Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [3]
‘No. Don’t put them away. They’re great. Really great. It’s just that … Do you really think you’d get enough from them to help you with the – you know … the debts?’
Sally stared down at the cards. Her face was burning. She shouldn’t have said anything. Isabelle was right – she’d make hardly anything from selling the cards. Certainly not enough to make a dent in her debt. She was stupid. So stupid.
‘But not because they aren’t good, Sally. They’re brilliant! Honestly, they’re great. Look at this!’ Isabelle held up a painting of Millie. Little crazy Millie, always smaller than the others and surely not a product of Sally, with the choppy fringe and mad, shaggy red hair, like a little Nepalese street child. Her eyes as wild and wide as an animal’s – just like her aunt Zoë’s. ‘It’s just great. It really looks like her. And this one of Sophie – it’s lovely. Lovely! And Nial, and Peter!’ Nial was Isabelle’s shy son, her older child, Peter Cyrus his good-looking friend – the hell-raiser and the favourite of all the girls. ‘And Lorne – look at her – and another of Millie. And another of Sophie, and me again. And—’ She stopped suddenly, looking down at one card. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a shiver. ‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Something’s wrong with the paint on this one.’
Sally pulled it towards her. It was the Princess of Wands – pictured in a swirling red dress, struggling to hold back a tiger that strained on a leash. Millie had been the model for this one too, except that something had happened to her face on this card. Sally ran a finger over it, pressed it. Maybe the acrylic had cracked, or somehow faded, because although the body and clothing and background were as she’d painted them, the face was blurred. Like a painting by Francis Bacon, or Lucian Freud. One of those terrifying images that seemed to see beyond the skin of the subject right through into their flesh.
‘Yuk,’ said Isabelle. ‘Yuk. I’m glad I don’t believe in this stuff. Otherwise I’d be really worried now. Like it’s a warning or something.’
Sally didn’t answer. She was staring at the face. It was as if a hand had been there and stirred Millie’s features.
‘Sally? You don’t believe in stuff like that, do you?’
Sally pushed the card into the bottom of the pile. She looked up and blinked. ‘Of course not. Don’t be silly.’
Isabelle scraped the chair back and carried the pot to the hob. Sally pulled the cards into an untidy pile, shoved them into her bag and took a hurried sip of wine. She’d have liked to drink it all at once, to loosen the uneasy knot that had just tied itself in her stomach. She’d have liked to get a little squiffy, then sit out in the sun on deckchairs with Isabelle the way they used to – back when she still had a husband and the time to do what she wanted. She hadn’t realized how lucky she was back then. Now she couldn’t drink in the sun, even on a Sunday. She couldn’t afford the good sort of wine Isabelle drank. And when lunch was finished here, instead of the garden she was going to work. Maybe, she thought, rubbing the back of her neck wearily, it was just what she deserved.
‘Mum? Mum!’
Both women turned. Millie stood in the doorway, red-faced and out of breath. Her jeans were covered with grass stains, and her phone was held up to face them both.
‘Millie?’ Sally straightened. ‘What is it?’
‘Can we switch on your computer, Mrs Sweetman? They’re all tweeting about it. It’s Lorne. She’s gone missing.’
2
At the police station, just two miles away in central Bath, Lorne Wood was all anyone could talk about. A sixteen-year-old pupil of a local private school, Faulkener’s, she was popular – and fairly reliable, according to her parents. From the get-go, Sally’s sister, Detective Inspector Zoë Benedict, hadn’t had even a speck of confidence that Lorne would be seen alive again. Maybe that was just Zoë – too pragmatic by far – but at two o’clock that afternoon, when