Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

Zoë stopped tapping and looked up at him.

‘I never knew his name.’ Jake’s voice was sober and low when he said ‘his’, as if speaking the word alone could bring hellfire down into his little thirties semi. ‘But he was the type, you know. He’d get in and out and no one would’ve seen a thing.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Dunno. Only met him once when he was down for a shoot. That’s how David done his business, innit? He’s got some gamekeeper raises pheasants for him and these dudes visit when there’s a shoot organized. This guy came down and was mouthing off. He was something in the military. The – what d’ya call it? – Ministry of you know…’

‘Defence? The Ministry of Defence?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Christian name?’

‘Dunno. David just called him “mate”. They knew each other in Kosovo. And that’s all I know about him. Otherwise, swear’ – he held his hands up – ‘I’d give it to you.’

‘Any others?’

‘No.’

Zoë tapped the last few words in, saved it, then clicked the phone off and put it into her pocket. She took a moment or two to regroup, then leaned forward to him, her elbows on her knees.

‘What?’

‘I’ve still got a problem, Jake. I mean, meet my eyes and tell me I look convinced you had nothing to do with Goldrab going missing.’

‘What the fuck’re you talking about?’

‘None of those names gets you off the hook. Do they?’

‘But I’ve got an alibi for that afternoon. Which is good news.’

‘Depending on your perspective. Who is it? Angel? Because he ’d convince a jury.’

Jake gave her a sly smile, the diamond in his front tooth glinting at her, as if this was the most satisfying thing he’d done in years. ‘That’s the easiest question you’ve asked, sista. I tore my jeans when David was shooting at me. When I seen what I done I go straight into town and buy a new pair. River Island. Their workers’ll remember me and for sure they’ve got a CCTV there.’

‘But as an alibi it doesn’t work because, of course, we don’t know exactly when Goldrab went missing. It was probably that afternoon some time, because his mother couldn’t reach him on the phone in the evening, but we can’t say for sure. You could have come back later and dealt with him then. Say, six or seven o’clock.’

‘That’s OK too. Straight after I got the new jeans I went to the cinema. With my mates. I used my credit card and there were six of us. And then we spent the rest of the night in the Slug on George Street. So wherever David Goldrab was going that night, whoever he met, it weren’t me. But none of that matters, does it?’

Zoë raised an eyebrow. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Nah,’ he said, with a smug smile. ‘Because David hasn’t been killed . David – Mr clever fucking Goldrab – oh, no, not him. He has disappeared himself.’

The air above the field was full of drifting white butterflies. Like fairies floating on the wind, they trailed past Sally’s face, blocking the sunlight, alighting on her shoulders and hands. To her right she could see shapes, indistinct in the blizzard. They were important, instinctively she knew they were, and she began to walk towards them, her hands shielding her face from the insects. The first shape was big, standing high, a giant, moving white mass. A car, she saw, as she got nearer – she could make out wing mirrors and headlights through the throng. She clapped her hands and the butterflies lifted in a cloud, spun and flapped. Underneath them the car bonnet was black and shiny, and Sally saw it was Steve’s Audi. Which meant, she was sure, that the shape on the ground, ten feet away, cocooned in white, was David Goldrab.

Her heart began to pound, a giant drum, filling her chest. She took a few steps, crunching on butterflies, breaking their bodies under her shoes. David lay on his back, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, as if he was in a sarcophagus, butterflies covering his face. She didn’t want to approach, but she knew she had to. She got to within a foot, and although every sense was telling her not to, she crouched near his head, stretched her hand out towards him.

The body moved. It rolled towards her and began to sit up. A hand shot out and gripped her. The butterflies swarmed away from the face but it wasn’t David under there. It was Zoë, sitting up and looking beseechingly at Sally, as if she was at the bottom of a very deep hole, and Sally was the only light she could see.

‘Sally?’ A hand was shaking her. ‘Sally? Wake up.’

She covered her face with her hands. ‘What?’ she mumbled.

‘You were crying.’

She opened her eyes. The room was dark, the bedside clock casting just a faint glow. Three o’clock. Steve was lying behind her, his hand on her shoulder. She touched her fingers lightly to her face and found her cheeks were wet.

He has disappeared himself…

Jake’s words kept knocking at Zoë. She’d been almost certain for a while that Goldrab was dead, but now she wasn’t so sure. It hadn’t occurred to her before that he could disappear himself. But now she saw it was feasible, and the thought made her more than uneasy. If he wasn’t dead it meant he could come back at any time, walk into her life and cut her down in one swipe. Because that was the sort of bastard he was.

The next day she got straight to work, ploughing through the list Jake had given her, putting out feelers – calls to Essex Police to track down Candi and Fraser, and to SOCA to see if there were any clues as to who ‘Spanner’ might be. She used the parliamentary website, Dodspeople, to search hundreds of CVs for MoD people who’d done time in Kosovo, and the more digging she did the more convinced she became that the person to start with was a guy named Dominic Mooney. Mooney was now head of intelligence at one of the Foreign Office departments, but what interested her was that he had spent time with the Civil Secretariat in Kosovo at the beginning of the decade and had done three years as the director of a unit set up in Priština to monitor and investigate prostitution and trafficking. If any of his staff in Kosovo had had contact with Goldrab, or had been up to anything suspicious, Mooney would be the one to know.

She put in a call to him in Whitehall, but he was out at a meeting, so she left a message with his secretary, then began systematically working her way through her list of other tasks. She spoke to the gardening company in Swindon, but they didn’t have much to tell her – Goldrab was reclusive, paid them by direct debit, and often the workers would be at Lightpil for eight hours solid without seeing or speaking to him. It was much the same story at the pool company, and at the stables where Goldrab kept his horse, Bruiser. He rode most days, though usually on his own, and paid the livery fees also by direct debit. In fact, no one Zoë spoke to had had any inkling of what Goldrab was like as a person, let alone any idea if he was unhappy or making plans to leave.

DC Goods called from town. Zoë had told him that Jake the Peg was in trouble again and given him the task of finding support for Jake’s alibi. Already he was unearthing evidence: the staff at River Island remembered him, and they had the CCTV footage to prove it. From a glance at the photo, the manager of the cinema too was almost certain she remembered Jake. She was having a look at the time-coded CCTV footage even as they spoke. His alibi for that night seemed watertight. Zoë found she wasn’t much surprised at that: it had felt too easy a solution for Jake to have been the one who had made Goldrab disappear.

She opened an email from the technical team at HQ. The freeze frames of the porn footage lifted from Goldrab’s computers had come back and none of the women was Lorne. She stared at the images, trying to force Lorne’s features into the girls’ faces, but she couldn’t. Again, she wondered if Goldrab’s disappearance was totally coincidental. Did that mean she was leaving Lorne behind by chasing what had happened to Goldrab? She looked at the photo of Lorne pinned to the wall. Come on, she thought, you brought me here, so you tell me – what do I do now? You know I really want David Goldrab. Do I go after it? Or is he nothing to do with you?