Hanging Hill

‘I’ve been going through the stuff from Kelvin’s place. We weren’t just looking for things to connect him to Lorne, we were looking to see if he had anything to do with David Goldrab’s disappearance.’

‘I know.’

‘It would be such a lovely tick in the box on our clear-up rates.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Not what we expected. We found something that turned everything around.’

‘What? What have you found? Something I left? My phone?’

‘Not a trace of you. No, we found something that…’ he moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth ‘… something that just doesn’t make sense. However I look at it.’

4

Sally stood next to the window in the utility room at Peppercorn Cottage, washing a lace blouse in the sink, her eyes raised to the perfect blue sky, crisscrossed with vapour trails. The awful silences that had gathered around Peppercorn after David’s death had gone and now it felt like a proper home. Steve was in the garage, hammering back some weatherboarding that had come loose. Next to the garage Nial and Millie were swarming around the VW camper-van, piling things into it. A cooler that Nial had adapted to run from the cigarette-lighter socket was stuffed with beer – no food or anything of any nutritional value as far as Sally could tell. There were rolls of bedding and Millie’s dresses arranged on hangers in the windows. She was already frantic – Nial had accidentally dropped her mobile phone into the washing-up bowl: it now lay in pieces on the dashboard, drying off in the sun with two of her blouses, a pair of denim shorts and some underwear that hadn’t come out of the wash in time.

‘You just don’t get it, Mum. If we don’t get there like radically early we’re so stuffed. The best pitches go in the first ten minutes – even in the camper-van fields. Honestly, we should have packed before the funeral. Peter and his brother’s mates will already be there.’

Sally gently wrung out the blouse and hung it up in the window, where it would catch the rest of the day’s heat. Outside, the yellow smudges of kerria and forsythia had long gone, and now the thick, heady summer blooms were beginning, delphiniums and poppies, bees swarming around them. Millie passed the window on the way to the van, arms full of clothes, and stuck her tongue out at her mother. Sally smiled. How incredible, when all along she thought she was the one protecting them, that they’d been protecting her. Nial put some music on the van’s sound system – Florence and the Machine – making the van shake. Not kids any more. No – they were adults.

She straightened the cuffs on the blouse. She’d wear it tonight and let Steve take it off her. They were going out to dinner. They would talk for hours. They’d get silly drunk. She’d tell him about the job she’d been offered by the hippies who’d bought her tarot cards – chief designer for a whole new product line they were launching. He’d tell her he loved her, and, maybe for the hundredth time, he’d make her a promise she didn’t want to accept. He’d say that if anything about David Goldrab ever came out, he was going to take the blame. He kept saying over and over again that he’d made the decision and that, if it came to it, Sally’s name was never going to be mentioned.

5

Ben drove Zoe home in silence. He wouldn’t say any more until he had her in the living room and had closed the doors. She half expected him to close the curtains too, he was in such a sombre, secretive mood.

‘What did you find? Something to do with Goldrab?’

‘Sit down.’

Shit, she thought. Sally had been right. Kelvin had taken photos of her that night.

‘Ben – just tell me. What have you found? Is it Goldrab?’

‘There was a contract out on Goldrab – you knew that. The SIB have taken Mooney in. He’s not talking.’

‘And?’

‘We found Goldrab’s teeth – buried in Kelvin’s back garden.’

She let her breath out. ‘OK,’ she said cautiously. ‘So it was Kelvin, then, who killed Goldrab?’

‘Looks like it. But that’s not what’s worrying me. It’s something else. What happened was that while we were searching we found a bunch of paperwork. I’ve been going through it all this week. And now…’

‘Now what?’

‘I’ve decided he didn’t kill Lorne.’

She gaped at him. ‘Didn’t kill her?’

‘Or rape her.’

‘Jesus. What the hell did you find?’

‘OK, OK. Listen. He did what he did to you and, Zoe, that was the worst thing I could imagine happening. Ever. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to be about it – and I still don’t know what it’s doing to you. Not exactly. But I’ve got to look past all that. Because none of it means he raped Lorne too.’

‘Hang on – what about all the things you found at his house? Her fleece. Her mobile phone.’

‘That was what really got me thinking. He’d gone to a lot of trouble hiding any evidence that you’d been there – there wasn’t a trace of you. So why didn’t he get rid of Lorne’s phone too? The lipstick?’

Zoe shook her head, mystified.

‘I’ll tell you why. It’s simple. He didn’t hide it because he didn’t know it was there…’

‘What?’

‘Look. After he got caught up with the accident those bomb-disposal guys had in Basra, the work they had to do to put him back together again was awesome. He spent three months in the Selly Oak military hospital in Birmingham while they stabilized him, then another two months recovering from a cranioplasty. They put a titanium plate in his skull, but it was causing him trouble. On the seventh of May he was having a scan to see what was wrong.’

Zoe frowned. She wasn’t getting it.

‘Lorne was killed while he was in hospital. I’ve checked. I’ve seen the admission records, I’ve spoken to the staff who were on duty. It’s solid, Zoe, solid. Kelvin Burford was in the hospital all of the seventh and on to the eighth. Under sedation. He could not have killed Lorne Wood.’

She sat down abruptly. Her head was buzzing. ‘But…’ she began. ‘But…’

‘I know. It was easy to jump to conclusions.’

Easy to jump to conclusions… At those words something dark and nasty skittered across Zoe’s head. Something that had been waiting there since the day Kelvin had attacked her, something she’d avoided all along. She remembered lying on the bed at Kelvin’s. Remembered saying, ‘Just do it. I want you to.’ All those years ago when Kelvin had watched her from the shadows at the back of the club, she’d known what he’d wanted. And lying on the bed that day, she’d told him he could. If she was totally clear-eyed about it, totally honest and rational, he’d only done what she’d asked him to do. He’d battered her. Brutalized her. But the rest? Was it rape? Technically?

‘No,’ she murmured, almost inaudibly, ‘he killed Lorne. He had to have.’

Ben held her eyes solemnly. ‘I know you think all I do is go around looking for miscarriages of justice. But, Zoe, rapist and all-round shit though Kelvin was, I think he was set up. I’ve got something to show you. Wait there.’

He went into the kitchen. Started opening cupboards. She stared numbly at the open doorway, letting it all filter through her. Kelvin in hospital the night of the rape? Someone else in the frame?

Ben reappeared in the doorway, holding a bundle of papers in a blue plastic wallet. ‘The analysis of Lorne’s phone. And some photos.’

He sat next to her and began to pull out the sheets – page after page of request forms and data-protection