Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

She gave a long sigh and sat back in her chair, arms flopping open. ‘OK. OK. But if there’s going to be bunting, I get to choose the colour.’

It was late and Millie wanted to stay with the Sweetmans, have a sleepover with Sophie. Apparently they were friends again. Sally wouldn’t have agreed after what had happened tonight, but maybe, she thought a little hopefully, Millie would spend time not just with Sophie but with Nial too. Get Peter Cyrus out of her head. And anyway, Steve insisted, Jake wasn’t a problem now: Sally could relax, she could come to his place and they could get drunk, celebrate the end of the whole bloody awful affair. Secretly she was glad. It gave her a chance to escape the silences that seemed to be building in the fields surrounding Peppercorn Cottage.

They stayed up late drinking a sweet dessert wine Steve had found for ten euros a bottle in a supermarket in Bergerac. They had sex twice – once on the kitchen counter with their clothes still on, and once much later in bed, under the covers, when they were very drunk and Sally couldn’t stop hiccuping or giggling. Things seemed almost normal on the surface. Even so, the last thing she did before she went to sleep was open the windows so the unfamiliar city noises would come into the room and get into her dreams – maybe stop Zoë, or David Goldrab sitting up in the field and grabbing her arm.

She woke late, her head thick and heavy, to a morning as hot as midsummer. She and Steve ate breakfast on the terrace. They drank cranberry juice and ate fresh raspberries. Today he was going to America and she had thought she was ready for that, but when, after breakfast, she came into the hallway to find him dressed in a suit, luggage on the floor next to him, she felt suddenly cold.

‘What if something happens? What if I get questioned again? I won’t know what to say.’

‘You won’t get questioned again. It won’t happen.’

‘What happens if someone traces that money you changed?’

‘The Krugerrands? They won’t. Trust me.’ He picked up his suitcase. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

Sally was subdued on the drive to the airport. The Audi would need to be repaired so they took her car, Steve driving, the window open, the radio on full blast, as if he didn’t have a worry in the world. She sat hunched on the passenger seat, her handbag clenched on her lap, staring out of the window at the Bristol suburbs, at the sunshine in sharp, blocky shapes on the dingy houses. She wondered whether Zoë sometimes came to Bristol. Of course she must – all the time. She’d been all around the world. Zoë’s face as she had stood at the table came back to Sally then, saying, ‘I apologize.’ She tried to imagine the image being taken away from her, pulled like a grey thread out of her head, out of the car window, whipped away by the slipstream, like a twisting ghost.

She and Steve didn’t speak much as they parked, made their way out of the sunshine into the terminal, through Check-in and up the escalator. They were already calling his flight, so he went straight to Security. It was after she’d kissed him goodbye and was walking away, her head down, that he stopped her.

‘Sally?’

She came to a halt, ten feet away, and turned. He was standing in the security line, facing her, the other passengers streaming past him. He wore an odd expression. He was rubbing his fingers together, studying them curiously. ‘What? What is it?’

He was frowning. He opened his hand to show her. ‘Lipstick?’

She walked back to him and together they looked at the lipstick on his fingers. A sort of orangey-red. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘I don’t know. Just from when I kissed you…’ He put his hand on her shoulder and rotated her away from him, looking at her back. ‘It’s on your dress. Look.’

Sally craned around, pulling the seat of the dress out to inspect. He was right – the back of her dress was covered with lipstick. A very distinct orange-red colour.

‘Did you brush up against something?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She strained to see it. ‘There’s lots of it.’

‘You have – you’ve leaned up against something. Here.’ Steve pulled out a folded handkerchief, made to rub at the cloth.

‘It’s OK. Don’t.’ She took it from him, let go of her dress and put the handkerchief back in his top pocket. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. You’ll be late.’ She kissed his cheek and gave him a gentle push towards the security checkpoint. ‘Go on.’

He took one last look at her dress. ‘You sure?’

‘Of course. Safe journey. Call me when you get there.’

Dominic Mooney’s Who’s Who entry hadn’t been updated since his return from Kosovo. It read:

Born: Hong Kong, 20 Sept. 1955; s of Paul and Jean Mooney; m 1990, Paulette Frampton; one s

Education: Kings, Canterbury; Edinburgh Univ, BA Hons; RMA Sandhurst

Career: Military service 1976-1988, UK, Belize and Northern Ireland (1979-80). Civil service 1986-present: 1986-99 Defence Procurement Agency; 1999-2001 Civil Secretariat, Kosovo; 2001-2004 TPIU Priština

Address: 3 Rightstock Gardens, Finchley, London N3

Zoë knew that on the first line ‘one s’ meant that Mooney had one son – who was probably a teenager and too old to go on holiday with his parents. It took her no time to find him online. She started after the morning meeting, searched Mooney/Kosovo and found him within ten minutes: Jason Mooney. He had posted just about his entire life story online, including the time his dad had spent in Kosovo. (No mention of the women and the aborted half-brothers and sisters.) He was a nice-looking boy, suntanned in the way happy students always seemed to be in their Facebook pictures. He liked swimming, and Punk, a club in Soho Street, and thought Pixie Lott was about the hottest woman on the planet. He had tattoos in Hindi on his left ankle, still wore a friendship bracelet his best mate had given him when he was twelve and was a fresher at City University, studying aeronautical engineering. His shoot-for-the-stars ambition was to work on a privately financed team sending a probe into outer space. But his number one love, his truly, truly highest devotion, the thing that would take his soul with it if he ever lost it, was his hog: a 71 FX Harley Super Glide. He was pictured with it, standing on a sunlit country lane, looking so happy his heart could burst. The photo had a soft focus to it, as if it was a picture of newly weds. The moment Zoë saw it a bright clean path opened up in front of her. So clear it almost seemed to have beacons at either side of it.

Watling had said there was no one in the wide world as cynical as she was. But she’d been wrong. Zoë beat the shit out of her for cynicism. She knew that the polite goodbye handshake of Watling and Zhang would be the last she’d ever hear from ‘the Feds’. There wasn’t going to be any bunting coming from the commanding officer’s desk on Salisbury Plain. She didn’t want to rattle the case for them, but she was still going to get what she needed from it.

Bring me the head of David Goldrab, she thought, snatching up her helmet, balaclava, credit cards and keys. She trotted down the stairs. No Zhang standing like a giant irritable spider in the car park today. She climbed on to the Shovelhead, opened up the choke and pressed the starter. She’d be in London by midday.

It was a sunny day – great riding weather. The M4 was clear, only one hold-up outside Swindon that she shimmied her way through. She got plenty of glances from men in their cars, the sun glinting off her Oakley dirt goggles like she was in some seventies road movie, the opening guitar riff from a Steppenwolf track looping through her head as she drove. The Mooneys lived in Finchley, north London, near the North Circular, where the packed terraces of the inner city began to give way to lawns and driveways and garages, lots of yew hedges and leylandii. She found the road easily – the sort of place you had to take only one step into to know you’d walked into Moneyville. High walls, electronic gates and security systems dozed in the sun. It wasn’t that far from Bishop’s Avenue, after all, where the zillionaires lived.