Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [87]
By one in the morning he was covered with sweat and ten Lidl carrier bags sat on the lawn, each bulging with an unrecognizable red paste. Sally said they should say a prayer or something. Or make some sort of gesture to mark the death.
‘You think anyone’s up there to hear a prayer like that?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stood on the driveway, transfixed by the bags. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter if we believe – maybe it only matters if he did. David.’
Steve shook his head. ‘Forgive me, Sally, but we just don’t have time for a morality lesson. If there is a God up there, then don’t waste His time praying for David Goldrab’s soul. Just pray – as hard as you can.’
‘For what?’
‘For us.’
41
The clouds cleared and the moon sat, low and dazzling, over the Somerset countryside. Sally arranged her jam-making pans outside on the lawn, filled them with limescale remover and cleaned everything they’d used – the drill, the chainsaw, the plastic sheet, the plastic bags. Then she cut all the plastic into small squares the size of postage stamps and placed them in a bin liner. Meanwhile Steve piled up the clothing they’d worn – with the shoes, the towels – heaped it in a flowerbed on the west side of the house, poured paraffin on it and set it alight. When the fire had died and they’d dug the ashes into the soil, they spread more plastic in the boot of the Audi and loaded in the carrier bags. An eleventh, containing hair and larger pieces of bone that hadn’t been pulverized by the mixer, went into the well below the back passenger seats. The remains filled the car with a foul mixture of offal and faeces. Sally and Steve kept their coats on, the heater up high, the windows wide open.
Steve was from the countryside outside Taunton. He was a rambler – someone who had every Ordnance Survey map of the British Isles ordered neatly according to their code number on his bookshelves. He knew the border lands of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire better than Sally did and he had a route already planned. It took in rivers and canals, forests where badgers foraged at night. It took in the Severn estuary – Steve waded out into the mud in the giant grey shadow of the decommissioned nuclear power plant at Berkeley. They stopped on the outskirts of villages and squeezed dollops through sewage grates in the road; they tramped across fields in the Mendips to press the contents of the last bag through the meshes that protected disused Roman mineshafts. Steve stood in the silent darkness, his ear close to the mesh, straining to hear the soft wet patter of the tissue hitting the sides of the shaft.
From time to time Sally turned and looked at his face as he drove, the glow of the dashboard lighting it. She watched his eyes on the road and a strange thought came to her – that for the first time in her life she’d done something as a partnership. An ugly, perverse, unthinkable thing, but it had been done by equals. Crazy though it all was, she decided it was the closest she’d ever been to anyone in her life.
He turned and caught her looking at him. He held her eyes, just for a second, and in that moment something passed between them. Something that made her stomach stir, as if an odd strength was gathering. Like the beginnings of excitement on a holiday, the desire to yell and dance. She opened the window and threw a handful of the shredded plastic into the slipstream,