Hanging Hill

spanning the stream, which rushed and echoed in a tunnel under the foundations. The braced redwood doors had been slid open to reveal the mill’s concrete floor, lightly strewn with straw.

‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Hello?’

No reply or movement, just the distant sound of a woodpigeon cooing, the constant undernote of running water.

‘Hello?’

She stepped inside the mill. The air was warm, full of noise. A giant waterwheel would have once been mounted at the far end of the building where the stream rushed under the boards, but it had been dismantled and a floor put over the open area. A concrete aisle ran down the centre, on either side of which were four wire-mesh holding pens with aluminium drop pans and red heat lamps hanging above them. A murmur was rising from the scores of pheasant chicks in the pens that squeaked and shuffled and ruffled their feathers.

‘Hey.’ Zoe leaned over the pen and held her hand out to them. ‘Hey, little guys.’ They scattered away from her, running off, banging into each other and gathering in a group at the rear of the pen, eyeing her nervously. She wandered around a bit longer – found a large, netted cage at the end of the building with older pheasants, all fitted with little face masks to stop them pecking each other. They straightened their necks and blinked at her, ratcheting their heads from side to side.

Behind the pen was a bench with a vice, several jam-jars full of nails and screws and, mounted on a magnetic strip above the bench, a set of hunting knives – the type that could be used to field-dress and skin animals. Zoe studied them for a while, wondering if they’d been used to skin David Goldrab. She eyed the pheasants with the masks – were they fussy about what they ate? A body could disappear like that and never be found.

She went back into the open air. Near the mill doors, set at an angle in the grass, there was a hole with a grate – an entrance to an oubliette or an old ice house for a forgotten manor, maybe – with a big, padlocked chain linked through it. She made a mental note of it, then wandered back to the cottage, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pausing to put her nose to the windows and peer inside. Idly she tried the back door. It opened. She hesitated, looking down at the handle, half surprised. Then she stepped inside.

‘Hello?’

No reply, so she went into the kitchen and along the hallway, opening doors as she went, checking inside. No one here. She went upstairs, the curtain on the landing flapping and twisting like a ghost in front of her. She found two bedrooms – one with a bed against french windows that opened, improbably, on to a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the stream, the second empty save for a pile of cardboard boxes and an old poster of a football team Blu-tacked to the wall. A tube of tennis balls lay on the floor. Christ, there were bloody tennis balls everywhere she went, these days. Lorne. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you. I’m going to find out if you’re somewhere in all of this.

There was a bathroom with greying towels left to dry on the radiator, a framed needlework sampler resting on the window-sill that read ‘I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son. I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes’. In the cabinet there was a box of medicine, open, the blister packs spilling out. ‘Catapres’, the label read. She’d heard of it. It was something to do with post-traumatic stress. She put the box back, leaned across the bath, opened the window and peered out at the tops of the trees. From here you could see parts of David Goldrab’s house, with its reconstituted stone tiles, its coynes and laughable attempts to blend into the area. The panes of its huge atrium reflected lozenges of sunlight back through the yew trees. Yep, if she was Mooney, the gamekeeper would have been the first person she’d approach.

She went back downstairs. There was nothing much in the front room, just a wide-screen TV and a load of DVDs, but in the back there was an office with paperwork stacked in rickety heaps. She sat down and began leafing through them, hoping to get an idea of this guy. There was a pile of invoices from Mole Valley Farm Supplies with black fingerprints on them. A series of letters from the Royal United Hospital about medical treatment he was receiving. Something to do with a head injury. Sheet after sheet of details of operations and medication and X-rays and…

She stopped, half the pile of paper in one hand, half in the other. She was looking at an image she couldn’t quite fathom. At first she thought it was some kind of Photoshopped joke, the sort of thing people loved to post online – outsize animals, one celebrity’s head spliced on to another’s body, ridiculous fake X-rays of all the weird objects a person had swallowed – because it seemed so outlandish. But when she studied it some more she saw it was real.

Watling and Zhang’s unit would love to see this, she thought, a little shakily. It was the sort of photo there’d been a big thing about recently – the sort taken by servicemen on their mobiles. It showed a pile of bodies – men, skinny and half dressed, darkened by the sun and death into leathery strips of flesh. It looked like Iraq or Afghanistan, because there were plenty of keffiyeh scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Maybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. That could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best assassins.

There was a noise from the doorway, and when she looked up a man was standing there, staring at her with his mouth wide open, as if he was more shocked to see her than she was to see him.

She dropped the photos and fumbled shakily inside her pocket for her warrant card, getting to her feet. ‘You scared me for a moment there.’

He was tall and bearded, hair flecked with grey. He had a protruding stomach inside his checked lumberjack shirt, and he’d covered his jeans with snap-on waterproof leggings, like a cowboy’s chaps. In his hand was a roll of garden twine. ‘Don’t think you’ll get away with this again,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry, I…?’ She trailed off. Her hand was frozen on the card, half in, half out of the pocket, as she stared at the scar on his head. ‘Kelvin?’ she said lamely. ‘Kelvin?’ It had taken a moment but she had recognized him. After eighteen years his name had popped into her head as if it was on a spring. Someone she’d been a tiny kid with at nursery school, and who, years later, had been a maintenance man in the Bristol strip club.

And at the moment she recognized him, he recognized her. He stepped forward, bent at the waist, an intrigued smile on his face. ‘Zoe?’

She let the warrant card drop into her pocket. Slowly she took her hand out, holding his eyes. He knew her name. She couldn’t show him the card, couldn’t let him know she was a cop now. He knew everything about her. Everything.

‘Wait there.’ He smiled. He had good teeth. She remembered that from before. Above everything, she remembered his teeth. ‘I’ll be straight back. I’ve got something to show you.’

He ducked out of the door and was gone, leaving her in the room, idiotically frozen like a statue. Kelvin Burford. Kelvin fucking Burford. It had been eighteen years since she’d last spoken to him and yet she’d dreamed about him last night, leaning on his broom at the back of the audience, a sly smile on his face. He was a bastard. A scary bastard. And he knew her bloody name. All that time she’d thought it was just Goldrab, Kelvin had known it too. She went to the doorway and stood, looking left then right. She was still trying to get her numbed brain to decide which way to go when he reappeared in the hallway.

This time he didn’t speak, just stood, filling the doorway. She’d never registered before quite how big he was, in girth and height. His belly in the lumberjack shirt hung over the top of his trousers. He was silhouetted by the sun that came through the back door and shone on to the filthy floor, and in his hand was a knife. One of the hunting knives she’d seen on the metallic strip in the mill building. Now she could see the long scar that started at his ear, went up around the top of his head and looped back down to the nape of his neck. It was square, with neat corners. She knew what that was – it was where metal had been inserted to replace his skull.

She glanced over her shoulder, calculating how far it was to the front door and if she could push past him. Then back at the knife. ‘Kelvin,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to be holding that now, is there? That’s the sort of thing’ll get you into a whole lorryload of shit.’

‘Zoe,’ he said, ‘I asked you before. What are you doing in my house?’

She took a breath, turned and bolted into the hallway. She skidded along, taking up the rug with her and hitting the door with all her force. She threw the Yale lock and pulled, expecting the door to fly open. It didn’t. The deadbolts were on. She grappled for them, throwing back the barrels, her hands shaking now. Still the door wouldn’t budge. It was Chubb-locked. You could see the bolt between the jamb and the strike plate.

She turned. Kelvin stood behind her, blocking the path to the kitchen, his head down, as if in puzzled thought. He was looking at the knife, holding it angled with the blade facing upwards, as if the way the light glanced off it fascinated him. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She threw herself away from the door and on to the stairs, flew up