Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

The rain had gone and the clouds had cleared but the sun was almost down now, the liquid orange light dissolving around the houses and churches on the hills above Bath. It was cold. Sally pulled her duffel coat around herself and watched Zoë come down the path from the Woods’ house. She had her hood up but she’d taken off the sunglasses and her face was naked in the twilight. The bruises and swelling had got worse in the last two hours, yet somehow she didn’t look broken any more. It was as if something in her had mended.

She got inside the car and slammed the door. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You can drive now. Go up to the main road and turn left so we stay close to the canal. I’ll tell you where to stop.’

While Sally started the engine and pulled out of the drive into the evening traffic, Zoë took off her jacket and rummaged in the pockets. She placed a plastic bag on her lap and unravelled an orange scarf on top of it. Then she fumbled inside the jacket again, pulled out a tiny Ziplock bag, and opened it. Inside there was a condom, filled with semen.

‘Oh, God,’ Sally muttered.

‘Well, don’t look if you can’t handle it.’

‘I can handle it. I can.’

‘Put the heater on.’

Sally turned it on full and concentrated on the traffic, glancing from time to time at her sister, who, biting her lip with concentration, was undoing the condom and carefully distributing the contents across the scarf. She folded the scarf and rubbed it together. Then she placed it on the carrier bag on the floor near the heater.

‘Disgusting.’ She returned the condom to the Ziplock bag, and used wet wipes to clean her hands. ‘Disgusting.’

She sat back in the seat, pushed her hair out of her eyes and ratcheted the seat back so she had room to stretch her legs out. She was so tall, Sally thought, and her legs were amazing – so long and capable. If Sally had been given legs like that to go through life with she’d have taken on the world in the same way Zoë had. She wouldn’t have shrunk back from it. She would have done all the things she’d done, and not regretted any of it. She wished she could explain it somehow – that she’d have been proud of everything. Even the pole-dancing. It seemed to her you needed real guts to do something like that.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ Zoë said suddenly. ‘It’s all going to be OK now.’

‘How do you know?’

She gave a small, wondering smile and shook her head. The headlights from the oncoming cars flickered across her face. ‘It just is.’

The traffic was heavy at this time of night. Even heading back into town along the canal the roads were congested – it took nearly half an hour to get to the bus stop Lorne had used the night she’d been attacked by Kelvin. The women used torches to navigate through the trees to the canal. The rush-hour affected not only the roads: the Kennet and Avon towpath, too, was a swift route out of the city and workers often used it as a cycle route, their suits in bags on their backs, but by the time the sisters arrived even that surge of traffic was over and the path was empty. There was no noise except the sounds of people cooking evening meals in the barges.

They walked quickly, heads down. The crime scene had been released two days ago and as they approached they could see a few soggy bunches of flowers lying in the wet grass, brown inside the cellophane. Zoë gave a quick glance around and stepped off the towpath, crunching into the undergrowth. Sally followed. They stopped a few yards from a natural clearing surrounded by dripping branches and nettles. A cross embroidered with flowers had been nailed to a tree up ahead. Sally stared at it. It would have been the Woods who had left it. The family with the hole in the heart.

‘This is going to get some CSI into a world of trouble.’ Zoë pulled the scarf out of her pocket. ‘Don’t like doing it.’

‘CSI?’

‘The crime-scene guys who are supposed to’ve searched this site. If it works I’m going to have some serious karma to pay back.’ She bit her lip and surveyed the clearing, then nodded back towards the path. ‘You stay here. Watch the canal. If anyone comes, don’t shout, just walk back in here to me. We’ll go out that way – between the trees. OK?’

‘OK.’

Sally stood, hands in her pockets, glancing up and down the path where the puddles reflected the light of the barges. Behind her, Zoë made her way through the undergrowth. She’d told a colleague in her team what they were doing. Ben, his name was. He didn’t know anything about what had happened to David Goldrab – that was always going to be a secret between the sisters – but he did know what Kelvin had done to Zoë and to Lorne. Sally felt a little better knowing someone else was helping; not that Zoë wasn’t capable all on her own. She looked back and saw her in the clearing, on tiptoe, draping the scarf over a tree branch. Totally capable. A few moments later she trudged back to Sally, wiping her hands as she came.

‘Anyone?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to rain again.’ Zoë looked up at the sky as they began to walk to the car. A little cloudy still. The moon was sending down a cool, diffuse light that gave everything monster outlines. ‘I really don’t.’ She fished in her pocket for her phone and pushed a key. ‘But I’ll need to tell Ben to make sure someone finds it ASAP.’

Sally kept walking, watching her sister out of the corner of her eye. She sensed Ben was more than just a trusted friend to her.

Then the call connected and she heard a man’s voice – Ben, she supposed – speaking excitedly. She heard the words ‘I was just about to call you,’ then something inaudible that made Zoë stop dead in her tracks. Sally paused too, and turned to her sister.

‘ Are you sure? ’ Zoë muttered into the phone. Her expression had changed completely. ‘A hundred per cent?’

‘What?’ Sally hissed. ‘What is it?’

Zoë flapped a hand at her to be quiet. She turned away and walked a few steps in the opposite direction, her finger in her ear so she could hear better what Ben was saying. She listened for a while, then muttered a few short questions. When she hung up, she came back at a trot, beckoning to Sally to get back to the car.

‘Zoë?’ she said, breaking into a jog alongside her. ‘What?’

‘Ben’s in Gloucester docks.’

‘And?’

‘Kelvin’s got a mate – a friend from the army who owns a barge moored there.’

‘A barge?’

‘We were looking for a barge right from the beginning. Thought there had been a houseboat here that night. This has to be the same one. It’s locked. Ben’s waiting for Gloucestershire Support Group boys to arrive and break in but…’

‘But what?’

‘He thinks there’s someone inside it. I think we’ve found him. I think we’ve found Kelvin.’

Sally drove fast up Lansdown Hill, Zoë in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the steering-wheel, glancing at the dashboard clock, calculating how long it would take to get to Gloucester. The traffic was thin now. It would take less than ten minutes to pick up Millie from the Sweetmans, then for Sally to drop Zoë off at her car. From there, with luck and a tailwind, Zoë could be at the docks within the hour.

Her mind was racing. Had the barge simply motored away, on the night of Lorne’s killing, along the canal system? She scrabbled in her memory – trying to decide if the Kennet and Avon canal connected into Gloucester. She couldn’t recall – but she could remember that the Gloucester docks were less than a mile from the red-light areas of Barton Street and Midland Road. She wondered if Kelvin’s ‘army friend’ had taken the photo of that pile of dead bodies in Iraq, and what – what – would be on that barge? Her hand kept drifting to the pocket where her phone was, wanting to call Ben, because it seemed to her that whichever way she pictured the barge she also saw blood drifting away from it in the water, swirling in oily curlicues. She wanted to tell him to be careful, to wait until she got there.