Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

‘There,’ she said, handing him one of them. ‘Do you want anything else?’

Ben was silent for a while. He looked at the mug, then at her.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Zoë, I’ve been thinking…’

Christ . She sat down at the table, her heart sinking. Here we go . ‘Thinking? About what?’

There was a pause. He started to say something, then changed his mind.

‘What, Ben? Spit it out – you’ve been thinking about what?’

Something in his eyes dimmed a little. He shrugged, half turned towards the window. ‘About the phone call.’

‘The phone call ? What phone call?’

‘The one Lorne had with Alice. There’s something in it that’s important. Something that didn’t come out when Lorne was reported missing.’

Zoë didn’t move. He’d sidestepped. He’d ducked saying it, whatever ‘it’ was. She stood, tipped her coffee into the sink, found her car keys in her pocket. ‘I’m taking the car today,’ she said. ‘Do you want a lift in or are you going to drive yourself?’

The superintendent at Bath was in his late fifties. He had curly blond hair kept very short and the sort of skin that burned easily. He’d started life in Firearms, then come over to CID and regretted the move to this day. He still wore a blue and yellow National Rifle Association pin in his lapel, had a wall covered with photos of himself in the firing range and seemed to hold every member of his team responsible for his big life-mistake. That morning he looked as if he’d far rather be at the club shooting the crap out of some ‘advancing Hun’ than standing at the helm of the biggest murder case that had hit the city in years.

‘This is a nasty, nasty crime. Very, very serious. I don’t need to tell you that – you’ve all seen the post-mortem pictures, you know what’s going on here. But I want to remind you to keep clear heads on this. Concentrate. There are lots of things to cover. Most of them you probably know, but let’s put them in a bundle so nothing’s missed.’ He held up his coffee cup to indicate the points outlined on the whiteboard behind him. ‘To summarize. Lorne – popular girl, very pretty, as you can see. Big circle of friends – though so far no one’s saying anything about boyfriends. First thing I want to run through is the list of items to flag up for the search teams. Bits and pieces here, but mostly things missing from Lorne’s personal effects.’

He pointed to the picture from the mortuary of Lorne’s bloodied left ear. The killer had ripped her earring out, leaving the lobe sliced from midway to bottom. A photo of her other ear showed the remaining earring intact. ‘Number one, an earring. Quite an unusual design. Apparently it had been bought for her in Tangiers by her father. See this filigree? So…’ He nodded in the direction of the DCs ranked at the back of the room, arms folded across their chests. They had been taken partly from the ranks at Bath station and partly from the Major Crime Investigation Unit. ‘One of you. Get that added to the search list.’

Zoë stood near the front, her hands in the pockets of her black jeans. Her tongue was thick with last night’s wine, her muscles twitchy with all the coffee she’d drunk this morning to jump-start the day, and her jaw was still hurting from having the tennis ball in her mouth. Ben was leaning against the desk next to her, his arms folded. Usually on the way in to work she’d keep up with his car on her bike, sidewinder him in traffic. Today, as she drove in to work, she’d kept her distance behind his car, feeling she suddenly didn’t have the right to fun and games and flirtation.

‘Her phone’s missing. Switched off. But I’m comforted to know that Telephony at the bureau has got a watch on it. Am I right?’

The sergeant who headed the team’s intelligence cell nodded. ‘Vodafone are a nice network,’ he said, ‘the only one in the UK that do live cell site analysis. The moment that phone is switched on they’ll get a ping on it and we’ll know.’

‘Except,’ said the superintendent, ‘chances that’ll happen are, let’s be realistic, zero. More likely he’s slung it, so I hope it’s been added to the search-team briefings. It’s an iPhone, white.’

He set his cup down and picked up a girl’s fleecy pink gilet. With his finger stuck through the loop at the neck he dangled it in front of the officers. ‘Mum is adamant she was wearing something like this when she left home. It wasn’t among what we recovered from the crime scene, so put an asterisk next to that for the search teams. And, last, there’s a tarpaulin, which you’ve seen in the photos – we’ve trawled around the barge owners down there and they’re all saying the same thing. It’s standard stuff for a barge, a tarp to cover the wood and coal and what-have-you – but still no one’s missing one. They get a lot of overnight moorings in that stretch of the canal, casual since you don’t pay for the first twenty-four hours, so bear that in mind. Have a word with all the boathouses and someone speak to British Waterways to find out what the water bailiff saw moored there overnight. Someone get photos of the tarp distributed – and the fleece. Either get Exhibits to have another photo of the earring done or get the PM one Photoshopped so it hasn’t got the dead ear attached. Then get it to the press office – the media can have both of these. Ben? Zoë? Can I leave it to you to decide how best to divvy that up?’

Zoë nodded. Ben held up his thumb.

‘Good. Now…’ The superintendent rubbed his hands together, as if he was about to announce an unexpected treat. ‘You can see we’ve got a lot of meat to chew on, a lot of standard routes to walk up, but there’s something else I want you to put into your pipes. We’ve got a visitor today.’

Everyone in the room automatically turned their eyes to the young woman who’d been sitting patiently in the corner throughout the meeting. With long, well-groomed dark hair, she was very neat and quiet, dressed in a white blouse and very tight bottlegreen trousers with high-heeled sandals just peeping out under the hems. Her skin was lightly tanned, her nails polished and well kept. Zoë had noticed a lot of the men looking at her.

‘This is Debbie Harry. Not, I am reliably informed, related to the other Debbie Harry.’

‘Sadly.’ Debbie shook her head ruefully. ‘In my dreams, you know.’

One or two of the men laughed. Goodsy, standing in the back row, whispered in his neighbour’s ear. Zoë could guess what he was saying.

‘Now, you’re from Bristol University, it says here, and you’re a forensic psychiatrist.’

‘Psychologist.’

‘Psychologist, sorry. A bit like Cracker?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Funny.’ The superintendent put a hand up to his mouth and said, in a stage whisper, to the team, ‘Doesn’t look much like Robbie Coltrane to me.’

This time almost everyone laughed. Not Zoë, though. She clearly recalled the superintendent saying over and over again that he’d never, ever, let a ‘fucking head doctor’ within a mile of his incident room. That they were all quacks and poofs and had their heads up their arses. Evidently he’d never met a ‘head doctor’ who looked like this. To see her, you’d think honey would ooze out of her mouth the moment it opened. She got up and came to the front, leaning back on the desk casually, as if this was her own lecture room, half crossing one leg over the other. Just enough to be flirtatious without being totally provocative. Clever girl, Zoë thought. She knew the effect it would have on a roomful of men.

‘Look,’ said Debbie, a bright, open expression on her face. ‘This is going to be a big leap of faith for some of you if I ask you to approach this not from an evidentiary perspective but from a psychoanalytical perspective, to ask you to think in terms of profiling the offender. Probably sounds like voodoo to a lot of you.’ She smiled. ‘But if you’re prepared to make that leap of faith then, I can assure you, I’ll be right alongside you.’