Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [129]
She dropped the photos and fumbled shakily inside her pocket for her warrant card, getting to her feet. ‘You scared me for a moment there.’
He was tall and bearded, hair flecked with grey. He had a protruding stomach inside his checked lumberjack shirt, and he’d covered his jeans with snap-on waterproof leggings, like a cowboy’s chaps. In his hand was a roll of garden twine. ‘Don’t think you’ll get away with this again,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’
‘Sorry, I …?’ She trailed off. Her hand was frozen on the card, half in, half out of the pocket, as she stared at the scar on his head. ‘Kelvin?’ she said lamely. ‘Kelvin?’ It had taken a moment but she had recognized him. After eighteen years his name had popped into her head as if it was on a spring. Someone she’d been a tiny kid with at nursery school, and who, years later, had been a maintenance man in the Bristol strip club.
And at the moment she recognized him, he recognized her. He stepped forward, bent at the waist, an intrigued smile on his face. ‘Zoë?’
She let the warrant card drop into her pocket. Slowly she took her hand out, holding his eyes. He knew her name. She couldn’t show him the card, couldn’t let him know she was a cop now. He knew everything about her. Everything.
‘Wait there.’ He smiled. He had good teeth. She remembered that from before. Above everything, she remembered his teeth. ‘I’ll be straight back. I’ve got something to show you.’
He ducked out of the door and was gone, leaving her in the room, idiotically frozen like a statue. Kelvin Burford. Kelvin fucking Burford. It had been eighteen years since she’d last spoken to him and yet she’d dreamed about him last night, leaning on his broom at the back of the audience, a sly smile on his face. He was a bastard. A scary bastard. And he knew her bloody name. All that time she’d thought it was just Goldrab, Kelvin had known it too. She went to the doorway and stood, looking left then right. She was still trying to get her numbed brain to decide which way to go when he reappeared in the hallway.
This time he didn’t speak, just stood, filling the doorway. She’d never registered before quite how big he was, in girth and height. His belly in the lumberjack shirt hung over the top of his trousers. He was silhouetted by the sun that came through the back door and shone on to the filthy floor, and in his hand was a knife. One of the hunting knives she’d seen on the metallic strip in the mill building. Now she could see the long scar that started at his ear, went up around the top of his head and looped back down to the nape of his neck. It was square, with neat corners. She knew what that was – it was where metal had been inserted to replace his skull.
She glanced over her shoulder, calculating how far it was to the front door and if she could push past him. Then back at the knife. ‘Kelvin,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to be holding that now, is there? That’s the sort of thing’ll get you into a whole lorryload of shit.’
‘Zoë,’ he said, ‘I asked you before. What are you doing in my house?’
She took a breath, turned and bolted into the hallway. She skidded along, taking up the rug with her and hitting the door with all her force. She threw the Yale lock and pulled, expecting the door to fly open. It didn’t. The deadbolts were on. She grappled for them, throwing back the barrels, her hands shaking now. Still the door wouldn’t budge. It was Chubb-locked. You could see the bolt between the jamb and the strike plate.
She turned. Kelvin stood behind her, blocking the path to the kitchen, his head down, as if in puzzled thought. He was looking at the knife, holding it angled with the blade facing upwards, as if the way the light glanced off it fascinated him. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She threw herself away from the door and on to the stairs, flew up them, grabbing at the banister to pull herself faster. The french windows in the bedroom – they opened on to a small balcony. She got into the room, launched