Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [101]
Zoë raised an eyebrow. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Nah,’ he said, with a smug smile. ‘Because David hasn’t been killed. David – Mr clever fucking Goldrab – oh, no, not him. He has disappeared himself.’
12
The air above the field was full of drifting white butterflies. Like fairies floating on the wind, they trailed past Sally’s face, blocking the sunlight, alighting on her shoulders and hands. To her right she could see shapes, indistinct in the blizzard. They were important, instinctively she knew they were, and she began to walk towards them, her hands shielding her face from the insects. The first shape was big, standing high, a giant, moving white mass. A car, she saw, as she got nearer – she could make out wing mirrors and headlights through the throng. She clapped her hands and the butterflies lifted in a cloud, spun and flapped. Underneath them the car bonnet was black and shiny, and Sally saw it was Steve’s Audi. Which meant, she was sure, that the shape on the ground, ten feet away, cocooned in white, was David Goldrab.
Her heart began to pound, a giant drum, filling her chest. She took a few steps, crunching on butterflies, breaking their bodies under her shoes. David lay on his back, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, as if he was in a sarcophagus, butterflies covering his face. She didn’t want to approach, but she knew she had to. She got to within a foot, and although every sense was telling her not to, she crouched near his head, stretched her hand out towards him.
The body moved. It rolled towards her and began to sit up. A hand shot out and gripped her. The butterflies swarmed away from the face but it wasn’t David under there. It was Zoë, sitting up and looking beseechingly at Sally, as if she was at the bottom of a very deep hole, and Sally was the only light she could see.
‘Sally?’ A hand was shaking her. ‘Sally? Wake up.’
She covered her face with her hands. ‘What?’ she mumbled.
‘You were crying.’
She opened her eyes. The room was dark, the bedside clock casting just a faint glow. Three o’clock. Steve was lying behind her, his hand on her shoulder. She touched her fingers lightly to her face and found her cheeks were wet.
13
He has disappeared himself …
Jake’s words kept knocking at Zoë. She’d been almost certain for a while that Goldrab was dead, but now she wasn’t so sure. It hadn’t occurred to her before that he could disappear himself. But now she saw it was feasible, and the thought made her more than uneasy. If he wasn’t dead it meant he could come back at any time, walk into her life and cut her down in one swipe. Because that was the sort of bastard he was.
The next day she got straight to work, ploughing through the list Jake had given her, putting out feelers – calls to Essex Police to track down Candi and Fraser, and to SOCA to see if there were any clues as to who ‘Spanner’ might be. She used the parliamentary website, Dodspeople, to search hundreds of CVs for MoD people who’d done time in Kosovo, and the more digging she did the more convinced she became that the person to start with was a guy named Dominic Mooney. Mooney was now head of intelligence at one of the Foreign Office departments, but what interested her was that he had spent time with the Civil Secretariat in Kosovo at the beginning of the decade and had done three years as the director of a unit set up in Priština to monitor and investigate prostitution and trafficking. If any of his staff in Kosovo had had contact with Goldrab, or had been up to anything suspicious, Mooney would be the one to know.
She put in a call to him in Whitehall, but he was out at a meeting, so she left a message with his secretary, then began systematically working her way through her list of other tasks. She spoke to the gardening company in Swindon, but they didn’t have much to tell her – Goldrab was reclusive, paid them by direct debit, and often the workers would be at Lightpil for eight hours solid without seeing or speaking to him. It was much the same story at the pool company, and at the stables where Goldrab kept his