Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [84]
Steve waited on the deck, keeping an eye on the road, while she crept in alone. It seemed so hot inside, stifling, as if the heating had been turned up high. The air was as still as the grave, and even in the familiar rooms and corridors, she found herself jumping at every shadow, as if David’s’s ghost was waiting to leap out at her. She wondered if it would be like this for ever, if she’d be driven mad by the guilt. You heard about that happening, people haunted all their lives by the spirit of the person who’d died.
When she checked the monitor in the office she saw that a huge part of the driveway wasn’t covered by the camera – plenty of room to get into the garage without being seen – so she collected a bunch of keys from the hooks in the kitchen where David kept them and went with Steve around the side of the house.
‘Holy shit,’ he muttered, when she pressed the fob and the door opened to reveal a huge, shiny car. ‘It’s only a Bentley.’
‘Is that good?’
He gave a small wry smile. ‘Come on.’
Behind a row of motor-oil cans they found a roll of plastic and some old ballast bags, some tape and a Stanley knife. They carried it all back to the parking area and unrolled the plastic on the ground next to the body.
‘Take his feet.’
‘Oh, God.’ She stood a yard away, staring at the body. Her teeth were chattering. ‘I don’t know if I can.’
‘Sally,’ Steve said steadily. ‘You can do it. I know you can – I saw you the other day with that hacksaw. You can do this.’
‘We’re really going to do it, then? Really not report it – and just get the money?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You tell me. You could have called the police but you didn’t.’
She closed her eyes and put her fingers on her temples. He was right, of course. She could have called the police at any time. Had she decided already – subconsciously – that this was what they’d do?
‘But …’ She opened her eyes. ‘Is it the right thing? Steve? Is it?’
‘How do you quantify right? Is it the legal thing? No. But is it the best thing? You’ll get thirty K for offing this old pervert. Is that the best thing? You tell me.’
Sally didn’t answer. She kept her attention on David’s face. Pale and rigid now. His eyes had changed. They no longer had a shine to them, the way normal eyes did. They were cloudier and flatter, she thought, as if they were sinking backwards into his skull. Earlier she’d seen a fly try to land on the right one. An image popped into her mind. A bruise. It was on the thigh of the girl that had been on the floor of the livestock pen. Just a single bruise, but it came at her like a punch.
‘OK.’ She came forward, rolling up her sleeves. ‘What do I do?’
David was heavy, but he wasn’t going stiff the way she’d imagined he would. Steve said not enough time had passed for that to happen. The body flopped around as they tried to move it, his arms lolling all over the place, but eventually they got him on to the plastic sheet. They folded it around him like a cocoon and lifted him into the boot of Steve’s Audi. Then Steve searched in the pool-maintenance shed until he found two buckets and, for the next twenty minutes, the two of them toiled up and down the path from the outdoor tap to where the body had lain, sluicing the ground with bucket after bucket of water until the blood, hair and urine had been rinsed into the ground.
Steve got into the Audi and put the key in the ignition. ‘Is there a back way to yours? A way we don’t have to use main roads?’
‘Yes. Follow me.’
She got into the Ka and reversed back along the track to the lane. The Audi headlights followed her. The countryside was pitch black now, a low cloud covering the moon. She took the switch-backs and narrow lanes that crisscrossed the land. They got back to Peppercorn Cottage without seeing another car. The porch light was on – it looked so welcoming that she had to remind herself there was nothing warm on the stove, no candles in the window or fires in the grates. That she and Steve weren’t going to spend the evening eating