Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [46]
Sally sat in silence, digesting this. She could see the reality and all the subtle equations that came out of it – if she was working for someone like that, it kind of made her equal to him, complicit, even. But after all her consideration she knew she wouldn’t back out. She needed the money. ‘I suppose that makes me pretty desperate, if I’m working for him.’
Steve reached over and pushed her hair behind her ear. ‘Sweetheart, we’re all desperate. We all have to do things we’re not proud of. That’s just the way the world goes round.’
22
It was raining so Zoë took the Mondeo. She parked near the locked gates to Sydney Gardens and prised her way through the bushes. The park was officially closed, but unofficially it was open to business. Everywhere she looked she saw young men loitering, standing casually, hands in pockets, or leaning against trees. One or two were actually sitting on the ground, lounging as if it was midday in August and not a rainy night. As she passed most of them melted away into the bushes.
The gate in the wall was set to open out on to the canal but not to allow anyone in at night. A police sign had been placed next to it, warning people that the towpath to the east was blocked due to an incident and advising them to find a different route. Zoë flicked out her torch and shone it at the ground. The rain had eased but earlier it had been heavy enough to fill to the brim the holes left by footsteps in the mud. The little pools glinted back at her in the light. She negotiated round the mud, squeezing through the bushes along the edge, and opened the gate. On the other side of the wall a single Victorian-style streetlamp threw down a yellow glow in a circle on the gravel and the canal water. Zoë ran the torch along the ground and found what she’d expected to find about ten feet away.
A slight depression spanned the path. Maybe some pipe-laying underneath had caused a dip, or a fault in the material. Whatever the cause, it had only taken the smallest amount of rain to join the scattering of puddles into one large lake. There was no way round it. You’d either have to splosh through it or take a running jump. And, she thought, looking back at the gate, if you’d just come through that gate and you were wearing shoes that had got muddy, you would probably use the opportunity to rinse off the mud.
If Lorne had come on to the towpath here she could have cleaned her shoes, and yet there’d still been mud on them when she died. Maybe there was another entrance to the canal, another place she’d stepped in the mud nearer the crime scene. Zoë set off down the path, her hood pulled up, keeping the beam on the ground, sweeping it from side to side. The temperature had dropped and smoke was coming from one or two of the barges, which had shut their doors and lit their wood-burning stoves. The chatter of TVs and the flickering blue light came through the windows.
She’d gone about three hundred yards when a small break in the trees to her left made her stop. It was a tiny space, no more than a badger run. It rose up, away from the path, then fell into darkness on the other side. Pushing aside the brambles and trees that crowded into the opening, she shone the light down. She smiled. Mud. And in it there were two clear shoe prints. They looked at a glance to be an almost exact match to Lorne’s muddied ballet pumps.
‘Oh, Lorne,’ she murmured. ‘You weren’t shopping on Saturday at all. You’ve been lying to us.’
23
The next morning Millie refused point blank to go to school. She said it was going to be crazy, anyway, with everyone talking about Lorne, and all the speculation, but Sally knew it was more to do with the guy in the purple jeep sitting outside Kingsmead. She wasn’t going to force