Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

Watched…

She’d been sure, so sure, that night that no one could be watching her and Steve in the garden. So how could it be? How could it be? What had she overlooked?

She pulled the laptop towards her and opened Google. When Google Earth had first come out she and Millie used to spend hours looking at it – zooming in on friends’ houses, going into street view and taking virtual walks down streets they knew. Streets they didn’t know. Streets they might never visit. Now she zoomed it in on Peppercorn. The familiar double-pitched roof of the garage, the grey gables – three at back and front – the stone chimney and the thatch. The photo had been taken in midsummer and the trees were as fluffy and fat as dandelion clocks, casting short, puffy shadows on the lawn. She traced her finger across the screen in a huge circle around the cottage. There was nothing, no overlooking buildings. She zoomed the image out and still there was nothing. Just the familiar planting lines through the crops in the neighbouring fields.

She pushed the computer away and sat for a while, a finger on her lips, thinking. She got up, switched off the light and went to stand at the window. There was nothing out there. No movement or change. Only the distant twinkle of cars on the motorway and the faint grey of the moon behind the clouds. She took off her shoes and padded silently down the corridor, into Millie’s room. She was asleep in bed, her breath coming evenly in and out, so she went back to the hallway, put on her wellingtons and a duffel coat and found the big, high-powered torch that Steve had insisted on buying her from Maplins, because he said it was craziness her being out in the middle of nowhere when there were power cuts all the time. Steve. God, she wished he was here now.

Silently she let herself out of the back door. It was cool – very cool, almost cold after the unseasonable heat of the day. She stood for a moment looking around at the familiar surroundings, the great line of silver birch on the north perimeter, the patch of wood to the east, the top garden where a kiwi tree grew, its fruit hard and bitter. Her car was parked at the place she and Steve had stood six nights ago, shaking and sick with what they had done.

She locked the door behind her and went to the car. She stood with her back to it and slowly, slowly, scanned the horizon. Nothing. She moved around the car and did the same on the other side. There was nothing there. No building or place someone could have stood and watched. She crossed the lawn to the flowerbed where she’d made the bonfire yesterday. The earth was still grey and luminous with the ash and she could smell the faintest trace of carbonized wood in the air. She hefted up the huge torch, switched it on and aimed the beam into the trees. She’d never used the light before and it was so powerful she could make out details hundreds of yards away. If it found glass, a window-pane she’d overlooked, it would flash back at her. She swept the torch across the fields, going in a wide circle up the side of the cottage, the garage, bumping over the hedgerows. She could see individual leaves and branches in the forest, the trees bending and whispering. In the copse at the top of the property the beam glanced across twin green spots. Eyes looking at her steadily. She came to a halt, her heart thudding. The eyes moved slightly, ducked a little, turned. It was just a deer, startled in the middle of grazing.

Sally let out all her breath and lowered the torch. There was nothing – no building, no concealed layby or bird hide or tree-house or farm building. Nowhere someone could have hidden to watch what they’d done. And then something occurred to her. Something that should have been clear all along if she’d only been thinking straight. The car. Whoever had sent the message had chosen to put it in the car when it was parked at Steve’s. What did that mean? Why hadn’t they come to Peppercorn? Why go to the trouble of following her to Steve’s if…

Of course. She switched off the torch, went fast across the lawn to the cottage. Unlocked the front door and, without taking off her wellingtons or switching on the lights, went into the kitchen and opened the laptop. The screen came to life – all the thick midsummer fields green and vibrant with light. She zoomed out, clawed the image to the left, moving north, pausing when she came to the faint, blurred line of the Caterpillar opposite Hanging Hill.

‘There,’ she breathed, sinking into her chair. ‘There.’

The photograph had been taken in, she guessed, late June. A pinkish floating haze of poppies hung over the fields. Among them, Lightpil House – a huge yellow slash on the green, its fountains and terraces reflecting the sun. To its north the almost triangular wedge of the parking space where David Goldrab had died. To its south, near the perimeter, half hidden by towering poplars, the roof of a cottage.

Whoever had left the note knew nothing about Peppercorn Cottage: they’d seen her at David’s. She’d thought they couldn’t be overlooked where the killing happened, but she hadn’t thought about the gardens of the houses at the top of Lightpil Lane. The bottom of the land attached to the cottage on the screen stretched along the northern wall of Lightpil House and came out at the bottom in a spoon shape, bordered by a low hedge. If someone had been standing there at the right time, if they had looked across the dip in the land…

The phone rang in her pocket, making her jump. She snatched it out with trembling hands.

‘Steve. Steve? ’

‘Christ, Sally, what the hell’s going on?’

‘It’s all gone wrong. I told you it would go wrong and it has.’

‘OK, OK, calm down. Now, first of all, we’re speaking on an international line. You know what I mean by that – can you hear it humming?’

She took deep breaths, still staring at the cottage roof. ‘Yes,’ she said shakily, thinking of those vast domed listening stations. And Cheltenham GCHQ not far from here. Did phone calls really get monitored? Maybe in Steve’s job they did. ‘I think I know what you mean.’

‘Explain, carefully, what’s happened.’

She licked her lips. ‘I got a message when I got back into the car. The lipstick I leaned on – it was a message. It said-’ She swallowed. ‘It said I wouldn’t get away with it.’

There was a long silence at the end of the line as Steve digested this. ‘Right,’ he said, sounding as if he wasn’t just thousands of miles away but millions. In a different galaxy. ‘Right.’

‘But if anyone has… you know, witnessed anything, it wasn’t here at Pepp- at my place, so I don’t think they know where I am. It must have been at the…’ She hesitated. ‘The first place. I think they must have seen my car – and then they saw it outside your place and planted the message. I’ve looked at Google Earth and I think I know where they were standing…’

‘OK. I’m coming straight back. I’m not even going to leave the airport – I’ll just turn right around and get the first flight back. OK?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. You can’t.’

‘I can.’

‘Yes. But I don’t want you to.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I mean it. I’m going to be OK.’

‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I’m coming back.’

‘No.’ This time her voice was so firm Steve went silent. ‘I really, really have to do this on my own. And, Steve, please don’t ask again.’

The air was colder now that it was past midnight, and the roads were almost empty. Gliding into London on the overpasses to the west was like a magic-carpet ride over an enchanted city. All the buildings were lit up like palaces. The Ark on Zoë’s right, bulging out over the road, the blue-tiled onion dome of a mosque on her left. She had to get into a single-lane queue for a while to go past a traffic stop in Paddington, with two police cars pulled over, their lights flashing, but apart from that nothing delayed her and she sailed on to Finchley.