. The breeze outside was stronger now. It was making the curtains on the landing flutter, sending shadows like flapping wings on to the hall floor. A figure moved on the other side of the frosted glass.

  She shot a glance behind her at the kitchen. The door was still open. Another noise and then, shattering the silence, the person began to knock at the door, the noise echoing through the house. It pushed her into action. She slid silently back the way she’d come, out of the kitchen, into the garden, walking fast in a straight line away from the house where she wouldn’t be seen from the front, her hands in her pockets, her head down. It was only when she got to within ten yards of the gap in the hedge that she broke into a run.

  She ran as fast as she could, fumbling in her pockets for her keys. The thorns in the hedge tore at her, the gravel in the parking space made her stumble. She was sweating and trembling as she got to the car. She wrenched the door open and threw herself inside.

  As she got the key in the ignition Steve’s voice came back to her. You won’t get punished.

  ‘Steve, you were wrong,’ she muttered, starting the engine. ‘You couldn’t have been more wrong.’

  27

  Zoë stood on the doorstep, her arms folded, her back to the gamekeeper’s cottage, waiting for someone to answer the door. She surveyed the garden. It was a mess, with overgrown grass and a derelict garage, the weatherboarding rotting and hanging off. Over at the entrance, where a vegetable plot had been dug out, there was a stack of metal cages – fox ‘trods’ for trapping the animals. A keeper would need these especially at this time of the year. The foxes were only just recovering from the winter. This was their rebound time, and because it coincided with the young pheasants being at their most vulnerable, still too weak to fly into the trees, you’d often see keepers ‘lamping’ in their Land Rovers – bumping across the fields aiming their huge torches out into the darkness, attracting the foxes out of the hedges to be picked off one by one by a twelve-bore shotgun.

  No one came to the door so she bent and looked through the letterbox. She could see a small hallway with dark polished floors and a patterned runner on the narrow staircase. No one in there. Strange. She’d had the sense there was. She checked her watch. Most people would be at work now, but a gamekeeper could keep any hours. If Goldrab had run a lot of driven pheasant hunts during the season they’d be breeding them on an intensive scale. A lot of places around here still did that in spite of the animal rights movement – and at this time of year there were scores of chicks at different stages of hatching. The keeper could be anywhere.

  She realized she could hear water. Just a faint noise coming from somewhere behind the cottage. She went round the side and saw a dilapidated stone mill building with slate tiles stretching out at right angles to the cottage, spanning the stream, which rushed and echoed in a tunnel under the foundations. The braced redwood doors had been slid open to reveal the mill’s concrete floor, lightly strewn with straw.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Hello?’

  No reply or movement, just the distant sound of a woodpigeon cooing, the constant undernote of running water.

  ‘Hello?’

  She stepped inside the mill. The air was warm, full of noise. A giant waterwheel would have once been mounted at the far end of the building where the stream rushed under the boards, but it had been dismantled and a floor put over the open area. A concrete aisle ran down the centre, on either side of which were four wire-mesh holding pens with aluminium drop pans and red heat lamps hanging above them. A murmur was rising from the scores of pheasant chicks in the pens that squeaked and shuffled and ruffled their feathers.

  ‘Hey.’ Zoë leaned over the pen and held her hand out to them. ‘Hey, little guys.’ They scattered away from her, running off, banging into each other and gathering in a group at the rear of the pen, eyeing her nervously. She wandered around a bit longer – found a large, netted cage at the end of the building with older pheasants, all fitted with little face masks to stop them pecking each other. They straightened their necks and blinked at her, ratcheting their heads from side to side.

  Behind the pen was a bench with a vice, several jam-jars full of nails and screws and, mounted on a magnetic strip above the bench, a set of hunting knives – the type that could be used to field-dress and skin animals. Zoë studied them for a while, wondering if they’d been used to skin David Goldrab. She eyed the pheasants with the masks – were they fussy about what they ate? A body could disappear like that and never be found.

  She went back into the open air. Near the mill doors, set at an angle in the grass, there was a hole with a grate – an entrance to an oubliette or an old ice house for a forgotten manor, maybe – with a big, padlocked chain linked through it. She made a mental note of it, then wandered back to the cottage, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pausing to put her nose to the windows and peer inside. Idly she tried the back door. It opened. She hesitated, looking down at the handle, half surprised. Then she stepped inside.

  ‘Hello?’

  No reply, so she went into the kitchen and along the hallway, opening doors as she went, checking inside. No one here. She went upstairs, the curtain on the landing flapping and twisting like a ghost in front of her. She found two bedrooms – one with a bed against french windows that opened, improbably, on to a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the stream, the second empty save for a pile of cardboard boxes and an old poster of a football team Blu-tacked to the wall. A tube of tennis balls lay on the floor. Christ, there were bloody tennis balls everywhere she went, these days. Lorne. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you. I’m going to find out if you’re somewhere in all of this.

  There was a bathroom with greying towels left to dry on the radiator, a framed needlework sampler resting on the window-sill that read ‘I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son. I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes’. In the cabinet there was a box of medicine, open, the blister packs spilling out. ‘Catapres’, the label read. She’d heard of it. It was something to do with post-traumatic stress. She put the box back, leaned across the bath, opened the window and peered out at the tops of the trees. From here you could see parts of David Goldrab’s house, with its reconstituted stone tiles, its coynes and laughable attempts to blend into the area. The panes of its huge atrium reflected lozenges of sunlight back through the yew trees. Yep, if she was Mooney, the gamekeeper would have been the first person she’d approach.

  She went back downstairs. There was nothing much in the front room, just a wide-screen TV and a load of DVDs, but in the back there was an office with paperwork stacked in rickety heaps. She sat down and began leafing through them, hoping to get an idea of this guy. There was a pile of invoices from Mole Valley Farm Supplies with black fingerprints on them. A series of letters from the Royal United Hospital about medical treatment he was receiving. Something to do with a head injury. Sheet after sheet of details of operations and medication and X-rays and …

  She stopped, half the pile of paper in one hand, half in the other. She was looking at an image she couldn’t quite fathom. At first she thought it was some kind of Photoshopped joke, the sort of thing people loved to post online – outsize animals, one celebrity’s head spliced on to another’s body, ridiculous fake X-rays of all the weird objects a person had swallowed – because it seemed so outlandish. But when she studied it some more she saw it was real.

  Watling and Zhang’s unit would love to see this, she thought, a little shakily. It was the sort of photo there’d been a big thing about recently – the sort taken by servicemen on their mobiles. It showed a pile of bodies – men, skinny and half dressed, darkened by the sun and death into leathery strips of flesh. It looked like Iraq or Afghanistan, because there were plenty of keffiyeh scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Ma
ybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. That could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best assassins.

  There was a noise from the doorway, and when she looked up a man was standing there, staring at her with his mouth wide open, as if he was more shocked to see her than she was to see him.

  She dropped the photos and fumbled shakily inside her pocket for her warrant card, getting to her feet. ‘You scared me for a moment there.’

  He was tall and bearded, hair flecked with grey. He had a protruding stomach inside his checked lumberjack shirt, and he’d covered his jeans with snap-on waterproof leggings, like a cowboy’s chaps. In his hand was a roll of garden twine. ‘Don’t think you’ll get away with this again,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Sorry, I …?’ She trailed off. Her hand was frozen on the card, half in, half out of the pocket, as she stared at the scar on his head. ‘Kelvin?’ she said lamely. ‘Kelvin?’ It had taken a moment but she had recognized him. After eighteen years his name had popped into her head as if it was on a spring. Someone she’d been a tiny kid with at nursery school, and who, years later, had been a maintenance man in the Bristol strip club.

  And at the moment she recognized him, he recognized her. He stepped forward, bent at the waist, an intrigued smile on his face. ‘Zoë?’

  She let the warrant card drop into her pocket. Slowly she took her hand out, holding his eyes. He knew her name. She couldn’t show him the card, couldn’t let him know she was a cop now. He knew everything about her. Everything.

  ‘Wait there.’ He smiled. He had good teeth. She remembered that from before. Above everything, she remembered his teeth. ‘I’ll be straight back. I’ve got something to show you.’

  He ducked out of the door and was gone, leaving her in the room, idiotically frozen like a statue. Kelvin Burford. Kelvin fucking Burford. It had been eighteen years since she’d last spoken to him and yet she’d dreamed about him last night, leaning on his broom at the back of the audience, a sly smile on his face. He was a bastard. A scary bastard. And he knew her bloody name. All that time she’d thought it was just Goldrab, Kelvin had known it too. She went to the doorway and stood, looking left then right. She was still trying to get her numbed brain to decide which way to go when he reappeared in the hallway.

  This time he didn’t speak, just stood, filling the doorway. She’d never registered before quite how big he was, in girth and height. His belly in the lumberjack shirt hung over the top of his trousers. He was silhouetted by the sun that came through the back door and shone on to the filthy floor, and in his hand was a knife. One of the hunting knives she’d seen on the metallic strip in the mill building. Now she could see the long scar that started at his ear, went up around the top of his head and looped back down to the nape of his neck. It was square, with neat corners. She knew what that was – it was where metal had been inserted to replace his skull.

  She glanced over her shoulder, calculating how far it was to the front door and if she could push past him. Then back at the knife. ‘Kelvin,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to be holding that now, is there? That’s the sort of thing’ll get you into a whole lorryload of shit.’

  ‘Zoë,’ he said, ‘I asked you before. What are you doing in my house?’

  She took a breath, turned and bolted into the hallway. She skidded along, taking up the rug with her and hitting the door with all her force. She threw the Yale lock and pulled, expecting the door to fly open. It didn’t. The deadbolts were on. She grappled for them, throwing back the barrels, her hands shaking now. Still the door wouldn’t budge. It was Chubb-locked. You could see the bolt between the jamb and the strike plate.

  She turned. Kelvin stood behind her, blocking the path to the kitchen, his head down, as if in puzzled thought. He was looking at the knife, holding it angled with the blade facing upwards, as if the way the light glanced off it fascinated him. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She threw herself away from the door and on to the stairs, flew up them, grabbing at the banister to pull herself faster. The french windows in the bedroom – they opened on to a small balcony. She got into the room, launched herself at the bed and scrabbled at the latch, but it was painted up and stiff. On the stairs Kelvin took a few heavy steps. Then stopped. As if he was shy or tired or unsure whether or not to follow.

  She thumped at the windows with the heel of her hand. They had a stainless-steel lever handle with a keyhole in the back plate, but no key. Fucking locked. What was it with her and locked doors, these days? She looked around frantically for the keys. There was a dilapidated armoire against the far wall, and a bedside cabinet. She wrenched the drawer open. Saw some screws, a phone battery, sex lube. No keys. Kelvin began to walk up the stairs again. His weight made the floorboards on the treads creak. Zoë got off the bed, and positioned herself in the way she’d been taught at police school. Sideways on, knees braced. She took long, slow breaths, trying to picture her centre of gravity sinking lower and lower, getting more and more solid and ready. Then, at the last minute, she lost her nerve. Dropped to her front on the floor and commando-crawled under the bed.

  News about Kelvin had filtered through to her over the years – how he’d been driving through Basra in a Snatch Land Rover and an IED planted in a dead dog had detonated, killing everyone in the vehicle except him. So, yes, Iraq – that must have been when the photo of the bodies in a pile had been taken. For a while his accident had been all over the local news. Then, six months after his surgery, he’d attacked a teenage girl in Radstock. The story went that the girl had been baiting him – calling him Metalhead. He’d lost it and attacked her. He’d pinned her to a wall, got a plastic bag and wrapped it around her face. Later she testified he’d had his hand up her skirt while he was doing it, that he’d ejaculated into his trousers while he was strangling her. He denied that part of the story. Still, he got banged up for it. The girl’s family wanted to sue the army for putting the madness into his head, but it had been thrown out of court.

  Zoë had avoided Kelvin as much as she could when he’d been doing maintenance at the club. But in those days relationships had been formed, odd, handicapped friendships that limped along sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. It must be how Kelvin knew David Goldrab. Maybe it was the reason he was working for him now.

  She rolled on to her side, breathing hard, frantically looking around for something she could use to defend herself. Under the bed were the things you’d expect from a single man living on his own – dust balls, a pair of underpants, a pile of men’s magazines. And bundled up in a ball next to the magazines, a few inches from Zoë’s head, a woman’s pink fleece.

  She froze, staring at it, her heart thudding. A pink fleece.

  It was the one Lorne Wood had been wearing the night she’d been murdered.

  28

  It was a strange thing, to have lost all sense of who you were and of what was right or wrong. Crouched in the damp-smelling woods, surrounded by the silence of the trees, one thought kept coming back to Sally, and that was how very much she envied Millie. Millie of all people. Millie who could find herself needing money and, instead of agonizing, just borrow it from the first person who offered. Millie who could drop in and out of a person’s life and not think twice about it. She envied the simplicity of a teenager’s mind – when you knew why you were doing what you were doing and could still follow the strand of reasoning back to its start point. When your motivations, goals and morals rested neat, uncrumpled and well spaced in your head. Before they began to knot together, lose their individual colour and become just a fat woolly ball.

  She scraped at the earth beneath the tree with her bare fingers, burrowing through last year’s leaves, warm and flaky, getting dirt under her nails. The court she’d summoned in her head had weighed Kelvin against Sally as David Goldrab’s killer and had found there was no contest. Kelvin Burford had a record of violence; he’d worked for David, and had severe mental problems. Of course he had
killed David. Of course it couldn’t have been the politely spoken, downtrodden housekeeper, with the nice accent and the teenage daughter in private school. And any way. There was evidence to prove it.

  She found what she was searching for and sat back on her heels, resting it on her lap. The tin. She lifted it and blew off the earth. The few oddments inside rattled. David’s teeth. His ring. She opened the lid and stared at them. Steve had called from the departures lounge at Sea-Tac. He’d finished the meeting, caught four hours’ sleep in the hotel, then gone back to the airport and brought his flight back to England forward. It was going to Heathrow and was leaving Seattle in four hours. It would be early tomorrow morning before he was home. She’d told him about the lipstick at Kelvin’s house, how it must have been him who’d left the message on her seat.

  ‘But I told you. I can deal with it on my own. You didn’t need to cut it short.’

  ‘I know you can, but you don’t have to. There are things you’re going to have to do that I don’t want you to do alone.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Sally, you and I have already done things neither of us ever thought we could. And it’s not stopping now. We have to go on to the end of the road.’

  We have to go on to the end of the road …

  She knew what he meant. There were places at the gamekeeper’s cottage she could leave the teeth. She could bury them, or wait until Kelvin was out and get into the house. Hide them somewhere careful. A place he wouldn’t think to look, but a place the police would. And while she was there she could search the parts of the house she hadn’t been able to earlier – check there really were no photos of her and Steve in the parking space. It was what Zoë would do, something clever like this. Zoë would do it, she would survive.