Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [105]
‘Yeah, well.’ Zoë cleared her throat. Raised a dismissive hand. ‘I’ve said my piece, but now I’d better go. Villains to catch. Kittens to rescue from trees. You know how it is.’
And she was gone, out of the kitchen, out of the cottage, striding across the gravel, spinning her keys on her hands. She didn’t look back as she drove out on to the lane so she didn’t see Sally watching her from inside the kitchen. Didn’t see that she didn’t move for several minutes afterwards. A passer-by, if there had been any passers-by in that remote place, would have thought she was frozen there. A fuzzy white face on the other side of the leaded panes.
15
Just as Sally’s job was finishing that afternoon, Steve called and asked her to meet him in town. There wasn’t enough time to get to his house before she picked up Millie so he suggested they met at the Moon and Sixpence, the place they’d first had dinner together. She used the bathroom she’d just cleaned to have a hurried wash, and straightened her clothes. She put on a little makeup, but in the mirror her reflection was still tired and drawn. She couldn’t stop turning over what Zoë had said that morning. About amends and patterns and the past.
She got to the café by four and found him sitting on the terrace, dressed in a suit and camel overcoat, drinking coffee. She sat down opposite him. He turned his grey eyes to her and studied her. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I think so. How was the meeting?’
He nodded in the direction of the third seat at the table. ‘In there.’ He had the weary, resigned look of a man who’d just woken up to the fact that the world was going to disappoint him for ever. ‘In there.’
She saw a rucksack on the seat. ‘Is that …?’
He nodded. ‘I got paid in Krugerrands.’
‘Krugerrands?’
He nodded. ‘Had to go and change it in Hatton Garden. I got a good deal – there’s more than thirty-two K in there.’
Sally shivered. Thirty-two thousand pounds for killing a man. Blood money, they’d call this. She should be revolted by it, but she wasn’t. She just felt numb. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I’m not going to do anything with it. It’s yours.’
‘But—’
‘Really. You did the job.’
‘But you helped. We did it together. Like partners.’
‘Don’t argue. Just take it.’
She bit her lip. Looked at the rucksack. It was bulging. Ever since Thursday night she hadn’t been able to look at a bag stuffed full of anything without picturing those carrier bags lined up on the lawn at Peppercorn. The red paste pressing against the plastic. She pulled her eyes away. Fiddled with the lid of Steve’s cafetière.
‘Millie got another call today from Jake.’
‘That’s fine. We’ll sort it tonight.’
‘I don’t know if I want to.’
‘Well, we’re going to have to. We’ll do it tonight and tomorrow I’m going to America. You know that, don’t you, that I’m still going to America?’
She nodded.
‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Yes,’ she said distantly. ‘I’ll be fine.’
But she wasn’t fine, of course. Her head was full of static and images. David Goldrab. The smells. The way the colour had crept into Zoë’s cheeks when she was standing in the kitchen this morning. The ‘pattern’. And now she thought that, whatever part of the pattern between humans she and Steve had made in the last few days, it was ugly and wrong. And that whatever happened now, it couldn’t be changed. The ugly, knobbly part would become an uneven, deviating vein in the fabric that would, with time, be woven over and built on, as the generations kept moving. On down the line.
16
Zoë spent the rest of the day in the office, following up leads and answering emails. She still hadn’t heard from Dominic Mooney so she put in one last call but was told he was still ‘in a meeting’. By the time she left the office the sun was low, the roofs and high windows of Bath gilded with the last of the light, as if they’d been dipped in gold. It would be dark by the time she got home. She could have a Jerry’s and ginger and watch the stars come out – on her own, while Ben and Debbie were doing whatever it was they did, wherever it was they did it. The welts