Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [155]
Sally pressed her eyelids down with her fingers. She was paler than a ghost, but she nodded. ‘Yes. If you are.’
They turned into the entrance, Zoë holding up the light, shining it into the house, and the two women stared in, taking a mental snapshot of what lay in front of them. The hallway ran from the front door to the back, with two doors opening from it on the left. The place was completely stripped; only some parts of the wall still had chunks of plaster. There were the remains of a carpet in the hallway, but it had become so rotten and wet it looked more like mud and was dotted with puddles. This must have been the site of many a party – empty bottles and beer cans littered the place and something big lay next to the back door. At first Zoë took it for a bundled-up carpet, or clothes, half covered with leaves, but then she saw it was a human being. His shirt was half lifted from his back to reveal long grazes that had leaked blood into the seat of his jeans.
She switched off the light and quickly flattened herself against the wall. Sally did the same and they stood there, breathing hard, closing their eyes and going back over what they’d seen.
‘It’s him,’ Sally whispered. ‘Nial.’
‘Yes.’
He’d been lying on his side, his back to them so they couldn’t see his face, but it was definitely him. Those injuries on his back could only have come from falling down the slope. Maybe with the last of his strength he’d crawled into the house through the back door. She switched the light on again, twisted back into the doorway and shone the torch on the two doorways to check Kelvin wasn’t standing there. Then she moved the beam to the body at the end of the hall and saw it move slightly.
‘Nial?’ She cupped her hand around her mouth and hissed down the hallway. ‘Nial? You OK? Where’s Millie?’
Nial’s hand lifted. Seemed to be trying to wave at them. It could have been a wave of acknowledgement, it could have been a warning, or it could have been him trying to direct them to Millie. It stayed in the air for a second or two, then collapsed. His leg twitched, he tried to roll sideways to face them, but the effort was too much. He gave up and just lay there, breathing slowly, his thin ribs rising and falling.
Thud. Thud. Thud, came the noise, from the second doorway. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Two lines of sweat broke from under Zoë’s hair. It was the room where old man Pollock had been found.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
She nearly lost it then. She shrank out of sight and stood with her back to the wall, panting, wanting to run away. She put her hands up to her face and tried to calm her breathing. Slowly. In and out. In and out. She’d held it together this long. She could do this. She could.
‘Zoë?’
A cool hand on her shoulder. She looked sideways. Sally was standing close to her. Her face calm, smooth. She reached down and gently prised the big torch from her sister’s stiff fingers.
‘It’s OK.’ She held Zoë’s eyes. ‘Really it’s OK. I’m OK. Not scared. Not at all.’
47
As she’d walked across the fields, come down the quarry edge and approached the house, something had happened to Sally. The thing that had been coming up inside her for weeks at last reached the surface. It was the thing that had been able to say no to Steve when he’d offered her money, to say no when he’d said he was coming home from Seattle. The thing that had been able to keep filming Jake that night in Twerton, and had been able to cut David Goldrab into a million pieces. The thing was skinless and sharp-toothed, with the long face of a dragon, and had just shaken itself free of the old Sally, leaving her perfectly calm, perfectly focused. She was going to go in and get Millie out. Simple as that.
She examined the torch, flicked the switch back and forward, checking it carefully. Then she lifted the axe in the other hand, holding it over her shoulder like a woodcutter.