Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [17]
‘That’s why I’m calling. Are you OK?’
‘It’s Lorne they murdered. Not me.’
Sally paused, a little thrown off by Millie’s dismissiveness. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just I thought with the way you used to be so close to Lorne you’d—’
‘We weren’t close, Mum.’
‘She seemed to be with you all the time.’
‘No – you just think she was. But really she preferred her mates at Faulkener’s and, anyway, I like Sophie better.’
‘Even so, it must be upsetting.’
‘No – really, I mean I’m shocked but I’m not crying my eyes out. It was ages ago. I haven’t seen her for ages.’
Sally looked up at the window, at the lonely moon lifting itself from the horizon. Bloated and red. Millie was a proper teenager now. To her a year really was an age. ‘OK,’ she said, after a while. ‘Just one thing – if you want to go out tonight will you speak to me first? Let me know where you’re going?’
‘I’m not going out. I’m staying in. With them.’ She meant Julian and his new wife, Melissa. ‘Worse luck. And it’s the Glasto meeting tonight.’
‘The Glasto meeting?’
‘I told you about this, Mum. Peter and Nial are going to pick up their camper-vans the day after tomorrow. They’re going to meet tonight to talk about it. Didn’t Isabelle tell you?’
Sally nibbled at the side of her thumbnail. She’d forgotten it was all so close. The boys were going to Glastonbury with Peter’s older brother and his friends. Peter and Nial had passed their driving tests and had been working like slaves for months, saving up money to buy two beaten-up old VW camper-vans they’d discovered rotting on a farm in Yate. Their parents, impressed by their determination, had chipped in to make up the shortfall and the insurance premiums. Millie hadn’t stopped talking about going with them to the festival, but the tickets were nearly two hundred pounds. There was no way. Absolutely no way.
‘Mum? Didn’t Isabelle say?’
‘No. And, anyway, I don’t suppose there’ll be any meetings tonight. Not with this news.’
‘There is. They’re going ahead – I asked Nial.’
‘Well, there’s no point in you going to a meeting if you’re not going to Glastonbury, is there? I’m sorry – but we’ve talked about this already.’
There was a long silence at the end of the phone.
‘Millie? Is there any point in you going?’
She gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose not.’
‘OK. Now, you get an early night. School in the morning.’
‘All right.’ Sally hung up and sat for a while with the phone face down on her lap.
Steve leaned across the sofa and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Said something you didn’t like?’
She didn’t answer. On screen the stuff about Lorne had stopped and the newscaster was talking about more spending cuts. Factories closing. The country going down the drain. Jobs disappearing every second.
‘Sally? It’s natural to be upset. It’s so close to home.’
She looked up at the moon again, a longing tugging at her. It would be nice to be able to tell him the truth – that it wasn’t just Lorne, that it wasn’t just Millie. That it was everything. That it was David Goldrab saying, I promise not to call you a cunt, and the thatch falling in, and the stain on the kitchen ceiling, and Isabelle’s look of dismay when Sally had said she was planning to sell the tarot. That it was having no one to turn to. Basically it was because of reality. She wished she could tell him that.
9
Bath was nestled, like Rome, in a pocket between seven hills. There were hot springs deep in the earth that kept the old spa baths supplied, kept the people warm and stopped snow settling in the streets. The Romans were the first to build on it, but successive generations had kept up the determination to live there in the warm – whole cities had crumbled and been rebuilt. The past existed in multicoloured strata below the citizens of Bath: like walking on layer cake, every footstep crossed whole lifetimes.
Zoë had grown up in the city. Even though she and Sally had been sent away as children, to separate boarding-schools,