Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [146]
Sally forced a smile and reached for the ignition key. She was getting a bit impatient with his hero act. He was too young to have any concept – any proper way of grasping the truth – of the awful, overwhelming reality of Kelvin Burford.
‘Thank you, Nial,’ she said patiently. She was tired. Very tired. ‘Thank you. I’ll pick her up before seven.’
40
Nothing in Lorne’s bedroom had been touched since Zoë’s last visit. She could tell that from the still, shuttered weight of the air. It needed stirring, needed human breath in it. She pushed her sunglasses on to her head, knelt, opened the lower drawer and began peeling away the layers of clothes. It was gone six o’clock and the rain had passed over the town. The lovely trees outside Lorne’s window dripped with water. Beyond them was the driveway and, at the end of it, Sally waiting in her little Ka. She’d driven Zoë here and now she was as anxious as Zoë was to get this stage of the process right. Sally, little Sally, who was turning out not to be weak-willed and spoiled, but tougher and smarter than Zoë would ever have guessed. And then, good God, then there was Ben …
In spite of everything that had happened at Kelvin’s, the part of Zoë that had been aching for years and years softened a little at the thought of Ben. He was … What was he? Too good to be true? A reality she couldn’t push away with a sarcastic ‘Yeah, right’? Earlier, at her house, instead of speaking, asking questions, he’d simply sat with his arms round her, his chin on her head, listening to the whole story. Everything. And afterwards – when she’d expected him to cough awkwardly, mutter something stiff about how her secret wouldn’t go any further, that maybe she should think about counselling – he’d shrugged, got up, clicked on the kettle and said, ‘Right, got time for a cuppa before we nail the dickhead?’ Now he was in the car somewhere, on the way to Gloucester with a list of Kelvin’s known associates in his pockets. She sighed. With all the wrong she’d done in the world, how had this right come to her so easily?
She shut the drawer and opened the next. There were some books in the back, and behind them a few oddments Zoë was sure Pippa hadn’t paid much attention to when she’d done her hurried inventory of the room after Lorne’s disappearance. She pushed aside a bra and knickers – Lorne’s underwear had been found so that was no use. She examined a grey peaked cap with diamanté studs in it – no, too distinctive, someone would have remembered her wearing a hat like that. Then she saw an orange silk scarf.
She sat back on her heels and rested the scarf across her knees. It could have been tucked under Lorne’s pink fleece that afternoon when she left the house and no one would have necessarily noticed it. It was distinctive enough – didn’t look like something you picked up in Next, more like something that had come from a holiday. She checked the label. ‘Sabra Dreams’, it said. ‘Made in Morocco’. The pin board above the desk had a photo of Lorne on a family holiday in Marrakesh. Pippa would remember her buying this.
Zoë put the scarf in her jacket pocket and zipped it up. She closed the drawers, put the sunglasses back on, and went downstairs. She found Pippa sitting, bizarrely, on the chair in the hallway next to the front door. The chair was meant for coats and handbags and oddments to be thrown on to it, not to be sat on: it was in the wrong place. Pippa looked as if she was neither in nor out of the house. As if she was permanently waiting for something.
‘Did you find what you wanted?’
‘I just needed to look around again. I thought there was something I missed. I was wrong.’ She stopped at the bottom step and studied Pippa.
‘What?’ She blinked stupidly. ‘What is it?’
‘I dunno. I guess I just wondered …’
‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t ask it, it’s not ethical, but I’d like to anyway. I want to know how you feel about the person who did this.’
Pippa’s face fell. ‘Oh, please – I can’t stand another lecture on forgiveness. I won’t forgive him. I know it’s wrong, I know it goes against all