Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

On screen the man was still jabbing in numbers, though evidently he didn’t know the code, because the gates stayed resolutely closed. David didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head, a nasty smile on his face. ‘Oh, Jake,’ he said, to the monitor. ‘Jake the Peg. You didn’t ought to be coming back here, mate. No. You really didn’t ought to be doing that.’

Taking casts of footprints and comparing them to shoes was generally one of the quicker jobs forensics teams did. No waiting around for lengthy lab tests. By eleven o’clock that morning the results from the canal path had come back. The prints Zoë had found last night had been made by Lorne Wood. And when the police looked at the path that led away from the gap in the trees they saw there was only one route she could have taken to get there. From the canal the track led through a small wooded area, then along a path that ran between two horse paddocks, under a railway bridge and out to a bus stop. Nowhere near the shops. Lorne had lied to her mother about where she had been that Saturday and, in Zoë’s book, if a person could lie about something like that, there was no knowing what else they could lie about – the fibs could roll on and on, as far as the horizon.

She got one of the DCs to start warrants on the bus companies’ CCTV, then spent some time in the office looking at all the routes that passed through the stop near the canal. They snaked out for miles in every direction – there was no knowing which she’d come from. She could have been travelling from almost any direction, she could have changed routes – she could even have gone as far afield as Bristol in the time she’d been away from home. Zoë fished out the camera chip she’d found in Lorne’s bedroom and balanced it thoughtfully on her finger, considering it. Twice already she’d almost taken it into Ben’s office. But each time she’d stopped herself. She wasn’t sure who she was protecting by not speaking up – Lorne or herself. In the end she got up and pulled on her jacket. She needed to know more before she did anything.

The agency was in the centre of Bath. ‘No. 1, Milsom Street’, said the sign, and under it, written in tall, thin letters, ‘The Zebedee Juice Agency’. It was above a boutique, and when Zoë came up the stairs she found a wide room, daylight pouring into it through a vast glass dome in the ceiling. There was no reception desk, just an array of red sofas dotted with faux -fur cushions and piles of magazines on black lacquer tables. On the wall in an unframed LCD screen a video played silently – faces, boys and girls, morphing one into another.

The manager, a girl dressed in a polo-neck, denim shorts and spiked heels with metallic shadow on her eyelids, jumped up to greet Zoë with a neurotic-sounding ‘Hi, hi hi!’ She was twitchy, kept rubbing her nose and swallowing, and it didn’t take a genius to see she was itching to get to her next line of coke. Still, Zoë supposed, you didn’t get that super-thin look without a bit of help.

She poured two long glasses of Bottlegreen lemon grass pressé and took Zoë to sit near the window. In the street below shoppers and tourists bustled in and out of the shops. The manager admitted she’d half been expecting a visit from the police – she added that maybe she should have called them herself, because she remembered Lorne well. She’d come in with her mother a month ago. She’d been a very nice-looking girl, if a bit short and a little on the heavy side for the catwalk. And her eyebrows had been plucked to within an inch of their lives. ‘Most of our models aren’t what you or I would call conventionally pretty. Some of them, if you saw them in the street, you’d almost call ugly. What’s hot at the moment is a very animal look. You want to be able to see the ethnicity of a model. If someone walks in the room and I think, Yeah, he’s got all the anger of his race behind him, that’s when I know I’m on to a winner.’

‘Lorne wasn’t like that?’

‘No. Glamour, maybe, but not right for the ramp. Never.’

‘Did you tell her that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how did she react?’

‘She was upset. But it’s what happens all the time, girls coming in here all hopeful, going away completely miserable, rejected.’

‘What about Mrs Wood? What was her reaction?’

‘Oh, relief. You’d be surprised – I get that reaction more than anything else. Mothers just humouring their daughters, but they’re over the moon when someone else points out what they’ve secretly thought all along and just can’t bring themselves to say. The girls, though…’ She gave a small shake of her head. ‘Even when you’ve said it over and over some of the girls still won’t listen to you. For some of them it’s like a hunger – eats away at them. They won’t take no for an answer. All they care about is seeing themselves staring up out of some glossy page somewhere. Those are the ones I worry about. Those are the ones that’ll end up places they really don’t want to be.’

‘Places they don’t want to be?’

The manager wrinkled her brow. ‘Yes – you know what I mean.’

Zoë held her eyes. For a moment she’d thought the emphasis in that sentence had been on ‘you’. As in You, DI Benedict, know exactly what I’m talking about. So don’t pretend you don’t . She found herself wanting an explanation – wanting to say, ‘What the hell do you mean?’, but then she caught herself. This girl was twenty if she was a day. There was no way she knew anything about what had happened all those years ago.

‘So,’ she said levelly, ‘what do you do if you get a girl like that who won’t be put off?’

The agency manager picked up a little pile of business cards in a plastic holder on one of the tables. She pulled one out and passed it to Zoë. ‘We tell them they’re better off doing glamour and give them one of these. Want one?’

Zoë took the card. Studied it. It was shaped like a pair of lips. It read: ‘Holden’s Agency. Where dreams come true’. ‘Did you give one to Lorne?’

The manager ran a finger inside her polo-neck, thinking about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a while. ‘Probably not, because her mum was here. I can’t recall exactly.’

‘She didn’t take one anyway?’

‘Maybe. I honestly couldn’t say.’

Zoë tucked the card into her wallet. She sipped her drink thoughtfully, her eyes on the windows in the department store opposite. Something was niggling at her, something she’d seen, or something the manager had said in the last ten minutes. It wouldn’t come to her. She put her glass on the table. ‘Lorne didn’t mention a boyfriend, did she? At any point when she was here did she mention any names?’

‘No. Not that I can recall.’

‘Do you have a catalogue? Of your models?’

‘Sure.’ She opened a drawer to show Zoë a stack of pink-bound notebooks and a box of pink memory sticks. All with the name ‘Zebedee Juice’ emblazoned in lime green. ‘Hard copy or a stick?’

‘One of these’ll do.’ She took a book. ‘I want to check if you’ve got any models with the initials “RH”.’

‘RH?’ While Zoë flicked through the catalogue the manager sat with her thumb in her mouth, her eyes to the ceiling, mentally running a tally of her clients. By the time Zoë got to the end she was shaking her head. ‘No. And not even with their real names.’

‘Staff?’

‘No. There’s only me, and Moonshine who comes in in the afternoon. Her real name is Sarah Brown.’

‘Nothing else you can remember that sticks in your mind about Lorne? Anything that you think could be important? Anyone she spoke about?’