Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [57]
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, and put it on the floor. She found a litter tray and some cat litter in the back of the shed and put it with a bowl of food and some water on the floor in the downstairs loo. Then she carried the cat over and placed it next to the food. ‘One night only, just until you’re better. Don’t even think about getting used to it – this is not a hotel.’
The cat ate hungrily. Zoë straightened to leave and, as she did, caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the washbasin. She stopped and stared at herself. Red shaggy hair. High cheekbones and sun-damaged skin. She looked half wild. Eighteen years ago in the clubs she had worn her hair cut short and white-blonde. Only one person had known her real name – the manager of the club, who was long gone, overseas somewhere. No one would recognize DI Benedict as the girl on that stage all those years ago. She was the master of disguise. She could hide anything she chose to.
She pushed up her sleeve, and stared at all the welts and scars. Unevenly shaped wounds made by her own nails. Something else she’d been clever at hiding. Ben had never noticed these all the time they’d been together. She’d covered them with makeup, made sure he never got a good look at the worst ones. The marks were the evidence of a trick she’d learned at boarding-school in her first term: whenever she thought of Mum and Dad and Sally, the way they could sit contentedly next to a fire, arms around each other, the feelings that came up in her used to make her cry softly into the pillow. Slowly she found that the only way to make the awful raw spot in her chest go away was to hurt another part of her body. She’d do it anywhere Matron wouldn’t notice – the tops of her thighs, her stomach. Sometimes there would be blood on her pyjamas in the morning, and then she’d make an excuse to creep off to the showers, where she’d stand, shivering, soaping away the evidence. The habit had never left her.
Stop it, she thought, yanking the sleeve down. Stupid stupid stupid. Stop it. This wasn’t her. She was the person who’d survived boarding-school, who’d fought her way across continents, who’d worked her way up the ranks in a male-dominated world. It didn’t matter that tonight was the second in a row Ben had suddenly become ‘too busy’ to come back to hers. She didn’t own him. It really didn’t matter. And none of her past was going to come back to get her just because of those photos of Lorne.
She switched off the light, closed the door on the cat, washed her dinner plate and the pots, then went to bed. She lay for a long time in the darkness, resisting the urge to touch her arms. When she did at last sleep, it was uneasy, ruptured, infected with dreams and discomfort.
She dreamed of clouds and mountains and rushing rivers. She dreamed of falling buildings and of a barge, tilting on its side, taking on water. And then, as the sun rose and her bedroom began to fill with light, she dreamed of a room like a Victorian nursery, with children’s number and letter charts on the wall and a rocking horse in the corner. Outside, an old-fashioned street-light cast its yellow glow on the snow that was being driven by a wind, the flakes racing in horizontal streaks past the panes. Although there was nothing familiar about the setting, somehow she knew this was the childhood bedroom she had shared with Sally. And she also knew, with absolute clarity, that it was the day of the ‘accident’. The day she’d come upstairs and found, to her fury, her bed, her toys and all her belongings painted by Sally with idiotic yellow