Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [130]
She thumped at the windows with the heel of her hand. They had a stainless-steel lever handle with a keyhole in the back plate, but no key. Fucking locked. What was it with her and locked doors, these days? She looked around frantically for the keys. There was a dilapidated armoire against the far wall, and a bedside cabinet. She wrenched the drawer open. Saw some screws, a phone battery, sex lube. No keys. Kelvin began to walk up the stairs again. His weight made the floorboards on the treads creak. Zoë got off the bed, and positioned herself in the way she’d been taught at police school. Sideways on, knees braced. She took long, slow breaths, trying to picture her centre of gravity sinking lower and lower, getting more and more solid and ready. Then, at the last minute, she lost her nerve. Dropped to her front on the floor and commando-crawled under the bed.
News about Kelvin had filtered through to her over the years – how he’d been driving through Basra in a Snatch Land Rover and an IED planted in a dead dog had detonated, killing everyone in the vehicle except him. So, yes, Iraq – that must have been when the photo of the bodies in a pile had been taken. For a while his accident had been all over the local news. Then, six months after his surgery, he’d attacked a teenage girl in Radstock. The story went that the girl had been baiting him – calling him Metalhead. He’d lost it and attacked her. He’d pinned her to a wall, got a plastic bag and wrapped it around her face. Later she testified he’d had his hand up her skirt while he was doing it, that he’d ejaculated into his trousers while he was strangling her. He denied that part of the story. Still, he got banged up for it. The girl’s family wanted to sue the army for putting the madness into his head, but it had been thrown out of court.
Zoë had avoided Kelvin as much as she could when he’d been doing maintenance at the club. But in those days relationships had been formed, odd, handicapped friendships that limped along sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. It must be how Kelvin knew David Goldrab. Maybe it was the reason he was working for him now.
She rolled on to her side, breathing hard, frantically looking around for something she could use to defend herself. Under the bed were the things you’d expect from a single man living on his own – dust balls, a pair of underpants, a pile of men’s magazines. And bundled up in a ball next to the magazines, a few inches from Zoë’s head, a woman’s pink fleece.
She froze, staring at it, her heart thudding. A pink fleece.
It was the one Lorne Wood had been wearing the night she’d been murdered.
28
It was a strange thing, to have lost all sense of who you were and of what was right or wrong. Crouched in the damp-smelling woods, surrounded by the silence of the trees, one thought kept coming back to Sally, and that was how very much she envied Millie. Millie of all people. Millie who could find herself needing money and, instead of agonizing, just borrow it from the first person who offered. Millie who could drop in and out of a person’s life and not think twice about it. She envied the simplicity of a teenager’s mind – when you knew why you were doing what you were doing and could still follow the strand of reasoning back to its start point. When your motivations, goals and morals rested neat, uncrumpled and well spaced in your head. Before they began to knot together, lose their individual colour and become just a fat woolly ball.
She scraped at the earth beneath the tree with her bare fingers, burrowing through last year’s leaves, warm and flaky, getting dirt under her nails. The court she’d summoned in her head had weighed Kelvin against Sally as David Goldrab’s killer and had found there was no contest. Kelvin Burford had a record of violence; he’d worked for David, and had severe mental problems. Of course