Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

Sally pressed her eyelids down with her fingers. She was paler than a ghost, but she nodded. ‘Yes. If you are.’

They turned into the entrance, Zoë holding up the light, shining it into the house, and the two women stared in, taking a mental snapshot of what lay in front of them. The hallway ran from the front door to the back, with two doors opening from it on the left. The place was completely stripped; only some parts of the wall still had chunks of plaster. There were the remains of a carpet in the hallway, but it had become so rotten and wet it looked more like mud and was dotted with puddles. This must have been the site of many a party – empty bottles and beer cans littered the place and something big lay next to the back door. At first Zoë took it for a bundled-up carpet, or clothes, half covered with leaves, but then she saw it was a human being. His shirt was half lifted from his back to reveal long grazes that had leaked blood into the seat of his jeans.

She switched off the light and quickly flattened herself against the wall. Sally did the same and they stood there, breathing hard, closing their eyes and going back over what they’d seen.

‘It’s him,’ Sally whispered. ‘Nial.’

‘Yes.’

He’d been lying on his side, his back to them so they couldn’t see his face, but it was definitely him. Those injuries on his back could only have come from falling down the slope. Maybe with the last of his strength he’d crawled into the house through the back door. She switched the light on again, twisted back into the doorway and shone the torch on the two doorways to check Kelvin wasn’t standing there. Then she moved the beam to the body at the end of the hall and saw it move slightly.

‘Nial?’ She cupped her hand around her mouth and hissed down the hallway. ‘Nial? You OK? Where’s Millie?’

Nial’s hand lifted. Seemed to be trying to wave at them. It could have been a wave of acknowledgement, it could have been a warning, or it could have been him trying to direct them to Millie. It stayed in the air for a second or two, then collapsed. His leg twitched, he tried to roll sideways to face them, but the effort was too much. He gave up and just lay there, breathing slowly, his thin ribs rising and falling.

Thud. Thud. Thud , came the noise, from the second doorway. Thud. Thud. Thud .

Two lines of sweat broke from under Zoë’s hair. It was the room where old man Pollock had been found.

Thud. Thud. Thud .

She nearly lost it then. She shrank out of sight and stood with her back to the wall, panting, wanting to run away. She put her hands up to her face and tried to calm her breathing. Slowly. In and out. In and out. She’d held it together this long. She could do this. She could.

‘Zoë?’

A cool hand on her shoulder. She looked sideways. Sally was standing close to her. Her face calm, smooth. She reached down and gently prised the big torch from her sister’s stiff fingers.

‘It’s OK.’ She held Zoë’s eyes. ‘Really it’s OK. I’m OK. Not scared. Not at all.’

As she’d walked across the fields, come down the quarry edge and approached the house, something had happened to Sally. The thing that had been coming up inside her for weeks at last reached the surface. It was the thing that had been able to say no to Steve when he’d offered her money, to say no when he’d said he was coming home from Seattle. The thing that had been able to keep filming Jake that night in Twerton, and had been able to cut David Goldrab into a million pieces. The thing was skinless and sharp-toothed, with the long face of a dragon, and had just shaken itself free of the old Sally, leaving her perfectly calm, perfectly focused. She was going to go in and get Millie out. Simple as that.

She examined the torch, flicked the switch back and forward, checking it carefully. Then she lifted the axe in the other hand, holding it over her shoulder like a woodcutter. Her face fixed, her heart beating slowly, she stepped into the hallway and crunched along the glass in the hall to the doorway where the noise was coming from.

She poked her head round the door, quite cool and unhurried now. There was no need for a torch – the moon from the window opposite lit up the room, wet and filthy. It was full of old furniture: a sideboard and a sofa that someone had tried to set fire to, a broken standard lamp leaning crookedly up against the wall. Scrappy blackened curtains hung at the window, which looked out at the cliff behind and, on the other side of the cracked glass, lit eerily by the moon, a man’s dark, oval face. Kelvin. Banging his head monotonously into the glass, raw intent in his face. She didn’t bolt back, just stood rooted in the doorway, staring at him. He wasn’t looking at her. He hadn’t even registered her presence, his eyes were so shuttered and blank in his brute need to get into the house.

He was smaller than she’d expected. He must be kneeling there, so close to the window, his hands out of sight below the sill. Whatever she’d imagined in his face – cunning or malice – it wasn’t there. It was dull. Flaccid. She made up her mind right there and then. She was going to kill him. She’d done it to David Goldrab, but this was going to be easier. Much easier.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Zoë had crept up behind her and was looking over her shoulder. ‘He looks weird. Is he drunk?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘It’s good. He’s useless.’ She put the dragon lamp on the floor and raised the axe. There was bile in her mouth. This was it, then. This was the moment. ‘Don’t look.’

‘Wait.’ Zoë grabbed her arm. ‘Hang on. Something’s wrong.’

Sally lowered the axe and Zoë hefted up the dragon lamp from the floor. It powered blindingly across the tiny room, illuminating the sofa and the sideboard and the tatty curtains, putting Kelvin’s face into sharp relief against the rock. He didn’t react to the light. Not at all. He remained in the same position, his lolling head banging rhythmically into the frame. There was a mark on his forehead where it was making contact, but no blood. And the banging was lackadaisical. More of a spasm than an intention.

‘Why’s he so low down?’

Sally shook her head, transfixed by his face. ‘Isn’t he kneeling?’

‘No. It’s something else.’

Together the two women took a step into the room. Zoë shook the torch, moved it randomly to create a strobe effect. Then she took another step forward and shone it straight into his eyes. Still he didn’t react. His eyes stared forward, black and blank, as if focused on something in the window-frame.

Sally let out all her breath, walked to the window and put the axe straight through the glass. Kelvin’s body swayed a little, but he didn’t look up at her. His head jerked forward and made contact with the frame again, just inches from her face, then snapped back. She saw his eyes under the lowered lids. Saw the blackness. Saw the scar in his skull that snaked down from his ear into the collar of his checked shirt. His face was pulled back in a grimace. There was some blood on the front of his shirt, as if maybe it had come from his mouth.

‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Dead.’

She leaned out of the broken window, angled the torch down, and saw he wasn’t kneeling at all. It was just that he had no legs. What had once been his lower body had concertinaed here. Into a bag of broken limbs half held together by his jeans. A tree branch growing out of the rock had caught him – suspended him there like a puppet, moving him back and forward into the window. Slowly, she raised the torch to the rockface. Saw a tree hanging half out of the rock, pale yellow earth spilling down. A long scar as if someone had tumbled down. She saw it all now – Kelvin and Nial struggling. A long, scrambling fall.