Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

Watling and Zhang’s unit would love to see this, she thought, a little shakily. It was the sort of photo there’d been a big thing about recently – the sort taken by servicemen on their mobiles. It showed a pile of bodies – men, skinny and half dressed, darkened by the sun and death into leathery strips of flesh. It looked like Iraq or Afghanistan, because there were plenty of keffiyeh scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Maybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. That could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best assassins.

There was a noise from the doorway, and when she looked up a man was standing there, staring at her with his mouth wide open, as if he was more shocked to see her than she was to see him.

She dropped the photos and fumbled shakily inside her pocket for her warrant card, getting to her feet. ‘You scared me for a moment there.’

He was tall and bearded, hair flecked with grey. He had a protruding stomach inside his checked lumberjack shirt, and he’d covered his jeans with snap-on waterproof leggings, like a cowboy’s chaps. In his hand was a roll of garden twine. ‘Don’t think you’ll get away with this again,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry, I…?’ She trailed off. Her hand was frozen on the card, half in, half out of the pocket, as she stared at the scar on his head. ‘Kelvin?’ she said lamely. ‘Kelvin?’ It had taken a moment but she had recognized him. After eighteen years his name had popped into her head as if it was on a spring. Someone she’d been a tiny kid with at nursery school, and who, years later, had been a maintenance man in the Bristol strip club.

And at the moment she recognized him, he recognized her. He stepped forward, bent at the waist, an intrigued smile on his face. ‘Zoë?’

She let the warrant card drop into her pocket. Slowly she took her hand out, holding his eyes. He knew her name. She couldn’t show him the card, couldn’t let him know she was a cop now. He knew everything about her. Everything.

‘Wait there.’ He smiled. He had good teeth. She remembered that from before. Above everything, she remembered his teeth. ‘I’ll be straight back. I’ve got something to show you.’

He ducked out of the door and was gone, leaving her in the room, idiotically frozen like a statue. Kelvin Burford. Kelvin fucking Burford . It had been eighteen years since she’d last spoken to him and yet she’d dreamed about him last night, leaning on his broom at the back of the audience, a sly smile on his face. He was a bastard. A scary bastard. And he knew her bloody name . All that time she’d thought it was just Goldrab, Kelvin had known it too. She went to the doorway and stood, looking left then right. She was still trying to get her numbed brain to decide which way to go when he reappeared in the hallway.

This time he didn’t speak, just stood, filling the doorway. She’d never registered before quite how big he was, in girth and height. His belly in the lumberjack shirt hung over the top of his trousers. He was silhouetted by the sun that came through the back door and shone on to the filthy floor, and in his hand was a knife. One of the hunting knives she’d seen on the metallic strip in the mill building. Now she could see the long scar that started at his ear, went up around the top of his head and looped back down to the nape of his neck. It was square, with neat corners. She knew what that was – it was where metal had been inserted to replace his skull.

She glanced over her shoulder, calculating how far it was to the front door and if she could push past him. Then back at the knife. ‘Kelvin,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to be holding that now, is there? That’s the sort of thing’ll get you into a whole lorryload of shit.’

‘Zoë,’ he said, ‘I asked you before. What are you doing in my house?’

She took a breath, turned and bolted into the hallway. She skidded along, taking up the rug with her and hitting the door with all her force. She threw the Yale lock and pulled, expecting the door to fly open. It didn’t. The deadbolts were on. She grappled for them, throwing back the barrels, her hands shaking now. Still the door wouldn’t budge. It was Chubb-locked. You could see the bolt between the jamb and the strike plate.

She turned. Kelvin stood behind her, blocking the path to the kitchen, his head down, as if in puzzled thought. He was looking at the knife, holding it angled with the blade facing upwards, as if the way the light glanced off it fascinated him. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She threw herself away from the door and on to the stairs, flew up them, grabbing at the banister to pull herself faster. The french windows in the bedroom – they opened on to a small balcony. She got into the room, launched herself at the bed and scrabbled at the latch, but it was painted up and stiff. On the stairs Kelvin took a few heavy steps. Then stopped. As if he was shy or tired or unsure whether or not to follow.

She thumped at the windows with the heel of her hand. They had a stainless-steel lever handle with a keyhole in the back plate, but no key. Fucking locked. What was it with her and locked doors, these days? She looked around frantically for the keys. There was a dilapidated armoire against the far wall, and a bedside cabinet. She wrenched the drawer open. Saw some screws, a phone battery, sex lube. No keys. Kelvin began to walk up the stairs again. His weight made the floorboards on the treads creak. Zoë got off the bed, and positioned herself in the way she’d been taught at police school. Sideways on, knees braced. She took long, slow breaths, trying to picture her centre of gravity sinking lower and lower, getting more and more solid and ready. Then, at the last minute, she lost her nerve. Dropped to her front on the floor and commando-crawled under the bed.

News about Kelvin had filtered through to her over the years – how he’d been driving through Basra in a Snatch Land Rover and an IED planted in a dead dog had detonated, killing everyone in the vehicle except him. So, yes, Iraq – that must have been when the photo of the bodies in a pile had been taken. For a while his accident had been all over the local news. Then, six months after his surgery, he’d attacked a teenage girl in Radstock. The story went that the girl had been baiting him – calling him Metalhead. He’d lost it and attacked her. He’d pinned her to a wall, got a plastic bag and wrapped it around her face. Later she testified he’d had his hand up her skirt while he was doing it, that he’d ejaculated into his trousers while he was strangling her. He denied that part of the story. Still, he got banged up for it. The girl’s family wanted to sue the army for putting the madness into his head, but it had been thrown out of court.

Zoë had avoided Kelvin as much as she could when he’d been doing maintenance at the club. But in those days relationships had been formed, odd, handicapped friendships that limped along sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. It must be how Kelvin knew David Goldrab. Maybe it was the reason he was working for him now.

She rolled on to her side, breathing hard, frantically looking around for something she could use to defend herself. Under the bed were the things you’d expect from a single man living on his own – dust balls, a pair of underpants, a pile of men’s magazines. And bundled up in a ball next to the magazines, a few inches from Zoë’s head, a woman’s pink fleece.

She froze, staring at it, her heart thudding. A pink fleece.

It was the one Lorne Wood had been wearing the night she’d been murdered.

It was a strange thing, to have lost all sense of who you were and of what was right or wrong. Crouched in the damp-smelling woods, surrounded by the silence of the trees, one thought kept coming back to Sally, and that was how very much she envied Millie. Millie of all people. Millie who could find herself needing money and, instead of agonizing, just borrow it from the first person who offered. Millie who could drop in and out of a person’s life and not think twice about it. She envied the simplicity of a teenager’s mind – when you knew why you were doing what you were doing and could still follow the strand of reasoning back to its start point. When your motivations, goals and morals rested neat, uncrumpled and well spaced in your head. Before they began to knot together, lose their individual colour and become just a fat woolly ball.