Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [44]
Zoë hadn’t thought about any of this for years. It was Lorne who’d put it back in her thoughts – Lorne, her perfect brother, and the places she may have gone, like Zoë herself, thinking she could escape the feelings. The photos. That was what chilled Zoë most. Because it was the same way she’d escaped. Eighteen years ago. Not a soul knew about it, but when she had first left boarding-school she’d taken a job for six months in a Bristol nightclub: a teenager still, undressing in front of men twelve times a day. At the time she’d deliberately not given too much thought to what she was doing – she’d laughed about it, insisted it was a great joke, and kept herself focused on the motorbike trip she was going to pay for at the end of it. But on the occasions she heard people talking about the sex-club industry and how it cheapened a person, her brave face would slip. She’d turn away, thinking privately that they didn’t recognize that to cheapen something it had to have had worth to start with, that to devalue something it had to have had value. Which was something she, and maybe Lorne, had long lost.
Maybe it was just the natural course for the broken child to veer off into places like that nightclub. Places where their own darkness was outmatched by those around them.
Zoë fed the last of the biscuits to the cats. It had begun to rain, pattering on the bike cover, which she had thrown untidily against the garden shed. Something caught her eye. She got up and peered at the cover, at the small puddle that was developing there.
‘Well, holy shit and Jesus on a bike,’ she muttered to the cats. ‘That’s what I’ve been missing. That’s it.’
21
Sally called Steve at nine thirty, and within twenty minutes his car headlights came in through the kitchen window and travelled up the wall. On the table in front of her was a pile of papers: mortgage statements, the utilities bills, her wage slips and the estimates for the work that needed doing on the house. She’d been poring over them for the last hour, struggling to see where she could eke out an extra four thousand pounds. Now she gathered them up hurriedly and shoved them behind some books before he appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in mid-length chino shorts, sandals and a faded T-shirt with a little rain sprinkled on the shoulders. He was unshaven and looked tired.
‘Hey,’ he whispered, closing the door. ‘You all right, beautiful?’
Sally beckoned him in. ‘It’s OK – she’s asleep. She’s like the dead when she goes.’
He came in, throwing his keys on to the table. ‘So? What’s going on?’
She went to the fridge and got out the bottle of wine they’d opened the night before. ‘Sorry – but I think I need a drink.’ She poured one for him, one for herself, put them on the table and sat, looking into the wine, her shoulders drooping.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted a friendly face.’
‘It’s more than that.’
She took a gulp of the wine.
‘Come on. What’s on your mind?’
‘I’m sorry – I just – it’s been a bad day. With Millie, with work.’ She shook her head despairingly. How could this keep happening? How could she go on being so stupid? All the time. All the time. It just wasn’t getting any better. ‘The house is falling down around my ears, Steve. The downpipe at the back has fallen off and there’s damp everywhere. The thatch is rotting, there are rats in the ceiling and they’ve eaten through the plasterboard. I found squirrel droppings in the utility room on Monday. It’d cost me ten thousand pounds to put it all back – and me? Idiot me? I don’t even know if I’m going to pay my council tax this month. And then … then today …’
‘Today?’
She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him seriously. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘Funny – no one’s ever asked me to do that before.’
She gave a watery smile. ‘Seriously. It’s about Millie. I’ve promised her not to say anything, but I can’t help it. It’s all so bizarre – I can’t keep it a secret. I’ve got