Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [128]
She went back into the open air. Near the mill doors, set at an angle in the grass, there was a hole with a grate – an entrance to an oubliette or an old ice house for a forgotten manor, maybe – with a big, padlocked chain linked through it. She made a mental note of it, then wandered back to the cottage, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pausing to put her nose to the windows and peer inside. Idly she tried the back door. It opened. She hesitated, looking down at the handle, half surprised. Then she stepped inside.
‘Hello?’
No reply, so she went into the kitchen and along the hallway, opening doors as she went, checking inside. No one here. She went upstairs, the curtain on the landing flapping and twisting like a ghost in front of her. She found two bedrooms – one with a bed against french windows that opened, improbably, on to a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the stream, the second empty save for a pile of cardboard boxes and an old poster of a football team Blu-tacked to the wall. A tube of tennis balls lay on the floor. Christ, there were bloody tennis balls everywhere she went, these days. Lorne. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you. I’m going to find out if you’re somewhere in all of this.
There was a bathroom with greying towels left to dry on the radiator, a framed needlework sampler resting on the window-sill that read ‘I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son. I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes’. In the cabinet there was a box of medicine, open, the blister packs spilling out. ‘Catapres’, the label read. She’d heard of it. It was something to do with post-traumatic stress. She put the box back, leaned across the bath, opened the window and peered out at the tops of the trees. From here you could see parts of David Goldrab’s house, with its reconstituted stone tiles, its coynes and laughable attempts to blend into the area. The panes of its huge atrium reflected lozenges of sunlight back through the yew trees. Yep, if she was Mooney, the gamekeeper would have been the first person she’d approach.
She went back downstairs. There was nothing much in the front room, just a wide-screen TV and a load of DVDs, but in the back there was an office with paperwork stacked in rickety heaps. She sat down and began leafing through them, hoping to get an idea of this guy. There was a pile of invoices from Mole Valley Farm Supplies with black fingerprints on them. A series of letters from the Royal United Hospital about medical treatment he was receiving. Something to do with a head injury. Sheet after sheet of details of operations and medication and X-rays and …
She stopped, half the pile of paper in one hand, half in the other. She was looking at an image she couldn’t quite fathom. At first she thought it was some kind of Photoshopped joke, the sort of thing people loved to post online – outsize animals, one celebrity’s head spliced on to another’s body, ridiculous fake X-rays of all the weird objects a person had swallowed – because it seemed so outlandish. But when she studied it some more she saw it was real.
Watling and Zhang’s unit would love to see this, she thought, a little shakily. It was the sort of photo there’d been a big thing about recently – the sort taken by servicemen on their mobiles. It showed a pile of bodies – men, skinny and half dressed, darkened by the sun and death into leathery strips of flesh. It looked like Iraq or Afghanistan, because there were plenty of keffiyeh scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Maybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. That could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best assassins.
There was a noise from the doorway, and when she looked up a man was standing