Hanging Hill

She put down the iron, slid its plastic heat-cover closed and went into the kitchen. David was standing in the breakfast room, scratching his chest, idly clicking through the channels on the big wall-mounted TV screen. Danuta was crouched next to the sink, her back to them, sorting through the cleaning equipment. When Sally came in David raised his eyebrows, as if he was surprised to see her. ‘OK, Sally?’

She nodded.

‘What can I do for you, darling?’

She made a face – nodded fiercely at Danuta, who was still rummaging in the cupboard.

‘Sorry?’ David said politely, glancing uncomprehendingly at Danuta’s back. ‘Beg pardon?’

Sally swallowed hard. ‘Mr Goldrab, have you got a moment? There’s something I need to ask you about.’

David gave a small smile. He turned away from her and went back to clicking through the channels. Sally waited. She watched as he calmly passed news channels, channels where everyone seemed to be under water or on a mountain ledge, one with a woman lying on a bed, dressed in nothing but a pair of bright orange pants and cheerleader socks, staring at the camera with her finger in her mouth. When he’d got to the end he clicked all the way back again. Then he turned to Sally. Again, he seemed surprised to see her still there.

‘OK, OK.’ He sounded impatient. ‘Go to the office and I’ll be there in a bit. Don’t give me a headache over it.’

The office was on the ground floor and was filled with computers, shelves of recording equipment, and cabinets of golfing trophies. On the walls were framed pictures of David looking proud with horses, his arm round girls in bikinis, grinning in a bow-tie next to a variety of celebrities that Sally recognized from programmes like The X Factor. She sat down and waited. After five minutes he appeared, closed the door and sat opposite her. ‘Sally. How can I help? Something on your mind?’

‘The agency will think it’s strange – if suddenly I’m not available two afternoons a week and you cancel the agreement with the three of us at the same time. They look out for things like that.’

He grinned. She could smell the alcohol on his breath. ‘See? What did I say? Told you you’ve got the smarts. It’s OK. I’ll call the agency, tell them I want to cut down the hours so you and the Polish tarts don’t come so often – say, every ten days. We’ll let that situation cruise for a couple of months, then I’ll cancel with them. It’s win-win for you, darling. And anyway…’ He smiled and bent towards her. For a moment she thought he might put his finger under her chin and raise her face to his. ‘… It’s not like I’m asking you to strangle someone. Is it?’

She didn’t smile.

‘So? Day after tomorrow, then, Princess?’

‘Just one thing.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘A request? Nice.’

‘Yes. Please – I don’t want you to call me a tart.’

He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and chuckled. ‘Know what, girl? I’ll do you a special introductory offer – I won’t call you a tart and I won’t call you a cunt either. OK? I won’t call you a cunt. Unless, of course, you act like one.’

8

Some cops disliked post-mortems. Others were fascinated by them and could talk about them for hours, reeling out lists of technical terms like a doctor. Zoe found that once you convinced yourself to look at the body as a piece of meat – as long as you saw it as nothing else – the most overwhelming thing, sometimes, about a PM was how tedious it was. It was full of recording details, taking photos, weighing even the tiniest organs, the most insignificant glands. And the human body in death wasn’t pink and red, but yellow. Or grey. It was only the initial cut – the thoracic-abdominal Y cut – she found difficult. The zipper, the cops called it. Most of them would stand away from the table during ‘the zipper’, avoiding the release of gases. Because she hated that part, and because it was in Zoe always to push herself, it was the part when she would stand the closest to the table. No masks or mints or smelly ointment to put up her nose. The most she would allow herself was a pinch of the nose and a squint. While Lorne’s body was opened Zoe stood next to her, half of her wanting to hold her hand, squeeze it while it happened, stop it hurting. Stupid, she thought, as the mortician wordlessly lined up the implements, rib spreaders and a range of cordless Stryker saws. Like she could change any of this shit.

Pathologists hated being pressed for conclusions before the examination was complete. Just hated it. Still, it was their job to resist – and the police’s job to persist, so from time to time Ben or Zoe would fire out a question, which the pathologist would answer with a disapproving click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and a few caustic comments muttered under his breath about the basic, unscientific impatience of the police, and why was it people couldn’t wait for a proper report instead of taking his words out of context and handing them on a plate to some jumped-up defence brief? But slowly, as the afternoon wore on, he began grudgingly to hand out small details. Lorne’s vagina and anus had tears to them, he remarked, but they hadn’t bled. Evidence that the rape could have happened just before or just after her death. He swabbed her, but couldn’t immediately see any semen in there, so maybe a condom had been used. Or she’d been raped using an object. There was an injury to the back of her head, probably the result of a fall. He guessed she’d been attacked from the front, which was consistent with the damage done to her face. And there’d been a blow to the stomach – a kick maybe – that had caused internal bleeding.

‘Is that what she died of?’

He shook his head, thoughtfully examining the inside wall of her abdomen. ‘No,’ he said after a while. ‘It would have killed her eventually. But…’ He pushed a finger into the thickened lump of blood that had gathered around her spleen. ‘No. There’s not as much blood as you’d expect with the artery to the spleen ruptured like this. She’d have died shortly after the injury.’

‘How?’

He raised his chin and looked at Ben steadily. Then, without expression, he pointed to the silver duct tape and the tennis ball, which had now been removed and sealed in a bag on the exhibits bench. ‘I’m not saying anything officially, and I need to look at her brain first, but if your nose looked like that and you had a ball jammed in your mouth, how do you think you’d breathe?’

‘She suffocated?’ said Zoe.

‘I expect that’s what my report will say.’ He clicked off the torch and turned to face them. ‘So? You want to know how it happened? He hit her like this – here across the zygomatic arch.’ The pathologist raised a hand and, in slow motion, mimed hitting his own face with a fist. ‘Just once. Her cheekbone’s broken, her nose is broken – she falls backwards. Then, probably when she’s on the floor, completely dazed, he forces the tennis ball and the duct tape over her mouth. The blood in her nose is starting to clot at this point and, before you know it, both airways are obstructed.’ Using the back of his wrist, he pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Fairly horrible.’

‘You’re not saying it was an accident she died?’ asked Ben.

The pathologist frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s important – the guy could say he didn’t mean to kill her. That he was just trying to keep her quiet. I’m picturing defence briefs and manslaughter pleas is all.’

‘He could have removed the tape. Even when she was unconscious her breathing response would have kicked in automatically if he’d taken the tape off and shaken her. He could have saved her.’

Zoe stood in silence, gazing down at Lorne. Now that the tape had been removed her jaw hung open in a slack grin. Her tongue was a swollen grey piece of gristle lodged among the white enamel of teeth. Earlier, walking along the canal path, Zoe had been excited, motivated and full of energy. Not any more. She glanced up, found Ben watching her and turned away quickly, fishing out her phone and pretending to be looking at something important there. She didn’t want anyone to think she wasn’t holding it together. Particularly not Ben.

Peppercorn Cottage was so remote. So completely isolated. It was one of the things Sally loved about it – that she didn’t have any neighbours overlooking, no one to stare and judge her, no one to say, ‘Look there. Look how that Sally Cassidy’s gone to rack and ruin. Look how she’s letting the place fall in around her ears.’ A little stone- built place set down quite alone amid miles of practical, unfussy farmland less than a mile from Isabelle’s house. It had a rambling garden and a view that went on for ever and it was called Peppercorn because, years ago, it had attracted a peppercorn rent. It was the most higgledy-piggledy cottage Sally had ever seen: everything went in