Kelvin’s known associates in his pockets. She sighed. With all the wrong she’d done in the world, how had this right come to her so easily?
She shut the drawer and opened the next. There were some books in the back, and behind them a few oddments Zoe was sure Pippa hadn’t paid much attention to when she’d done her hurried inventory of the room after Lorne’s disappearance. She pushed aside a bra and knickers – Lorne’s underwear had been found so that was no use. She examined a grey peaked cap with diamante studs in it – no, too distinctive, someone would have remembered her wearing a hat like that. Then she saw an orange silk scarf.
She sat back on her heels and rested the scarf across her knees. It could have been tucked under Lorne’s pink fleece that afternoon when she left the house and no one would have necessarily noticed it. It was distinctive enough – didn’t look like something you picked up in Next, more like something that had come from a holiday. She checked the label. ‘Sabra Dreams’, it said. ‘Made in Morocco’. The pin board above the desk had a photo of Lorne on a family holiday in Marrakesh. Pippa would remember her buying this.
Zoe put the scarf in her jacket pocket and zipped it up. She closed the drawers, put the sunglasses back on, and went downstairs. She found Pippa sitting, bizarrely, on the chair in the hallway next to the front door. The chair was meant for coats and handbags and oddments to be thrown on to it, not to be sat on: it was in the wrong place. Pippa looked as if she was neither in nor out of the house. As if she was permanently waiting for something.
‘Did you find what you wanted?’
‘I just needed to look around again. I thought there was something I missed. I was wrong.’ She stopped at the bottom step and studied Pippa.
‘What?’ She blinked stupidly. ‘What is it?’
‘I dunno. I guess I just wondered…’
‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t ask it, it’s not ethical, but I’d like to anyway. I want to know how you feel about the person who did this.’
Pippa’s face fell. ‘Oh, please – I can’t stand another lecture on forgiveness. I won’t forgive him. I know it’s wrong, I know it goes against all the ideals I thought I had, but then it happens to you and all you want is for them to die. And die without being able to leave a final message. Without being able to have a final meal or hold someone’s hand. That’s all I could think – that she couldn’t hold someone’s hand when she died. And now I want his mother to feel the way I do. If it means I’ll rot in hell I don’t care. It’s the way I feel.’
Zoe nodded. Pippa hadn’t said it but she clearly still believed Ralph had killed Lorne. Earlier, when Ben had gone to the station to get her one of the unit mobiles to replace the one that was now in Kelvin’s possession, they’d crept through a back door into Ben’s office and done a quick intelligence search on Kelvin. They’d been stunned by what was there. He had been hauled in over and over again for petty offences. Even before enlisting – at about the same time she’d been travelling the world – he’d been a nightmare to the constabulary. Over and over again he’d sent up huge warning flares that he was dangerous. Yet over and over again he’d been freed on some technicality. Amazingly, it was only after the conviction for the assault in Radstock that his five-yearly application to renew his gun licence had been turned down. Up until that point he’d been allowed complete access to a twelve-bore shotgun. If Pippa was having trouble forgiving Ralph, how was she going to feel when she heard about Kelvin and how the entire system had failed her?
‘I wasn’t going to ask that,’ Zoe said eventually. ‘I was going to say sorry. About the way it’s all gone.’
‘Me too, Zoe. Me too.’
Wearily she got to her feet, and held the door open. Zoe zipped up her jacket and pulled up her hood even though it wasn’t raining, Pippa put a hand on her arm and peered at her face. At her swollen nose and the red welts on her cheekbones. ‘Zoe? Do people ever really walk into doors?’
‘All the time.’
‘
‘Then you’ve never been as drunk as I was.’
Pippa tried to smile, but it was a twisted, sad thing. Something pitiful. Zoe pulled the hood tighter and pretended to be struggling with the zip. Then she held up a hand, goodbye, and walked quickly away down the wet path, the scarf snug in her pocket.
41
The rain had gone and the clouds had cleared but the sun was almost down now, the liquid orange light dissolving around the houses and churches on the hills above Bath. It was cold. Sally pulled her duffel coat around herself and watched Zoe come down the path from the Woods’ house. She had her hood up but she’d taken off the sunglasses and her face was naked in the twilight. The bruises and swelling had got worse in the last two hours, yet somehow she didn’t look broken any more. It was as if something in her had mended.
She got inside the car and slammed the door. ‘You OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. You can drive now. Go up to the main road and turn left so we stay close to the canal. I’ll tell you where to stop.’
While Sally started the engine and pulled out of the drive into the evening traffic, Zoe took off her jacket and rummaged in the pockets. She placed a plastic bag on her lap and unravelled an orange scarf on top of it. Then she fumbled inside the jacket again, pulled out a tiny Ziplock bag, and opened it. Inside there was a condom, filled with semen.
‘Oh, God,’ Sally muttered.
‘Well, don’t look if you can’t handle it.’
‘I can handle it. I can.’
‘Put the heater on.’
Sally turned it on full and concentrated on the traffic, glancing from time to time at her sister, who, biting her lip with concentration, was undoing the condom and carefully distributing the contents across the scarf. She folded the scarf and rubbed it together. Then she placed it on the carrier bag on the floor near the heater.
‘Disgusting.’ She returned the condom to the Ziplock bag, and used wet wipes to clean her hands. ‘Disgusting.’
She sat back in the seat, pushed her hair out of her eyes and ratcheted the seat back so she had room to stretch her legs out. She was so tall, Sally thought, and her legs were amazing – so long and capable. If Sally had been given legs like that to go through life with she’d have taken on the world in the same way Zoe had. She wouldn’t have shrunk back from it. She would have done all the things she’d done, and not regretted any of it. She wished she could explain it somehow – that she’d have been proud of everything. Even the pole-dancing. It seemed to her you needed real guts to do something like that.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ Zoe said suddenly. ‘It’s all going to be OK now.’
‘How do you know?’
She gave a small, wondering smile and shook her head. The headlights from the oncoming cars flickered across her face. ‘It just is.’
The traffic was heavy at this time of night. Even heading back into town along the canal the roads were congested – it took nearly half an hour to get to the bus stop Lorne had used the night she’d been attacked by Kelvin. The women used torches to navigate through the trees to the canal. The rush-hour affected not only the roads: the Kennet and Avon towpath, too, was a swift route out of the city and workers often used it as a cycle route, their suits in bags on their backs, but by the time the sisters arrived even that surge of traffic was over and the path was empty. There was no noise except the sounds of people cooking evening meals in the barges.
They walked quickly, heads down. The crime scene had been released two days ago and as they approached they could see a few soggy bunches of flowers lying in the wet grass, brown inside the cellophane. Zoe gave a quick glance around and stepped off the towpath, crunching into the undergrowth. Sally followed. They stopped a few yards from a natural clearing surrounded by dripping branches and nettles. A cross embroidered with flowers had been nailed to a tree up ahead. Sally stared at it. It would have been the Woods who had left it. The family with the hole in the heart.
