Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

She stood at the hob, whisking the milk into froth, shooting him surreptitious looks as he wandered around, yawning and checking inside the fridge. It had been four months since they’d got together and she still couldn’t quite believe he was here. Steve had given her sex on the brain: if she had even half an hour between cleaning jobs, she’d scurry over to his house and they’d end up naked on the kitchen floor. Or on the stairs, halfway up to the bedroom. It was totally different from being with Julian. Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. At thirty-five.

Steve was in ‘corporate espionage’. Sally wasn’t entirely sure what that meant – but he always seemed to be dealing with people who lived in remote and glamorous places. His address book, which she’d seen lying open at his house one day, was crammed with addresses in countries like the Emirates, Liberia and South Africa, and more than once he’d had to set his alarm for the middle of the night so he could get up and take a conference call with someone in Peru or Bolivia. He wore a suit when he left the house in the morning, but in her imagination he wore a black polo-neck and jeans and had secret knives fitted in his soles. She had no idea why he wanted to be with someone as stupid as she was. Maybe it was because she was so easy. He only had to look at her and she’d roll backwards on to the bed, her legs open, a blank, grateful smile on her face.

‘So.’ He linked his fingers and cracked the knuckles. Rolled his head. ‘Where’re you working today?’

‘North.’

‘Not Goldrab again?’

‘No. Not today.’ She spooned frothy milk on to two cups of coffee, shook cocoa powder on to them from a metal flour-shaker and put a cup in front of him. She went back to the oven and busied herself with laying croissants on a tray. ‘Yesterday he offered me another job. Cleaning still, but doing the admin for his house too.’

‘Are you going to take it?’

‘It’s a lot of money.’

Steve stirred his coffee, thinking about this. ‘Look,’ he said, after a while, ‘I’ve never said anything, but the truth is I kind of worry about you when you’re there.’

‘Worry? Why?’

‘Put it this way – I know a lot about him. A lot I’d rather not know.’

She slammed the oven door, straightened and turned to him, pushing her hair from her forehead. ‘How?’

He laughed. ‘How long have you lived in Bath? You know that Disneyland ride, Small World, with the little kids singing, “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears”? That’s Bath for you – a small, small world. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.’

She got jam and butter from the fridge, collected knives and napkins, thinking about this. He was right. They all sort of knew each other, or of each other – and people talked and gossiped so you never felt entirely disconnected from others, no matter if you hadn’t seen them for years. It was the way she got information about what Zoë was doing, for example (she didn’t dare ask Mum and Dad – for years she’d never spoken a word about Zoë to them, knowing the spectres it might raise if she did). The grapevine was also the way she’d first become aware of Steve – in the vague, amorphous way you got to know about the other parents at a school, even though his two children were much older than Millie and now at university. He and his ex had got divorced, it turned out, on the same day as Sally and Julian. Steve had heard vaguely about her separation through the grapevine and one day, months later, he’d seen her sitting in traffic in the pink HomeMaids Smart car. He’d called the number on its side and got the manager to put a call through to her. That was the thing about Bath. Really, it was just a big village. Sometimes it was a bit creepy. As if she couldn’t move without everyone knowing.

But, looking at Steve now, she didn’t quite believe the small-village scenario explained how he knew about David.

‘He’s not one of your…’ She searched for the word. What would he call him? A customer? A client? She knew so little about his job. ‘He hasn’t employed you, has he?’

‘No.’

‘But you still know a lot about him?’

Steve frowned. ‘Yeah… well,’ he said vaguely. ‘Maybe this is a bad time to talk about it. You know, first thing in the morning.’ He drew a newspaper nearer and began to read.

But Sally persisted. ‘I don’t know anything about your job. I feel a bit in the dark sometimes.’

He looked up at her. He had very clear grey eyes. ‘Sally, that’s the big drawback. If you know a bit about my job you know the lot.’

‘And then you’d have to kill me.’

‘And then I’d have to kill you.’ He gave an apologetic smile.

‘I do have to be careful. That’s all.’

‘But I work for him. And he is a bit… weird. Maybe you know something I should. Something important.’

He pursed his lips and tapped the rim of his cup thoughtfully with his nail, as if he was wondering what he could risk saying. After a while he pushed the cup away. ‘OK – I can tell you this much. Goldrab’s not paying me, it’s the other way round. I ’m being paid to investigate him .’

‘Investigate him ? Why?’

‘That’s where the soul baring stops. I’m sorry. If you have to work for him, I can’t stop you. All I ask is you keep your wits about you.’

‘Oh,’ she said, feeling a little naïve not to have cottoned on to this before. ‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘A while now. Months. That’s pretty normal – a lot of my subjects sit on my books for years. But if you want the truth, the pressure on Goldrab’s been upping lately. In the last couple of weeks my clients are getting a bit pushier about him.’

‘Do you mean Mooney?’

Steve put down his cup and stared at her. ‘How do you know that name?’

‘I think I must have heard you talking to him on the phone.’

‘Then forget it. Please. Forget it.’

She gave a nervous little laugh. ‘You’re scaring me now.’

‘Well, maybe you should be scared. Or cautious, at least. Goldrab is a nasty man, Sally. Very nasty. And the fact he’s walking around free and not banged up on some life sentence is only a matter of fluke. Seriously, forget you ever heard that name. Please. For both our sakes.’

‘There are cats at your back door.’

Zoë was sitting at the table looking at the post-mortem photos of Lorne, distractedly rubbing her aching jaw, when Ben came into the living room, fully dressed, doing up the cuffs on his shirt. She hadn’t heard him get up, hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. He’d had less than five hours’ sleep but he was immaculate. He put his forehead to the glass door and peered down at the cats. ‘They’re eating.’

Zoë packed the photos into her courier’s satchel and put it next to the front door. She switched the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’

‘You’ve fed them,’ he said curiously. ‘They’ve got saucers out there.’

‘So?’

‘It’s kind of you. A secret kind habit.’

‘It’s not kind , Ben. I’m not being kind to them. I feed them so they don’t wake the neighbourhood up. Let’s not have an awards ceremony over it, eh?’

He turned and gave her a long look. As if she disappointed him and was solely responsible for driving all the fun and light out of his life. She shook her head, half cross with herself. Last night when she’d gone to bed he’d been asleep. Or pretending to sleep – she hadn’t been able to tell. But their conversation about children had allowed something thin and cold and cunning to come in from the dark and slide silently between them. She knew it, he knew it. She made the coffee, banging around, spooning instant granules into mugs and slopping a little milk in.