Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [134]
He frowned, genuinely perplexed. ‘You don’t think I’m going to let you go – not now – do you?’
30
It was Zoë’s face that stopped Sally. She’d got halfway up Hanging Hill, gripping the steering-wheel so hard her hands were white, leaning forward and staring out of the windscreen. The turning to Lightpil House and Kelvin’s cottage was up ahead but, as she indicated to turn, out of nowhere Zoë’s expression popped into her head. It was when she’d been standing at the table in the kitchen the day before yesterday, talking about patterns and the way we all connected to each other.
Sally faltered. Her foot twitched on the accelerator. She tried to picture Zoë with a tin full of a dead man’s teeth, driving into the countryside with them. To do what? Point the finger at someone innocent. She couldn’t conjure up the image. Just couldn’t. Clever as Zoë was, it wasn’t how she’d deal with this. And then Sally had a memory of Kelvin Burford at nursery school all those years ago – a fierce and sturdy little boy with the snot dried in crusts where he’d wiped it across his face, the feral sense of determination that stuck right out of his eyes whenever he looked at you.
As the turning to the gamekeeper’s cottage came up to meet her, she flicked the indicator off. She let the car sail past it, continuing on along the main road. Scared as she was of Kelvin, she couldn’t do something else this contorted. Whatever Steve said, she couldn’t go on spoiling the pattern.
No. There had to be another way.
31
‘What’s the matter?’ Kelvin had brought a bottle of cider up from the kitchen. He was standing at the window that looked out to the side of the house, unscrewing the bottle and pouring the contents into a cloudy glass. He lowered his chin and gave Zoë a long, measured look. ‘What’s the matter with you? You look weird.’
She lay in a curl against the bed head. She could no longer breathe through her nose: it had filled with compacted blood. Just like Lorne’s had. She kept thinking about that pile of bodies in Iraq. She kept thinking that if Kelvin had seen things like that on a day-to-day basis then Lorne’s death would have seemed like nothing.
All like her …
He knew Lorne as a stripper or topless model. The same way he’d known Zoë. Neither of them would matter much to someone this insane. They’d be just links in the sequence. The superintendent had laughed, and said, ‘You’re telling us there’s a pile of bodies somewhere?’ but Kelvin wouldn’t see any difference between a pile of dead women and a pile of dead Iraqi insurgents. And to fight it she had nothing. Clever, clever Zoë. Spiky and cold, yes, but you couldn’t take the clever out of her. Except now. When she just couldn’t find a clever solution to this.
‘I’m …’ she began.
‘What?’ He looked up sharply. ‘You’re what?’
She hesitated. If she told him now she was police it could go either way. It could scare him into releasing her, or it could make him finish the job off even quicker.
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m cold. Can I have my sweater back?’
He grabbed it from the floor and threw it at her, then sat down and drank the glass of cider in one gulp. He lit a cigarette and smoked for a while, his eyes on the wall, as if he was lost in thought. She clutched the sweater round her shoulders. Gave a small shiver. ‘I have to go now.’ Her voice was coming out a bit thick when she spoke, making her sound as though she was deaf. ‘My husband’s going to call the police – he’ll be worried about me. I want to see you again. I’ll come back.’
‘You’ve said that already.’
‘I meant it.’
He poured more cider, screwed the lid on the bottle and raised the glass, as if he’d lost interest in her. She dropped her head back and breathed slowly through her mouth. She’d noticed in the last ten minutes that the window-frame was weak. Maybe – maybe …
‘You made me angry.’ Kelvin didn’t turn to her. ‘You made me angry and you made me do it. There’s a line, you know.’ He tapped the cider glass rhythmically.