Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

She pulled back from the window, and picked her way back across the litter of beer cans into the hallway. She dropped to a crouch next to Nial, where the ground was tacky with blood. She put her hand on his side, feeling it rapidly rise and fall under her fingers. His body was hot. As if the effort of the struggle with Kelvin was still being released.

He had a tiny ribcage, not much bigger than Millie’s. She pulled his shirt down to cover him. ‘Can you hear me? Where’s Millie?’

He lifted his hands to his face and groaned. He half turned on to his back.

‘Nial? It’s OK. You can tell me – I’m prepared.’

‘She’s OK.’ His voice was thick. ‘She’s safe. I did it.’

‘Did it? Did what?’

‘I saved her. I saved Millie.’

Sally rocked back and sat down, among the beer cans, litter and broken glass. She sat there, holding her ankles, the floor and walls all moving around her. ‘Where, Nial?’ she heard Zoë say behind her. ‘Where is she?’

‘I locked her in the Glasto van. Up near the house. She hasn’t got her phone – it all happened too fast. You must have driven right past her.’

Ben couldn’t understand why Zoë wanted to go to Kelvin Burford’s funeral. What did she think she was going to gain from it? Did she feel sorry for his family? Or did she simply want to be sure he was really dead and gone? Zoë couldn’t answer the question, she just didn’t know, but she went all the same: her, Sally and Steve. Millie, Nial and Peter had come too, still adamant they wanted to be there. So it was six of them that shuffled into a pew that day in the tiny chapel, each a little uncomfortable and awkward, fidgeting in their formal clothing, hoping the service wouldn’t be too long and drawn out.

It was midsummer. The coroner had taken five weeks to call the final inquest on Kelvin Burford’s death and reach the verdict of death by misadventure. The investigation into Lorne Wood’s death, meanwhile, hadn’t officially been closed, but Kelvin might as well have been tried and convicted of it because the whole world knew what he’d done. The scarf at the canal was positive for his DNA, and when his house was searched not only had Lorne’s pink fleece and mobile phone been discovered under the bed, but also, in the desk drawer downstairs, the lipstick used to write on her body and the distinctive filigree earring that had been ripped from her ear. Ironic, really, when Zoë thought of all the planning she, Sally and Ben had put into getting Kelvin nailed – assuming he’d have disposed of the evidence at his cottage and would have to be nailed some other way.

There’d been story after story about the ‘monster’ Burford in the paper, detailing Kelvin’s past, his injury in Basra, his assault on the girl in Radstock. There weren’t many of his friends and family brave enough to turn up to the funeral so the congregation was small. Zoë glanced around – a few police, one or two colleagues who’d served with him in Basra wedged into the uncomfortable pews, not meeting anyone’s eyes, as if they were ashamed. Then she realized with a jolt that the pew they’d chosen was directly behind Kelvin’s sister. She stopped moving around then and, as silence fell in the chapel, studied the back of the woman’s head. Fair hair curling out from under a black straw pillbox hat. It occurred then to Zoë that maybe guilt had sent her here. Shame at the number of ways she’d stepped outside the subtle moral framework of truth and lies that the police were supposed to know and respect. As well as Kelvin, David Goldrab’s disappearance was on her conscience – repeatedly she’d reassured the family that everything possible was being done, while in truth she was silently helping the case to slide further and further down the force’s must-do list.

Air wheezed into the organ pipes, a chord sounded. She picked up the order of service and fanned herself lightly, raising her eyes to the rafters overhead. The cobwebs and the dust. Maybe the eyes of God were beyond all that, peering down at her, seeing all these secrets. She’d been wrong that Lorne was just the tip of the iceberg, that Kelvin had already killed. There had been no traces of human remains anywhere in the house or in the Land Rover – and the photo from Iraq had been downloaded from a website that had got thousands of hits before it had been wiped from the server. Yes, she thought, she’d been wrong about a lot of things in the last few weeks. But some right had come out of it too. Her connection to Sally, to Millie. And maybe, through that, a new way of connecting to the rest of the world. A new dimension in the pattern she was leaving.

The doors at the back of the church opened and the funeral director’s pall-bearers began the long walk up the aisle. Zoë looked down and saw Sally’s hand resting on her lap. She looked to her left and saw Millie’s hand on hers. On an impulse she reached out and took both, and as she did, the answer to Ben’s question about the funeral popped into her head.

Solidarity. That was what it was. She was here to show the world, and Kelvin’s memory, that this family, her family, wouldn’t be pushed apart again. Ever.

When the service was over, the teenagers ran on ahead, though the adults lingered a while, waiting for Kelvin’s sister to go before they got up and left by the east entrance, which led into the graveyard. They didn’t want to bump into the press who were ranked outside the west gate, gathering around Kelvin’s sister.

The three of them went to the bench under the buddleia tree to wait it out. Sally sat on Steve’s knee, Zoë stood in front of them, smiling, a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. She looked gorgeous, Sally thought, like an Amazon. Dressed in white from head to foot, with an incredible tan she’d picked up just from being on her bike. Her face had healed completely and she wore a solid cherry-red lipstick that hadn’t smudged or faded.

‘I like your dress,’ Sally said. ‘And the hat.’

‘Thanks.’ Zoë pulled off the hat and sat next to them. Tried to shake a crease out of the skirt. ‘It’s not really my thing. You know, dresses and hats. Still – proves I scrub up OK.’

‘Ben’s not here?’

‘Yes – he’s waiting in the car until the press go. See him?’

Sally looked across the graves and the cypress trees and saw a dark-blue Audi pulled up in the patchy sunlight. Ben was inside it, wearing sunglasses. ‘He’s staring at us. He doesn’t look happy.’

‘Ignore him. He reckoned we shouldn’t have come to the funeral. Thinks we’re nuts.’

Behind Ben, Nial and Peter’s Glastonbury vans were parked. Peter had got into his and now Nial was unlocking the side door of his and pulling it back to let in some cooler air. In the days since the inquest Nial had painted yellow flowers and skulls on it. He’d stencilled a line around the middle, a Plimsoll line in pale blue, with the words ‘Projected Glasto mud level 2011’.

‘They’re going to Glastonbury tonight,’ Steve told Zoë. ‘Sleeping in the van for three days. Nice.’

‘The Pilton mudbath? Oh, Christ, I feel so jealous. You’re happy to let her go? After everything?’

Sally watched Millie lean into the cab of Nial’s camper and attach something – a charm or a ribbon – to the mirror. She saw Nial loosen his tie – he still had a brownish mark on the side of his face where he’d scraped it in the tumble down the cliff. Both of them looked awkward and wrong in their formal outfits – a white blouse and black skirt for Millie, bare legs in black pumps, which looked vulnerable and out of place, Nial in a suit that was a little short in the legs, his hands dangling out of the sleeves. He was growing into himself, just as Sally had known he would eventually. There’d been story after story about him in the papers. Nial – little Nial, suddenly pushed into the shoes of the hero – leading Kelvin to Pollock’s Farm away from Millie, whom he’d hidden in the camper-van. The tarot had been wrong that Millie was going to die. A warning, of Kelvin and what was to come, but not a warning of death. ‘I’m not worried.’ Sally smiled. ‘She’ll be all right with Nial.’