Mo Hayder - Hanging Hill

‘He’s totally in love with her,’ Steve said.

Zoë laughed. ‘He might be in love with her, but what about Millie? Has it worked? He’s a hero now – is she in love with him?’

‘No.’ Sally sighed. ‘Of course not. Poor Nial.’

‘No?’

‘It’s Peter. It’s always been Peter.’

Zoë narrowed her eyes at Peter, who was sitting in his van fastening his seatbelt. ‘That waste of space? I never liked him, not from the moment I set eyes on him – he’s too full of himself.’

‘I know. He’s split up from Sophie now, though, so you never know.’ She shook her head. ‘One day Millie’ll look back and see what she missed in Nial. I just hope it’s not too late.’

Sally meant it. She was sure Nial was the right one for Millie. It wasn’t just the heroics of the night, it was something that had happened the day Nial was released from the hospital. He and Millie had come to Sally with serious faces and told her a different version of the events at Pollock’s Farm. Even now she was still turning this new version round and round in her head, trying to decide where to put it, what to think of it, whether she should be angry with them. They had told her that, coming home from school the previous night, Millie had been terrified about what Sally might be doing and whether she was going to confront Kelvin. They both knew what he was capable of, so Nial had taken the situation in hand.

Kelvin hadn’t followed Millie out to Pollock’s Farm at all. In fact, quite the opposite. He’d been lured there by Nial, who had decided, as part of his heroic fantasy, that he was going to take Kelvin on. Fight him face to face like a man. Millie hadn’t known anything about it, Nial insisted valiantly, until at the very last minute. All she knew was that twenty minutes after they’d got home Nial had stepped outside to make a private call. Minutes later he’d come hurrying back inside, telling her to hide quickly in the Glasto van. Of course he hadn’t foreseen the awful outcome, the long, clumsy chase that had taken them over the edge of the cliff. He’d only done it because, above everything, he and Millie had wanted to protect her, Sally.

She’d smiled quizzically at him when he said that, flattered, but puzzled. She wondered why anyone would ever want to protect her. She felt like a lion. She didn’t think she’d ever need protecting again. She thought life was very wild, and weird, and wonderful.

‘Zoë,’ she said now, ‘do you think it’s OK to do the wrong thing for the right reason?’

Her sister put her head back and roared with laughter. ‘Good God! What do you think I think?’

‘But what about the pattern?’

Zoë smiled and let her eyes wander over to Ben’s car. ‘The pattern?’ she said softly. ‘Oh, that always works itself out in the end.’

Sally smiled at that, and blushed, and looked down at Steve’s hands, linked across her lap. She thought about the three of them, she and Zoë and Millie, locked for ever to one person by a secret. For Zoë it was Ben and for her it was Steve. And that was OK. They were the people they wanted to be locked to. But for Millie…?

Well, for Millie it would happen eventually. One day she’d look at Nial and know she’d met the one.

As soon as Zoë got into the car she saw that Sally had been right: Ben really was in a mood. His expression was solemn. Guarded.

‘What?’ She buckled the seat-belt and glared at him. ‘Because I went to his funeral? Well, I know why now. We wanted to show strength, not cowardice, like he did. Is that a sin?’

He took off the sunglasses and started the car. ‘It’s not that.’ He checked the rear-view mirror and pulled out of the parking space. ‘Not that at all.’

‘Then what? For Christ’s sake.’

‘We’ve got to talk. About all of this.’ He waved a hand behind him to indicate the church. ‘Something’s gone seriously awry.’

Zoë stared at him. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. ‘Awry?’ she said carefully. ‘What does “awry” mean?’

‘I’ve been going through the stuff from Kelvin’s place. We weren’t just looking for things to connect him to Lorne, we were looking to see if he had anything to do with David Goldrab’s disappearance.’

‘I know.’

‘It would be such a lovely tick in the box on our clear-up rates.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Not what we expected. We found something that turned everything around.’

‘What? What have you found? Something I left? My phone?’

‘Not a trace of you. No, we found something that…’ he moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth ‘… something that just doesn’t make sense. However I look at it.’

Sally stood next to the window in the utility room at Peppercorn Cottage, washing a lace blouse in the sink, her eyes raised to the perfect blue sky, crisscrossed with vapour trails. The awful silences that had gathered around Peppercorn after David’s death had gone and now it felt like a proper home. Steve was in the garage, hammering back some weatherboarding that had come loose. Next to the garage Nial and Millie were swarming around the VW camper-van, piling things into it. A cooler that Nial had adapted to run from the cigarette-lighter socket was stuffed with beer – no food or anything of any nutritional value as far as Sally could tell. There were rolls of bedding and Millie’s dresses arranged on hangers in the windows. She was already frantic – Nial had accidentally dropped her mobile phone into the washing-up bowl: it now lay in pieces on the dashboard, drying off in the sun with two of her blouses, a pair of denim shorts and some underwear that hadn’t come out of the wash in time.

‘You just don’t get it, Mum. If we don’t get there like radically early we’re so stuffed. The best pitches go in the first ten minutes – even in the camper-van fields. Honestly, we should have packed before the funeral. Peter and his brother’s mates will already be there.’

Sally gently wrung out the blouse and hung it up in the window, where it would catch the rest of the day’s heat. Outside, the yellow smudges of kerria and forsythia had long gone, and now the thick, heady summer blooms were beginning, delphiniums and poppies, bees swarming around them. Millie passed the window on the way to the van, arms full of clothes, and stuck her tongue out at her mother. Sally smiled. How incredible, when all along she thought she was the one protecting them, that they ’d been protecting her . Nial put some music on the van’s sound system – Florence and the Machine – making the van shake. Not kids any more. No – they were adults.

She straightened the cuffs on the blouse. She’d wear it tonight and let Steve take it off her. They were going out to dinner. They would talk for hours. They’d get silly drunk. She’d tell him about the job she’d been offered by the hippies who’d bought her tarot cards – chief designer for a whole new product line they were launching. He’d tell her he loved her, and, maybe for the hundredth time, he’d make her a promise she didn’t want to accept. He’d say that if anything about David Goldrab ever came out, he was going to take the blame. He kept saying over and over again that he’d made the decision and that, if it came to it, Sally’s name was never going to be mentioned.

Ben drove Zoë home in silence. He wouldn’t say any more until he had her in the living room and had closed the doors. She half expected him to close the curtains too, he was in such a sombre, secretive mood.

‘What did you find? Something to do with Goldrab?’

‘Sit down.’