Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [50]
24
Taking casts of footprints and comparing them to shoes was generally one of the quicker jobs forensics teams did. No waiting around for lengthy lab tests. By eleven o’clock that morning the results from the canal path had come back. The prints Zoë had found last night had been made by Lorne Wood. And when the police looked at the path that led away from the gap in the trees they saw there was only one route she could have taken to get there. From the canal the track led through a small wooded area, then along a path that ran between two horse paddocks, under a railway bridge and out to a bus stop. Nowhere near the shops. Lorne had lied to her mother about where she had been that Saturday and, in Zoë’s book, if a person could lie about something like that, there was no knowing what else they could lie about – the fibs could roll on and on, as far as the horizon.
She got one of the DCs to start warrants on the bus companies’ CCTV, then spent some time in the office looking at all the routes that passed through the stop near the canal. They snaked out for miles in every direction – there was no knowing which she’d come from. She could have been travelling from almost any direction, she could have changed routes – she could even have gone as far afield as Bristol in the time she’d been away from home. Zoë fished out the camera chip she’d found in Lorne’s bedroom and balanced it thoughtfully on her finger, considering it. Twice already she’d almost taken it into Ben’s office. But each time she’d stopped herself. She wasn’t sure who she was protecting by not speaking up – Lorne or herself. In the end she got up and pulled on her jacket. She needed to know more before she did anything.
The agency was in the centre of Bath. ‘No. 1, Milsom Street’, said the sign, and under it, written in tall, thin letters, ‘The Zebedee Juice Agency’. It was above a boutique, and when Zoë came up the stairs she found a wide room, daylight pouring into it through a vast glass dome in the ceiling. There was no reception desk, just an array of red sofas dotted with faux-fur cushions and piles of magazines on black lacquer tables. On the wall in an unframed LCD screen a video played silently – faces, boys and girls, morphing one into another.
The manager, a girl dressed in a polo-neck, denim shorts and spiked heels with metallic shadow on her eyelids, jumped up to greet Zoë with a neurotic-sounding ‘Hi, hi hi!’ She was twitchy, kept rubbing her nose and swallowing, and it didn’t take a genius to see she was itching to get to her next line of coke. Still, Zoë supposed, you didn’t get that super-thin look without a bit of help.
She poured two long glasses of Bottlegreen lemon grass pressé and took Zoë to sit near the window. In the street below shoppers and tourists bustled in and out of the shops. The manager admitted she’d half been expecting a visit from the police – she added that maybe she should have called them herself, because she remembered Lorne well. She’d come in with her mother a month ago. She’d been a very nice-looking girl, if a bit short and a little on the heavy side for the catwalk. And her eyebrows had been plucked to within an inch of their lives. ‘Most of our models aren’t what you or I would call conventionally pretty. Some of them, if you saw them in the street, you’d almost call ugly. What’s hot at the moment is a very animal look. You want to be able to see the ethnicity of a model. If someone walks in the room and I think, Yeah, he’s got all the anger of his race behind him, that’s when I know I’m on to a winner.’
‘Lorne wasn’t like that?’
‘No. Glamour, maybe, but not right for the ramp. Never.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did