Hanging Hill

Chapter 1

It had been a spring afternoon in early May, the time of year when the evenings were lengthening, and the primulas and tulips under the trees had long frayed and gone blowsy. The signs of warmer weather had made everyone optimistic, and for the first time in months Sally had come to Isabelle’s for lunch. The sun was still high in the sky and their teenage children were out in the garden, while the two women opened a bottle of wine and stayed in the kitchen. The windows were open, the gingham curtains fluttering lightly in the breeze, and from her place at the table Sally watched the teenagers. They’d known each other since nursery, but it wasn’t until the last twelve months or so that Millie had shown any interest in coming up here to Isabelle’s house. Now, however, they were a gang – a proper little group – two girls, two boys, two years apart in age, but at the same private school, Kingsmead. Sophie, Isabelle’s youngest at fifteen, was doing handstands in the garden, her dark ringlets bouncing all over the place. Millie, the same age, but a head shorter, was holding her legs up. The girls were dressed in similar jeans and halter-necks, though Millie’s clothes were faded and threadbare in comparison to Sophie’s.

‘I’ll have to do something about that,’ Sally said ruminatively. ‘Her school uniform is falling to pieces too. I went to Matron to see if I could get a second-hand one, but she didn’t have any left in Millie’s size. Seems all the parents at Kingsmead want second-hand now.’

‘That’s a sign of the times,’ said Isabelle. She was making treacle tart – weighting the pastry base with the handful of marbles she kept in a jar on top of the fridge. The butter and golden syrup were bubbling in the pan, filling the kitchen with a heavy, nutty smell. ‘I’ve always passed on Sophie’s things to Matron.’ She dropped the marbles and pushed the pie dish into the oven. ‘But from now on I’ll save them for Millie. Sophie’s a size up from her.’

She wiped her floury hands on her apron and stood for a moment, studying her friend. Sally knew what she was thinking – that Sally’s face was pale and lined, that her hair wasn’t clean. She was probably seeing the pink HomeMaids cleaning-agency tabard she wore over her faded jeans and floral top and feeling pity. Sally didn’t mind. She was slowly, after all this time, beginning to get used to pity. It was the divorce, of course. The divorce and Julian’s new wife and baby.

‘I wish I could do something more to help.’

‘You do help, Isabelle.’ She smiled. ‘You still talk to me. Which is more than some of the other mums at Kingsmead do.’

‘Is it that bad? Still?’

Worse, she thought. But she smiled. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. I mean – I’ve spoken to the bank manager and I’ve moved all my loans around so I’m not paying so much interest. And I’m getting more hours with the agency now.’

‘I don’t know how you do it, working like you do.’

Sally shrugged. ‘Other people do it.’

‘Yes, but other people are used to it.’

She watched Isabelle go to the hob and stir the treacle. There were bags of flour and oats opened on the side. Every article bore names like ‘Waitrose’, or ‘Finest’ or ‘Goodies Delicatessen’. At Sally and Millie’s cottage all the packets had ‘Value’ or ‘Lidl’ written on them and the freezer was full of the feeble, stringy vegetables she’d struggled to grow in the back garden – that was a money lesson Sally had learned in a hurry: vegetable-growing was for the idle rich. It was far cheaper to buy them in the supermarket. Now she nibbled her thumbnail and watched Isabelle moving around the kitchen – her familiar, sturdy back in the sensible mud-coloured shorts and blouse. Her apron with the flower sprigs on it. They’d been friends for years, and she was the person Sally most trusted, the first person she’d go to for advice. Even so, she felt a little shy of talking about what was on her mind.

Eventually, though, she went to her bag and pulled out a blue folder. It was shabby and only held together with an elastic band. She carried it to the table, set it down next to the wine glasses, pulled off the band and emptied out the contents. Hand-painted cards, embellished with beads, ribbons and feathers, all sealed down with varnish. She placed them on the table and sat there uncertainly, half ready to snatch them up and shovel them back into the bag.

‘Sally?’ Isabelle lifted the pan off the heat and, still stirring, came over to look. ‘You didn’t do these, did you?’ She peered at the top one. It showed a woman wearing a violet shawl, sprinkled with stars, that she had pulled across her face so only her eyes were showing. ‘God – they’re beautiful. What are they?’

‘Tarot cards.’

‘Tarot? You’re not going all Glastonbury on us, are you? Going to tell us all our futures?’

‘Of course not.’

Isabelle put down the pot and picked up the second card. It showed a tall woman holding a large, transparent star at arm’s length. She seemed to be gazing through it at the clouds and the sun. Her tangly dark hair, flecked with grey, hung long down her back. Isabelle gave a small, embarrassed smile. ‘That’s not me, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, honestly, Sally – you’re a bit too flattering with the cleavage, if you don’t mind.’

‘If you look through them all you’ll see lots of faces you know.’

Isabelle shuffled through the paintings, stopping from time to time when she recognized someone. ‘Sophie! And Millie too. You’ve painted us all – the kids too. They are beautiful.’

‘I was wondering,’ Sally said tentatively, ‘if I might be able to sell them. Maybe to that hippie shop in Northumberland Place. What do you think?’

Isabelle turned and gave her an odd look. Half puzzled, half amused, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether Sally was joking or not.

Instantly Sally knew she’d made a mistake and began hastily pulling the cards together, a blush of embarrassment racing up her neck. ‘No – I mean, of course they’re not good enough. I knew they weren’t.’

‘No. Don’t put them away. They’re great. Really great. It’s just that … Do you really think you’d get enough from them to help you with the – you know … the debts?’

Sally stared down at the cards. Her face was burning. She shouldn’t have said anything. Isabelle was right – she’d make hardly anything from selling the cards. Certainly not enough to make a dent in her debt. She was stupid. So stupid.

‘But not because they aren’t good, Sally. They’re brilliant! Honestly, they’re great. Look at this!’ Isabelle held up a painting of Millie. Little crazy Millie, always smaller than the others and surely not a product of Sally, with the choppy fringe and mad, shaggy red hair, like a little Nepalese street child. Her eyes as wild and wide as an animal’s – just like her aunt Zoë’s. ‘It’s just great. It really looks like her. And this one of Sophie – it’s lovely. Lovely! And Nial, and Peter!’ Nial was Isabelle’s shy son, her older child, Peter Cyrus his good-looking friend – the hell-raiser and the favourite of all the girls. ‘And Lorne – look at her – and another of Millie. And another of Sophie, and me again. And—’ She stopped suddenly, looking down at one card. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a shiver. ‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Something’s wrong with the paint on this one.’

Sally pulled it towards her. It was the Princess of Wands – pictured in a swirling red dress, struggling to hold back a tiger that strained on a leash. Millie had been the model for this one too, except that something had happened to her face on this card. Sally ran a finger over it, pressed it. Maybe the acrylic had cracked, or somehow faded, because although the body and clothing and background were as she’d painted them, the face was blurred. Like a painting by Francis Bacon, or Lucian Freud. One of those terrifying images that seemed to see beyond the skin of the subject right through into their flesh.

‘Yuk,’ said Isabelle. ‘Yuk. I’m glad I don’t believe in this stuff. Otherwise I’d be really worried now. Like it’s a warning or something.’

Sally didn’t answer. She was staring at the face. It was as if a hand had been there and stirred Millie’s features.

‘Sally? You don’t believe in stuff like that, do you?’

Sally pushed the card into the bottom of the pile. She looked up and blinked. ‘Of course not. Don’t be silly.’

Isabelle scraped the chair back and carried the pot to the hob. Sally pulled the cards into an untidy pile, shoved them into her bag and took a hurried sip of wine. She’d have liked to drink it all at once, to loosen the uneasy knot that had just tied itself in her stomach. She’d have liked to get a little squiffy, then sit out in the sun on deckchairs with Isabelle the way they used to – back when she still had a husband and the time to do what she wanted. She hadn’t realized how lucky she was back then. Now she couldn’t drink in the sun, even on a Sunday. She couldn’t afford the good sort of wine Isabelle drank. And when lunch was finished here, instead of the garden she was going to work. Maybe, she thought, rubbing the back of her neck wearily, it was just what she deserved.

‘Mum? Mum!’

Both women turned. Millie stood in the doorway, red-faced and out of breath. Her jeans were covered with grass stains, and her phone was held up to face them both.

‘Millie?’ Sally straightened. ‘What is it?’

‘Can we switch on your computer, Mrs Sweetman? They’re all tweeting about it. It’s Lorne. She’s gone missing.’

Chapter 2

At the police station, just two miles away in central Bath, Lorne Wood was all anyone could talk about. A sixteen-year-old pupil of a local private school, Faulkener’s, she was popular – and fairly reliable, according to her parents. From the get-go, Sally’s sister, Detective Inspector Zoë Benedict, hadn’t had even a speck of confidence that Lorne would be seen alive again. Maybe that was just Zoë – too pragmatic by far – but at two o’clock that afternoon, when one of the search team beating the undergrowth next to the Kennet and Avon canal found a body, she wasn’t in the slightest surprised.

‘Not that I’d ever say “I told you so”,’ she murmured to DI Ben Parris, as they walked along the towpath. She kept her hands shoved in the pockets of the black jeans the superintendent was always telling her she shouldn’t wear as a warranted officer with a duty to the image of the force. ‘You’d never hear those words come out of my mouth.’

‘Of course not.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the group of people up ahead. ‘It wouldn’t be in your nature.’

The site had already been cordoned off, with portable screens fixed in place across the path. Hovering outside the screen were ten or twelve people – barge owners, mostly, and already a member of the press, dressed in a black waterproof. As the two DIs pushed their way through, warrant cards held up, he raised his Nikon and fired off a few shots. He was a sure sign that word was getting out faster than the police could keep up with, thought Zoë.

An area of nearly two thousand square metres had been cordoned off, away from the eyes of the public. The path was loose, chalky gravel giving way on one side to the bulrushes of the canal, on the other to a tangle of undergrowth – cow parsley, nettles and grass. Officers had left a gap of about fifty metres between the screens and the inner cordon, limited by police tape. Thirty metres or so past that, in a part of the undergrowth that formed a natural tunnel, stood a white tent.

Zoë and Ben pulled on white forensic suits, tightened the hoods, and added gloves. They ducked into the tent. The air inside was warm and packed with the scents of crushed grass and earth, the ground crisscrossed with lightweight aluminium tread plates.

‘It’s her.’ The crime-scene manager stood a foot inside, making notes on a clipboard. He didn’t look up at them. ‘No doubt. Lorne Wood.’

Behind him at the end of a walkway the crime-scene photographer was circling a muddy tarpaulin, taking video.

‘The tarp’s the type they use to cover firewood on the barges. But no one on this stretch of canal is missing one. The guy threw it over her. To look at her you’d think she was in bed.’

He was right. Lorne was lying on her back, as if asleep, one arm resting on top of the tarp, which was pulled up to her chest like a duvet. Her head was lolling to one side, turned up and away from the tent entrance. Zoë couldn’t see her face, but she could see the T-shirt. Grey – with ‘I am Banksy’ across the chest. The one Lorne had been wearing when she’d left her house yesterday afternoon. ‘What time was she reported missing?’

‘Eight,’ said Ben. ‘She was supposed to be on her way home.’

‘We’ve found her keys,’ said the CSM, ‘but still no phone. There’s a dive team coming to search the canal later.’

In the corner of the tent a technician dropped a pair of black ballet pumps into a bag. He put a red flag in the ground, then sealed the bag and signed across the seal. ‘Was that where they were found?’ she asked him.

He nodded. ‘Right there. Both of them.’

‘Kicked off? Pulled off?’

‘Taken off. They were like this.’ The CSM held out his hands, straight and neatly together. ‘Just placed there.’

‘Is that mud on them?’

‘Yes. But not from here. From the towpath somewhere.’

‘And this grass – the way it’s been flattened?’

‘The struggle.’

‘It’s not much,’ she said.

‘No. Seems to have been over quickly.’

The photographer had finished videoing. He stepped back to allow Zoë and Ben to approach the body. The tread plates divided into two directions at the foot of the tarpaulin and circled the body. Zoë and Ben went carefully, taking the side that led to Lorne’s face. They stood for a long time in silence, looking down at her. They’d both been working in CID for more than a decade and in that time they’d dealt with just a handful of murders. Nothing like this.

Zoë looked up at the CSM. She could feel her eyes wanting to water. ‘What’s made her face go like that?’

‘We’re not sure. We think it’s a tennis ball between her teeth.’

‘Christ,’ said Ben. ‘Christ.’

The CSM was right: a piece of duct tape had been placed across Lorne’s mouth. It was holding in place a spherical object that had been jammed inside as far as it would go, luminous green tufts visible at the top and bottom. It had forced her jaw open so wide she seemed to be snarling or screaming. Her nose was squashed into a bloodied clot, her eyes were screwed up tight. There was more blood in her hair. Two distinct lines of it ran from under the duct tape down to her jaw – almost in the places the jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy would be hinged, except that they met her jaw almost under her ears. She must have been lying on her back when the bleeding had happened.

‘Where’s it coming from?’

‘Her mouth.’

‘She’s bitten her tongue?’

The CSM shrugged. ‘Or maybe the skin’s split.’

‘Split?’

He touched the corners of his mouth. ‘A tennis ball forced into her mouth? It would put strain on the skin here.’

‘Skin can’t spl—’ she began, but then she remembered that skin could split. She’d seen it on the backs and faces of suicide victims who’d jumped from high buildings. The impact often split their skin. The thought put a cold weight in her stomach.

‘Have you pulled back the tarp?’ Ben was leaning over, trying to peer under the tarpaulin. ‘Can we see?’

‘The pathologist’s asked no one else to touch it – asked that you come to the PM. He – I— Both of us want her down to the mortuary just as she is. Tarp and all.’

‘So, I’m guessing there’s a sexual element?’

The CSM sniffed. ‘Yes. You can definitely say there is. A strong sexual element.’

‘Well?’ Ben checked his watch and turned to Zoë. ‘What do you want to do?’

She dragged her eyes away from Lorne’s face and watched the officer on the other side of the tent label the bag with the shoes in it. ‘I think …’ she murmured ‘… I think I want to take a walk.’

Chapter 3

For a while Lorne Wood had been part of Millie and Sophie’s little group – but then, about a year ago, she had seemed to grow apart from the other girls. Maybe they hadn’t had that much in common to begin with – she had been at a different school, was a year older and always struck Sally as more sophisticated. She was the prettiest of them all and she seemed to know it. A blonde with milky skin and classic blue eyes. A true beauty.

That lunchtime the teenagers gathered around the computer in Isabelle’s study, trying to get all the gossip they could, trying to piece together what had happened from Facebook and Twitter. There wasn’t much news – the police hadn’t made any public statements since the one they’d issued this morning, confirming she was missing. It seemed Lorne had last been seen by her mother yesterday afternoon when she’d headed into town, on foot, for a shopping expedition. Her Facebook page hadn’t been updated in that time and no calls had been made on her mobile: apparently, when her parents had rung, the phone was switched off.

‘It could just be a tiff,’ Isabelle said, when the kids had gone back outside. ‘Fed up with her parents, run off with a boyfriend. I did it when I was that age – teach your parents a lesson, that sort of thing.’

‘Probably,’ agreed Sally. ‘Maybe.’

It was nearly one thirty. Time to get going. She began to pack up her things, thinking about Lorne. She’d met her only a handful of times, but she recalled her as a determined girl, with a slightly sad air. She remembered sitting in the garden with her one day, when she and Millie were still living with Julian in Sion Road, and Lorne saying, quite out of the blue, ‘Millie’s so lucky. You know – for it to be just her.’

‘Just her?’

‘No brothers or sisters.’

That had come as a surprise to Sally. ‘I thought you got on with your brother.’

‘Not really.’

‘Isn’t he kind to you?’

‘Oh, yes, he’s very kind. He’s kind. And he’s nice. And he’s clever.’ She pushed her hair away from her pretty face. ‘He’s perfect. Does everything Mum and Dad want. That’s what I mean. Millie’s lucky.’

It had stuck in Sally’s mind, that exchange, and it came back to her now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. She’d never heard anyone say it was a disadvantage to have a brother or a sister before. Maybe people thought it, but she’d never heard anyone actually voice it.

‘I wish they wouldn’t do that.’ Sally looked up. Isabelle was standing in the window, frowning out at the garden. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told them.’

Sally got up and joined her. The garden was long, planted with fruit trees and surrounded by huge poplars that rustled and bent when so much as a breath of wind came through. ‘Where are they all?’

Isabelle pointed. ‘See? At the end. Sitting on the stile. I know what they’re thinking.’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh, yes. Pollock’s Farm. They’re wondering if they can get down there before we notice.’

Isabelle’s house was a mile to the north of Bath on the escarpment where the steep slopes of Lansdown levelled out. To the north-west were the lowlands and the golf courses; to the east, and butting up to Isabelle’s garden, was Pollock’s Farm. It had been derelict for three years since the owner, old man Pollock, had gone mad and had started, so people said, drinking sheep dip. The crops stood dead in the field, weed-choked; dead brown maize heads drooped on their stems. Half-dismantled machinery rusted along the tracks, pig troughs filled with stagnant rainwater, and the decomposing pyramids of silage had been broken into by rats and gnawed until they seemed like the crumbling ruins of a forgotten civilization. The place was notoriously dangerous – not just for the hazards in the fields, but for the way the land stopped abruptly in the middle, interrupted by an ancient quarry that had cut a steep drop into the hillside. The farmhouse was at the bottom of the quarry – you could stand in the top fields and look down through the trees on to its roof. It was where old man Pollock had died – in his armchair in front of the television. He’d sat there for months, while the seasons changed, the house decayed and the electricity was turned off, until he’d been discovered by a meths addict searching for privacy.

‘The boys are worse since that happened. Honestly, it’s like a magnet to them. They gee each other up. They just love frightening themselves, daring each other.’ Isabelle sighed, turned away from the window and went back to the cooker where the treacle tart was cooling on a rack. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say. They pretend they don’t but I know they still go there. Or if not them, then someone. I went down there about a month ago – and it’s awful. The place is littered with crisp packets, cider bottles, every disgusting thing you could imagine. It won’t be long before one of them steps on a syringe. I found a beer can in Nial’s bin the other day and I don’t trust Peter. I’ve seen scabs around his mouth. Do you know what that means?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t either. I suppose I automatically thought drugs. Maybe I should tell his mother – who knows? Anyway – that place.’ She gestured at the window. ‘It doesn’t help at all. The sooner the probate is sorted and they’ve sold it the better. I’ve told the gardener over and over again to close the stile off – but he just won’t get round to it. They’re at this age and you can’t help thinking …’

She gave a little shiver. Her eyes went briefly to Sally’s bag. Perhaps thinking about Millie’s face on the tarot. Or maybe Lorne Wood. Missing for sixteen hours. Then her expression cleared. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her. I’ll run her over to Julian’s at six. There’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about.’

Chapter 4

It had been Lorne Wood’s habit that spring to go shopping in town, then walk home, taking a route through Sydney Gardens, then out on to the towpath where her house was – about half a mile to the east. Sydney Gardens was the oldest park in Bath, famous for its replica Roman temple of Minerva. It was also notorious for cottagers – you only had to step one pace off the path to see a young man, nicely dressed, standing sheepishly in the bushes, a hopeful smile on his face. Parents frog-marched their children past the vicinity of the toilets, talking loudly to distract their attention, and dog-walkers regularly came to the local vets with dogs choking on used condoms scavenged from the undergrowth. A railway line ran through the park – police teams had thoroughly searched it already, as it wasn’t unknown for bodies to be pulverized and scattered by a speeding train to the point at which they seemed to have disappeared altogether. Now, however, the search teams weren’t looking for a body. They were looking for clues about Lorne’s journey from town to the place she’d been killed.

Zoë and Ben walked down the canal path not speaking. From time to time one of them would stop and peer into the bushes on the right, or down into the impenetrable canal water, hoping to catch sight of something significant that the teams had missed. About a quarter of a mile back into town Zoë stopped at a small gate in a wall. The woody branches of a wisteria hung over it, the pendulous purple racemes just beginning to open. The gate led into Sydney Gardens. It was probably the place Lorne had got on to the towpath. Zoë and Ben stood opposite each other, faces lowered, considering the patch of mud between their feet.

‘Is it what was on her shoes?’ he asked.

‘It’s the same colour.’

Ben raised his head and scanned the path – the puddles that straddled the gravel. It had rained yesterday, but the sun was drying it now. ‘A lot of places in Bath have mud this colour. It’s the limestone in the earth.’

Zoë eyed the puddles. She was thinking about the shoes. Ballet pumps. Unsuitable for walking, really, but all the girls wore them these days.

Ben put his hands in his pockets and squinted up at the sky. ‘So?’ he said quietly. ‘What do you think’s under that tarp?’

‘Christ knows.’

‘Boss?’ DC Goods, one of the team, was coming along the path towards them, waving to attract their attention. ‘I’ve got a woman wants to speak to you.’

‘A woman?’

‘One of the live-aboards. Some of the owners got a good view of the crime scene before it was cordoned. They got the lie of the land. This one saw the body – just a glimpse. She’s got something she wants to tell you.’

‘Great.’ Zoë set off down the path at a pace, Ben a few steps behind her. Her head was buzzing. It would be really nice – really nice – to tuck a solved murder into her portfolio. Be able to stand up in front of the force and Lorne Wood’s family and say she’d found the killer. The person who’d shoved a tennis ball into their daughter’s mouth. And done God only knew what else to her.

The barge wasn’t far from the park – at least a quarter of a mile from the crime scene. It was brightly painted, with flowers daubed all over the cabin, the name Elfwood carved across the stern. On the roof, next to the little chimney, were piled provisions – coal, wood, water bottles, a bicycle. Ben rapped twice on the roof, then jumped on to the aft deck and bent to look down into the cabin. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m here,’ said a voice. ‘Come in.’

He and Zoë went down the steps, bending their necks to avoid the low ceiling. It was like going into Aladdin’s cave – every surface, the ceiling, the walls, the cupboards, had been adorned with wooden sculptures of tree nymphs. The windows were hung with glittering cheesecloth in shades of purple and pink, and everything smelt of cats and patchouli oil. Not much sunlight filtered through, just enough for them to make out a woman of about fifty, with very long curly hennaed hair, perched on one of the bulkhead seats, a roll-up cigarette in her hand. She wore a circlet of flowers in her hair and a huge velvet cape that fastened at the neck and was open to reveal a lace blouse and a skirt with tiny gold mirrors stitched on it. Her bare legs and feet, crammed into rubber-soled sandals, were very white. Like the jars of duck fat you saw lined up when the French market came to Bath in the summer.

‘Good.’ She took a long draw on the cigarette. ‘Nice to see the police doing something worthwhile instead of busting the innocent.’

‘I’m DI Benedict.’ Zoë put her hand out. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

The woman put the cigarette into her mouth and shook the hand. She peered at Zoë through the smoke, getting the measure of her. After a moment or two she seemed satisfied. ‘Amy,’ she said. ‘And him? Who’s he?’

‘DI Ben Parris.’ Ben offered his hand.

Amy shook it, eyeing him suspiciously. Then she took the cigarette out of her mouth and motioned for them to sit down. ‘No tea – generator died on me two weeks ago, and you really don’t want to see me doing my thing with the Primus stove.’

‘That’s OK. We won’t be long.’ Zoë pulled out her pocketbook. After all these years, with all the technology available, the force still liked everything noted in handwriting. Even so, she usually backed it up by recording everything on her iPhone. Technically she shouldn’t, not without asking permission, but she did it anyway. She’d developed a technique – a quick pass of the hand over her pocket, knew the keys without looking. Beep-beep with her fingers and she was recording, pretending with the notepad. ‘Our constable said you had something you wanted to talk about.’

‘Yes,’ said Amy. Her eyes were very intense, spiralled with broken veins. ‘I saw the body. Lots of us did.’

‘That was unfortunate,’ Ben said. ‘We do our utmost to preserve scenes. Sometimes we don’t manage it.’

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that you can see the soul leave the body? If you watch hard enough you’ll see it.’

Zoë lowered her face and pretended to write in her notepad. If Goodsy had brought them down here to hear about souls and spirits she’d kill him. ‘So – Amy. Did you see a soul? Leaving her body?’

She shook her head. ‘It had already gone. A long time ago.’

‘How long?’

‘When she died. Last night. They don’t hang around. It has to be the first half an hour.’

‘How do you know it was last night?’

‘Because of the bracelet.’

Ben raised an eyebrow. ‘The bracelet?’

‘She was wearing a bracelet. I saw it. When they found her body I saw the bracelet.’

Amy was right – Lorne had been wearing a bracelet. A dangly charm bracelet with a plated silver skull and miniature cutlery: a knife, fork and spoon. Also a lucky ‘16’, which she’d got for her birthday. It had been listed by her parents in the missing-persons report.

‘What about the bracelet? Why’s that important?’

‘Because I heard it. Last night.’ She took another deep drag, held it, then let it all out in a long, bluish stream. ‘You hear it all – sitting in here you hear every part of life. They all use the towpath, don’t they? You get the fights and the quarrels, the parties and the lovers. Mostly it’s just bike bells. Last night it was a girl with something dangling. Chink-chink, it went.’ She held up her finger and thumb, opened and closed them like a little beak. ‘Chink-chink.’

‘OK. And anything else?’

‘Apart from the chink-chink? Not much.’

‘Not much?’

‘No. Unless you count the conversation.’

‘The conversation?’ Ben said. ‘There was a conversation too?’

‘On the phone. You get used to knowing if it’s on the phone. At first, when I moved here, I used to think they were talking to a ghost – wandering along chit-chatting, no one answering. It took me ages to work it out. I don’t do technology – haven’t got a mobile phone and I won’t. Thank you very much.’ She gave a small, polite nod – as if Ben had offered her a free mobile and she’d been forced, graciously, to turn him down.

‘And you think it was Lorne?’

‘I’m sure it was.’

‘You didn’t see her?’

‘Just her feet. Wearing the same shoes as the ones that were next to her body. I saw those too, when they found her body. I take these things in.’

‘What time was this?’

‘A little before eight? It was quiet – the rush had finished. I’d say maybe seven thirty, seven forty-five?’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

Zoë and Ben exchanged glances. When Lorne had gone missing, the OIC – the officer in charge of the missing-persons case – had got historical cell site analysis on her phone, which revealed she’d had one phone conversation yesterday evening, with her friend – a call that finished at seven forty-five. That must be what Amy had overheard. Which gave them an accurate time for when Lorne was on the path.

‘Amy,’ Ben said, ‘did you hear what she was talking about?’

‘I heard one thing. Just one. She said, “Oh, God, I’ve had enough …”’

‘“Oh, God, I’ve had enough”?’

‘Yes.’

‘So she was upset?’

‘A bit fed up, maybe. But not crying or anything. Sad – but not scared.’

Ben wrote something down. ‘And she was definitely alone? You didn’t hear anyone else with her?’

‘No.’ Amy was clear. ‘She was alone.’

‘So she said, “Oh, God, I’ve had enough,” and then …’

‘Then she just walked on. Chink-chink-chink.’ Amy clenched the cigarette between her teeth, eyes screwed up against the smoke, and waved her hand back in the direction of the crime scene. ‘That way. Off to where it happened. I didn’t hear anything after that. Not until she turned up dead. Raped, too, I suppose. I mean, that’s what it’s usually about – men and the way they hate women.’

Raped, too, I suppose. Zoë glanced up out of the window, at the sun falling on the towpath, and wondered what was under the tarpaulin Lorne had been covered with. Truthfully, she’d like to find a way of wriggling out of the PM. She couldn’t, of course. Something like that would get around the force in no time.

They sat a bit longer and talked to Amy, but apart from the phone conversation, she didn’t have anything to add to the case. Eventually Ben got to his feet. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’

Zoë rose and followed him. He’d already got to the deck and she was still in the galley when a loud, meaningful cough from behind stopped her. She turned and saw Amy smiling at her, a finger to her lips. ‘What?’

‘Him,’ Amy hissed, jabbing a finger at the deck. ‘There’s no point you wasting your time on him. He’s gay. You can see it from the way he wears his clothes.’

Zoë looked back to the staircase. Ben was waiting on deck in the sunlight, his shadow lying a short way down the stairs. She could see his shoes, well polished, expensive. His suit – which was probably off-the-peg M&S – he managed to wear as if it was Armani. Amy was right – he looked like something from an aftershave ad. ‘This isn’t something we should be talking about,’ she murmured. ‘Not under the circumstances.’

‘I know, but he is, isn’t he?’ Amy smiled. ‘Go on. He has to be.’

‘I really wouldn’t know. It’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever given any thought to. Now.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m on my way. Thank you, Amy. You’ve given me a lot to think about.’

Chapter 5

Sally tried not to work at the weekend, but the job she had on a Sunday paid well and wasn’t as lonely as the others, because the agency had teamed her with two other cleaners. Marysieńka and Danuta – two good-natured blondes from Gdańsk, who wore lots of foundation to work and had their nails done at the new Korean parlour on Westgate Street. They had the use of the agency’s pink-painted Honda Jazz with the HomeMaids logo in purple vinyl stuck on the side of the car. Marysieńka always drove – her boyfriend had a job with the First Bus Company and had taught her to negotiate British traffic like a rally driver. ‘The first rule,’ she maintained, ‘is he who hesitates gets fucked.’ That would make Danuta shriek with laughter as the little HomeMaids car shot out into traffic, forcing the sedate drivers of north Bath to slam on their brakes. The two Poles were nice girls who took cigarette breaks and sometimes smelt vaguely of fish and chips, as if maybe they shared a flat above a takeaway. Sally always imagined they talked about her when the day was finished – made promises to each other never to get that desperate, that downtrodden.

Today they picked Sally up at the end of Isabelle’s long driveway. They were dressed in white jeans and heels under their pink cleaning tabards and they kept the window open, arms out, smoking and banging on the side of the car in time to the radio. They were in their twenties: they wouldn’t have anything to do with a schoolgirl from the nice side of town, so Sally didn’t talk about Lorne being missing. She sat in the back, chewing Airwaves gum to kill the smell of wine on her breath, watching the hedgerow race past and thinking of what else she remembered about Lorne. She’d met her mother once – her name was Polly. Or Pippa or something … Anyway – maybe Isabelle was right: maybe she had run away because of something going on at home. But missing? Really, really missing? And from what the kids had seen on Twitter the police were taking it very seriously, as if something awful had happened to her.

The women’s client that day – David Goldrab – lived out past the racecourse and along the main route out of Bath on a side road off the area called Hanging Hill, where the great Lansdown battle between the royalists and the parliamentarians had been fought nearly four hundred years ago. It was a funny place, noticeable chiefly for the landmark known locally as the Caterpillar, a line of trees on the crest of the facing hill that could be seen for miles around. But Hanging Hill was also, to Sally’s mind, vaguely sinister. As if it had been infected by its history, an air of corruption seemed to hang over everything. Local rumour had it that the Brinks Mat gold had been melted down in foundry flasks somewhere around here by a Bristol gold dealer, and there was something Sally found uncomfortable about both David and his home, Lightpil House. The grounds, with their shrubberies, gravelled walks, tree plantations, ponds and outlier groves, had all been established in the last decade by landscapers with diggers and earth-movers, and looked totally out of place. The house, too, was modern and seemed to overwhelm its surroundings. Built with the buttery stone that all the buildings in Bath were made of, in a style meant to mimic a Palladian villa, it had a huge two-storey-high portico, an orangery with a row of glass arches, and was guarded at the entrance by electronic gates topped with gilt pineapples.

Marysieńka drove the Honda down the track that led around the perimeter to a small parking area at the bottom of the property. From here they carried their cleaning kit up the long path that meandered past the swimming-pool and through immaculately tended hedges of rhododendron and ceanothus. The door was open, the house silent, just the television on in the kitchen. This wasn’t unusual – they quite often didn’t see David. The agency had made clear that he didn’t want to be bothered or spoken to. From time to time he’d wander through the kitchen in a towelling robe and FitFlops, mobile tucked under his chin, a remote control in his hand, wincing and shaking his head disappointedly when the Sky box refused to co-operate, but often he’d be locked in his office in the west wing, or over at the livery stables where he kept his show horse, Bruiser. There’d be a list of jobs for the girls and an envelope of cash in the kitchen. He didn’t get many visitors, and although he wasn’t the tidiest or cleanest man, sometimes it was odd to be cleaning and scrubbing floors and sinks and toilets that hadn’t had any use in the week since they’d last been there. They could have closed the door of each room and sat filing their nails, squirted a dose of polish into the air and left. No one would have been any the wiser. But they were all secretly a little scared of David, with his security systems and electronic gates, his camera mounted over the front door. So they played it safe and cleaned the place whether it needed doing or not.

The women set to work. The carpets were thick, wall to wall, in shades of blue and pink. Highly polished brass candelabra fittings hung on every wall and each window was pelmeted and dressed with swagged, fringed curtains in lush blue or gold silk. Everything needed to be dusted. There were two wings, each joined by corridors to the heart of the house where the kitchen and living areas were. The Polish girls took a wing each, while Sally got started with the ironing in the utility room.

There was always a pile of the pinstriped poplin shirts David wore, in a range of pastel colours, pink and peppermint and primrose. They all had handstitched labels with ‘Ede & Ravenscroft’ written in curlicue script. Missing, she thought, as she filled the steam iron and laid out the first shirt. Missing was never good. Not if it was a teenage girl from a nice family. And then she wondered if the police would have to interview her. She wondered if a man in a uniform would be sent out to the cottage. If, perhaps, he’d notice the way Millie and Sally were living these days and report it back to Zoë. Who wouldn’t be remotely surprised that her dimwit sister with the hopeful smile and the dopey stars in her eyes had at last got her comeuppance from the world and been put where she belonged.

She’d been ironing for ten minutes when David appeared outside, walking briskly across the gravel drive from the garage. He wasn’t tall but he was powerful – the Polish girls called him ‘the fat man’ – stockily built with cropped grey hair and a year-round suntan. Today he wore a lemon-yellow Gersemi polo shirt, breeches and Italian high boots, and was tapping his short whip against his thigh as he came. He must have been up the road at the stables in Marshfield. He hadn’t removed his jewellery to ride – the sun flashed off the gold chain at his neck and the single gold stud in his ear. He came in through the orangery, stopped briefly in the kitchen and slammed the fridge door. Then he appeared in the utility room.

‘The only way to end a good dressage session.’ He was holding in one hand a lead-crystal flute of pink champagne and in the other a bag of peanuts. ‘Peanuts to replace the salts I’ve lost and the Heidsieck to keep the pulse rate up. The only way. Taught me by the best dressage boys in Piemonte.’

He had an English accent that veered between Australian, East London and Bristol – his ‘U’ sound always came out like an ‘A’, so that ‘hut’ sounded like ‘hat’. She had no idea where he was from but she was sure he hadn’t been born in a huge mansion like this. She didn’t break off from her ironing, but if he noticed her lack of response, it didn’t faze him. He slung himself into a swivel chair that sat in the corner, giving it a half-turn so he could throw his feet up on the worktop. He smelt of aftershave and horses – there were still marks on his forehead where the riding hat had been.

‘I’m a lucky man, you know that?’ He used his teeth to open the bag of peanuts, tipped some into his hand and began tossing them into his mouth. ‘I’m lucky because I’ve got a good nose for the people I can trust. Always have had. It’s got me out of a lot of problems. And you, Sally? I’ve already got you. Got you up here.’ He tapped his head. ‘Already locked away. I know what you are.’

Sally had got used to his occasional sermons: she’d heard him on the phone to his mother, talking about the latest thing he’d seen on the news, how it had upset him and how his already dim view of the human race was getting worse by the day. She’d learned, above all, that she wasn’t expected to respond to his monologues, that he just wanted to be able to talk. This, though, was more personal than usual. She went on with the ironing, but she was paying more attention now.

‘See, I know something you won’t admit to anyone.’ He smiled up at her. A slow smile that showed all his teeth and made Sally think of rats and reptiles. ‘I know this is killing you. A woman like you? Scraping shit off other people’s toilets? You weren’t raised to be doing something like this. Those Polish slappers? I look at them and I think, Cleaners – that’s what they’re doing now and that’s what they’ll be doing when they’re eighty. But you? You’re different, you’ve seen better and you hate cleaning. You hate it with a vengeance. Every floor you scrub, every stained pair of sheets you pull off a bed, it kills you.’

The colour crept across Sally’s face, the way it always did when she didn’t know what to say. She tried to keep her mind on the shirt – shaking it out, laying the collar flat, testing the button on the iron. It shot out a hissing jet of steam, making her jump a little.

David watched her in amusement. He used his feet on the worktop to jiggle the chair from side to side. ‘See, Sally, I think a quality girl like you deserves a proper job.’

‘What do you mean, “a proper job”?’

‘Let me explain. Let me give you a little bite-size lesson in David Goldrab. When I go out to work – not that I do have to much, these days, Gottze dank – but when I do, I have to deal with people. And hands-on deal with them, if you get my drift. So this is my retreat, the place I come for solitude, and the last thing I want is Shangri-La crowded with people – you can understand that, can’t you? I like my space. But I’ve got ten acres, and more than four thousand square feet of living space, and I don’t need to tell you a spread like that takes TLC. The outside’s sorted – the pool man comes every two weeks, and there’s some half-wit lives down at the cottage between this estate and the next. He deals with the pheasants, arranges a shoot for me if I’ve been stupid enough to invite people down from London. I leave them a list of jobs, like I do with you, pay their wages direct into their bank accounts, only have to speak to them by phone. Great. Except it’s not enough – because of the house. You only have to turn your back on it for a second and before you know it the place is falling in around you. Now call me a snob,’ he put a hand over his heart, a martyred look on his face, ‘but I can’t bear talking to the fucking yokels who come out here to do these jobs, dragging their disgusting knuckles along the floor and blinking their one fucking eye.’

He chucked more peanuts into his mouth, waved the champagne glass around.

‘I don’t want to have to even look at these monkeys. I want to sit upstairs, watching Britney Spears get her kit off on MTV, and be completely oblivious to the half-wit rodding my drains downstairs. Now that’s where you’d come in. I still want you to clean, but I also want you to go round the house every week and make a list of what needs to be done. Then I want you to organize it, monitor it, let the fuckers in, make them coffee – whatever their inbred little hearts desire, pay them and keep a record of what I’m forking out. Get my drift?’

‘Basically, you’re looking for a housekeeper?’

‘Yeah, well, don’t make it sound like “Basically, David, you’re looking for a dick-sucker.” I’m offering you twenty quid an hour – off the books. No tax. Six hours a week over two afternoons. Say, Tuesdays and Thursdays. After I give the agency my fifteen quid an hour for you, how much do you go home with – in your pocket?’

She lowered her eyes, embarrassed it was so little. ‘Four pounds an hour. They take emergency tax from me.’

‘See? You’d have to work five hours to earn what I’m offering you for one.’

Sally was silent for a moment, doing the sums. He was right. It was a lot of money. And she had free slots on both of those afternoons that she’d been wanting to fill for a long time.

‘Come on, Sally. Tell the agency you’re not available two afternoons a week and come to me instead.’ He tipped back his head and emptied the bag of nuts into his mouth. He crunched them up, swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You can wipe that look off your face. It ain’t a trick and I’m not proposing to you.’

‘What about them? Danuta and Marysieńka.’

‘I’ll knob them off. Tell the agent I don’t need a cleaner. I don’t associate with common little slappers like them anyway, their tits lolling out all over the place.’

‘But – they’re relying on it.’

David shrugged. He pushed with his feet and sent the chair back across the floor, making it twirl and spin. He came to a halt, gave her a grin. ‘You know what, Sally? You’re a good Christian woman and now you’ve put it like that I can see the error of my ways. The dumb Polacks are relying on the money, so I’ll do the right thing.’ He stood and went to the door. ‘I’ll call the agent, renegotiate our contract. I’ll complain about your work – say I want you off the job, the Polish tarts can stay.’ He winked. ‘Tell you what, I might even double their money. That should put a smile on their faces.’

Chapter 6

‘I was cagey about discussing this in the field.’ The pathologist stood next to Ben and Zoë at the dissecting table in the hospital mortuary, looking down at Lorne Wood’s remains. The room was closed, a uniformed officer sitting outside the door, just one mortician and the photographer in attendance. ‘In my experience, a case like this? You limit the spread of information. Limit the people who know the details.’

The photographer moved around the body, taking it from every angle, coming in close on the tarpaulin, which was still drawn up to Lorne’s chest. Just as she’d been found. Zoë watched, her lips pursed. She had been here before, in this room, with this pathologist, but they’d always been straightforward murder cases. Horrific and tragic all of them, but uncomplicated – the victims, mostly, of bar fights gone wrong. Once a shotgun victim – a farmer’s wife. Of course, this wasn’t going to be anything like those cases.

When the photographer had taken all the necessary shots, the pathologist stood next to Lorne’s head, using a torch to look up into her nose, lifting both eyelids and shining the light into them.

‘What’s the blood?’ Zoë asked. ‘The stuff coming from her mouth.’

The pathologist frowned. He peeled back a tiny part of the tape and stood back so Zoë could peer down at it. The skin at the edges of Lorne’s mouth was stretched around the tennis ball. And the corners had indeed split – two bloodied cracks each about a centimetre long. Just as the CSM had said.

Zoë gave a small nod. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly. She straightened and took a step back.

‘I think the ball’s dislocated her jaw too.’ The pathologist put both hands under Lorne’s ears and felt it, his eyes on the ceiling. ‘Yup.’ He straightened. ‘Dislocated.’ He glanced up to get the photographer’s attention. ‘Do you want to get some shots of this while I’m holding the tape back a bit?’

There was silence in the room while the photographer worked. Zoë avoided looking at Ben and she guessed he wouldn’t be meeting her eyes either. Neither of them had said anything on the drive over, but she was sure his head would be full of the same things hers was – like, what was going on under that tarpaulin? The pathologist seemed to take an agonizingly long time with the photographer and with taking samples from Lorne’s hair and nails. It was an age before he went to the tarpaulin.

‘OK?’ he said, his eyes on Zoë and Ben’s faces. ‘Ready?’

They nodded.

He drew the tarp back slowly, and crumpled it into an evidence bag the mortician was holding out. Zoë and Ben remained motionless, staring at what was in front of them. Taking it all in.

She was dressed from the waist up in the grey Banksy T-shirt. Below that she was completely naked. Her legs had been opened and positioned in a frog shape, knees out to the sides, soles together. At first Zoë thought her abdomen and thighs were covered with red slashes. Then she saw they were marks made in a waxy reddish-orange substance. ‘What is that? Lipstick?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ The pathologist pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned in, frowning. ‘It says something. Maybe you should – uh?’

‘“All like her …”’ Ben inclined his head sideways, reading the letters that ran up the inner thigh. ‘“All like her”? Is that what it says?’

‘And this?’ The pathologist indicated her abdomen. Letters running across it below her ribs, spanning her navel. ‘Very clear to me.’

‘“No one”?’ Zoë murmured. ‘No one.’ She glanced up at Ben. As if he might have an answer. He shook his head. Shrugged.

‘The other thing that struck me when I was in the field was this.’ The pathologist bent and looked under Lorne’s buttocks. ‘He’s rolled up all her clothes – her jeans, her socks, her underwear, put them under there. And, unless I’m very much mistaken, they’re not torn, not ripped.’

‘She let him take them off?’

‘Depends by what you mean by “let him”. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she was beyond struggling at that point.’

‘You mean he raped her when …’

‘When she was unconscious,’ Ben said quietly. ‘That he knocked her out and then got on with it. Which is why no one on the canal heard anything.’

‘I’m not saying anything. What I’m doing here is pointing out the areas of interest we could pay attention to during this postmortem. Which …’ he pushed the spectacles up his nose and moved the gooseneck lamp so it was shining directly on Lorne’s face ‘… is going to take a long time. I hope you don’t have dinner plans.’

Chapter 7

Sally stood in David Goldrab’s utility room, the iron forgotten in her hand, his words going round and round in her head. Twenty quid an hour – off the books. No tax. Six hours a week. A hundred and twenty pounds every week to add to her pay packet? At the moment she and Millie were just squeaking by after food, utilities, council tax and interest payments. An extra four hundred and eighty a month would mean she could begin to pay off the loans. Buy Millie a new school dress, new jeans. But working for David Goldrab? Here on her own, with all his rudeness and bluster? She wasn’t sure.

Since Julian had left, it seemed that every day there had been a new obstacle, a new impossible predicament. And there was never time to think it through properly. Back in the days before Sally and Zoë had been separated from each other and sent away to different boarding-schools, Mum used to watch old films on TV on Saturday. There was a character in one of her favourites who liked to say, ‘Morals? We can’t afford morals.’ That was what happened at the bottom of the pile: you let ideals, like not stealing other people’s work, sink to the bottom of the list – somewhere beneath the electricity bill and the school uniform. You learned to swallow the things you really wanted to say.

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.’

Chapter 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. Zoë 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 Zoë 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 Zoë 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 Zoë 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 Zoë.

‘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.’

Zoë 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, Zoë 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 steps – the floors, the roof, even the bricks were askew. Not a straight line in sight. In the last year and a half she and Millie had crammed it full of the craft they did in their spare time. The kitchen was stacked with things – the eggcups glazed and studded with paste gems, the little portraits of the pets they’d owned over the years pinned crazily to the walls, the boiled-sweet Christmas stars still hanging in the windows like stained glass, filtering the sunlight in coloured topaz dots. So unlike the house in Sion Road that they’d lived in with Julian.

The living room was at the back, looking out over flat fields, not another building as far as the eye could see. That night Sally left the curtains open to the night and sat curled on the sofa with Steve, sipping wine and staring in disbelief at the TV. Lorne Wood’s death was on the national news and the top story on the local news.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Sally murmured, her lips on the rim of her glass. ‘Lorne. Look at her – she can’t be dead. She was so pretty.’

‘Nice-looking girl,’ Steve said. ‘It’ll get more coverage than if she wasn’t.’

‘All the boys were crazy about her. Crazy. And on the towpath of all places. Millie and I used to go there all the time.’

‘It’s still a towpath. You still can.’

Sally shivered. She ran her hands up and down the goosebumps on her arms and inched closer to Steve, trying to steal some of his body warmth. She and Steve had been together for four months now. On nights like tonight, when Millie was at Julian’s, Sally would go to Steve’s or he would come over to the cottage, bringing armfuls of treats, cases of wine and nice cheeses from the delis in the town centre. Tonight, though, she wished Millie was with them and not down at Sion Road. After a while, when she couldn’t relax, couldn’t stop the shivering, she swung her legs off the sofa, found her phone and dialled Millie’s mobile. It was answered after just two rings. ‘Mum.’ She sounded half scared, half excited. ‘Have you seen it? On the news? They murdered her.’

‘That’s why I’m calling. Are you OK?’

‘It’s Lorne they murdered. Not me.’

Sally paused, a little thrown off by Millie’s dismissiveness. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just I thought with the way you used to be so close to Lorne you’d—’

‘We weren’t close, Mum.’

‘She seemed to be with you all the time.’

‘No – you just think she was. But really she preferred her mates at Faulkener’s and, anyway, I like Sophie better.’

‘Even so, it must be upsetting.’

‘No – really, I mean I’m shocked but I’m not crying my eyes out. It was ages ago. I haven’t seen her for ages.’

Sally looked up at the window, at the lonely moon lifting itself from the horizon. Bloated and red. Millie was a proper teenager now. To her a year really was an age. ‘OK,’ she said, after a while. ‘Just one thing – if you want to go out tonight will you speak to me first? Let me know where you’re going?’

‘I’m not going out. I’m staying in. With them.’ She meant Julian and his new wife, Melissa. ‘Worse luck. And it’s the Glasto meeting tonight.’

‘The Glasto meeting?’

‘I told you about this, Mum. Peter and Nial are going to pick up their camper-vans the day after tomorrow. They’re going to meet tonight to talk about it. Didn’t Isabelle tell you?’

Sally nibbled at the side of her thumbnail. She’d forgotten it was all so close. The boys were going to Glastonbury with Peter’s older brother and his friends. Peter and Nial had passed their driving tests and had been working like slaves for months, saving up money to buy two beaten-up old VW camper-vans they’d discovered rotting on a farm in Yate. Their parents, impressed by their determination, had chipped in to make up the shortfall and the insurance premiums. Millie hadn’t stopped talking about going with them to the festival, but the tickets were nearly two hundred pounds. There was no way. Absolutely no way.

‘Mum? Didn’t Isabelle say?’

‘No. And, anyway, I don’t suppose there’ll be any meetings tonight. Not with this news.’

‘There is. They’re going ahead – I asked Nial.’

‘Well, there’s no point in you going to a meeting if you’re not going to Glastonbury, is there? I’m sorry – but we’ve talked about this already.’

There was a long silence at the end of the phone.

‘Millie? Is there any point in you going?’

She gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose not.’

‘OK. Now, you get an early night. School in the morning.’

‘All right.’ Sally hung up and sat for a while with the phone face down on her lap.

Steve leaned across the sofa and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Said something you didn’t like?’

She didn’t answer. On screen the stuff about Lorne had stopped and the newscaster was talking about more spending cuts. Factories closing. The country going down the drain. Jobs disappearing every second.

‘Sally? It’s natural to be upset. It’s so close to home.’

She looked up at the moon again, a longing tugging at her. It would be nice to be able to tell him the truth – that it wasn’t just Lorne, that it wasn’t just Millie. That it was everything. That it was David Goldrab saying, I promise not to call you a cunt, and the thatch falling in, and the stain on the kitchen ceiling, and Isabelle’s look of dismay when Sally had said she was planning to sell the tarot. That it was having no one to turn to. Basically it was because of reality. She wished she could tell him that.

Chapter 9

Bath was nestled, like Rome, in a pocket between seven hills. There were hot springs deep in the earth that kept the old spa baths supplied, kept the people warm and stopped snow settling in the streets. The Romans were the first to build on it, but successive generations had kept up the determination to live there in the warm – whole cities had crumbled and been rebuilt. The past existed in multicoloured strata below the citizens of Bath: like walking on layer cake, every footstep crossed whole lifetimes.

Zoë had grown up in the city. Even though she and Sally had been sent away as children, to separate boarding-schools, even though her parents had moved long ago to Spain, Bath was still her home. Now she lived high on one of the surrounding hills, where the city had spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Victorian terraced house, all her own. The back garden was tiny, with just enough room for a few plant pots and a shed, but the inside was spacious for a person living alone, with three large, high-ceilinged bedrooms on the first floor, and at ground level a single room she’d made by knocking down the interior walls. It stretched thirty-five feet from front to back door and was arranged into two living areas – the kitchen-diner at the front, with a scrubbed wooden table in the bay window, and a TV-watching area at the back, with sofas and her DVDs and CDs. In the middle, where the dividing wall would have been, sat Zoë’s hog.

The bike was a classic – a black 1980 Harley Superglide Shovelhead – and had been her only friend on the year she toured the world. It had cost her two and a half thousand pounds and some long, sleepless nights when a drive belt gave up or the carburettor jets blocked in the middle of an Asian mountain range. But she still treasured it and rode it to work now and then. That night, at half past eleven, when the city outside the bay window was lit up like a carpet of lights, the bike was still cooling off, its engine making little noises. Ben Parris turned from Zoë’s fridge and came to crouch in front of it. He was carrying a saucer of milk, which he put at the front wheel. ‘There you go, favoured object.’ He patted the tyre. ‘Fill your boots. And never forget how loved you are.’

‘It’s not a bloody affectation, you know.’ Sitting at the table next to the window, Zoë upended the bottle of wine into her glass. ‘I don’t have anywhere else to put it. It’s as simple as that.’

‘There’s a back garden.’

‘But no way into it except through the house. I’d have to wheel the bike across the floor every day anyway so I may as well park it there.’

‘How about out the front on the road?’

‘Oh, stop. Now you’re really talking madness.’

‘It’s nice to see something so loved.’

‘Treasured,’ she corrected. ‘Treasured.’

He straightened and came to the table. ‘Mind you …’ he picked up his own glass and turned to look around the room ‘… you in a house at all is a bit of a revelation. Before we got together I sort of pictured you living in the back of a jeep or something. But look.’ He opened his hands, spun around as if he was amazed. ‘You’ve got curtains. And heating. And real live electric lights.’

‘I know. It’s so cool, isn’t it?’ She leaned across to the wall and flicked the kitchen light on and off. ‘I mean, look at that. Magic. Sometimes I even flush the toilet. Just for fun.’

Ben carried his glass around the room, idly turning over pots and glasses and books, studying the photo collage on her wall, which had never been planned but had started as a couple of photos Blu-tacked there to keep them out of the way and grown to cover the entire wall. Talking of first impressions, Amy in the barge had been right, Zoë thought. Ben really was hysterically good-looking. Almost ridiculous that anyone could look that good. And his appearance, she had to admit, did make you wonder about him. She’d worked with him for years and it had come as a total shock to find that, not only was he heterosexual, he was full-throttle heterosexual. When he’d first kissed her, in the car park at a colleague’s drunken retirement party, her response had been to blurt out, ‘Oh, Ben, don’t tit around. What’re we going to do if you come home with me? Share waxing secrets?’

He’d taken a step back, nonplussed. ‘What?’

‘Oh, come on.’ She’d given him a playful poke in the chest. ‘You’re gay.’

‘I am not.’

‘Bet you are.’

‘Bet I’m not.’

‘OK. I bet there’s not a single body hair on you. Bet you go to the barber’s and get a weekly BSC.’

‘A what?’

‘Back, sack and cr …’ She’d trailed off. ‘Ben – come on,’ she said lamely. ‘Don’t mess around.’

‘What? You head case – I’m not gay. Je-susssss.’ He undid his shirt and showed her his chest. ‘And I’ve got body hair. See?’

Zoë glanced down at his chest and clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Good God.’

‘And more down here too. Hang on.’ He was tugging at his zip. ‘I’ll show you.’

And that had been Zoë and Ben spoken for, stuck into a twenty-four-hour mission for Ben to prove to her how ungay he was. She’d emerged from it screaming and giggling and doing a naked jig at the open window, like a rain dance, singing a victorious whoop-whoop-whoop out across the city. That had been five months ago and they were still sleeping together. He wasn’t intimidated by her height, or her messy thatch of red hair, or her never-ending legs, which should have been in a kick-boxing movie. He didn’t care about her drinking and her tempers or the fact she couldn’t cook. He was addicted to her.

Or, rather, he had been. But lately, she thought, something was different. Recently a serious note had crept into the equation. That resilient, good-humoured man, the one who’d come back at Zoë in a blink, had transformed into someone quieter. It wasn’t a change she could put her finger on, just something about the length of silences between sentences. The way his eyes sometimes strayed in the middle of conversations.

Now, while Zoë pulled another bottle from the rack and shoved in the corkscrew, Ben went to the little pantry to get a bag of crisps. He stood for a while, considering what was on the shelves. ‘You’ve got stacks and stacks of food in here.’

She didn’t glance up. ‘Yeah – in case I get ill and can’t go out.’

‘You couldn’t just ask someone to go out and shop for you?’

Zoë stopped struggling with the corkscrew and raised her eyes to him. Just ask someone? Who the hell was she supposed to ask? Her parents weren’t here – she spoke to them sometimes on the phone, visited them in Spain every now and then, when she felt she ought to, but they were thousands of miles away and, honestly, things had always been strained with them. She hadn’t seen Sally in eighteen years – at least, not properly to speak to, just briefly in the street – and that was all the family she had locally. As for friends, well, they were all cops and bikers. Not exactly born nursemaids, any of them.

‘I mean, you’d do it for someone if they needed it, wouldn’t you?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point, then?’

She went back to opening the cork. ‘Being prepared for the unexpected. Didn’t they do a module on that in training? I’m sure I remember it.’ She topped up her glass and set it to one side. Then she reached into her bike satchel and pulled out the file on Lorne. She spread the photos of the post-mortem on the table. Ben emptied the crisps into a bowl, brought it over to the table and looked down at the images.

‘“All like her”?’ Zoë used her forefinger to trace the words on Lorne’s leg. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There are letters missing. Before and after. They’re smudged.’

‘That’s just part of the message. I guess it’s up to us to fill in the rest. If it’s important.’

She picked up the photo of Lorne’s abdomen. The words ‘no one’. ‘What the hell?’ she murmured. ‘I mean, really – he’s nuts, isn’t he? What’s he talking about – “no one”?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That she’s no one to him? That she’s nothing. Dispensable? Or that no one understands him?’

Ben sat down. ‘God knows. Bloody nightmare, isn’t it? And I keep going back to what she said outside the barge: “I’ve had enough.” I spoke to the OIC when she was missing, and there was nothing unusual about the chat she was having, according to her mate at the other end of the line.’

‘Alice.’

‘Alice. So when Lorne said, “I’ve had enough,” what was she talking about? And why didn’t Alice say anything about it?’ He gazed wearily into his drink, sloshed it from side to side. ‘Someone’s going to have to speak to her parents in the morning.’

‘The family liaison’s with them overnight.’

‘I don’t even want to think what they’re going through.’

‘Exactly. Another good reason not to have children. Someone should have read them the warnings on the pack before they got into the procreation thing.’

Ben stopped sloshing his wine and raised his eyes to her. ‘Another good reason not to have children? Is that what you said?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Sounds a bit flippant.’

She shrugged. ‘Not flippant – rational. I just don’t see why people do it. When you look around yourself at the world – see how overcrowded it is – and then you see people having to go through what the Woods are going through, I mean, why do it?’

‘But you don’t not have children because you’re afraid of losing them. That’s crazy.’

Zoë stared at him, a little pulse beating at the back of her head, irrationally annoyed by that comment. He’d made it sound pitying. As if not wanting children meant she was ill, or defective. ‘Crazy or not, you won’t ever catch me with a football up my sweater.’

Ben gave her a long, puzzled look. A car went by on the street outside and a cloud covered the moon. After a while he stood. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I think I’ll go to bed now. Got a big day tomorrow.’

She raised her chin, surprised by his tone. His hand on her shoulder was friendly, but it wasn’t the touch of a lover. ‘OK,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I won’t disturb you when I come up.’

He left the room and she sat for a long time, gazing at the place on the stairs his feet had disappeared, wondering what on earth she’d said. Wondering if the natural evolution of her life was always going to be the same – always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Sally had always been the baby of the family. Dolly Daydream. Wide blue eyes and blonde ringlets. Everyone’s favourite – and completely lost now that the family was gone and there was no one left to look after her. Once, she’d been close to her parents, but with the divorce something had changed. Maybe it was embarrassment, shame, a deep sense that she’d let them down somehow, but she’d found herself making excuses not to visit them in Spain, and slowly, over the months, their contact had dwindled to a phone call a week – sometimes Millie would answer and speak to them and Sally wouldn’t even know about it until later. As for Zoë … well, Zoë was never going to come into the equation. She was something high up in the police now, and wouldn’t want anything to do with Sally – the spoiled, idiot doll, propped up in the corner with her vacant grin, always looking in the wrong direction and missing what was important in life.

Missing things like Melissa, happening right under her nose.

Big, tanned, leggy Melissa, with her fat frizz of blonde hair, her tennis player’s shoulders and loud Australian accent. She’d crept into their lives through those fatal gaps in Sally’s attention and, before anyone could draw breath, she was the next Mrs Julian Cassidy, starting a whole new chapter of Cassidys. According to Millie, the baby, Adelayde, had taken over the house at Sion Road with her playpens and bouncy chairs in every doorway. Melissa had dug up the lawn and replaced it with gravel-filled beds, huge desert plants and walkways for Adelayde. Sally didn’t mind, though. She had decided there was only one way to approach the divorce – amiably. To accept it and welcome it as a new start. She didn’t miss Sion Road. The house seemed, in her memory, to be murky and distant, always cloaked in cloud or orange electric light. And anyway, she told herself, Peppercorn Cottage was beautiful, with its views and clear, natural light that just fell out of the sky and landed flat on the house and garden.

Peppercorn was hers. The terms of the divorce were that Julian would pay Millie’s school fees until she was eighteen and buy the cottage for her and Sally to live in. The solicitor said Sally could have got more, but she didn’t like the thought of clawing for things. It just seemed wrong. Julian had set up a special kind of mortgage on Peppercorn. Called an offset, he explained, it meant she could borrow against the house should she need to. Sally didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of it, but she did grasp that Peppercorn was acting as a kind of a cushion for her. She and Millie had moved out of Sion Road one November weekend, carrying their suitcases and boxes of art equipment through drifts of fallen leaves and into Peppercorn. They’d turned the heating up high and bought boxes of pastries from the deli on George Street for the removals men. Sally hadn’t given a thought to the overdraft she kept dipping into. Not until the following year, when the warning letters from the bank began to fall on the doormat.

‘What on earth have you spent it all on? Just because the overdraft is there it doesn’t mean you’ve got to use it. They’ll take Peppercorn away from you if you’re not careful.’

That winter, Julian had met her in a coffee shop on George Street. It was sleeting outside and the floor in the café was soaking from all the people who’d come off the street and dropped snow on it. Julian and Sally had sat at the back of the shop so Melissa couldn’t walk by and catch sight of them.

‘I don’t know anyone who could go through that much money in a year. Honestly, Sally, what have you been doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said lamely, completely at a loss. ‘Truly I don’t.’

‘Well, I bet it hasn’t gone on maintaining the house. That thatch’ll need redoing before next winter. Buying things for people, I suppose. You’re like a child when it comes to giving presents.’

Sally put her fingers on her temples and concentrated on not crying. It was probably true. She didn’t like to turn up at someone’s house without something for them. Probably it came from when she was a little girl. From the time she’d do anything to make Zoë smile. Anything at all. She’d save up her pocket money and, instead of spending it on herself, she’d wait until she overheard Zoë talking about something she wanted in one of Bath’s shops, then sneak out and buy it. Zoë never seemed to know what to do with the gift. She’d stand with it in her hand and look at it awkwardly, as if she suspected it might explode in her face. As if she didn’t quite know what expression to arrange her features into. Sally wished she could talk to her sister now. She wished there wasn’t this awful cold distance between them.

‘I’ve never had to think about money,’ she told Julian now. ‘You always took care of it. It’s not a very good excuse, I know. And you’re right – the thatch has got a hole in it. Something about course fixings. There are squirrels and rats in it, looking for food. Someone’s told me it’s going to be ten thousand to fix.’

Julian sighed. ‘I can’t keep propping you up, Sally. I’m under a lot of pressure at work and things are very fraught at home with the baby not far away. Melissa’s finding it hard not to get tense about money. She wouldn’t be happy at all to hear I was helping you still.’ He screwed up his napkin and felt in his pocket for his wallet. It was a new leather affair with his initials embossed in gold. From it he flipped out a cheque book. ‘Two thousand pounds.’ He began scribbling. ‘After that my hands are tied. You’ll have to find other ways of supporting yourself.’

If a change in life could be marked with a point in time, the way a signpost marks a fork in the road, or an island divides a river, Sally looked back at her life and saw two markers: the first, when, during a childhood squabble with Zoë, Sally had fallen off a bed on her hand, an event their parents had treated with unexpected seriousness, behaving suddenly as if an unspeakable darkness had descended on the family, and, the second, that day with Julian – the day when she had, at last, grown up. Sitting hunched over her cup of hot chocolate, her feet wet and cold, her propped-up umbrella leaking a pitiful puddle on the floor, she saw the world in its plainest colours. Saw it was serious. It was real. The divorce was real and the overdraft was real. There really existed things like bankruptcy and repossessed houses and children living on sink estates. They didn’t happen Out There. They happened In Here. In her life.

The six months that had followed were some of the hardest of her life. She got herself a job, she traded in her car for a smaller Ford Ka, she learned how to work out interest rates and how to write letters to banks. She heated only the kitchen and Millie’s bedroom all winter, and never used the tumble-drier. There always seemed to be bird dirt on at least one of Millie’s school shirts when it came in from the line – that, or when it was really cold, frost making the clothes as stiff as boards. But she persevered. It was an uphill struggle and even now it was like running to keep still. She didn’t turn to her parents for help – they’d have been devastated to know the state she was in and, besides, it would get back to Zoë eventually. Zoë would never have got herself into a predicament like this. Zoë had always been the clever one. Amazing. She’d never have ended up accepting jobs from people like David Goldrab. She’d judo-kick him over the nearest hedge before she did that.

Still, it had to be done, she thought, as she got up the morning after Lorne had been found, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make breakfast. There weren’t any choices in this new world of hers. She switched on the kettle, set a pan of milk on the hob, arranged cups and plates on the table. Steve was still asleep so she didn’t put the radio on. Anyway, it would all be about Lorne Wood and she didn’t know if she could face listening to any more of that. She put some croissants into the oven. The tarot cards were still sitting in an untidy pile on the table where she’d dumped them last night. Now she paused and studied the one of Millie. It wasn’t that the paint was fading, she saw. It was that something corrosive had blistered the surface, worming and chewing at Millie’s face. Feeling suddenly cold, she raised her eyes and looked out of the window at the fields that strained limitlessly to the bottom of the sky. The canal where Lorne had died was miles away. Miles and miles and miles.

You don’t believe in stuff like that, do you?

Of course not.

She turned the card face down and went to switch on the kettle. Millie was safe. She was fifteen. She knew how to look after herself. And, anyway, sooner or later you had to learn to take a step back.

Chapter 10

On the other side of town, in her living room, Zoë stood with a cup of coffee in her hand and studied the photos on her wall. Most of them came from the trip she’d taken eighteen years ago. Just her and the bike. She’d been everywhere. Mongolia, Australia, China, Egypt, South America. Getting the money together for the adventure had been one of the toughest things she’d ever done – it had just about ripped the skin from her back. Had taken her places, made her do things she never wanted to think about again. But the trip itself turned out to be the most important time in her life. It had taught her all she knew about self-sufficiency, survival, determination. It had sprung her from the trap she’d lived in since childhood.

Lorne Wood would never have the chance to learn any of those things, she thought now, as the sun powered into her kitchen through the bay windows. That was a whole chapter of Lorne’s life that would never be opened.

She put down the coffee and wandered around the room, opening cupboards and drawers until she found a tube of Slazenger tennis balls. They’d been there for two or three summers, since she’d got it into her head she was going to beat every woman in the constabulary tennis club at Portishead. She’d done it within six months. Then she turned her attention to the men. But none of the men would play with her after that, so she’d got bored and dropped it.

Ben was still in bed, still asleep. Zoë sat on the sofa arm with her back to the stairs and popped open the tin. The balls smelt of rubber and old summer grass. She tipped one out and bounced it once on the floor, then blew on it to clean off the fluff and grit. She rubbed it on her sleeve, opened her mouth wide, and pushed the ball in as far as it would go.

It went in surprisingly easily, lodging at its widest point between her teeth – half in, half out of her mouth. The dry, chemical-tasting nap pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth, kicking in the gag reflex. The impulse was to rip the ball out – she really believed she could hear the gristle in her jaw joint popping – but she dug her fingers into the arm of the sofa, closed her eyes and tried to breathe through it, forcing herself to picture the ball being taped into her mouth. Her body shook, sweat popped under her arms, little black and white stars burst against her retinas. And then, when she thought the skin at the edges of her mouth would split open, like Lorne’s had, she tugged the ball out and let it tumble to the floor, taking with it thick bands of saliva.

She sat back against the sofa, shaking, sucking in breath after breath, while on the floor the ball bounced and bounced. It hit the curtains and came to a juddering halt.

Chapter 11

‘Hey. I found you.’ Steve stood in the kitchen doorway. He was naked, rubbing his eyes and stretching his arms above his head. ‘God, I slept well. I love it here.’

‘Sit down.’ Sally got an elastic band out of a drawer, bound Millie’s card to the outside of the pack and pushed it into the back of one of the drawers. She turned to check the milk that was heating on the stove. ‘I’ve got to get going. Got to be at work at nine.’

‘No time for hanky-panky, then?’

‘I’ve got to be at work.’

He smiled and stretched some more. His hands found the low ceiling and he used it to press himself down, bending his knees, lengthening his body and cracking the sleep out of his muscles. He was different in every way from Julian, who had been pale and hairless with soft arms and womanly hips. Steve was big, with dark hair and a solid, suntanned neck. His legs were hard and hairy, like a centaur’s. Looking at him now, stretching, was like watching one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy studies come to life.

She stood at the hob, whisking the milk into froth, shooting him surreptitious looks as he wandered around, yawning and checking inside the fridge. It had been four months since they’d got together and she still couldn’t quite believe he was here. Steve had given her sex on the brain: if she had even half an hour between cleaning jobs, she’d scurry over to his house and they’d end up naked on the kitchen floor. Or on the stairs, halfway up to the bedroom. It was totally different from being with Julian. Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. At thirty-five.

Steve was in ‘corporate espionage’. Sally wasn’t entirely sure what that meant – but he always seemed to be dealing with people who lived in remote and glamorous places. His address book, which she’d seen lying open at his house one day, was crammed with addresses in countries like the Emirates, Liberia and South Africa, and more than once he’d had to set his alarm for the middle of the night so he could get up and take a conference call with someone in Peru or Bolivia. He wore a suit when he left the house in the morning, but in her imagination he wore a black polo-neck and jeans and had secret knives fitted in his soles. She had no idea why he wanted to be with someone as stupid as she was. Maybe it was because she was so easy. He only had to look at her and she’d roll backwards on to the bed, her legs open, a blank, grateful smile on her face.

‘So.’ He linked his fingers and cracked the knuckles. Rolled his head. ‘Where’re you working today?’

‘North.’

‘Not Goldrab again?’

‘No. Not today.’ She spooned frothy milk on to two cups of coffee, shook cocoa powder on to them from a metal flour-shaker and put a cup in front of him. She went back to the oven and busied herself with laying croissants on a tray. ‘Yesterday he offered me another job. Cleaning still, but doing the admin for his house too.’

‘Are you going to take it?’

‘It’s a lot of money.’

Steve stirred his coffee, thinking about this. ‘Look,’ he said, after a while, ‘I’ve never said anything, but the truth is I kind of worry about you when you’re there.’

‘Worry? Why?’

‘Put it this way – I know a lot about him. A lot I’d rather not know.’

She slammed the oven door, straightened and turned to him, pushing her hair from her forehead. ‘How?’

He laughed. ‘How long have you lived in Bath? You know that Disneyland ride, Small World, with the little kids singing, “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears”? That’s Bath for you – a small, small world. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.’

She got jam and butter from the fridge, collected knives and napkins, thinking about this. He was right. They all sort of knew each other, or of each other – and people talked and gossiped so you never felt entirely disconnected from others, no matter if you hadn’t seen them for years. It was the way she got information about what Zoë was doing, for example (she didn’t dare ask Mum and Dad – for years she’d never spoken a word about Zoë to them, knowing the spectres it might raise if she did). The grapevine was also the way she’d first become aware of Steve – in the vague, amorphous way you got to know about the other parents at a school, even though his two children were much older than Millie and now at university. He and his ex had got divorced, it turned out, on the same day as Sally and Julian. Steve had heard vaguely about her separation through the grapevine and one day, months later, he’d seen her sitting in traffic in the pink HomeMaids Smart car. He’d called the number on its side and got the manager to put a call through to her. That was the thing about Bath. Really, it was just a big village. Sometimes it was a bit creepy. As if she couldn’t move without everyone knowing.

But, looking at Steve now, she didn’t quite believe the small-village scenario explained how he knew about David.

‘He’s not one of your …’ She searched for the word. What would he call him? A customer? A client? She knew so little about his job. ‘He hasn’t employed you, has he?’

‘No.’

‘But you still know a lot about him?’

Steve frowned. ‘Yeah … well,’ he said vaguely. ‘Maybe this is a bad time to talk about it. You know, first thing in the morning.’ He drew a newspaper nearer and began to read.

But Sally persisted. ‘I don’t know anything about your job. I feel a bit in the dark sometimes.’

He looked up at her. He had very clear grey eyes. ‘Sally, that’s the big drawback. If you know a bit about my job you know the lot.’

‘And then you’d have to kill me.’

‘And then I’d have to kill you.’ He gave an apologetic smile.

‘I do have to be careful. That’s all.’

‘But I work for him. And he is a bit … weird. Maybe you know something I should. Something important.’

He pursed his lips and tapped the rim of his cup thoughtfully with his nail, as if he was wondering what he could risk saying. After a while he pushed the cup away. ‘OK – I can tell you this much. Goldrab’s not paying me, it’s the other way round. I’m being paid to investigate him.’

‘Investigate him? Why?’

‘That’s where the soul baring stops. I’m sorry. If you have to work for him, I can’t stop you. All I ask is you keep your wits about you.’

‘Oh,’ she said, feeling a little naïve not to have cottoned on to this before. ‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘A while now. Months. That’s pretty normal – a lot of my subjects sit on my books for years. But if you want the truth, the pressure on Goldrab’s been upping lately. In the last couple of weeks my clients are getting a bit pushier about him.’

‘Do you mean Mooney?’

Steve put down his cup and stared at her. ‘How do you know that name?’

‘I think I must have heard you talking to him on the phone.’

‘Then forget it. Please. Forget it.’

She gave a nervous little laugh. ‘You’re scaring me now.’

‘Well, maybe you should be scared. Or cautious, at least. Goldrab is a nasty man, Sally. Very nasty. And the fact he’s walking around free and not banged up on some life sentence is only a matter of fluke. Seriously, forget you ever heard that name. Please. For both our sakes.’

Chapter 12

‘There are cats at your back door.’

Zoë was sitting at the table looking at the post-mortem photos of Lorne, distractedly rubbing her aching jaw, when Ben came into the living room, fully dressed, doing up the cuffs on his shirt. She hadn’t heard him get up, hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. He’d had less than five hours’ sleep but he was immaculate. He put his forehead to the glass door and peered down at the cats. ‘They’re eating.’

Zoë packed the photos into her courier’s satchel and put it next to the front door. She switched the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’

‘You’ve fed them,’ he said curiously. ‘They’ve got saucers out there.’

‘So?’

‘It’s kind of you. A secret kind habit.’

‘It’s not kind, Ben. I’m not being kind to them. I feed them so they don’t wake the neighbourhood up. Let’s not have an awards ceremony over it, eh?’

He turned and gave her a long look. As if she disappointed him and was solely responsible for driving all the fun and light out of his life. She shook her head, half cross with herself. Last night when she’d gone to bed he’d been asleep. Or pretending to sleep – she hadn’t been able to tell. But their conversation about children had allowed something thin and cold and cunning to come in from the dark and slide silently between them. She knew it, he knew it. She made the coffee, banging around, spooning instant granules into mugs and slopping a little milk in.

‘There,’ she said, handing him one of them. ‘Do you want anything else?’

Ben was silent for a while. He looked at the mug, then at her.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Zoë, I’ve been thinking …’

Christ. She sat down at the table, her heart sinking. Here we go. ‘Thinking? About what?’

There was a pause. He started to say something, then changed his mind.

‘What, Ben? Spit it out – you’ve been thinking about what?’

Something in his eyes dimmed a little. He shrugged, half turned towards the window. ‘About the phone call.’

‘The phone call? What phone call?’

‘The one Lorne had with Alice. There’s something in it that’s important. Something that didn’t come out when Lorne was reported missing.’

Zoë didn’t move. He’d sidestepped. He’d ducked saying it, whatever ‘it’ was. She stood, tipped her coffee into the sink, found her car keys in her pocket. ‘I’m taking the car today,’ she said. ‘Do you want a lift in or are you going to drive yourself?’

Chapter 13

The superintendent at Bath was in his late fifties. He had curly blond hair kept very short and the sort of skin that burned easily. He’d started life in Firearms, then come over to CID and regretted the move to this day. He still wore a blue and yellow National Rifle Association pin in his lapel, had a wall covered with photos of himself in the firing range and seemed to hold every member of his team responsible for his big life-mistake. That morning he looked as if he’d far rather be at the club shooting the crap out of some ‘advancing Hun’ than standing at the helm of the biggest murder case that had hit the city in years.

‘This is a nasty, nasty crime. Very, very serious. I don’t need to tell you that – you’ve all seen the post-mortem pictures, you know what’s going on here. But I want to remind you to keep clear heads on this. Concentrate. There are lots of things to cover. Most of them you probably know, but let’s put them in a bundle so nothing’s missed.’ He held up his coffee cup to indicate the points outlined on the whiteboard behind him. ‘To summarize. Lorne – popular girl, very pretty, as you can see. Big circle of friends – though so far no one’s saying anything about boyfriends. First thing I want to run through is the list of items to flag up for the search teams. Bits and pieces here, but mostly things missing from Lorne’s personal effects.’

He pointed to the picture from the mortuary of Lorne’s bloodied left ear. The killer had ripped her earring out, leaving the lobe sliced from midway to bottom. A photo of her other ear showed the remaining earring intact. ‘Number one, an earring. Quite an unusual design. Apparently it had been bought for her in Tangiers by her father. See this filigree? So …’ He nodded in the direction of the DCs ranked at the back of the room, arms folded across their chests. They had been taken partly from the ranks at Bath station and partly from the Major Crime Investigation Unit. ‘One of you. Get that added to the search list.’

Zoë stood near the front, her hands in the pockets of her black jeans. Her tongue was thick with last night’s wine, her muscles twitchy with all the coffee she’d drunk this morning to jump-start the day, and her jaw was still hurting from having the tennis ball in her mouth. Ben was leaning against the desk next to her, his arms folded. Usually on the way in to work she’d keep up with his car on her bike, sidewinder him in traffic. Today, as she drove in to work, she’d kept her distance behind his car, feeling she suddenly didn’t have the right to fun and games and flirtation.

‘Her phone’s missing. Switched off. But I’m comforted to know that Telephony at the bureau has got a watch on it. Am I right?’

The sergeant who headed the team’s intelligence cell nodded. ‘Vodafone are a nice network,’ he said, ‘the only one in the UK that do live cell site analysis. The moment that phone is switched on they’ll get a ping on it and we’ll know.’

‘Except,’ said the superintendent, ‘chances that’ll happen are, let’s be realistic, zero. More likely he’s slung it, so I hope it’s been added to the search-team briefings. It’s an iPhone, white.’

He set his cup down and picked up a girl’s fleecy pink gilet. With his finger stuck through the loop at the neck he dangled it in front of the officers. ‘Mum is adamant she was wearing something like this when she left home. It wasn’t among what we recovered from the crime scene, so put an asterisk next to that for the search teams. And, last, there’s a tarpaulin, which you’ve seen in the photos – we’ve trawled around the barge owners down there and they’re all saying the same thing. It’s standard stuff for a barge, a tarp to cover the wood and coal and what-have-you – but still no one’s missing one. They get a lot of overnight moorings in that stretch of the canal, casual since you don’t pay for the first twenty-four hours, so bear that in mind. Have a word with all the boathouses and someone speak to British Waterways to find out what the water bailiff saw moored there overnight. Someone get photos of the tarp distributed – and the fleece. Either get Exhibits to have another photo of the earring done or get the PM one Photoshopped so it hasn’t got the dead ear attached. Then get it to the press office – the media can have both of these. Ben? Zoë? Can I leave it to you to decide how best to divvy that up?’

Zoë nodded. Ben held up his thumb.

‘Good. Now …’ The superintendent rubbed his hands together, as if he was about to announce an unexpected treat. ‘You can see we’ve got a lot of meat to chew on, a lot of standard routes to walk up, but there’s something else I want you to put into your pipes. We’ve got a visitor today.’

Everyone in the room automatically turned their eyes to the young woman who’d been sitting patiently in the corner throughout the meeting. With long, well-groomed dark hair, she was very neat and quiet, dressed in a white blouse and very tight bottlegreen trousers with high-heeled sandals just peeping out under the hems. Her skin was lightly tanned, her nails polished and well kept. Zoë had noticed a lot of the men looking at her.

‘This is Debbie Harry. Not, I am reliably informed, related to the other Debbie Harry.’

‘Sadly.’ Debbie shook her head ruefully. ‘In my dreams, you know.’

One or two of the men laughed. Goodsy, standing in the back row, whispered in his neighbour’s ear. Zoë could guess what he was saying.

‘Now, you’re from Bristol University, it says here, and you’re a forensic psychiatrist.’

‘Psychologist.’

‘Psychologist, sorry. A bit like Cracker?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Funny.’ The superintendent put a hand up to his mouth and said, in a stage whisper, to the team, ‘Doesn’t look much like Robbie Coltrane to me.’

This time almost everyone laughed. Not Zoë, though. She clearly recalled the superintendent saying over and over again that he’d never, ever, let a ‘fucking head doctor’ within a mile of his incident room. That they were all quacks and poofs and had their heads up their arses. Evidently he’d never met a ‘head doctor’ who looked like this. To see her, you’d think honey would ooze out of her mouth the moment it opened. She got up and came to the front, leaning back on the desk casually, as if this was her own lecture room, half crossing one leg over the other. Just enough to be flirtatious without being totally provocative. Clever girl, Zoë thought. She knew the effect it would have on a roomful of men.

‘Look,’ said Debbie, a bright, open expression on her face. ‘This is going to be a big leap of faith for some of you if I ask you to approach this not from an evidentiary perspective but from a psychoanalytical perspective, to ask you to think in terms of profiling the offender. Probably sounds like voodoo to a lot of you.’ She smiled. ‘But if you’re prepared to make that leap of faith then, I can assure you, I’ll be right alongside you.’

Zoë took a long, patient breath. She’d been here before, heard psychologists talking the talk. Spiels about anger excitation, power reassurance, long analyses of why the bastard had done what he did, what he was thinking when he did it, what his eye colour was, what underpants he wore, what he’d had for breakfast the day he did it. In her experience they weren’t worth much as investigative tools, and sometimes they were positively destructive. Still, some investigators swore by them and she could see from the glowy light in the superintendent’s eyes that he was a new convert. Amazing what a nice pair of legs and a smile could do.

‘First,’ Debbie said clearly, ‘I suppose the question that’s in the front of everyone’s minds, the biggest one, is, what’s the writing all about?’ She turned her eyes to the whiteboard where the blown-up photos of Lorne’s abdomen had been pinned. Next to them, in a round, cursive hand, the words had been written out.

No one.

‘I wonder,’ Debbie said ruminatively, ‘I wonder – is that a message to us? Could be. Or to Lorne? Or a statement to the killer himself? Let’s think carefully about that wording: “no one”. Does that mean Lorne is no one to him? A nothing? Worthless? Or is it something else? Does it mean that he’s a no one? That no one cares. No one understands me. I’m inclined to think it’s something like that – which would mean we have someone here with very low self-esteem. He could be the type to form unnaturally intense relationships with people – the type to become jealous or aggrieved easily. Now that he’s killed Lorne he could enter a period of self-recrimination. There may be a suicide attempt. There may already have been a suicide attempt, so I’d suggest that would be something you could check on – suicides and admissions since the time of her death.’ Debbie turned back to the board. She was enjoying this. Like a reception teacher with a class full of bright-faced children gazing up at her raptly. ‘Let’s move on to the next sentence. He’s written something on her thigh that looks like “all like her”. Any ideas on that?’ She scratched her head, a subtle suggestion to the team that they were thinking with her, that she wasn’t just cramming her theories down their throats. ‘Any thoughts?’

The men shrugged, waiting for her to provide the answer.

‘OK.’ She linked her hands round her knees and tipped her head shyly. ‘Let me be a bit bold. Let me take you by the hand and lead you out on a limb. Let me say that, in my opinion, Lorne knew her killer.’

There was a ripple of attention. People murmuring among themselves. Zoë glanced at Ben to see his reaction. His head was lowered and he was busily scribbling notes to himself on his customary yellow legal pad, probably to stop himself laughing out loud, she thought.

Debbie held up her hand to quieten the muttering. ‘I know – a leap of faith, but let me just work with it for a moment. What do we know about Lorne?’

‘That she was popular,’ said the intelligence cell sergeant. ‘Had lots of friends, lots of male admirers. So that sentence could be “they all like her”.’

‘Exactly,’ Debbie said triumphantly, beaming at him. ‘Exactly. This is a direct comment about Lorne. And, in case you think I’m grasping at straws to support a flimsy theory, let me say something else. I’ve analysed Lorne’s tragic injuries, and those just confirm my conclusions about who attacked her that night. He definitely approached her from the front. The pathologist said it was a single blow that incapacitated her, and caused the bleeding to the nose. There are no signs she tried to run – no screams heard. Her attacker had got really close to her, really close, and she’d allowed it. Now, would she have done that if she didn’t know him? No, is the answer. She wouldn’t. In fact …’ she did a little mime of a tightrope walker – arms out, trying to keep her balance ‘… now I’m out on my limb – whoa! – I may as well go all the way and say I wouldn’t rule out that the offender may have had, or at least believed he was having, a relationship with Lorne. I also think he could be quite near Lorne’s age. Maybe a year or two older – and probably the same ethnic and socio-political background. Could even be a member of her peer group.’

The superintendent held up his hand. ‘A question.’

Oh, please, Zoë thought, ask her why she’s talking such crap. Go on, ask her.

‘You say he’s about her age?’

‘Within a year or so, yes.’

‘And what makes you think he’s known to her?’

‘She had a blow to the face. That’s a classic sign. Depersonalization, we call it. But before I go any further …’ Debbie gave them a million-dollar smile, with the expensive dentistry on show ‘… I’m going to come back off my limb. See? I’m nice and safe in the tree now, and I want to make one thing very, very clear. OK?’

‘OK,’ one or two voices said.

‘I want it clear that my thoughts are only for guidance. Only for guidance and only my opinion. You’re all adults, and I don’t want to be patronizing, but you should always keep an open mind. Please.’ She sighed as if this was the one drawback in her job – the way everyone took her word as gospel. ‘I reiterate: you must keep an open mind.’

‘Christ Christ Christ.’ After the meeting Zoë swung into Ben’s office without knocking. She was the only one in the building allowed to do that. She dropped into a chair and folded her arms, her legs pushed out, heels dug into the carpet. ‘Can you fucking believe it? The superintendent is being led by his dick. Known to her killer? The same age? All this from her injuries? “This blow to her face is a classic sign of depersonalization”? I mean, shit, Ben, it’s the same injury you see in about eighty per cent of the muggings we go to and most of those victims had never met their attacker before. Don’t you remember those photos of depersonalization they showed us on that course – that was de-bloody-personalization. Eyeballs out. Things carved into the forehead. Noses cut off. Twenty-seven wounds to the face. But Debbie “not the Debbie” Harry is saying a single blow to the …’ She trailed off. Ben wasn’t shaking his head ruefully, regretting the appalling situation. Instead he was sitting in silence. Watching her without expression.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What’s that look for? You don’t agree with her, do you?’

‘Of course not – she treated us like two-year-olds.’

‘But?’

‘What she said about the wording wasn’t totally off piste. Some of it kind of had merit.’

‘Kind of had merit?’ Zoë stared at him open-mouthed. She couldn’t believe this, just couldn’t believe it. ‘No. You’re just getting your own back because of whatever I said last night that you didn’t like.’

‘I’m saying it because it sounds feasible.’

‘Feasible? Try irresponsible. Have you thought how dangerous it is, screwing down our target to someone in his teens? All those Neanderthals in the incident room with their tongues on the floor at the sight of a girl in tight trousers who can use big words are going to set off with such narrow parameters that the killer could walk straight past them, and if he’s not the white middle-class public-school boy Debbie said he should be they’ll let him go. It’s wrong on so many different levels. And it doesn’t even feel right. It doesn’t feel like someone that young would have the confidence to do what Lorne’s killer did.’

‘I disagree.’

‘It’s a free world, Ben. And it’s good we disagree. As long as you remember to keep an open mind. Even Tracey Sunshine said that.’

‘Of course. Of course I will.’ He pushed back his immaculate cuff and checked his watch. ‘So, nine o’clock now. What’re you going to take?’

‘Well, I’m not going to be interviewing schoolboys, I can promise you that. I might do something really radical – like try to establish an investigation based on the evidence. You know – like we were trained? I might try to find out which barge that tarp came from.’ She pushed her chair back, got to her feet. ‘Or, even better, I’ll meet up with the liaison officer. Go and speak to the Wood family. You?’

‘Alice Morecombe, the friend on the phone. I’ve got to find out about that last conversation. And then …’

She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘And then?’

‘I’ll take some of MCIU up to Faulkener’s. Speak to all the boys in Lorne’s year – and everyone in the year above her too.’

She shook her head resignedly. ‘Does this mean we’re at war?’

‘Don’t be silly. We’re grown-ups. Aren’t we?’

She held his eyes. ‘I hope so, Ben. I really do.’ She looked at him for a bit longer, then checked her watch. ‘A drink tonight? Depending on how the day pans out?’

‘Sure.’ He gave a brief smile, then swivelled his computer screen round and began entering his password.

‘I’ll see you later, then?’ She watched his fingers on the keys. ‘About seven?’

‘Seven.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the computer. ‘Sounds perfect.’

Chapter 14

Zoë would have driven the Harley anywhere – but the superintendent just hated the thought of her rolling up to interviews in her leathers, so for police business she used the car: the ancient Mondeo she’d got cheaply when the force had offloaded some of its fleet. The Woods lived out near Batheaston and to get there she had to drive past the exclusive Faulkener’s School where Ben had sent his team to interview the schoolkids. She slowed the Mondeo, peered up the rhododendron-lined driveway and saw all the marked and unmarked cars parked up. Ranks of them. Already she knew where this case was going: the superintendent was going to throw all the resources after Debbie Harry’s theories. Zoë could see all the swimming-against-the-tide that lay in her future.

She speeded up, passing the school, then almost as quickly slowed again. About a hundred yards ahead, pulled on to the kerb, there was a purple Mitsubishi Shogun jeep. It was a real number, tricked out like a pimp-mobile with clamped-on running-boards, angel-eye headlights and a bush snorkel. Sitting in it was a notorious piece of local pond life – Jake Drago, otherwise known as Jake the Peg, for some reason that eluded her. Skinny and always fidgeting, Jake the Peg had spent almost half his adult life inside, mostly for stupid brawls and drug-dealing. But for the last two years, people said, he’d got his act together, had found some way of staying on the straight. Zoë doubted it. She pulled the car over and got out, tucking her shirt into her jeans as she walked back along the pavement to him.

‘Hey.’ Jake got out of the car as she approached. He slammed the door, leaned back against it, folded his arms and gave her a long look up and down, taking in the high-heeled cowboy boots and the black shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

‘Hey, Jake.’ She stopped a pace away, smiled nicely. It was true what they said: he looked different. He’d cleaned up, had put on weight and muscle. He wore a tight white vest that his pumped-up pecs pushed against. His dark hair was cut short at the sides with the top gelled up. He was very tanned and oiled and, frankly, to her eyes, looked like he was on his way to a disco. ‘I see you haven’t learned much over the years. In the States you get out of a car like that when a cop comes along and you’re liable to get yourself shot. Here, you’re just liable to make me wonder if you’re hiding something in there. And then I’d have to search the car, or breathalyse you, and at that point it all gets really tedious.’

‘How do I know you’re a cop?’

‘Oh, please.’ She gave a laugh – a low, forced laugh – and looked around herself as if there might be someone to share the joke with. ‘Please. Don’t even go there. Let’s not demean ourselves.’

‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want? I want to look at your muscle car.’ She put a hand on the bonnet. ‘It’s totally mint, Peg. Suits you.’

‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘I saw. Sitting there in the morning sun. Saw you were in a hurry.’

He scowled. ‘This is starting to piss me off.’

She looked across at the entrance to the school with its big ornate gates and the unmarked police cars. You wouldn’t know what they were unless you were police yourself. ‘What’re you doing outside the school? Why’d you pick here to sit?’

He gave her a tight, twitchy look. Then he smiled, showing the glint of a diamond set in his front tooth. ‘I’m a perv. Didn’t you know? Watching all the girls in their little short skirts?’ He rubbed his thighs. ‘Fuck, but they make me hot. Make me think about things my probation officer says I didn’t ought to think about.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – still taking me for an idiot after all these years. You’re not a nonce, Peggers. You’re a lowlife piece of turd that one day, God willing, the good citizens of Bath will scrape off the bottom of their shoes for ever – but you’re not a nonce. So what is it? You dealing to the spoiled little girls and boys in there?’

‘I told you – I was resting. Closing my eyes.’

‘You heard about the murder? That’s the sort of thing that gets around.’

‘Course I heard.’

‘You know when it happened?’

‘Yes. The night before last.’

‘And you know where?’

‘Over there.’ He nodded in the direction of the canal. ‘They found her down there, didn’t they?’

‘And you didn’t see anything?’

‘Me? Me? Nothing. Never saw a thing.’

‘You sure? I mean, I could have a rummage around in that disgusting pimped-up heap of shit you’re driving, you sad bastard, and take you in. Now, are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’ He tucked his hands into his armpits and fixed his eyes on her chin. ‘A hundred per cent.’

‘It’s just, you know, I’m a woman so I’ve got a memory like an elephant, can never wipe that slate clean. Know what I’m saying? And the thing I will never forget about you, Peggie, is you lying to the police. Every time you get your arse hauled in you tell lies. Now – tell me. Did you see anything?’

He blinked at her. A line of sweat had started on his lip. He lowered his head and kicked at the dirt a little. ‘Dunno. I might’ve done. Might’ve seen her with one of the boys. Walking down there, near the canal.’

‘One of the boys? What do you mean, “one of the boys”?’

‘Schoolkid. They went into that wood over there.’

For a moment Zoë genuinely didn’t know what to say. She stared at the top of his head, gleaming and gelled, thinking that Debbie Harry would have loved to hear that come out of his mouth. To confirm her theory. But then Jake shifted and kicked the dirt some more and twitched and avoided her eyes, and suddenly she got it. He hadn’t seen Lorne with anyone – he hadn’t seen a thing. He’d been sitting out here all day, dealing to the pupils of Faulkener’s, and probably some of them had already told him that the police were questioning all the boys. He wanted her off his case, so he was just parroting back what he thought she wanted to hear.

She sighed. Swung her keys round on her index finger. Another unmarked car had just pulled into the driveway of the school. Swimming against the tide.

‘Pleasant though it always is to pass the time of day with you, Peggie,’ she said nicely, ‘I’ll let you get back to work now. I mean, you’re going to need the money, what with those rear indicators being illegal and the fines I’m going to slap on you if I see you hanging around here again.’

Chapter 15

The Woods’ house was set in gardens that rambled for almost an acre up from the canal towpath. The narrow driveway led through an imposing grove of redwood trees, with well-tended lawns stretching away on either side, then clusters of outbuildings and greenhouses. A ride-on mower sat in the sun and a wheelbarrow full of dead bindweed had been abandoned on the hard-standing. The house itself was comparatively small and unprepossessing – a thirties pebble-dashed box, neat and well maintained but unimaginative. A uPVC conservatory had been added at the back, inside which sat floral armchairs and a dining table covered with a white linen tablecloth.

Zoë parked and walked around the side of the house. The liaison officer the family had been assigned had warned the Woods of Zoë’s visit. He’d told them she had no news, that she was coming to ask questions, so they wouldn’t all gather to stare expectantly at her. Lorne’s father was in the garden and didn’t even look up when she passed. He wore a swagman’s hat, complete with dangling corks, a Singha beer T-shirt, and shorts. He was using a chainsaw to cut a felled birch into logs, and although he must have seen her, he kept his back turned to the house. According to the paperwork he was a project manager in the construction business. Zoë guessed he wasn’t of the right social stratum to be down the boozer mounting posses to lynch whoever it was who’d killed his daughter. But he’d be picturing it nevertheless. He’d be having intellectual arguments with himself, huge battles of reason, about the role and logic of the justice system. About forgiveness and humanity. He’d be cutting the log and imagining it was Lorne’s killer he was hacking into.

From the patio bench a tall, sorrowful-looking lad watched her approach. He sat with his elbows on his knees and was jiggling slightly, as if he was ready to jump up at any moment. He had a shock of sandy hair, and the chinos and sweatshirt he wore seemed to have been slept in. This must be Lorne’s brother, driven home overnight from his university in Durham. He gave her an embarrassed nod, held up his hand to indicate the front door, then went back to his nervous jiggling.

The door was open a crack. Zoë pushed it further and found herself in a hallway filled with framed photos. Horse photos: gymkhanas, ponies clearing jumps, difficult ones – triple oxers and cross-country walls. A young Lorne grinning from under a riding hat, arms round the neck of a black pony, its browband bristling with rosettes.

‘Hello?’

‘In here,’ came a voice from the end of the corridor. Zoë continued on and found, in the kitchen, the liaison officer sitting hunched over a computer, and Mrs Wood, standing at the worktop, scratching furiously in a small notebook. She was dressed in corduroy trousers and a Joules Elephant Polo T-shirt, a mass of curly hair tied back from her face. The moment she turned to face her Zoë noted two things. The first was that Mrs Philippa Wood had once been Miss Philippa Snow and had been at Zoë’s boarding-school nearly twenty years ago. The second was that Mrs Wood really hadn’t accepted her daughter was dead. She was smiling grimly, a pragmatic expression on her face, as if she was determined to get through this visit from the police as soon as possible.

‘Pippa Wood.’ She gave Zoë’s hand a firm shake. If she recognized her she didn’t say anything. ‘Coffee? It’ll take just a moment.’

Zoë exchanged a glance with the liaison officer, who gave a slow nod, as if to say, ‘I told you so. It hasn’t reached her yet.’

‘Please. Black, with two sugars.’ She folded her arms and leaned against the counter top, watching her switch on the kettle and get down mugs from the cupboards. ‘I know you spoke to the police yesterday, Mrs Wood, and the day before that when Lorne went missing. I don’t want you to think we’re hassling you. I just wanted to see if anything had come up for you overnight. Anything you recalled – anything in your statement you wanted to change or add to.’

‘Not really.’ She held out an opened biscuit tin containing brownies and sponge fingers. Zoë hadn’t seen sponge fingers in years. She took one. Pippa snapped the lid back on. ‘She got home from school at one – they do a half-day on Saturday. She got changed and went into town. Completely normal.’

‘She did that often?’

‘Yes. She liked to go shopping. Some of the places in the centre stay open till six, even later.’

‘And she didn’t say she was meeting anyone?’

‘No.’ She got milk from the fridge. ‘She liked to be on her own.’

‘What was she shopping for?’

‘The usual. Clothes. Window-shopping, of course, because I don’t let her have money just to waste. She thought she was going to London to be a model – any money I’d given her she’d have squandered on that pipedream. We’re trying to teach her the value of money, what’s a sensible spend and what isn’t, but with Lorne, it’s in one ear and out the other. Her brother, on the other hand …’ She shook her head, as if life was a mystery to her. ‘Isn’t it amazing how two children, the same genes, can turn out so differently?’

‘What’s a “sensible” spend?’

Pippa scrutinized Zoë, as if she was wondering whether this was a trick question. ‘Well, not clothes, of course. At least, not the sort of clothes she wants. Something practical, maybe.’ She gave the leg of her own trousers a shake as an illustration. ‘But not these things she goes for, covered in glitter – they fall apart after one wash.’

At school Zoë and Pippa had been in different years, but now Zoë was remembering something of her reputation. Super sporty, captain of the hockey team, crazy about horses. And as hard as nails.

‘Did she have a horse?’

‘Not any longer. She did have, but she wouldn’t look after him. I’d have kept him, but I didn’t send him out to be broken in, did it myself, so he was never going to be happy with me on his back and he was too small, anyway. Now it’s just the mare and the five-year-old.’

Zoë nibbled thoughtfully at the sponge finger, her hand cupped under it so as not to drop the sugar crusting on the kitchen floor. There had been a time years ago when she’d done a routine enquiry on a twelve-year-old girl who’d been thrown and trampled by her horse, and was lying in a coma in Intensive Care. The mother had been in tears during the interview. But in tears for what might happen to the horse, not to her daughter. All that came out of her mouth was: ‘It wasn’t his fault. He got scared – she shouldn’t have had him on the road. It wasn’t his fault.’ Zoë licked her fingers carefully, then leaned a little way out of the kitchen door and peered at the staircase. ‘Is her room up there?’

‘There’ve been some teams in it already. They took her computer. They left about an hour ago.’

‘Could I have a look?’

‘Of course you can. You’ll forgive me if I don’t come with you.’

Zoë carried the coffee into the hallway and went slowly up the stairs, past all the gymkhana photos. It stuck in her head, that line: Any money I’d given her she’d have squandered on that pipedream. It was years since she’d been living at home with her parents, and all the pain that had entailed, but the memory came back to her as sharp as cold air. Never quite measuring up. Wanting nothing more than to escape.

Lorne’s room – with a poster of the Sugababes Blu-tacked on the door – was opposite the top of the stairs, next to the family bathroom. The persistent buzz of Mr Wood’s chainsaw was more muffled here. Zoë pushed opened the door, went inside and stood for a while, taking in the room.

Lorne had been privileged – Faulkener’s would have set the Woods back twelve to fifteen grand a year, probably, and here there were little giveaways of her lifestyle that pinned her as a cut above the ordinary: a framed photo of her in front of the Sydney Opera House, another of her dressed in a strapless ballgown, débutante smile on her face, age all of thirteen, Zoë guessed. Aside from that, what was most distressing about the room was its sheer normality. Exactly the sort of teenage girl’s bedroom that would be replicated in hundreds of other homes across Bath. No pictures of horses; instead it was posters of girl bands dressed in what looked like lingerie. On the wall next to the window a corkboard was covered with photos – Lorne pictured on a climbing wall, tongue out to the camera, delighted grin on her face; Lorne with three other girls crammed into a photo booth; Lorne in a floaty white dress, a flower circlet on her ankle; Lorne in a strawberry-design swimsuit – the epitome of every teenage boy’s fantasy. Her hair changed too, from one shot to the next, from bright blonde, cut in a fringe, to Goth, sullen black, complete with a magenta streak in the fringe. Zoë wondered how that had gone down at Faulkener’s School. At her boarding-school hair dye would have been an expellable offence, but that school’s speciality had been turning out no-nonsense girls. Like her. And like Pippa Wood downstairs.

She put down her cup, pulled a pair of gloves out of her pocket, put them on and opened a drawer. Underwear, in a bundle, perhaps from Lorne’s own untidiness or perhaps because the police team had been untidy – knickers to one side, bras to the other. Another drawer had school socks and tights, another hair accessories, hundreds of them bursting out. She went to a small multicoloured chest of drawers and peered into the top drawer. More underwear. A stack of red gymkhana rosettes. Perhaps Lorne hadn’t been allowed to throw them away so she’d done the next best thing and kept them well out of sight.

Out of sight …

She straightened and scanned the room. When Lorne had gone missing the OIC had come in here with a Support Group team looking for clues to her disappearance. Zoë had read through his notes and there hadn’t been anything much. But a girl like Lorne? Tension between her and her mother? There had to be something the OIC had missed. She sat on the bed, her hands resting on her lap, and concentrated on summoning up the feeling she’d had earlier. The sudden, shuddering connection to her own teenage self. If this had been her room, where would she have hidden things?

At boarding-school the dorms had been small – just four to a room. There had been a cupboard stretching the length of one wall and each girl had been allocated a section in it for her clothes. They had also been given a small bedside table each. Not much scope for hiding things you didn’t want others to see. Zoë had found a way, though. Her eyes trailed to Lorne’s bedside table, which was piled with magazines. She pushed herself off the bed, lay down on the floor, and reached a hand up under the table. She found just the smooth wood of the base. She got up, moved to the desk and did the same. Nothing. She went to the wardrobe. This time when she pushed her fingers underneath she found, taped to the base, a solid, block-shaped object encased in a plastic bag.

She peeled away the tape, removed the package and sat on the bed with it on her lap. Inside the plastic bag she found a small book, complete with a lock in the shape of a heart, a key in it. On the front of it were scrawled the words: ‘Mum, if you’ve found this then I can’t stop you reading it. But don’t forget that you will have betrayed my trust.’ Zoë smiled for the little human part of Lorne that had just peeped out. More human than Pippa downstairs, still fretting that her daughter wasn’t remotely interested in horses.

Zoë opened the book, and leafed through the pages. Lorne had pasted the pages with paper cut-out flowers, and little stickers in the shape of eyes that blinked and jiggled when you moved them. Most of the earlier dates had no entry, but for the last few weeks it seemed Lorne had become an inveterate scribbler. Every page was crammed to the margins with notes in a tiny, barely legible scrawl. Zoë took her reading glasses from the breast pocket of her shirt, carried the book to the window, where the light was good, and read.

Most of the stuff was predictable teenage angst. Every day Lorne had recorded her weight and the number of calories she’d eaten, then a long, sometimes desperate commentary on how her hair looked awful, how fat she was getting. She made plans for how much she would eat at weekends. Zoë had read surveys that said at least seventy per cent of teenage girls were always on a diet. She’d spent her own teens worrying about the streak-of-piss insults her gangly frame got her – but to be always worrying about what food you put in your mouth, what kind of a hell prison was that?

More than once the initials ‘RH’ came up.

April fourteenth. Saw RH. He’s mega with the fat-tie thing. Christina says he likes me. I don’t know. Wore my Hard Candy blue eyeshadow. Totally lush!

RH was talking to that girl in the sixth form that’s supposed to have a flat in New York. Nela says her name is Mathilda but I thought Tillie though maybe that’s short for it. Quite pretty with blonde hair but she’s got really fat calves. She shouldn’t wear leggings. Yuk.

Went to Katinka’s after school. And got some hair colour – going to do it when Alice comes over at the weekend. Mum’s going to FREEEEEEEEEEAKKKK!!!!! EEEEEKKK!!!

Read about this girl who was on holiday in Goa with her family. She was just sitting on the beach and a scout from Storm in London saw her. Her first job she got £1,000 and the editor of Vogue saw her and put her on the front page. Now she lives in New York, New York!!!! And she’s from Weston bloody super Mare! I look at her and I think – if you can do it …

The next page was taken up with nothing but the initials ‘LW’ entwined with ‘RH’. On the page after that, on 20 April, a note said:

Kissed him!!!!! I am officially in LOVE!!!!!! Can’t tell anyone. He said his mum would kill him if she knew. She’s a complete witch. He says he’s going to apply to University College and Imperial, so when I’ve got my totally lush flat in Chelsea (ha ha!) he can come and see me anytime we feel like it and his batshit crazy mother can’t get us.

Zoë turned the page. If Debbie Harry saw this and the comments on his dominating mother, she’d hang, draw and quarter RH. Whoever he was.

Zeb Juice are going to see me!!! Can’t believe it. That’s given me a boost I can’t believe. I’m going to call some of the others too. I’m going to wear my pink heels and blue jeans. Shopping list, get Noodlehead Curl Boost, St Tropez Bronzing Mist – Marie Claire says it’s legend. £30. But, doh, brain freeze about where I’m going to get that money from. If I walk home every day and save all my bus fares and all my tuck money I still won’t have enough …

After that the pages hadn’t been written on. Instead they’d been filled with flowers and hearts and sketches of a girl – Lorne herself, presumably – dressed in bikinis and high-heeled boots. Zoë flicked through the remaining pages. There was nothing else of any interest. She closed the diary, and as she did, she noticed a small pocket on the back. When she inserted her nail she found a tiny object in there. An eight-milligram camera chip.

She sorted around on the desk until she found the camera it belonged to, plugged in the chip and began clicking through the photos. Lorne was pictured here, right in this bedroom. From the awkward position it looked as though she’d taken them herself using an automatic timer. In the first three she was dressed in a bikini – standing full length. But it was the fourth and subsequent shots that made Zoë sit down on the bed, dismayed. Lorne appeared dressed in suspenders, stockings and a basque, poised coquettishly on the floor, legs crossed. In the last two she had taken the basque off and was looking provocatively into the camera, her tongue held lightly at her glossed lips.

Zoë clicked through them twice, a huge wave of sadness coming over her. Why would a nice middle-class girl like Lorne do something like that? Lots of reasons, of course – maybe it was nothing more sinister than an impressionable schoolgirl trying to ease herself into her own sexuality. Or maybe to impress a boyfriend. But it could also be nastier than that. An old ghost came to Zoë then, going pitter-patter around the corners of her mind – thinking that it could be because Lorne had learned to dislike herself early. Maybe when she realized her brother was the star in their mother’s eyes she’d begun struggling to find a way to escape. Zoë knew what that felt like. Maybe that was what these photos were about.

Outside, the noise of Mr Wood’s chainsaw cut through the silence. She took the card out of the camera and held it in the palm of her hand, trying to decide if the photos were important – the portal to a whole separate side of Lorne that no one was mentioning. Whether they were connected to her modelling dream and just how desperate she had been to make that dream come true. No, she told herself, probably lots of teenage girls had photos of themselves like this, hidden somewhere from Mum and Dad. It would be better just to leave them in the diary, taped out of sight, never to be seen again. Or destroy the chip.

Or treat it as an investigative lead.

She raised her eyes to the window, saw the frondy leaves of a silver birch moving gently against the blue sky. Some time passed. Thirty seconds. A minute. Then she got to her feet and shoved the card into her back jeans pocket. ‘Sorry, Lorne,’ she murmured. ‘But I’m not sure. Not yet.’

Chapter 16

Downstairs in the conservatory, Pippa was sitting with the liaison officer. She had a diary open on her lap and seemed to be going through her plans for the next month or so. Maybe they were discussing funerals, press conferences. Outside, Mr Wood was still thrashing the life out of the tree. When Pippa heard Zoë come down she stopped talking. She closed the book and came through into the hallway. ‘All finished?’

‘Just one or two questions.’

‘That’s OK. I want to help.’

‘Lorne had a big circle of friends?’

‘A big circle? Oh, God, yes. I couldn’t keep up with it. From the moment she hit fifteen and I gave her a phone and keys to the house I only ever saw her when she brought people back here. They’re a nightmare, teenagers, absolute nightmare. Sometimes you just want to crawl under a …’ She trailed off. As if it had just dawned on her that there’d never be another teenager to make her life a misery. ‘Yes, well …’ She rubbed her arms convulsively and glanced back at the kitchen. ‘Yes. Anyway, did you want some more coffee?’

‘That’s OK,’ Zoë said gently. ‘I’ve had enough to send me to the moon and back. Can I ask you, though, about her friends? Were they mostly from the school?’

‘No.’ Pippa shook her head. ‘No, not really. They were from all over. She was always talking to people. And I think with the way she looked she – she had lots of boys who recognized her. I don’t know where she gets it from – not me, that’s for sure.’

‘But not one special boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Can I ask you the million-dollar question?’

‘What? Was she a virgin? Is that it?’

‘Someone’s going to have to ask it eventually. It’s not that she’s in the defence stand here. It’s just that we need to build a better picture.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve already been told by the—’ She glanced back to where the liaison officer was sitting, studying his laptop. ‘I know it’s an important question. He said it would be, said it could be relevant.’ She put her finger to her forehead and kept it there, as if she was concentrating very hard on something. Like keeping her balance. ‘I don’t know, is the honest truth. If you wanted me to put money on it I’d say no. But please don’t tell other people that. I don’t want it gossiped about.’

‘You don’t remember anyone with the initials “RH”, do you?’

‘No. Doesn’t ring any bells. Why?’

‘Just wondering. What about the name Zeb Juice? Does that mean anything to you?’

Pippa gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Zebedee Juice. It’s an agency in George Street.’

‘An agency?’

‘Modelling. I told you – Lorne was under the impression she’d be the next Kate Moss, so when the agency agreed to see her I was worried – very worried. As you can imagine.’

‘What sort of modelling do they deal with?’

‘What sort? Well – I don’t know. The usual, of course. Fashiony stuff. Catwalk.’

So not the kind of modelling in the pictures. Zoë felt better to hear that. ‘What happened – when she went to the agency?’

‘They told her she wasn’t tall enough. They weren’t interested, thank God.’

‘You were pleased?’

‘Of course I was pleased.’ Pippa sounded faintly annoyed. ‘What mother wouldn’t be? It was a ridiculous dream.’

Zoë didn’t answer that. Outside the conservatory four magpies had appeared on the lawn and were hopping around, making feints at each other. One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy. She could still see the big brother outside, sitting awkwardly on the bench. The one who’d got it all right in his mother’s eyes.

‘Is that all? Is that all you need?’

‘For the time being. Yes, it is. Thank you.’

She felt in her pocket for her car keys and was halfway out of the door when Pippa said suddenly, ‘I was at school with you, wasn’t I?’

Zoë turned back slowly. ‘I didn’t like to point it out.’

‘You were good at games and you were clever. Really clever. You used to win all the quizzes. Did you go to university? Everyone said you would.’

‘University? No. I dropped out. Travelled the world and ended up back here. Broke my father’s back financially, putting me and my sister through school, and look what I did to repay him.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘Went into the cops.’

‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘She went to a different school – softer than the one we were at. The sort that turns out good wives.’

‘How come you went to different schools?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said evasively. ‘We couldn’t get on somehow. Like you said – amazing how you combine the same genes and get two totally different people.’

‘And you?’ Pippa said. ‘How about you? Did you have children?’

‘No.’

Pippa took a breath to reply – and in that second, in the slight pause, Zoë saw the cracks. The human being in there. As if the terrified Pippa Wood, the one who wouldn’t know where to begin or end dealing with this horror, had peeped out of her eyes. It was a flash, just a fleeting moment, a panicked, screaming Picasso face, a terror that Zoë was going to answer, Oh, yes. I have a beautiful daughter. Just like Lorne. Except mine’s alive. It was basic human envy – the envy that the sick, the grieving and the old have for the young and the healthy. And the living. Then the look was gone, and the calm mask was back.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, and turned away abruptly, closing the door behind her.

Zoë was left standing in the sunlight with the sound of Mr Wood’s saw, and the low chug-chug-chug of a barge going past on the canal.

Chapter 17

All day at work people talked about Lorne Wood. Every place Sally cleaned someone would mention it, would shake their head and say how terrible it was – as if she was one of their own children. Sally didn’t much want to talk about it, she didn’t want to think about how easily it could have been Millie. This morning she’d taken the spoiled tarot card out of the pack and hidden it in a drawer. The remainder were wrapped in a cloth inside her tote bag because today she was working near the hippie shop, and there might be an opportunity to go in and show the cards to the owner. But in the end she couldn’t summon up the courage. Instead she locked them in the boot of the car and tried to stop thinking about them.

It was the day she sometimes picked up Millie from school, rather than let her take the bus. She parked in a street opposite, along with all the other mothers, their windows open to watch the gates. Nial and Peter came out and passed, holding up a hand to say hi to her, then, after a short interval, Sophie on her own. The moment she saw Sally she hurried over to the car. ‘Mrs Benedict, Millie’s still in the classroom. She wants you to go and get her.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. She’s upset.’

Sally locked the car and went inside quickly, hurrying down the vaulted-stone corridors. The classroom was at the other side of the school – it was very old-fashioned, lined with bookshelves, stuffed with books and learning aids. Light came through the tall mullioned windows. At one of the individual desks that faced the windows, Millie sat with her head drooping forward. When she heard the door open she turned. Her face was tight, as if a hand was holding it from behind and forcing her head to move.

‘Mum.’

She came and stood at the desk. ‘Are you OK? I saw Sophie.’

‘I don’t feel well, Mum. Can you bring the car in through the back entrance and pick me up next to the sports hall?’

‘What’s wrong? You should have called.’

‘Nothing. I mean – it’s my stomach. It’s just a bit—’

‘Your stomach?’

‘It’s crampy.’

‘Your period?’

‘No – just – I don’t know. It feels a bit squirmy.’

Sally examined Millie’s face. She’d never been good at knowing when her daughter was lying. But right now she suspected that whatever was wrong with Millie it had nothing to do with her stomach. She looked as if she was hiding something. ‘Did you speak to Matron?’

She shook her head, moved her eyes from Sally’s scrutiny and stared out of the window. ‘Please, Mum, can you just get the car?’

‘Is this about Lorne? Are you upset?’

‘No.’

‘Then is it Glastonbury? Because, Millie, I can’t change my mind, darling.’

‘No. It’s not. I just feel ill. I swear.’

Sally sighed. ‘OK. I’ll be waiting round the side in five minutes.’

She picked up the car from the street and stopped it in the courtyard that faced the modern buildings of the new sports hall. Millie came out, her school blazer draped over her shoulders, her face down, and got quickly into the car. ‘Can we go straight home?’

‘You’ll have to tell me what’s happening.’

‘Please.’ She curled into the seat and pulled her knees up. ‘Please, Mum.’

‘Either you tell me what’s going on or we’re going to the doctor’s.’

‘No, Mum, I feel better now. I just want to go home.’

Sally put the car in gear and drove to the end of the tarmac drive, stopping at the intersection. She indicated left. Millie jerked sideways in her seat, her hand shooting out to grab the steering-wheel. ‘No! Wait – wait, Mum, please wait. Don’t.’

‘What is it?’

Millie was trembling. Her face was white, but Sally knew it wasn’t pain. If she had to put a finger on it she’d have said it was fear. ‘Millie?’

‘Go right. Right.’

‘But left is the way home.’

‘We can go the back way. All my friends are out there. They’ll do the L on the forehead thing if they see me taken off by Mummy. Loser.’

‘No one’s there. They’ve gone.’

‘Can we just go the back way, Mum? Please go right.’

Sally took the car out of gear. ‘I’m sorry, Millie, but it’s left. Unless you tell me what’s going on.’

‘Oh, God!’ She screwed up her fists. ‘OK, OK. Just let me – give me a moment to …’ She shuffled down the seat so she was crushed in the footwell.

‘What are you doing?’

‘There’s someone out there. In a purple jeep. I’ve got to avoid him.’

‘Who?’

‘Just someone.’

Down on the floor Millie’s face was white, her pupils dilated, She wasn’t just afraid – she was terrified. As if there was a monster out in the street. Sally eyed the phone in its holster on the dashboard and wondered who she could call. Isabelle? Steve?

‘Please, Mum! Can we go?’

Sally swallowed and put the car in gear. She inched it out over the junction and peered up and down the street. Her palms were sweating on the vinyl steering-wheel. The street was quieter now – the schoolkids had indeed gone, but, on the far side of the road, its nose facing the school gates, was parked a strange-looking purple four-wheel drive. It had bull-bars, a snorkel, and what looked like daggers embedded in the wheels.

Sally pulled the Ka out into the road.

‘Is he there?’ Millie dragged the blazer over her head and shrank further into the footwell, her hands over her head. ‘Is he? Oh, my God, I’m so dead.’

Sally pulled up alongside the purple car. She let the car stop in the middle of the road, and turned woodenly to look at the man. He was mixed race, with a little pencil moustache and very shiny gelled hair. He wore a tight white T-shirt and a thick gold necklace. At first he didn’t notice her. He was watching the gates of the school. Then he sensed her presence. He turned, met her eyes and gave her a slow smile, revealing a single diamond mounted in one of his front teeth. ‘What?’ he mouthed. ‘What?’

She floored the accelerator and the little car shot down the hill, screeching, making pedestrians stop and stare.

‘Mum? What’s happening? Was he there?’

At the bottom of the hill she glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw that he hadn’t attempted to follow. She swung the car left past the big nineteenth-century church on the fork, then to the right, then left again, putting as much distance as she could between themselves and the man. She didn’t stop until she’d reached Peppercorn, way out in the deserted countryside. She got out and stood on the lawn, breathing the sulphury smell of the engine and the organic waft of cow manure and grass – scanning the valley where the line of commuters wound its sluggish way towards the motorway. When she was sure nothing had followed them she went back to the car and opened the door. Millie ventured out from under the blazer, her hair mussed and sticking out all over the place, a bleary, lost look on her face. She crawled out, limp and exhausted, her head hanging.

‘Can we go inside now?’

Sally carried all her work gear into the cottage and put it in a pile in the corner. Then she went into the bedroom, Millie following. Sally kicked off her shoes and pulled back the covers.

‘What?’

‘Get in.’

‘But it’s only five o’—’

‘Please.’

Millie obediently kicked off her shoes and crawled on to the bed. Sally checked the curtains were drawn tight, then switched off the light and got in next to her daughter, embracing her from behind, her head resting on her back. She didn’t speak. She lay there, listening to Millie breathing, her eyes on the slit of light between the curtains. She counted in her head, slowly and rhythmically moving herself through the minutes, through the silence.

It was almost a quarter of an hour before Millie spoke. ‘I’m sorry.’

Sally nodded. She was sure it was true.

‘He’s involved in drugs.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said wearily. ‘Oh, God.’

‘He sells drugs in the school, and at Faulkener’s too. He goes back and forth between the two. I don’t take them, Mum. I don’t. I tried it once with Nial and Soph. Please, please, don’t tell Isabelle – please. We hated it. It made my heart race and I thought I was going to die, but everyone at school’s done it, honestly – you’d be so shocked, Mum, at who’s done it. The prefects have, some of the ones in the hockey teams. They do it before they have a match. It’s like it’s totally normal.’

Sally pressed her head tighter into her daughter’s back. This was what the tarot card had been trying to warn her about, this happening behind her back. God, she really was as dumb as Julian had always said. ‘Is that why you’re avoiding him, that man? Because of the drugs?’

‘No. I don’t take drugs, Mum. I swear. I swear on everything.’

‘Is it something to do with Lorne Wood? With what happened to her?’

Millie turned round and gave her mother an odd look. ‘No. Of course not. Why do you think it would have anything to do with that?’

‘Then what?’

‘Money.’

‘What money?’

‘He lent me some money.’ She hitched in a breath, started to cry quietly. ‘Oh, Mum, I honestly thought it would be OK, I honestly did. I never thought it was going to turn out like this.’

Sally blinked dry-eyed in the darkness. Millie borrowing money? From someone like that? This was a dream. ‘It can’t be much.’ She paused, then added tentatively, ‘Can it?’

Millie curled herself into a ball, her shoulders shaking, saying over and over, ‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Mum, if you and Dad hadn’t split up it would never have happened. I’d have the money if you were still together.’

‘Is this about Glastonbury?’

‘No – it’s about Malta. If you and Dad were still together I could have gone on that school trip to Malta.’

‘You did go to Malta.’

‘Yes, but I could have gone without having to—’ She began to sob loudly. ‘This is such a mess. I’m such an idiot.’

Sally lifted her head. ‘Dad paid for the trip to Malta.’

‘He didn’t. In the end Melissa said he couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you – I thought you’d stop me going.’

‘So how on earth did you …? Oh, Millie. You’re telling me you got the money from him. From that man? But it must have been a lot. A lot of money.’

‘You’re making it sound awful. You don’t understand – you haven’t got a clue what it’s like. Everyone else’s parents are together. The whole class is going skiing in the autumn except Thomas and he doesn’t count, and Selma is going to New York at half-term. She’ll probably get loads of clothes while she’s there too and that’s before you even get to who’s going to Glasto. It’s horrible being me, Mum. You’ve got no idea, it’s horrible.’

‘How much do you owe him?’

‘He’s saying because I didn’t pay it back when I should have he’s got to charge me interest.’

‘That’s completely illegal. We’ll have to go to the police. We can drive there now.’

‘No. No, Mum. You can’t.’ Millie twisted around, stared over her shoulder at her mother. ‘You can’t go to the police – you just can’t. I’ll get expelled and everyone’ll find out – none of the parents’ll let me hang out with my friends. Dad’ll find out – Peter and Nial and Sophie’ll all find out. And he’ll hurt me next time. Really. If he finds out I went to the police I’ll be dead, Mum. Please – please. I’ll do anything. I’ll stop school and go to one of the state schools, then Dad can give the money he’s giving Kingsmead to me. I’ll do anything. Just please don’t go to the police – I can’t bear it if you tell anyone.’

‘How much do you owe him, Millie?’

Millie went quiet and still, as if she was crawling inside herself, rooting around to find a place where she was safe. ‘Four …’ she murmured after a while ‘… thousand. He kept adding interest, Mum, he kept making it more.’

Sally closed her eyes, rested her forehead against Millie’s hot back. She pictured Isabelle’s kitchen littered with expensive food and drink; she saw Melissa planting exotic shrubs in the garden at Sion Road; she saw David Goldrab swinging himself into his giant car. She saw all the mothers and fathers outside Kingsmead and knew that she was looking into a different world. That in the year and a half since she’d been divorced from Julian, she and Millie had slipped noiselessly and uncomplainingly over an invisible barrier into a place they’d never come back from. And it was all because of money.

Chapter 18

For the first time since Zoë had known him, Ben’s appearance was less than perfect at that evening’s team meeting. Last night’s wine and lack of sleep were starting to show. He had the beginning of a five o’clock shadow on his jaw and his shirt was creased at the back. To her annoyance she found that creased shirt slightly endearing.

‘It’s all a bit disappointing,’ he said, addressing the assembled team. ‘I admit it hasn’t been a good day. First of all we’re still waiting for a single sighting. Unbelievable, I know, considering how usually a case with this much media will pop up scores of sightings all over the place. And Lorne, a striking girl, known to people, walking all that way home and not one person claiming they saw her. Nothing on any of the shops’ CCTV equipment, and none of the shop assistants remember anything either – though, according to her family, she did have a habit of browsing and not buying. So, nothing very encouraging on that.’

He rolled up his sleeves. It had been hot today. Hot enough to make those creases and so hot that summer seemed to have arrived already. Out in the streets almond blossom, blown in from the gardens and the parks, lay in drifts in the gutters. Zoë hadn’t said anything to Ben about the camera chip. She wasn’t sure how and when she’d do it. Whether she’d do it at all. The chip was still in her back pocket.

‘Our witness at the canal reported a conversation with Lorne that really didn’t tally with the conversation the OIC was told about when she went missing. So I spent an hour talking to Alice, the friend Lorne was on the phone to, and although she admitted Lorne was more upset than she’d originally said, she was evasive when I pushed her on why she was upset.’ He took a sip of coffee, set the cup down carefully. ‘So, let me just make an intuitive comment here. She was protecting someone.’

The superintendent, who had been at the back of the room, his arms folded, waiting to be impressed, now leaned forward. ‘Protecting someone?’

‘Yes. Alice was Lorne’s best friend, I mean real to-the-death friends, inseparable. And now she’s covering something up for her, even though she’s dead. Something important.’

Debbie Harry, who had been sitting in silence in the corner, got up and came to the front. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Ben and addressed the team, as if this was an investigation they were running together. ‘That’s right. You see, from this, and from other comments some of her schoolfriends have made, we’re pretty sure there’s probably a boyfriend. Someone Lorne wanted to keep secret.’

Zoë stared at her. We’re pretty sure? Who the hell did she think she was? An investigator? Ben’s partner? She was a psychologist. What was she doing still hanging around? The last Zoë remembered, these people got paid for on an hourly basis; obviously Debbie didn’t get that. Obviously she thought she was part of the team. And Zoë could see from the team’s faces that they were all, to a man, every one of them, sucking up her psychology-for-dummies stuff because it was coming out of the mouth of a pretty girl with some letters after her name.

‘Yes. There is almost certainly a boyfriend. It accounts for Alice’s evasiveness. We think Lorne may have been keeping it secret for a while – and now, of course, he’s afraid to come forward. Why, we don’t know, but he’s out there. Whether he was responsible for her death or not … well, that’s an unknowable. But those words, “I’ve had enough …”’ Debbie gave the team her patronizing smile, the one that said, Come along – I’m interested in what you think. Let’s work together on this ‘… does it sound to you like she and the secret boyfriend had been having trouble?’

‘RH,’ Zoë said. Everyone turned to her in surprise. ‘His initials will be “RH”.’

‘How did you reach that conclusion?’ said the superintendent.

She gave him a withering look. ‘I’ve had my palm read. This morning. The psychics are great at this stuff – this investigatory shit. They said someone with the initials “RH” is going to come into my life.’

There was a brief embarrassed silence at the deliberate poke at Debbie. Ben frowned at Zoë. Then Debbie spoke. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said archly. ‘What’s your point?’

‘In Lorne’s diary she talks about RH. I’ve spent the afternoon chasing it. So far nothing. If you’re looking for a secret boyfriend, look for someone with those initials.’

There was a long pause. Then Debbie let out her breath and smiled. Her inclusive, welcoming smile, as if to say: I am so glad you’ve finally seen our way of thinking. Welcome aboard the Great Ship Debbie Harry. We know you’re going to love your time here. ‘Thank you, Detective Benedict. Thank you. It’s great to be moving forward now. And I think you’ll all agree that finding “RH” …’ she opened her hands, delighted with the way things were progressing ‘… will be absolutely crucial to cracking this case.’

Chapter 19

A lot of families in Bath chose Victorian homes over Georgian – the Victorians tended to have more rooms on each floor, not so many flights of stairs to run up chasing kids or pets. They were easier to heat and easier to make alterations to because most of them weren’t listed. The house Sally had lived in with Julian was a detached Victorian villa, with an extension and a conservatory at the rear, set well back from the road in large gardens that Millie used to enjoy running around. Now, though, there were paths where there never had been, a whole complex system of low lavender bushes cut severely into squares. Millie’s tree-house had been repainted with purple crocodiles and elephants for little Adelayde, the new Cassidy.

Millie hated Melissa. She only came here once a week on sufferance to see her dad. Now when Sally pulled up outside, she refused to go in, or even have her presence acknowledged. She sat in the car with her nose pressed to the window and stared out as Sally walked up the path, lit by the solar-powered garden lights that were stuck in the ground every few feet.

She hadn’t phoned in advance – Julian would find a way of not answering the call – she went straight to the front door and knocked loudly. From inside came a voice, Melissa, calling, ‘Julian. The door.’ A moment or two later he appeared, wine glass in hand.

‘Oh.’ His face fell when he saw her. ‘Sally.’

‘Can I come in?’

He glanced uneasily over his shoulder. She could see an expensively engineered pram sitting there, a row of rattles suspended above it. ‘What’s it about?’

‘Millie.’

‘Julian?’ Melissa called from inside. ‘Who is it, baby?’

‘It’s … Sally.’

There was a silence. Then the living-room door opened and Melissa appeared. She was a landscape gardener by trade, and when Sally had first met her she seemed to be dressed for a rodeo, with a suede cowboy hat, walking boots with thick socks folded over the tops and tweed shorts that never changed colour from day to day. She laughed like a pony and the cord of the hat would bounce around under her chin. Sometimes in the cold weather a clear drip would form at the end of Melissa’s nose and tremble there unnoticed for long minutes while she talked. She was the last person Sally would have expected Julian to go for. Today she was dressed in her customary shorts, but over them she wore an enormous oatmeal cardigan with Adelayde strapped to her chest in a scarlet cloth papoose. She automatically jiggled up and down to keep the baby asleep while she eyed her husband’s ex-wife.

‘Sally!’ she said after a moment or two, ‘You look lovely. Come in.’ She stepped back to let her into the living room, smiling expansively. ‘Lovely to see you.’

Sally went in and stood for a while in silence. The room was unrecognizable – redecorated in deep primary colours, with sharp, uncomfortable furniture. A black and white silk curtain was pulled across half of the bay windows, the baby’s playpen placed in front of them.

Melissa switched off the television, which was playing quietly in the corner, and settled on the edge of the large sofa, shifting the baby’s legs in the sling so they lay on either side of her stomach. Sally glanced around for her comfy old armchair where she had fed Millie as a baby. Instead she saw a leather love seat decorated in purple and white hexagons. She sat on it awkwardly.

‘How’s Millie?’ said Melissa, with a smile. ‘Lively as ever?’

‘No. She’s terrible.’

Melissa’s smile faded. ‘Really? Is it because of that girl? Lorne Wood?’

‘That’s not helping.’

‘One of the boys who did work experience with me knew her. He had a crush on her. I was surprised. She didn’t seem his type. Terrible – cheap-looking, you know.’

‘What’s troubling Millie?’ asked Julian. ‘She seemed all right the other day.’

‘It’s been a long time, but I think she’s still finding the divorce very difficult.’

‘Sally,’ Julian murmured, ‘maybe if you want to talk about the divorce it’d be better if—’

‘She’s having a hard time.’ Her voice came out more firmly than she’d expected it to. ‘She’s just a little girl and she’s finding it difficult.’

Julian frowned. He’d never seen this from Sally. Looking a little nervous, he closed the door and crossed the room. He sat down next to Melissa, pulling his trousers up his thin legs so that he didn’t stretch the knees. Looking at him now, Sally wondered what on earth she’d ever seen in him, except that he’d always been there somehow, paying for things and answering questions for her like a father. Until the day he wasn’t, and he was doing it all for Melissa instead. ‘OK. I hear you. You want a discussion. And what do you want out of that discussion? From us – me and Melissa?’

She blinked. ‘Uh – money.’

Melissa took a deep breath. She sat back on the sofa and crossed one long tanned leg over the other, fixing her eyes on the ceiling. Julian closed his eyes as if he’d had a momentary sharp pain in his head. He opened them, put his elbows on his knees and placed his palms together. ‘Can I just say that this is something we did talk about before? And, if you remember, I said—’

‘Four thousand pounds.’

‘Jesus!’ Melissa hissed. She bounced Adelayde even more vigorously, her eyes still locked on the ceiling. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Julian sat back in the chair, folded his arms and regarded Sally carefully. It was the sort of look she’d seen him use in business, sizing up a deal, trying to decide if a client was to be trusted. He was scrutinizing her as if, for the first time, he saw her as someone the same age as he was, and not his inferior – his little child bride. ‘You’re not joking, I take it.’

‘I’m not.’

‘What’s the money for?’

‘The trip to Malta. You said you were going to pay for it.’

‘OK. If there’s going to be aggression introduced at this point this might be the time to call a halt and say let’s chat to the solicitors first and then—’

‘You told her you were going to pay for her to go to Malta. You made her that promise – I was there when you did it. It would have been something quite different if you’d said no, but that’s not what happened. You made the promise and broke it. She thought you were going to pay for her. She ended up having to borrow the money.’

‘I suppose,’ Melissa said, in a level tone, ‘she could have cancelled it when she knew Julian and I really couldn’t afford it.’

‘All her friends were going.’

‘No one mentioned four thousand to me,’ Julian said. ‘Four thousand! What sort of trip to Malta costs four thousand pounds? They’re teenagers, for heaven’s sake. They’re supposed to sleep on the floor of the train, not take suites in the new Airbus A380.’

‘This is genuine. Millie needs the money. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

‘Millie needs it or you need it?’ Melissa said. Then she closed her eyes. ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean that. Ignore me.’

‘Who did she borrow the money from? Not Nial’s parents, please, God. They’ve already got me on their shit list with whatever you’ve told them over the divorce.’

‘Julian, look – I can’t make you, I can’t force you to do anything. I signed my rights away with the divorce, and even if I could afford legal advice I know what they’d say. All I can do is ask you, politely, to help her. She’s in trouble, Julian, really in trouble. She’s only fifteen and there’s nothing I can do in this situation.’

He licked his lips, glanced at his wife. ‘Melissa?’

She shrugged. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the ceiling and was still jiggling the baby up and down. She had the look of someone humming loudly in their head to block out what was happening around them. ‘You do whatever you think is the right thing.’ She placed her hand protectively over Adelayde’s small head, as if suddenly it was her and the baby against Sally and Julian. ‘Whatever your conscience tells you is right is what you should do.’

Julian gave a hard cough. He looked from Sally to Melissa and back again. Sally had never seen him so uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, Sally. All the maintenance I was going to give Millie went into Peppercorn. I’ll give you a hundred but that’ll have to be all.’

Melissa made a small, disgusted noise in her throat.

‘You OK about that, Melissa?’

‘Fine,’ she said, in a high, tense voice. ‘Absolutely fine.’

He got to his feet, left the room and could be heard after a moment in his office at the end of the corridor. Sally and Melissa were left in the room on their own, Melissa breathing in and out loudly, as if she was trying to calm herself. Eventually it seemed she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Her head snapped towards Sally.

‘You said you weren’t going to ask for anything else. You told Julian you wouldn’t ask for any more. He’s paid for your house – he’s had to take out a massive mortgage on this place to do it – and he’s already paid Millie’s school for the next three years. Three years. He couldn’t afford that but he did it anyway.’

Sally said nothing. On the way up the path she’d noticed several empty bottles of Bollinger in the recycling bin. When she’d been with Julian he’d drunk Bollinger on special occasions, not every night. And the oatmeal cardigan Melissa was wearing had cost three hundred pounds. She’d seen it in the window of Square earlier this week. He still had an apartment in Madeira that he rented out, and a cottage in Devon.

‘I mean, is she even enjoying the school? Is she doing well? Obviously I hope so because it’s a lot of money to pay out if she’s not. I very much doubt Julian will be able to put two children through private education. Adelayde probably doesn’t stand a chance with what Millie is costing.’ Melissa looked as if she might start crying at any moment. ‘So I very much hope for Julian’s sake that the one child he’s poured everything into will do well.’

Sally got to her feet and went to the door.

‘Don’t threaten us, Sally.’

She turned back. Melissa had got to her feet and was staring at her with pure hatred. ‘Don’t be nasty. No need to be nasty – because as nasty as you are I can be nastier.’

Sally opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Without a word she went into the hallway, shut the door behind her and stood next to the expensive pram, fiddling anxiously with her car keys. A moment later Julian emerged from his study. He was holding a cheque and a printed sheet. It said simply, ‘I acknowledge the receipt of the sum of one hundred pounds from Mr J. Cassidy.’

‘Sign, please.’

She signed, not meeting his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. She took the cheque in its good-quality white envelope, and turned for the door.

‘Sally?’

She paused, one hand on the lock.

‘Please …’ Julian stepped up close to her and whispered, so Melissa couldn’t hear, ‘please – will you tell Millie I love her? Will you?’

Chapter 20

Zoë sat in the back garden of her terraced house, one hand on her knee, the other cupped for the stray cats to shyly nibble biscuits from it. The lights were on inside, the curtains open. She could picture herself as a sad illustration: ‘The lonely old spinster with her cats. The only companions she has …’ When, after the meeting, she’d found Ben in his office he’d been distracted, busily typing up notes. She’d wanted to talk about the meeting – perhaps tell him about the photos. But she was tired of arguing, tired of her lonely position on the opposite side of the ring from the team, so she simply said, ‘I’m thinking of knocking off now. See you at mine?’

There had been a pause. Then he’d glanced up at her, a little frazzled. ‘I’m sorry, Zoë. I really need to get on with this.’

Afterwards she wondered why it bothered her – it wasn’t as if they spent every night together. She didn’t care. She really didn’t care. Even so, she’d half hoped when she got back to the empty house that he’d be magically standing on the doorstep. He wasn’t, though. She trudged up the path and let herself in. The saucer of milk was still in front of the bike.

It was her default to be alone, she thought, pouring more cat biscuits into her cupped hand. It was no big deal. Some people needed people, others just didn’t. She thought about what Pippa Wood had said about siblings turning out so differently, of her disappointment at what Lorne had become – and, without warning, her mind opened in a place she hadn’t planned, and she was looking through a doorway, seeing a room.

It was the living room from her childhood – the lights on, the fire playing merrily in the grate. Sally, aged about three, was sitting on Mum’s lap, Mum smiling at her, stroking her yellow hair. And in the shadowed corner of the room – Zoë, dark-eyed and silent. Sitting on the floor in the corner, playing with building bricks, glancing up surreptitiously from time to time, wondering when Mum would look over or smile at her. Two such different children – the one a beautiful, corn-fed child from a dream, the other a broken-up fox. Spiteful and clever and obstinate.

The ‘accident’ with Sally’s hand had been, truthfully, anything but an accident. The reality was that Zoë had had a fit of temper when what had been building for years was sparked off by something trivial. Zoë had been eight, Sally seven, and from that moment on the sisters were kept apart by their parents, and Zoë had learned for sure who she was and on which side of life she had to exist. She understood now that she was capable of ‘evil’ and of ‘doing the unthinkable’. It was a lesson she’d never be allowed to unlearn.

She glanced up now through the open back door into the lighted room, to the pictures on the wall. Some showed the motorbike trip and some showed her at boarding-school – always grinning and resilient. Great at games and maths, always in trouble with the teachers. Everyone who met her, even Ben, thought that being enrolled, aged just eight, at boarding-school meant she was privileged. No one outside the Benedict family knew it was nothing to do with privilege and pony parties and everything to do with keeping her separate from Sally. Who was kind and sweet and adored by Mum and Dad. So lovely that they had to protect her from her cuel and uncontrollable sister.

Zoë hadn’t thought about any of this for years. It was Lorne who’d put it back in her thoughts – Lorne, her perfect brother, and the places she may have gone, like Zoë herself, thinking she could escape the feelings. The photos. That was what chilled Zoë most. Because it was the same way she’d escaped. Eighteen years ago. Not a soul knew about it, but when she had first left boarding-school she’d taken a job for six months in a Bristol nightclub: a teenager still, undressing in front of men twelve times a day. At the time she’d deliberately not given too much thought to what she was doing – she’d laughed about it, insisted it was a great joke, and kept herself focused on the motorbike trip she was going to pay for at the end of it. But on the occasions she heard people talking about the sex-club industry and how it cheapened a person, her brave face would slip. She’d turn away, thinking privately that they didn’t recognize that to cheapen something it had to have had worth to start with, that to devalue something it had to have had value. Which was something she, and maybe Lorne, had long lost.

Maybe it was just the natural course for the broken child to veer off into places like that nightclub. Places where their own darkness was outmatched by those around them.

Zoë fed the last of the biscuits to the cats. It had begun to rain, pattering on the bike cover, which she had thrown untidily against the garden shed. Something caught her eye. She got up and peered at the cover, at the small puddle that was developing there.

‘Well, holy shit and Jesus on a bike,’ she muttered to the cats. ‘That’s what I’ve been missing. That’s it.’

Chapter 21

Sally called Steve at nine thirty, and within twenty minutes his car headlights came in through the kitchen window and travelled up the wall. On the table in front of her was a pile of papers: mortgage statements, the utilities bills, her wage slips and the estimates for the work that needed doing on the house. She’d been poring over them for the last hour, struggling to see where she could eke out an extra four thousand pounds. Now she gathered them up hurriedly and shoved them behind some books before he appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in mid-length chino shorts, sandals and a faded T-shirt with a little rain sprinkled on the shoulders. He was unshaven and looked tired.

‘Hey,’ he whispered, closing the door. ‘You all right, beautiful?’

Sally beckoned him in. ‘It’s OK – she’s asleep. She’s like the dead when she goes.’

He came in, throwing his keys on to the table. ‘So? What’s going on?’

She went to the fridge and got out the bottle of wine they’d opened the night before. ‘Sorry – but I think I need a drink.’ She poured one for him, one for herself, put them on the table and sat, looking into the wine, her shoulders drooping.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted a friendly face.’

‘It’s more than that.’

She took a gulp of the wine.

‘Come on. What’s on your mind?’

‘I’m sorry – I just – it’s been a bad day. With Millie, with work.’ She shook her head despairingly. How could this keep happening? How could she go on being so stupid? All the time. All the time. It just wasn’t getting any better. ‘The house is falling down around my ears, Steve. The downpipe at the back has fallen off and there’s damp everywhere. The thatch is rotting, there are rats in the ceiling and they’ve eaten through the plasterboard. I found squirrel droppings in the utility room on Monday. It’d cost me ten thousand pounds to put it all back – and me? Idiot me? I don’t even know if I’m going to pay my council tax this month. And then … then today …’

‘Today?’

She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him seriously. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Funny – no one’s ever asked me to do that before.’

She gave a watery smile. ‘Seriously. It’s about Millie. I’ve promised her not to say anything, but I can’t help it. It’s all so bizarre – I can’t keep it a secret. I’ve got to talk about it.’

He pulled up a chair and sat. ‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘She … needed some money. She knew she couldn’t come to me, so she went to someone she shouldn’t have. Someone who wants the money back. And he’s not the sort of person I know how to deal with – he’s a drug-dealer.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘I know. I’m just so dense.’ She knocked her knuckles against her forehead, wishing she could wake up the dumb, sleepy mass in there. ‘I just never get it. I didn’t see any of this coming, just like I didn’t see the divorce coming, and now my only chance of making a decent living is to work for a criminal, and he’s rude and you say he’s dangerous, but I haven’t got any choice because my daughter still thinks she can live like all her rich friends do and will make any stupid decisions because of it and now I’m—’

‘Hey hey hey.’ Steve reached across and caught her hand in his. ‘Hey. Take it slowly. We can work it out. I mean— Do you want me to speak to this character? Do you know how to get in touch with him?’

‘You can’t. If you do, Millie will find out. I’ve promised her not to say a word. Anyway – God knows what he’ll do to her if he thinks he’s not getting the money. I’ve thought about it. The only way is for me to pay back what she’s borrowed.’

‘Then I’ll lend you the money. The divorce wasn’t kind on me, you know that, but I can find the money. It’s not a problem.’

She bit her lip and raised her eyes to his. In his open face, his straightforward smile, she saw a sweet and welcoming slope. A slope that she could step on to with ease. Fall on to and be carried along. It would be comfortable: the fear would go away. But it would lead her nowhere. Eventually she’d come back to the same numbness she’d reached with Julian.

‘No,’ she said, with an effort. ‘No. Thank you, but no. I’ve got to work this out on my own. David will pay me an extra four hundred and eighty a month so it’ll take a while, but I’ll do it. And I borrowed a DIY book from the library – maybe I can fix some of the house myself. There are some tools in the garage that the last owners left and I can borrow some more from Isabelle.’

‘OK.’ He smiled. ‘And what you can’t get from her I’ll lend you. Whatever you need.’

She smiled back weakly. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Steve rose and went to the fridge for the wine bottle, but she couldn’t draw the line that easily. She sat, her head on one side, turning her glass round and round on the table, watching the wet rings cross and recross.

‘Steve?’ she said, when he sat down again.

‘What?’

‘You know this morning, what you were saying about David Goldrab?’

His face darkened. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully with a knuckle. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember.’

‘What did you mean when you said it was just fluke he hadn’t been banged up years ago? If he had been put in prison, what would it have been for?’

‘Oh, Sally. Are you sure you want to know all this?’

‘Yes. I’ve got my first day at his tomorrow and, honestly, I’m nervous. I can’t go on any more with my head in the clouds, always missing the plain bloody obvious, always being the last to know anything. Please …’

Steve shook his head. ‘OK. Well, chiefly Goldrab’s a pornographer.’

‘A pornographer? What does that mean? He sells magazines?’

‘Mostly videos. Downloads on the Internet.’

‘A pornographer? Are you sure?’

‘I’m afraid so. A hundred per cent sure.’

She was surprised to find she wasn’t more shocked. ‘Gosh – all day I’ve been thinking you meant he was a real criminal.’

Steve gave a dry laugh. ‘He is a real criminal, a real, live criminal. One of the richest pornographers in the country – and that’s saying something because we’re one of the few nations in the world that doesn’t have a thriving porn production industry. He makes his living from persuading young women – not even women some of them, girls, more like – to do things they’ll regret for ever. Before the Internet took off he spent a long time in Kosovo making illegal porn that he smuggled into the country. And I mean nasty stuff – animals, bondage. You name it. People have suffered, I can guarantee that. I’m not going to get all Mr Morals on you, for God’s sake – I’m a red-blooded man and and I’m not saying I haven’t watched a bit of porn in my time – but, trust me, a lot of the women he’s used didn’t have a choice in the matter. They didn’t have the freedom. Especially the ones in the Balkans.’

Sally sat in silence, digesting this. She could see the reality and all the subtle equations that came out of it – if she was working for someone like that, it kind of made her equal to him, complicit, even. But after all her consideration she knew she wouldn’t back out. She needed the money. ‘I suppose that makes me pretty desperate, if I’m working for him.’

Steve reached over and pushed her hair behind her ear. ‘Sweetheart, we’re all desperate. We all have to do things we’re not proud of. That’s just the way the world goes round.’

Chapter 22

It was raining so Zoë took the Mondeo. She parked near the locked gates to Sydney Gardens and prised her way through the bushes. The park was officially closed, but unofficially it was open to business. Everywhere she looked she saw young men loitering, standing casually, hands in pockets, or leaning against trees. One or two were actually sitting on the ground, lounging as if it was midday in August and not a rainy night. As she passed most of them melted away into the bushes.

The gate in the wall was set to open out on to the canal but not to allow anyone in at night. A police sign had been placed next to it, warning people that the towpath to the east was blocked due to an incident and advising them to find a different route. Zoë flicked out her torch and shone it at the ground. The rain had eased but earlier it had been heavy enough to fill to the brim the holes left by footsteps in the mud. The little pools glinted back at her in the light. She negotiated round the mud, squeezing through the bushes along the edge, and opened the gate. On the other side of the wall a single Victorian-style streetlamp threw down a yellow glow in a circle on the gravel and the canal water. Zoë ran the torch along the ground and found what she’d expected to find about ten feet away.

A slight depression spanned the path. Maybe some pipe-laying underneath had caused a dip, or a fault in the material. Whatever the cause, it had only taken the smallest amount of rain to join the scattering of puddles into one large lake. There was no way round it. You’d either have to splosh through it or take a running jump. And, she thought, looking back at the gate, if you’d just come through that gate and you were wearing shoes that had got muddy, you would probably use the opportunity to rinse off the mud.

If Lorne had come on to the towpath here she could have cleaned her shoes, and yet there’d still been mud on them when she died. Maybe there was another entrance to the canal, another place she’d stepped in the mud nearer the crime scene. Zoë set off down the path, her hood pulled up, keeping the beam on the ground, sweeping it from side to side. The temperature had dropped and smoke was coming from one or two of the barges, which had shut their doors and lit their wood-burning stoves. The chatter of TVs and the flickering blue light came through the windows.

She’d gone about three hundred yards when a small break in the trees to her left made her stop. It was a tiny space, no more than a badger run. It rose up, away from the path, then fell into darkness on the other side. Pushing aside the brambles and trees that crowded into the opening, she shone the light down. She smiled. Mud. And in it there were two clear shoe prints. They looked at a glance to be an almost exact match to Lorne’s muddied ballet pumps.

‘Oh, Lorne,’ she murmured. ‘You weren’t shopping on Saturday at all. You’ve been lying to us.’

Chapter 23

The next morning Millie refused point blank to go to school. She said it was going to be crazy, anyway, with everyone talking about Lorne, and all the speculation, but Sally knew it was more to do with the guy in the purple jeep sitting outside Kingsmead. She wasn’t going to force her, but she wasn’t going to leave her at Peppercorn alone, not after last night. She called Isabelle, but she was going to be in meetings all day, so, in spite of herself, she called Julian. He too was working all day.

‘Please, Mum,’ Millie begged. ‘Please. Just don’t make me go to school.’

She looked at Millie for a long time. This was impossible. Either take her fifteen-year-old daughter to the house of a pornographer or let her take her chances with the drug-dealing loan shark. God, what a tangled web. Still, she had to make a decision.

‘You’ll spend four hours sitting in the back of the car.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll take a book. I won’t be in the way.’

Sally sighed. ‘Go and make a sandwich. Then get dressed – and I mean dressed. No short skirts and a proper blouse, no skimpy T-shirts. Something sensible. And you’d better bring some of that English homework too – four hours is a lot of time to kill.’

It was another fine day, the sun already high in the sky, last night’s rain just a memory, but all the way to Lightpil House Sally worried. She kept thinking about what Steve had said – about the girls in Kosovo, some of them not even women yet. And then, conversely, she started worrying that David wouldn’t let Millie stay, that they’d have to get straight back in the car and turn round, that she’d lose the extra four hundred and eighty pounds a month she’d factored into her sums.

When they pulled into the parking area Millie opened the window and leaned out, blinking in the sun and gazing up at Lightpil House as if she was driving on to a movie set. David Goldrab must have been waiting because before Sally could park he was coming down the long path to meet them. He was wearing his towelling robe and FitFlops, a glass of green tea in his hand, and a digital heart monitor on his wrist, as if he’d just come off one of the treadmills in the gym on the first floor. Sally pulled on the handbrake and watched him, wondering what he’d do when he saw Millie. Sure enough, when he caught sight of her in the front seat he frowned. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Millie,’ she said, bracing herself for an argument. ‘My daughter. She won’t get in the way.’

David bent down at the driver’s window, hands on his thighs, and gave Millie a long, appraising look. ‘You staying with us, are you?’

‘She’ll be out here in the car. She won’t bother us.’

‘Like pheasants, do you, Princess?’

Millie glanced at her mother.

‘It’s all right,’ said David. ‘It’s not a trick question. Got to learn to answer questions with honesty. If a person asks you a trick question the only person it shows up is them. So – do you like baby pheasants or not?’

‘She’s staying in the car.’

‘Sally, please. She’s not a two-year-old. She needs something to occupy herself. Won’t come to any harm – better than being cooped up in this …’ He paused and gazed at the little Ka, trying to find words to describe its lowliness. ‘Yeah. Anyway – better you run around in the sunshine, Princess. Now, answer the question. Do you like pheasants?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Then I’ll show you where to go and have a look.’

‘Don’t go out of the grounds,’ Sally said. ‘And take your phone.’

Millie rolled her eyes. ‘I heard you,’ she hissed. ‘OK?’

Sally took a few deep breaths. She unbuckled her belt and got out of the car. Millie climbed out of the passenger seat and flattened her blouse with her palms, looking around, clearly impressed by everything she saw and amazed that her mother could somehow, in whatever context, be part of it.

‘See that path down there at the side of the house?’ David came round the front of the car and pointed down to the edge of the property. ‘You follow that and you’ll find a gate. There’s a padlock. Code’s 1983. My date of birth.’ He gave a laugh. Neither Sally nor Millie joined in. ‘Go through and there’s a shed. Full of the little buggers. When you’re done, come and sit on the terrace. Mum’ll make you a lemonade. Won’t you, Sally?’

Millie glanced at her mother. Sally hesitated, feeling sick. But she jerked her head to tell Millie to go. To get on with it. ‘Phone,’ she mouthed at her. ‘Keep your phone switched on.’

With another uncertain look at David, Millie set off down the path. He folded his arms and watched her go. She was very thin in her jeans, which were big in the leg but tight on the hips, and her hair bounced and gleamed in the sunlight. Sally watched the way he was eyeing her daughter. She slammed the car door, louder than she needed to, and he turned to her with a lazy smile.

‘What? Oh, Sally, I’m disappointed. You think I’m checking her out, don’t you? What do you take me for?’ He looked back at Millie, who was just disappearing behind the flower borders. ‘Do you think I’m some kind of pervert? A man of my age? A girl of that age? She’s far, far too old for me.’

Sally stiffened and he roared with laughter, nudging her arm. ‘I’m joking, girl. Joking. It was just a leetle joke. Go on – crack a fucking smile, can’t you? Christ.’ He sighed. ‘Did you have to pay extra for that stick you’ve got up your arse or did it come free with the convent education?’

Sally swallowed. Her mouth was dry. But she didn’t let it show. She went to the car boot and began to get out her cleaning equipment.

‘I’m only pulling your leg, girl.’

She took out the black attaché case she kept her notepads and pencils in and, without waiting, set off up the path, followed by David, who huffed and puffed and muttered darkly about people with no sense of humour. Inside the house was filled with the smell of bread. He must have been cooking, using the three hundred pounds’ worth of automatic bread-maker that sat next to the coffee machine in the kitchen. Sally sucked at the air, pulling it down into her lungs, willing it to calm her. The smell of food always made her nerves go away.

‘Know what, Sally?’ David said, when they got to the office. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have the feeling Sally Benedict doesn’t hold David Goldrab in very high esteem. Because that’s the way the world works, ain’t it? Now, you probably grew up in some place with turrets and stables. Me? Well, there were towers and drawbridges in my past too – a tower block with a fucking great iron security door to stop the junkies off the Isle of Dogs breaking in and shitting in the lift. Which never worked anyway, whether it got used as a toilet or not. Seventeenth floor and no hot water, no heating.’

He sat on his swivel chair, unstrapped the heart monitor, plugged it into the back of a white Sony laptop and began downloading his day’s workout readings. Then he used his heels to kick himself across the room to a larger desktop computer and switched it on.

‘1957 – that was when I was really born, not 1983, in case I had you fooled there. Youngest of three boys – it was two to a bed in those days, a mattress on the floor, and count yourself lucky if you got one scabby little square inch of peeling wallpaper to stick your posters on. Always getting your dick groped – had to sleep like this.’ He put his hands over his crotch and bent at the waist as if he’d just taken a cricket ball in the groin. ‘Oldest brother turned into a drunk at thirteen. Mum never even noticed, she was that taken up with herself and her own bloody misery. He’d come home shit-faced and crash on top of us. Can still smell him, the miserable cunt. One morning I wake up and the bed’s wet. He’s wet the fucking bed, and the moment I sit up in bed, see him lying there all covered in puke and blood and his own piss but still breathing, still snoring, I know for sure that if it takes every inch of my energy, every drop of my sweat, if I have to eat shit, kill for it, I’m going to get out of there – find my own space. My Lebensraum.’

He opened his hands to indicate the grounds outside the window. From there the hills rolled away. There was hardly anything, just a few telegraph poles in the far distance, to indicate that there were any other human beings on the planet. The gate Millie had gone through was surrounded by trees throwing giant shadows on to the grass below. She was nowhere to be seen.

‘Lebensraum,’ he repeated. ‘What Hitler wanted. Sometimes, you know, you have to wonder if Hitler didn’t have a point. And there’s me, Jewish name, and plenty of Jew blood in me, though not as pure as my arse of a father would’ve liked it – and I’m thinking Hitler had a point! My ancestors, God rest your souls, put your fingers in your ears, but Hitler was a vegetarian. And he did like animals. And most of all he liked space. Space to breathe, space to live, space to sleep. Space not to be groped and pissed on by your slag of a brother. And that’s what you’re here for, Sally, to run my Lebensraum. And to keep it like that. Peaceful. Lacking in human clutter.’

The heart monitor had finished downloading its data. David spent some time studying it. Then, seeming satisfied, he switched off the computer.

‘Course,’ he said, with a half-glance up at her, ‘if I had my druthers I’d have a woman in my life, little golden-haired thing with big knockers, a good head for figures, and a problem in the nymphomaniac department. But I know women – most of you’ve only got one thing on your mind, and it doesn’t begin with S. So, Sally, come and sit here.’ He drew another chair up next to him in front of the computer. ‘Come here and let me show you what I want you to do.’

Sally sat next to him. He smelt vaguely of sweat and aftershave. She couldn’t stop thinking about the women in the Balkans, about whether he’d told them his life story.

‘Now …’ he waved a hand around the office ‘… this is Tracy Island – the nerve centre of Goldrab Enterprises. We’re sitting in the personal section. That, over there, that’s the money-making part.’

He was pointing to where a desk sat piled high with files and another computer. There was a filing cabinet next to the desk and, mounted above that, a huge monitor showing the view of the driveway from the security camera in the front. Once she’d been cleaning here and had noticed a pile of paperwork on top of that cabinet. She hadn’t looked too closely but she recalled invoices in a foreign language. The name Priština had jumped out. At the time she’d thought it was the name of a city in Russia. Now, thinking about what Steve had said, she guessed it must be Kosovo.

‘Sally, I don’t want you going home with the idea I don’t trust you, because of course I do. But you won’t mind me pointing out that my work is confidential. I prefer to keep it that way. In other words, if I catch you snooping around there I’ll shoot you in the fucking eye.’ He gave a fat, pleased smile when he saw her reaction. ‘A joke. Another joke. Jesus, the sense-of-humour fairy is definitely AWOL this morning, ain’t she? Now, on this computer I keep the database for the house. See? So this is where you work. You enter the invoices here, and the receipts here. It’s not rocket science. You make the calls, get the estimates, organize the workers. Just try to make it so everyone comes on the same day so I’m not running around every morning thinking, I’ve got to get my drawers on pronto cos the bleeding plumber’s on his way.’

‘OK,’ she said quietly.

‘And smile, for fuck’s sake. Crack a bleeding smile. It’s like looking at a shagging slapped arse, looking at you—’

He broke off and jerked to his feet, staring at the CCTV monitor on the wall. ‘Holy Jesus,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘The scabby little bumsucker.’

On the lane outside was parked a small Japanese jeep in a metallic purple, with shiny chrome bull-bars. Sally stared at it. The dealer from Kingsmead? It couldn’t be. Here at David Goldrab’s? As if he’d followed them? The window opened and an arm came out, jabbing at the keypad on the gate. It was him. She recognized the hair and the suntan. She spun round and stared out of the window. Millie had appeared on the lawn. Maybe she’d already seen the pheasants, maybe she wasn’t interested anyway, but for some reason she had settled on the grass, lying on her stomach, her phone in both hands, busily texting or browsing, or updating her Facebook page. Sally got up, dithering, not sure what to do, whether to run through the kitchen and yell, or to get her phone and call her.

On screen the man was still jabbing in numbers, though evidently he didn’t know the code, because the gates stayed resolutely closed. David didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head, a nasty smile on his face. ‘Oh, Jake,’ he said, to the monitor. ‘Jake the Peg. You didn’t ought to be coming back here, mate. No. You really didn’t ought to be doing that.’

Chapter 24

Taking casts of footprints and comparing them to shoes was generally one of the quicker jobs forensics teams did. No waiting around for lengthy lab tests. By eleven o’clock that morning the results from the canal path had come back. The prints Zoë had found last night had been made by Lorne Wood. And when the police looked at the path that led away from the gap in the trees they saw there was only one route she could have taken to get there. From the canal the track led through a small wooded area, then along a path that ran between two horse paddocks, under a railway bridge and out to a bus stop. Nowhere near the shops. Lorne had lied to her mother about where she had been that Saturday and, in Zoë’s book, if a person could lie about something like that, there was no knowing what else they could lie about – the fibs could roll on and on, as far as the horizon.

She got one of the DCs to start warrants on the bus companies’ CCTV, then spent some time in the office looking at all the routes that passed through the stop near the canal. They snaked out for miles in every direction – there was no knowing which she’d come from. She could have been travelling from almost any direction, she could have changed routes – she could even have gone as far afield as Bristol in the time she’d been away from home. Zoë fished out the camera chip she’d found in Lorne’s bedroom and balanced it thoughtfully on her finger, considering it. Twice already she’d almost taken it into Ben’s office. But each time she’d stopped herself. She wasn’t sure who she was protecting by not speaking up – Lorne or herself. In the end she got up and pulled on her jacket. She needed to know more before she did anything.

The agency was in the centre of Bath. ‘No. 1, Milsom Street’, said the sign, and under it, written in tall, thin letters, ‘The Zebedee Juice Agency’. It was above a boutique, and when Zoë came up the stairs she found a wide room, daylight pouring into it through a vast glass dome in the ceiling. There was no reception desk, just an array of red sofas dotted with faux-fur cushions and piles of magazines on black lacquer tables. On the wall in an unframed LCD screen a video played silently – faces, boys and girls, morphing one into another.

The manager, a girl dressed in a polo-neck, denim shorts and spiked heels with metallic shadow on her eyelids, jumped up to greet Zoë with a neurotic-sounding ‘Hi, hi hi!’ She was twitchy, kept rubbing her nose and swallowing, and it didn’t take a genius to see she was itching to get to her next line of coke. Still, Zoë supposed, you didn’t get that super-thin look without a bit of help.

She poured two long glasses of Bottlegreen lemon grass pressé and took Zoë to sit near the window. In the street below shoppers and tourists bustled in and out of the shops. The manager admitted she’d half been expecting a visit from the police – she added that maybe she should have called them herself, because she remembered Lorne well. She’d come in with her mother a month ago. She’d been a very nice-looking girl, if a bit short and a little on the heavy side for the catwalk. And her eyebrows had been plucked to within an inch of their lives. ‘Most of our models aren’t what you or I would call conventionally pretty. Some of them, if you saw them in the street, you’d almost call ugly. What’s hot at the moment is a very animal look. You want to be able to see the ethnicity of a model. If someone walks in the room and I think, Yeah, he’s got all the anger of his race behind him, that’s when I know I’m on to a winner.’

‘Lorne wasn’t like that?’

‘No. Glamour, maybe, but not right for the ramp. Never.’

‘Did you tell her that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how did she react?’

‘She was upset. But it’s what happens all the time, girls coming in here all hopeful, going away completely miserable, rejected.’

‘What about Mrs Wood? What was her reaction?’

‘Oh, relief. You’d be surprised – I get that reaction more than anything else. Mothers just humouring their daughters, but they’re over the moon when someone else points out what they’ve secretly thought all along and just can’t bring themselves to say. The girls, though …’ She gave a small shake of her head. ‘Even when you’ve said it over and over some of the girls still won’t listen to you. For some of them it’s like a hunger – eats away at them. They won’t take no for an answer. All they care about is seeing themselves staring up out of some glossy page somewhere. Those are the ones I worry about. Those are the ones that’ll end up places they really don’t want to be.’

‘Places they don’t want to be?’

The manager wrinkled her brow. ‘Yes – you know what I mean.’

Zoë held her eyes. For a moment she’d thought the emphasis in that sentence had been on ‘you’. As in You, DI Benedict, know exactly what I’m talking about. So don’t pretend you don’t. She found herself wanting an explanation – wanting to say, ‘What the hell do you mean?’, but then she caught herself. This girl was twenty if she was a day. There was no way she knew anything about what had happened all those years ago.

‘So,’ she said levelly, ‘what do you do if you get a girl like that who won’t be put off?’

The agency manager picked up a little pile of business cards in a plastic holder on one of the tables. She pulled one out and passed it to Zoë. ‘We tell them they’re better off doing glamour and give them one of these. Want one?’

Zoë took the card. Studied it. It was shaped like a pair of lips. It read: ‘Holden’s Agency. Where dreams come true’. ‘Did you give one to Lorne?’

The manager ran a finger inside her polo-neck, thinking about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a while. ‘Probably not, because her mum was here. I can’t recall exactly.’

‘She didn’t take one anyway?’

‘Maybe. I honestly couldn’t say.’

Zoë tucked the card into her wallet. She sipped her drink thoughtfully, her eyes on the windows in the department store opposite. Something was niggling at her, something she’d seen, or something the manager had said in the last ten minutes. It wouldn’t come to her. She put her glass on the table. ‘Lorne didn’t mention a boyfriend, did she? At any point when she was here did she mention any names?’

‘No. Not that I can recall.’

‘Do you have a catalogue? Of your models?’

‘Sure.’ She opened a drawer to show Zoë a stack of pink-bound notebooks and a box of pink memory sticks. All with the name ‘Zebedee Juice’ emblazoned in lime green. ‘Hard copy or a stick?’

‘One of these’ll do.’ She took a book. ‘I want to check if you’ve got any models with the initials “RH”.’

‘RH?’ While Zoë flicked through the catalogue the manager sat with her thumb in her mouth, her eyes to the ceiling, mentally running a tally of her clients. By the time Zoë got to the end she was shaking her head. ‘No. And not even with their real names.’

‘Staff?’

‘No. There’s only me, and Moonshine who comes in in the afternoon. Her real name is Sarah Brown.’

‘Nothing else you can remember that sticks in your mind about Lorne? Anything that you think could be important? Anyone she spoke about?’

‘No. I’ve been thinking about it. Ever since I saw the news and put two and two together about it being the same girl who was here, I’ve been going through it. And I honestly can’t remember anything about the meeting that was odd.’

‘OK. Can I keep this book?’

‘Of course – please. Be my guest.’

‘One last thing, and then I’ll go. What do you think about Lorne? Do you think she was one of the ones who’d end up in those places you were were talking about? Did she have the hunger?’

The manager gave a short laugh. ‘Did she have the hunger? My God. I don’t think there’s a girl who walked through that door in the last two years who had it any worse.’

Chapter 25

David Goldrab spoke into the intercom, released the gates and told Jake to park at the front, come in through the front door, which was open, and wait in the hall. Then he disappeared upstairs to the bedroom to get dressed. The moment he left the office Sally dialled Millie’s number, her fingers shaking on the keypad. She stood at the window as the call went through and watched Millie on the lawn, frowning down at the phone. She seemed to be considering ignoring it. After a moment, though, she changed her mind and held it to her ear.

‘Yeah, what?’

‘He’s followed us. He’s here.’

‘Who?’

‘The guy in the jeep. Jake. That’s his name. Jake.’

Millie jolted at that. She got to her feet and stood for a moment, half frozen, not knowing which way to go.

‘It’s OK.’ Sally crept to the doorway and put her head into the gap, peering down the corridor. She could just see the hallway – a huge, galleried atrium with a central staircase done in granite and marble with black and white tiles on the floor. Jake was near the front door. His ebony hair was gelled into spikes, his distressed jeans and T-shirt showing off his muscles and the trim line of his belly.

‘He’s in the house,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘Don’t worry – he’s in the hall at the front. He can’t see you.’

She held the phone to her chest and cautiously leaned out of the doorway again to watch him. He seemed smaller and much less confident now he wasn’t in his car. He kept bending a little to crane his neck up the stairs to see where David had disappeared to.

Sally ducked back into the office. ‘I’m not sure what he’s up to,’ she hissed. ‘It’s weird – maybe he’s here just to see David. Go and hide somewhere – somewhere in the trees where he won’t see you from the back of the house. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.’

The noise of a door closing upstairs echoed down the stairs. Sally ended the call and jerked her head back through the door. Jake was still in the hall, tightening his belt, pulling his shoulders back, watching David come along the landing.

‘Jake! Jake the Peg!’ David smiled expansively from the top of the stairs. He was wearing a well-cut white shirt over jeans. His feet were bare as he padded down, his arms open as if greeting a long-lost friend. He stopped a few stairs from the bottom and sat so he was a little above Jake’s eye level, forcing him to look up. ‘It’s been too long. How’s things? How’s the extra leg, mate?’ He held his hands at his crotch to mime an enormous phallus. ‘Still getting out and about, is it? Making lots of new friends?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Jake nodded nervously. He folded his arms tight across his chest, his hands tucked under them. ‘Everything’s wicked. Ticking over. Had a bit of a business proposal and thought I’d – y’know – drop in. Talk to you about it.’

‘Yeah – I saw you “dropping in”. I’ll be honest – I was a bit taken aback you’d think I had the same gate code six months on. Thought that was a bit disrespectful, but … you know how I am. Never dwell on things. If you feel at home enough to plug my code into my gate, after not seeing me in all this time, I reckoned that means you just feel comfortable around me.’ He took a toothpick from his pocket and began studiously picking his teeth, his hand over his mouth, his eyes on Jake. ‘So, Jakey, Jakey, Jakey, my extra-legged boy, Jake. What you bin up to, boyo? Just, from time to time you do hear some stupid rumours. Last I heard you were up to a bit of jiggery-pokery with the old no-no stuff. Selling it on to the rich kids – hanging around outside the posh schools, like a lonely turd in a lake, or so I’ve heard. Course I never listen to that nonsense, cos I’m sure it ain’t true.’

‘Nah …’ Jake shifted anxiously. ‘Course it ain’t.’

‘So how you bringing home the corn, these days, then, matey boy? Now that you’re not cracking off the money shots for me?’

‘Oh, you know. Been – doing my thing. Hoeing my row.’

David made a small sound in his throat as if he found this incredibly funny. He had to put a finger to his head and bend slightly at the waist to stop himself laughing like a horse.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. It’s just …’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then gave in to another spasm of giggles. He checked it and sat straight, his face still twitching. ‘It’s just “hoeing my row”. The images it conjures up, mate. Hoeing my—’ He couldn’t get the words out. Again he doubled up with silent contortions.

Jake watched stonily, the huge muscles in his arms twitching slightly. ‘Sounds like they’re funny. The images.’

‘They are,’ David said, his voice tight, as if he was on the verge of hysteria. ‘Very funny. They’re poof images. One poof hoeing the other poof’s row. You know, one poof ploughing into another’s glory hole. That’s what it made me think of.’ David wiped his eyes again. Got himself under control. ‘My mother is a relatively intelligent woman. I mean, apart from the three times she opened her legs to my father, she isn’t altogether thick. Do you know what she used to say to me when I was a nipper? She used to say, “There are several people you should never trust, son. You should never trust a cop, you should never trust a skinny chef, you should never trust a fat beggar. Never trust an Arab or a bloke whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Never trust a man in black shoes and white socks and never trust a black man in a fez. But do you know who was at the top of her never-trust list? The crème de la crème of untrustworthiness?’

‘No.’ Jake said it almost soundlessly.

‘The poofs. The fucking poofters.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

David gave a slow smile. ‘You’re a fucking queer, Jake. A bumboy, a shirt-lifting faggoty shit-stirrer. Now, I ain’t saying that’s your fault. What the scientists are saying, these days, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but what they’re saying is that you can’t help it. Apparently it’s in your biology. You can’t be blamed for it – it’s in your genes.’ He held his hands out in amazement, as if to say, ‘How weird is that?’ ‘Yeah, according to the mad professors it’s nothing to do with you all being a bunch of perverts, it’s all down to some fuck-up in the chromosome department. So I can’t blame you, Jake, for the simple fact of you being a turd-tickler – what you do with your arse is your lookout – but I can blame you, and this is where I start to feel twitchy, like, what I can blame you for …’ he leaned forward ‘… is not having the fucking good manners to mention it to me. Jake the Peg with his extra leg – and turns out the leg’s not got its lead up for the bit of gash lying on the bed. It’s got it up maybe for one of the crew members. Or, God forgive me for saying it, maybe even for me. And he never mentions it. That, you see,’ he jabbed his fingers in the air, ‘that is what I call ignorance.’

David lowered his hand and put it on the banister. For a moment it looked as if he might swing his legs up and kick Jake in the chin. But he didn’t. He simply pulled himself to his feet.

Jake swallowed. He didn’t step back. He put his hands into his jeans pockets defiantly. ‘I’m not a poof.’

‘Liar.’ David’s face didn’t change. ‘You are.’

‘OK – so what if I was? Don’t mean anything, does it? This isn’t the Stone Age – there’s human rights now. You can’t get away with calling me a poof.’

David made a tutting noise. He shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Playing the poofter discrimination card? It’s against the rules, boyo. As bad as playing the race card.’ He dropped his head to one side and put on a fake bright voice: ‘We are sorry, your poof card has been denied. Please be advised that your poof card account has been closed. This decision was based on your account history of excessive over-limit spending. Please destroy your card immediately as it will no longer be honoured. Now, see that crossbow on the wall? Up there.’

Jake raised his eyes. Sally couldn’t see up to the galleried landing, but she knew what was up there. A crossbow mounted in a cabinet with a picture light trained above it. In the back of the cabinet there was a framed photograph of the sun setting over the African bush.

‘I shot a fucking hippo with that. Back in the days when white law-abiding people who worked hard had rights, before someone took them away from us and started handing them out to animals and blacks and poofters – and I don’t care how politically incorrect you think I am, you, my son, are not welcome here. Now –’ he gave a peremptory jerk of the head, indicating the door ‘– now, get that tart of a car off my gravel before I get my friend up there off its stand and shoot you in your fancy little pink-boy derrière.’

Jake kept his chin up, staring at the crossbow. There was a long silence. Sally could see his Adam’s apple going up and down, as if he wanted to speak. Then he seemed to change his mind. He dropped his chin and without another word, without meeting David’s eyes one more time, he turned and left the house. There was the sound of his feet crunching on the gravel, the high-pitched squeak of a remote locking device, and the slam of a car door. Then the sound of the car leaving, going slowly.

Shakily, Sally separated herself from the wall and dialled Millie’s number.

Chapter 26

The incident stayed with Sally all day. Even when Jake had gone, and she’d spoken to Millie and knew she was safe out in the garden, even when she’d spent three hours struggling with the database and things at Lightpil House had quietened down, with David wandering around, champagne in hand, muttering incessantly about class and the immorality of homosexuality, she was still uneasy. There wasn’t really any doubt in her mind now that Steve had been right, that what lay under the surface of David Goldrab’s life was wide and deep. She had the feeling it could all just crack open at a moment’s notice.

She gave Millie a long lecture about it in the car on the way back. ‘This is serious stuff. Jake is not good news. These are really unpleasant people you’re getting involved with.’

‘Well, you’re the one working for one of them,’ Millie replied sullenly, and, of course, Sally couldn’t argue with that. Now Julian wasn’t around to shelter them, she and Millie had crossed that line and she was beginning to see how different everything on this side was.

‘I’m thinking of a solution. I will come up with something.’

‘Will you?’ Millie stared out of the window, a bored, disbelieving expression on her face. ‘Will you really?’

Sally was exhausted by the time they turned into the driveway at Peppercorn, and the last thing she felt like was seeing people. But there were two camper-vans parked in the garden – Isabelle and the teenagers were standing there, waiting for her. She pulled on the handbrake. She’d completely forgotten that today was the day Peter and Nial would pick up the camper-vans they’d been saving for. Two rusting old heaps with mud and manure all the way up to the wheel arches. She had to force a smile on to her face as she got out. But as it turned out no one else was in the party mood either. They might have pretended they were celebrating the vans’ arrival, but there was an underlying tension. An unspoken ghost flitting between them. Lorne Wood. Dead at sixteen.

‘Their first lesson in mortality,’ Isabelle said, when she and Sally were on their own at last. They’d each poured a glass of the nice wine Steve was always bringing to Peppercorn, and had gone into the living room. ‘It’s a difficult one. They’re taking this badly.’

‘Millie didn’t want to go to school today. She said it was because the police might be there. Were they?’

‘No. But they were at Faulkener’s the second day in a row. Sophie got a text from one of the girls. Apparently the place came to a standstill – the police think one of the boys did it.’

‘One of the boys?’ Sally looked at Isabelle’s face, the salt-and-pepper strands of hair and the clear blue eyes. ‘Seriously?’

‘The police stopped the kids using their phones. They kept them shut in the school all day. It sounded like a frenzy – some of the parents have been complaining to the head.’

The two women stood at the french windows, gazing out reflectively at the kids and the vans. Sally had painted each of the kids several times. She’d loved doing it – it was like capturing their emerging personalities, tethering a tiny piece of their fleeting souls to something, even if it was just oil paint and canvas. Because, she thought now, if there was one thing she knew for sure, things were changing for them fast. Faster than anyone could have predicted.

‘Nial says the girls are scared.’ Isabelle gave a sad smile. Outside, Nial was bent over, using a Magic Marker to sketch on his van the patterns he was going to paint. ‘He half thinks he’s going to be the white knight – just the way you painted him in those cards. Protect them all. Like that’s going to happen with Pete around.’

It sounded about right, Sally thought. Sweet little Nial, secretly her favourite of the boys. Too small, too timid, he was totally overshadowed by Peter. He was good-looking, but in the way that wouldn’t show itself properly until he was in his thirties. When handsome boys like Peter would be getting heavy and losing their hair, the boys like Nial would be growing into their looks. Just now he was still too small and feminine for the girls to notice him. Her favourite tarot card depicted him as the Prince of Swords, on the one hand angry and sometimes vengeful, on the other reserved and hugely intelligent. The sort who could lead rebellions with his insightful ideas. She’d chosen to clothe him in a robe of velvet and brocade, blue, to bring out his eyes.

‘Do you think they’re right?’ she said. ‘To be scared, I mean. Do you think it was one of the other schoolkids?’

‘God, I don’t know. But there is one thing I can tell you.’ She nodded at the teenagers. ‘There’s something they’re not saying.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, but I do know my son. And there’s something he’s not saying. Something he really wants to say but can’t. He and Peter are really secretive at the moment.’ She used her toe to push the glass door open a little more. The sound of birds singing came through it, with the bleat of lambs and the distant noise of traffic on the motorway. She was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘Peter was in love with Lorne – did you know that?’

‘Yes. I mean, I suppose everyone was in a way.’

‘I think she wasn’t interested in him, but he loved her. So did Nial, I imagine. But …’ she said, lowering her voice a little ‘… I think the thing with Peter was what really finished Millie’s friendship with her.’

Sally shot her a look. ‘Millie’s friendship?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Know what?’

‘Look at them out there, Sally. Really look at them.’

Sally did. Millie had separated from the group and was under a tree about ten yards away, sitting on the swing, one toe on the grass, twisting round and round, making her shadow twirl on the ground. Now, as she watched, Millie raised sullen eyes to the others. Sally followed the direction of her gaze and saw Peter, crouched next to the van, examining something in the tyre. She looked back at Millie and saw the expression on her face. It hit her like a train. That was what Isabelle meant. Millie was in love. In love with Peter. Good-looking, brazen, self-assured Peter, who was completely wrapped up in himself, and completely oblivious to Millie.

‘Is that …’ She paused, feeling stupid again. ‘Is that why Millie stopped seeing Lorne? Because he was in love with her?’

‘Did you really not know?’

‘Uh,’ she said dumbly. She rubbed her arms. ‘Yes. I mean, I suppose.’

The two women were silent for a while, watching the kids. Something sad and lonely and familiar was thumping in Sally’s stomach. The sick knockings of being the loser – the way Millie must feel about Peter. It had been the same for her at boarding-school, where she’d learned early to exist at the bottom of the winning pile. While Zoë, of course, at the other school, knew what it was like at the top.

‘Oh, Isabelle,’ she murmured sadly. ‘They’re growing up. It’s happened right under our noses.’

Chapter 27

Sally had put the dinner in the oven and was making chocolate fudge for Isabelle to take home, cutting it into squares and putting it on greaseproof paper. Isabelle was outside but now she came in through the back door, huffing and puffing and kicking at the grass clippings that clung to her bare feet. Sally smiled at her, but Isabelle put a finger to her mouth and shook her head seriously.

‘What?’

She turned to reveal Nial and Millie standing behind her in the doorway, sheepish expressions on their faces. Sally set down the knife, wiped her apron and made herself smile at them. She was thinking of the conversation earlier – Isabelle insisting the teenagers were keeping a secret. ‘Millie?’ she said warily. ‘What is it?’

‘Look, Sally.’ Isabelle closed the door behind the teenagers and crossed to the table, holding Sally’s eyes seriously. ‘There’s a problem.’

‘Is it Lorne?’

‘No. Thank God, no.’ She raised her eyebrows at her son in the doorway. ‘Nial? Come on – explain.’

Nial came forward and sat down, casting a tentative glance at Sally. Millie followed hurriedly, pulling up a chair next to him – sitting with her shoulder touching his, her hands between her knees, her eyes lowered. She might be in love with Peter, but Isabelle was right: when it came to knights in shining armour Nial was always there, hoping all the girls would want to hide behind him. Of course, he’d puff himself up to make himself look as big as he could and they’d walk straight past him, their arms open to drape around Peter’s neck.

‘What happened,’ Isabelle said, ‘is they got their Glastonbury tickets a couple of months ago. You knew that, didn’t you? With Peter’s big brother?’

‘Of course. That’s what you’re painting the vans up for, isn’t it? Why? What’s the problem?’

Isabelle dug her finger into the wood grain of the table. Gave Millie an embarrassed sideways glance. ‘Millie hasn’t paid for her ticket.’

‘Her ticket?’ Sally turned her eyes to Millie. ‘What ticket? Millie, we talked about this. You were never going to have a ticket – you weren’t going with them.’

‘Mum, please. Don’t go off on one.’ She looked as if she might cry. ‘Peter paid for them online. Now I’ve got to give him my share of the money.’

‘But …’ Sally sat down, shaking her head. ‘Sweetheart, I’ve told you over and over again, I just can’t afford for you to go to Glastonbury. We talked about this.’

‘Everyone else’s parents are paying.’

‘Yes, but everyone else’s parents …’ She stopped herself. She’d almost said: ‘Everyone else’s parents know what they’re doing.’

Isabelle put her hand on Sally’s arm. ‘Nial and I want to pay for it. That’s why we’re here. Seriously – I’m happy. If you’re happy for her to go, then I’m happy to pay.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t. You’ve already helped me out more than I deserve.’

‘But think of everything you’ve done for me over the years. You’ve helped me – given me so much. I’ve lost count of the number of presents you’ve given me, all the paintings you’ve done for us. You must let me help you out.’

Sally gave a long sigh. She bit her lip and looked out of the window. The second time in less than twenty-four hours that she’d sat here and insisted she could do this alone. She turned back to where Isabelle and Nial were watching her with expectant faces. ‘I can’t take your money,’ she said. ‘Thank you for offering, but I really can’t. Millie will have to find a way of earning it. Or she’ll have to send the ticket back.’

‘Mum! I can’t believe you sometimes.’

Millie pushed her chair back and ran out of the cottage, slamming the door. Isabelle and Nial sat in silence, eyes lowered.

‘Sally,’ Isabelle said eventually. ‘Are you sure we can’t help?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve got to find my own way through it.’

She got up and carried the glasses to the sink, turning her back to them. Her shoulders were sagging with tiredness. God, she thought bitterly, I’m even starting to bore myself saying it.

Chapter 28

One of the cats that crowded around Zoë’s back door had injured its foot. She noticed it as she stood there late that night after work, sipping a long-overdue Jerry’s rum mixed with ginger, watching them all swarming around her, eager for the food she put out every night. The little one hung back from the group, peering nervously at her. It looked skinny, as if it hadn’t been eating.

She drained the Jerry’s, went back inside for more cat biscuits and coaxed it out of the shadows. She managed to catch it and take it inside to examine under the light. It had a rubber band looped around its back legs. No wonder it couldn’t walk. The band had rubbed, but it hadn’t yet broken the skin. She cut it carefully, and peeled it away. Then she put her hands under the cat’s front legs and held it up in front of her to check it everywhere else. It gazed back at her, its legs dangling idiotically.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, and put it on the floor. She found a litter tray and some cat litter in the back of the shed and put it with a bowl of food and some water on the floor in the downstairs loo. Then she carried the cat over and placed it next to the food. ‘One night only, just until you’re better. Don’t even think about getting used to it – this is not a hotel.’

The cat ate hungrily. Zoë straightened to leave and, as she did, caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the washbasin. She stopped and stared at herself. Red shaggy hair. High cheekbones and sun-damaged skin. She looked half wild. Eighteen years ago in the clubs she had worn her hair cut short and white-blonde. Only one person had known her real name – the manager of the club, who was long gone, overseas somewhere. No one would recognize DI Benedict as the girl on that stage all those years ago. She was the master of disguise. She could hide anything she chose to.

She pushed up her sleeve, and stared at all the welts and scars. Unevenly shaped wounds made by her own nails. Something else she’d been clever at hiding. Ben had never noticed these all the time they’d been together. She’d covered them with makeup, made sure he never got a good look at the worst ones. The marks were the evidence of a trick she’d learned at boarding-school in her first term: whenever she thought of Mum and Dad and Sally, the way they could sit contentedly next to a fire, arms around each other, the feelings that came up in her used to make her cry softly into the pillow. Slowly she found that the only way to make the awful raw spot in her chest go away was to hurt another part of her body. She’d do it anywhere Matron wouldn’t notice – the tops of her thighs, her stomach. Sometimes there would be blood on her pyjamas in the morning, and then she’d make an excuse to creep off to the showers, where she’d stand, shivering, soaping away the evidence. The habit had never left her.

Stop it, she thought, yanking the sleeve down. Stupid stupid stupid. Stop it. This wasn’t her. She was the person who’d survived boarding-school, who’d fought her way across continents, who’d worked her way up the ranks in a male-dominated world. It didn’t matter that tonight was the second in a row Ben had suddenly become ‘too busy’ to come back to hers. She didn’t own him. It really didn’t matter. And none of her past was going to come back to get her just because of those photos of Lorne.

She switched off the light, closed the door on the cat, washed her dinner plate and the pots, then went to bed. She lay for a long time in the darkness, resisting the urge to touch her arms. When she did at last sleep, it was uneasy, ruptured, infected with dreams and discomfort.

She dreamed of clouds and mountains and rushing rivers. She dreamed of falling buildings and of a barge, tilting on its side, taking on water. And then, as the sun rose and her bedroom began to fill with light, she dreamed of a room like a Victorian nursery, with children’s number and letter charts on the wall and a rocking horse in the corner. Outside, an old-fashioned street-light cast its yellow glow on the snow that was being driven by a wind, the flakes racing in horizontal streaks past the panes. Although there was nothing familiar about the setting, somehow she knew this was the childhood bedroom she had shared with Sally. And she also knew, with absolute clarity, that it was the day of the ‘accident’. The day she’d come upstairs and found, to her fury, her bed, her toys and all her belongings painted by Sally with idiotic yellow flowers. A ‘surprise’. To please her.

But in the dream Zoë didn’t feel rage. Instead she felt fear. Real terror. Something about the snow and the nursery and the numbers on the wall was crowding at her, trying to close in on her. And behind her a child was screaming. She turned and saw it was Sally, her face a mask of terror, something red leaking from her hand. With the other hand she was pointing anxiously at the numbers on the wall, as if it was of vital importance that Zoë saw them. ‘Look,’ she was screaming. ‘Look at the numbers. Number one, number two, number three.’

Zoë looked again at the number chart and saw it had changed. Now it wasn’t numbers written out for children to learn: it was the sign at the Zebedee Juice Agency, No. 1 Milsom Street.

No. 1 … No. 1.

She sat up quickly, gulping air, her heart racing. It took her a moment to realize where she was – in her bed at home.

It was light outside and sunlight dappled the ceiling. No. 1. Number one. Now she got it. It had niggled at her when she was at Zebedee Juice and now she understood why. It was what the killer had written on Lorne’s stomach. She snatched up her phone. The display read ten to eight. She’d been asleep for seven hours. There was a team meeting in forty minutes. But this time it wasn’t going to be Debbie Harry speaking at the front of the room. It was going to be Zoë.

She raced through the shower, guzzled two cups of coffee, let the cat out, shooing it when it tried to nuzzle her ankle, and got to work at exactly half past to find the meeting had already started. Someone had blown up a series of photos – all registered sex offenders under the age of twenty-five who lived in the area – and had pinned them to the wall. One of the DSs was talking the team through the history of each one. When Zoë came in, flushed, hair still wet from the shower, clutching her bike helmet, the DS stopped talking and stared at her dumbly.

‘Sorry, mate,’ She dumped the helmet and her keys on a chair and came to the front of the room. ‘I’ve got to say something. Just before you go any further.’ She uncapped a marker pen and drew a circle on the whiteboard. ‘We’re looking at it all wrong.’

In the circle she carefully wrote: No. One.

Then she moved one of Lorne’s post-mortem pictures – the one with the message on her stomach – and stuck it on the board next to the words. ‘Look at the picture,’ she said. ‘Look at her belly button. Right here, after the “No”.’

The team gawped at the whiteboard, not a flicker of recognition in their faces.

‘It doesn’t mean no one understands him. It doesn’t mean that Lorne is no one to him. He’s telling us she is number one. Just one of many. He means there are going to be more. A number two. A number three.’

There was a long, stunned silence. Then, at the edge of the room, the superintendent cleared his throat. ‘Great – thanks, Zoë. Everyone – take that on board, OK? You hear me? Now.’ He nodded at the DS. ‘Have you finished, mate? Because I want to get on to this thing with British Waterways. I want a complete list of anyone who was mooring in the canal on Saturday so we can—’

‘Hang on, hang on.’ Zoë held up her hand. ‘I’m still here, you know. I haven’t left the room.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m still here. Or are you going to ignore what I just said?’

‘I haven’t ignored it. I’ve told everyone to keep it in mind.’

‘Would you like me to finish what I was going to say? Or shall I not bother?’

The superintendent looked at her, a baleful light in his eyes. But he knew Zoë of old, knew sometimes it was easier to roll over, and eventually he took a step back, holding his hands up in surrender.

‘OK.’ She turned back to the team. She knew the blood had come to her face and that Ben was watching her steadily from the corner. ‘We’ve got to take this seriously, because – who knows? – I might even be right. He could intend doing this again. It could already have happened. Has anyone gone to Intelligence to find out if there’re any other forces dealing with anything like this?’

‘We’d know if there were,’ said the superintendent.

‘Would we? What if the body hasn’t been found?’

‘There’d be a missing-persons case.’

‘No – that’s rubbish. How many women in their late teens, early twenties, go missing every month?’

‘Yes – but you’re not talking about girls like Lorne.’

Zoë looked back at him with a level gaze. She knew what he meant – that the girls who went missing without making headlines were the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the runaways, the strippers and the dregs. She’d get it through to them if she showed them the photos of Lorne. But she couldn’t. Just couldn’t do it.

‘You mean,’ the superintendent said, lowering his chin and looking over his glasses at her, ‘there’s a pile of dead bodies somewhere? Just no one’s noticed?’

‘No. I’m saying that up to now we’re pushing this investigation towards it being someone she knows, a teenager. I’m asking you to reconsider. I’m asking you to think outside those parameters. And to do it quickly – because, honestly, I think this could be a warning.’

Debbie Harry, who had been sitting at the back of the room in silence, gave a delicate little cough. She looked very young and fresh and pretty, dressed in a white lace blouse, her hair tied back. ‘While speculation is a good thing, it is just that. Speculation.’

‘More speculative than saying “all like her” means everyone likes her? What if it means he’s going to go after anyone who’s like Lorne?’

‘Well,’ Debbie said, suddenly soothing, ‘I’ve always been very clear in stating my case in this forum: that my opinions are only guidance. That you really, really – all of you – must form your own conclusions. And always keep an open mind.’

‘Yes. And I heard you say that. But I might be the only one who did, because I look around and I see a whole room full of investigators all too happy to accept a bit of guidance from you because it means they don’t need to use their brains. Sorry, guys, it’s true. You’ve accepted her parameters, so if we’re really going to work this case like a psychology seminar, then let’s go for it. Let’s all of us write up a thousand interpretations of these sentences. Then have a seance to decide which is right.’

‘Hang on, hang on.’ The superintendent held up his hand. ‘There’s vindictiveness creeping in here. It’s the last thing we need.’

‘Vindictiveness?’

Debbie nodded regretfully. As if it hurt her to be attacked, but that she, the adult, was prepared to be grown-up about it. She gave Zoë a sympathetic smile. ‘Well, I didn’t want to be the one to say it, but I have wondered if I’m stirring things up for you, Detective Benedict. Just a feeling that something about me is tapping into something very painful for you.’

Zoë opened her mouth to answer, then saw that everyone was staring at her. She got it. They all thought she was jealous. Jealous of this idiotic jumped-up psychology student with her one-size-too-tight blouses and her soft hair. She shot Ben a look, half expecting, or hoping, he’d say something in her defence, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. He had focused his eyes on the photos of the sex offenders on the board as if he was far more interested in them.

‘Jesus.’ Bad-temperedly she snatched up her keys and her helmet. ‘Welcome to the new age of policing. Anyone in here who gives a shit about justice, you’d better start saying your prayers.’ She saluted the superintendent, clicked her heels together and, the team staring at her as if she was completely mad, left the room, slamming the door behind her.

Chapter 29

Sally had decided that Millie had to go to school, whatever happened. She had some free slots at work that morning, so she drove her to Kingsmead, and promised to pick her up next to the sports hall at home time. Jake the Peg’s purple jeep was nowhere to be seen. Even so, she watched Millie all the way until she’d gone into the building.

Her job that morning was just around the corner from the school – in one of the most expensive streets in the city. Most of the houses were elegant detached villas, built in Victorian times. The Farrow and Ball paint fad had arrived here, and all the doors and windows seemed to be painted in muted greys and greens; bay trees in faux-lead pots lined either side of neat gravel paths while pots of woody lavender and rosemary were dotted everywhere. Steve had a house at the other end of the road from Sally’s cleaning job, so on Wednesdays she’d got into the habit of going on to his afterwards. Sometimes they’d eat lunch. More often they’d end up in bed.

His house was a little smaller than the others in the street, but otherwise very similar – a stone-flagged doorstep, an old-fashioned bell with a wire pulley that rang a proper chime inside. At one o’clock she stood outside, listening to the bell in the hallway and thinking about David and what had happened with Jake. She was ready to tell Steve all about it. But the moment he opened the front door, she saw the mood was all wrong.

‘Hi, gorgeous.’ He kissed her briefly, but it was a distracted kiss. Just a peck on the side of the face before he turned and went back down the corridor towards the kitchen.

She followed him thoughtfully, watching his retreating back. He was dressed in shorts and a paint-spattered T-shirt with ‘Queensland: beautiful one day, perfect the next’ printed across the back. There was something heavy about his shoulders, which wasn’t right. ‘Are you OK?’ she said, when they got into the kitchen.

‘Hmm?’

‘I said, is everything all right?’

‘Yes, yes. I was going to make you lunch – there’s tuna in the fridge – but I got busy sorting out all the tools you need for the house. And while I was going through them I got hit.’ He slapped the back of his neck, as if a mosquito had landed there. ‘Right here, by the bloody carpentry muse.’ He gestured to the adjoining living room, where dustsheets lay on the floor covered with curls of planed wood. A nail gun had been balanced on a Black & Decker Workmate and a toolkit sat under it. ‘Trying to fix that doorframe, but I’m just making a cock-up of it.’

‘I’ll cook.’ Sally unfastened her HomeMaids tabard. ‘You get on with it.’

‘Sally, I—’

‘What?’

He shook his head. Turned away. ‘Nothing. There’s, uh …’ he waved a hand vaguely at the cupboards ‘… sesame oil in the one at the end, if you want it.’

He went back to the living room. Sally folded the tabard and put it on the worktop, watching him carefully. He stopped in the doorway, looped up a professional-style tool-belt, bristling with chisels and hammer handles, and strapped it to his waist. Then he picked up the nail gun, switched it on, and began firing nails into the doorframe. He didn’t once turn to look at her. Over the months she’d learned that, from time to time, Steve had moods like this, when something would preoccupy him. One or two clients would leave him quiet and introspective for days, as if he’d peeped into a world he wished he hadn’t known about. Maybe now he was thinking about an upcoming trip he was supposed to be making on Saturday – a client in Seattle he needed to visit. That, or maybe the meeting he’d had yesterday in London: he’d been anxious about that before he’d left, before Millie had got up. He’d been vague about who he was meeting – perhaps it had been Mooney. The one whose name she was supposed to forget.

She went back to the fridge. Tuna steaks in greaseproof paper oozed red on the middle shelf. There was a pot of basil that looked to have been bought from the farmers’ market, some gherkins and, when she delved deep, an old jar of capers. She’d make salsa verde. She took the ingredients out and began to chop, her eyes sliding across the room to Steve as she worked. Every time he drove a nail into the doorframe she jumped.

She’d finished the sauce and was heating the oil in the pan with her back to the room when the sound of a nail being fired was followed by a loud clatter. She put down the pan and turned. He was standing with his side to her, his left hand placed high on the doorframe, the other pressed against the wall. The nail gun was on the floor where it had fallen, turning slowly on its axis. He had his head down and was perfectly still, except for his left leg, which was moving spasmodically up and down as if he was kicking himself. He looked sideways at her, his face grey, pinched.

‘Think I’ve fucked my hand, Sally, if you’ll forgive the expression.’ His teeth were clenched. He jerked his head in the direction of his left hand, not raising his eyes to it. ‘Gun hit a knot, slipped. I’ve got to assume I’ve really fucked it. Would you have a look?’

She turned off the gas and hurried across to him. The hand looked normal at first glance, just as if it was resting there, the fingers pointing up to the ceiling, but, closer to it, she saw what had happened. He’d skewered himself to the wall. She stood on tiptoe and examined it.

‘What?’ he said tightly. ‘What can you see?’

She could see the steely gleam of a nail head poking out from the fleshy pad below his thumb. She could see a single, oily line of blood running from the site of the wound to the wrist, where it split into a delta that continued down through the hair on his arm. And she could picture more – she could imagine the musculature and bone structure inside, because it was what she’d seen almost thirty years ago on the X-ray of her own hand after the accident with Zoë. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to get past that image. It always made her feel inescapably sad. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about these things.’

‘OK.’ He wiped his face with his free hand. ‘See that hacksaw?’

She crouched and rummaged through the toolkit. ‘This?’

‘No. That one.’

‘What?’ She picked it up shakily. ‘What’ve I got to do?’

‘Cut the nail. Between my hand and the wall.’

‘Cut it?’

‘Yes. Please, Sally, just do it. I’m not asking you to cut my hand off.’

‘OK, OK.’ She went quickly to the cupboard under the sink and pulled out two rolls of kitchen towel. She got a chair, scraped it up to where he stood and climbed on it to inspect the wound. Tongue between her teeth, she pressed the area around it. Steve winced and sucked in a breath, rolled his head around once or twice as if he was trying to release a crick in his neck. The skin on his thumb was stretched sideways: the nail had only pierced the side of the muscle. It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought.

‘OK.’ Her heart was thumping. ‘I don’t think it’s too serious.’

‘Just do it.’

Her hands were slippery with sweat but she pushed her fingers between the wall and his flesh and gently pulled at it, pushing it along the nail away from the wall, until about a centimetre of the shaft was visible between skin and wall.

‘Jesus.’ He dropped his head, teeth clenched, and his foot kicked harder. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

Tentatively she raised the hacksaw, edging the blade into the space between the wall and the hand, lowering it until it bit into the shaft of the nail. Steve stopped talking and went still. His eyes rested on her face. She moved the saw back and forth experimentally once or twice. He’d gone curiously quiet. She adjusted the blade and felt it lock into the metal, knew it was right, and began to saw.

‘Sally,’ he whispered suddenly, while she worked, ‘I really need you.’

Her eyes shot to him and she saw something she’d never seen in them before – something naked and scared. When he had said ‘need’ he had meant more than just needing her to cut him away from the wall. It was a bigger ‘need’ than that. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could the blade slipped through the metal and the nail came apart. Steve’s hand dropped and the head of the nail fell out of it. He took a couple of steps back and she jumped off the chair and caught him, lifted the hand and held wads of kitchen towels round it to stem the blood. She made him sit down, his hand positioned on his shoulder.

‘Take deep breaths.’

He shook his head. His T-shirt had dark circles of sweat at the neck and under the arms. There was a fine spatter of blood on the floor and the tools were scattered all over the place. After a minute or two, he spoke. ‘Yesterday was the most fucking awful day, Sally.’

‘Yes.’ She crouched, peering up into his grey face. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

He looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to find a steady place to rest his eyes and keep everything together. ‘It’s work. Fucking crap crap crap.’

‘Is it America?’

‘No. God, no – that’s a breeze. It was the meeting. In London. With … You know who I was meeting.’

Mooney, she thought. I was right. ‘What happened?’

There was a long silence. Then he turned his grey eyes back to her and looked at her seriously. ‘I got offered a novel way to earn thirty K. No tax. Would solve all your problems in the blink of an eye.’

‘What?’

‘Killing David Goldrab.’

She put her head to one side and gave a small smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right. I’ll kill him and you steal all his champagne.’

Steve didn’t laugh, just went on staring at her.

‘What? You look weird, Steve. Don’t scare me.’

‘But I’m serious. That’s what they offered me at the meeting yesterday. I sat in the Wolseley in Piccadilly drinking two-hundred-quid-a-bottle champagne and got offered thirty K to off David Goldrab. I told you it was going to be dark.’

They stared at each other, stony-faced with shock.

After a moment he shook his head. ‘No – forget it. I didn’t say that.’

‘Yes, you did.’ She straightened, groped blindly for the sofa behind her. Sat down with a bump on the arm. ‘It’s not true – is it?’

His eyes flickered across her face. ‘Good God, Sally, what the hell have I wandered into?’ His shoulders slumped wearily. ‘It’s like being in a bloody Tarantino movie.’

‘You’re serious? You’re really serious?’

‘Fuck, yes. Yes.’

‘Do people really do things like that? In real life?’

He shrugged, as mystified as she was. ‘Apparently. I mean, Christ, I always kind of knew it happened from time to time to people in my job. You’d hear about it – this and that bent PI giving some ex-IRA guy ten K to drive a Range Rover over someone’s wife in their driveway. Just like I always knew the really shit stuff in life existed. The reality of all the bastards who walk the streets unchallenged. They’re not stopped because they’re dressed in Armani suits, drive high-end Audis and get called “sir”, but they’re psychos just the same, for their ruthlessness and for the scalps they take. I knew all that – that lives were being destroyed under the veneer. I knew complete and utter bare-faced greed really existed. And on some level I knew things like this must happen. People must get killed – for a price.’ He leaned back in the chair, clutching his hand. ‘I just never, ever, thought it would come near me.’

Sally let all her breath out. She gazed up at the ceiling, spent time fitting this into her head. After a while, when neither of them had moved, she said, ‘Steve?’

‘What?’

‘Those people. Weren’t they nervous when you said no?’

He was silent for a moment. Then he unwrapped his hand and inspected the wound. Licked his finger and rubbed at the blood.

She lowered her chin and squinted at him. ‘Steve?’

‘What?’

‘You did say no. Didn’t you?’

‘Of course I did.’ He didn’t meet her eyes. ‘What else do you think I’d have said?’

Chapter 30

Zoë strode down the corridor from the incident room to find five teenagers standing moodily outside her office. The three boys had spiked hair and wore their school trousers belted under their skinny buttocks. The girls were straight out of St Trinian’s, with school skirts rolled up at the waist to show their legs and shirts tied at the waist like Daisy Duke.

‘Auntie Zoë?’ said the smaller of the two girls. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’

That stopped Zoë in her tracks. She leaned a little closer, peering at the girl. ‘Millie? Jesus. I didn’t recognize you.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Millie put both hands on her hair, as if to check it was still there. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. I just …’ She’d only ever seen Millie in photos Mum and Dad had sent, and twice in the flesh, in the street, just in passing. But she was pretty – really pretty. It took a moment for Zoë to gather her wits. ‘What do you want? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’

‘The headmaster let us come here. We’ve been waiting to speak to you. Can we do it in private?’

‘Yes. Of course. Come in, come in.’ She unlocked her office and kicked the door open, scanned the room quickly for anything the kids shouldn’t see – post-mortem photos or notes on Lorne’s case. ‘There aren’t any chairs. Sorry about that.’

‘’S OK,’ said the tallest boy. ‘We won’t be staying.’

Zoë closed the door. Then she sat on the desk and regarded them all carefully. She had to stop herself staring directly at Millie, though she monitored her out of the corner of her eye. Was it her imagination or did Millie look more like her, Zoë, and less like Sally? ‘What can I do for you all?’

‘We need some help,’ said the tall boy. He was blond and good-looking. You could tell from the body language of the rest of the group that he was the alpha male. That he threw his weight around and generally got what he wanted. ‘It’s about Lorne Wood.’

‘Right.’ Zoë glanced cautiously from face to face. ‘OK. And I take it from the way we’re all standing here, the way that you approached me, that you want, for the time being, to have a private chat?’

‘For the time being.’

‘That’s fair enough. But before we start I’d like to get your names. I give you my word it won’t go any further. Here.’ She pulled out a spiral-bound jotter and handed the bigger boy a pen. He studied it for a moment, unsure. Zoë nodded. ‘You have my word,’ she repeated. ‘You really do.’

Reluctantly he took it, bent over the desk and wrote Peter Cyrus. He handed the pen to Millie, who glanced at Zoë, looked about to say something, but instead bent over and wrote Millie Benedict. Benedict, Zoë noticed, not Cassidy. So it was true what she’d heard: Sally really had divorced Julian. And here was Millie – using Sally’s name instead of her father’s. What did that say about the separation?

The other teenagers lined up and took turns to write on the pad.

Nial Sweetman, Sophie Sweetman, Ralph Hernandez.

Ralph Hernandez.

Zoë stared at the name, moving her jaw from side to side. She put on a calm smile and raised her head to him. She hadn’t taken much notice of him until now. He was slight, medium height, with wiry dark hair and olive skin. Apart from his tie, which was knotted the way they all seemed to these days, puffed up and wide, like some seventies TV cop’s, he was dressed more conventionally than the others, in that at least his trousers appeared to almost fit him and the spikes in his hair weren’t totally outlandish. His fierce brown eyes were bloodshot.

‘So.’ She forced her voice to sound casual. ‘What can I do for you all?’

There was a moment’s silence. Then the one called Nial nudged the one called Peter. Sophie and Millie kept still, their eyes on the floor. Ralph rubbed the back of his sleeve nervously across his forehead.

‘It’s like this,’ said Peter. ‘Ralph’s scared.’

‘Concerned,’ Ralph corrected. ‘A little concerned. That’s all.’

‘I see. And why are you concerned?’

‘I was …’ He scratched his arms. ‘I was …’

‘He was with Lorne,’ Peter said, ‘the night she was killed.’

Zoë cupped her chin with her fingers. Gave the teenagers a ruminative look. In her chest her heart was knocking like a tomtom. Here was Debbie and Ben’s ‘killer’. All five foot ten of him. And meanwhile, if she was right about that message on Lorne, the real killer was out there somewhere. Maybe thinking about number two. ‘OK,’ she said calmly. ‘And obviously there was a reason you didn’t mention this before.’

‘I’ve never told my parents I’d got a girlfriend. And Lorne never told anyone about me either. It was supposed to be a secret.’

‘His parents are Catholic. They find that sort of thing a bit – you know.’

‘Can you help him?’ Nial asked. ‘He doesn’t know what to do.’

‘Help? I’m not sure about help. This is serious. I know you know that – you’re not stupid. But we’ll take this slowly. Ralph, Lorne was your girlfriend. How long had you been seeing her?’

‘Only a couple of weeks. But I loved her. I mean that. She was the one for me.’ There was something tight in his voice that said he wasn’t lying. ‘Please,’ he said, and for a moment he sounded like a little kid. A kid left out in the rain and begging to come inside. ‘Please, I just don’t know what to do.’ He straightened against the wall and put his head back against the plaster, shaking it. ‘Honestly, I think I’d be better off dead.’

‘Come on,’ she said, leaning forward, ‘let’s take a deep breath, shall we?’ Technically she should be thinking about calling in the child-protection units, with a minor saying things about wanting to die, but she’d never get the story out of him if she did that. ‘OK? You OK?’

After a moment or two he licked his lips and muttered, ‘Yeah.’

‘And calmly now, Ralph, just calmly, knowing how awful you feel about all of this, and knowing how much you want to help us catch whoever did this to Lorne, take me through what happened that night.’

The room fell quiet. All the other teenagers had their attention on him. He lowered his eyes to his hands, which he held in tight fists. ‘She told her mum she was shopping, but actually she was meeting me. Up near Beckford’s Tower. Where we always met.’

Beckford’s. The great Victorian monument that drunken farmers were supposed to have used to find their way home at night, with its neoclassical belvedere, its gilded lantern. It stood in a cemetery at the top of Lansdown and could be seen from all across the city. It was also on one of the bus routes that came through the stop near the canal. Zoë sighed. Lorne must have been on the bus because she’d been up at Beckford’s with Ralph. ‘So, what time was that?’

‘About five thirty, I think.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘I’m really not sure. It could have been an hour. It could have been an hour and a half.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I didn’t check my watch. I just didn’t. Otherwise I’d tell you.’

So, up to ninety minutes maximum. Add to that the ten minutes or so bus ride to the centre of town and there was still the outside chance Lorne had gone somewhere after leaving Ralph – before going to the canal.

‘And then?’

‘And then she left. And I walked into town. I met up with, uh –’ he rubbed his arms again ‘– with Peter and Nial.’

‘We went out for a beer,’ Nial said hurriedly. ‘The school had won a cricket match the day before so we felt like having a little celebrate.’

‘The three of you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you old enough to be cruising round the local pubs?’

‘Well – no. Not really. We kind of used fake IDs.’

‘Kind of?’

‘Yes. Why? Are you going to give us a lecture on it?’

Zoë raised her eyebrows at him. Impressed by his guts. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not. In the scheme of things it’s not exactly the crime of the century. So what time did your little fake-ID celebration finish?’

Nial shot Peter a look. Peter scratched his head. ‘What time was it? About midnight?’

‘About that, yeah.’

‘Where did you go, Ralph?’

‘Home. Weston.’

‘How did you get there?’

‘I walked.’

‘Did anything unusual happen on the way? Did you see anyone you knew?’

‘No.’

‘So let’s backtrack a bit. You met Lorne. What happened while you were together?’

There was a silence. Ralph’s head was quite still but his hands weren’t. They made little trembling movements. His shoulders were shaking. He shook his head imploringly – as if he couldn’t trust himself to speak without crying.

Zoë met Peter’s eyes. She jerked a thumb at the door. ‘Give us a few moments here?’ she mouthed. ‘Some privacy.’

The other two boys and the two girls exchanged glances. Then, as if they were a single organism, capable of reaching decisions without words, they filed out. In the corridor they stood with their hands in their pockets, each with one foot up against the wall. Like the cover of a Ramones album. It never went out of style to be skinny and sullen.

Zoë kicked the door closed, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the window-sill and turned back to Ralph. He had slid down the wall and was in a little huddled squat, his hands over his face. ‘OK, OK.’ She crouched next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth of his skin through the thin shirt. The tremor of his breath coming in and out. ‘Look, you’ve done the right thing by coming to me.’ She handed him a tissue. He took it and crammed it against his face. ‘You can be proud of that.’

He nodded and wiped his nose. His breathing was thick and nasal.

‘But I need to get it all clear in my thoughts, Ralph. I asked you if something particular happened at Beckford’s Tower and that seemed to upset you.’

He nodded miserably. ‘We had an argument. She wanted to tell everyone about us and I …’ He had to take deep breaths to calm himself. ‘We split up. We split up and she said she never wanted to see me again and … And … And that’s what happened. And it’s all my fucking fault. All because I’m scared of my fucking parents.’

‘It’s not your fault, Ralph. It’s really not your fault.’

‘What’s going to happen? Do I have to go to court? Are my parents going to know about it? My father’ll be furious. He thinks lying should be counted as a mortal sin.’

She rested her arm on his shoulders. He really was just a little boy. She could see the faint white of his scalp at the neat parting of his black hair. ‘I think, Ralph, that most parents would be more concerned about your welfare. And that you’ve had the courage to tell the truth.’

‘Christ.’ He’d used up the tissues so he wiped his nose on the shoulder of his shirt. ‘I wish you were my mother.’

‘Oh, no, no. I’d be a terrible mother. You can trust me on that one. Now, coming here was a huge decision for you, but it was the right one. This information is really, really important. With it we can build a picture of what happened to Lorne. But there’s not a lot I can do with the information if I can’t share it with my colleagues. If I gave you a guarantee that nothing will be said to your parents until you’re happy for them to hear, would you come and tell the rest of the team? The ones who can make a difference? You could stop this happening again. To someone else.’

There was a silence. It took her a moment to realize he was nodding.

Chapter 31

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 had dictated that all interviews of suspects had to take place in a specially designated room – well lit, well ventilated, soundproofed, with embedded recording facilities and access to a neutral ‘break-out’ space should the interviewee decide he or she didn’t like the way the interview was going. Councils around the country had had to dig deep to install PACE rooms – and at Bath police station there were two.

Zoë sat at her desk with the door open so she could monitor the passageway. Her office was at the place where the corridor branched off to lead to the interview rooms. If Ralph was moved from the side office near the incident room where Ben was speaking to him, it meant they had gone against every one of her instincts, every one of her requests, and were interviewing him as a possible suspect in the murder. But the station was silent for a long time. Hours. God only knew what they were doing with him.

She tried to concentrate on other tasks. She set up an intelligence request for missing women aged between sixteen and twenty-one. When she’d told Debbie that ‘all like her’ meant the killer was going to target girls like Lorne, she’d plucked it out of the air. But what if she hadn’t been so far off the mark? It was worth thinking about. Except that, looking at the screen, it wasn’t going to be easy – the result of the search was terrifying. Name after name after name. Of course she knew most of the girls on the list were probably alive and well and had simply lost contact with their families, or were avoiding them. A good proportion would have returned and the police not been notified. Even so there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. One person couldn’t work through all of those on their own. She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. Shit. If one of those names had belonged to a victim of Lorne’s killer and their body hadn’t been found, there was no earthly chance the police would pick up on it.

At a quarter to ten Ben walked past, going fast, carrying a stack of files. He didn’t pay her any attention, but went into his office. She heard the door slam. She waited for a moment or two, then got up, went along the corridor and knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Me. Zoë.’

A pause. A hesitation? Then, ‘Come in.’

She pushed the door open. He was sitting at his desk, his elbows planted on either side of the stack of paperwork. He faced her but, she noticed, his eyes didn’t meet hers. There was a blank, polite smile pasted on his face. ‘What’s happening?’ she said.

‘With?’

‘You know what with. With Ralph. Are you still interviewing him? Did you get him an appropriate adult from Social Services?’

‘He’s seventeen. Doesn’t need one.’

‘I promised him his parents wouldn’t be involved. Not unless he agreed to it.’

‘Yes. And that’s what we’re working on. Him agreeing to it. They’re going to find out eventually.’

Zoë let all the air out of her lungs. She came forward and sat on the chair opposite him. Ben eyed her, one of his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he really didn’t appreciate the way she was making herself at home. ‘It’s not him,’ she said. ‘It’s just not. He’s too young. Don’t you remember, all those courses – how these sorts of crimes take time to build? He’s just a kid. He nicely and neatly fits a profile you’ve been sold, but it’s a flawed profile. Please see that. It’s flawed.’

Ben gave her a calm smile. ‘I like to think I’m too much of a professional to be trammelled by psychological profiling, flawed or not. That would be a huge mistake – remember what our trainers used to say? “To assume makes an ass out of you and me.”’

Zoë sighed. ‘Come on, Ben – I know you too well.’

He tapped his pen on the desk. ‘Ralph Hernandez is a person of interest. That’s all I can say at this point.’

‘A “person of interest”? Oh, for God’s sake – you are such a bloody moron it’s just not true.’

‘Am I, Zoë? Have you got any better leads than this?’

‘I gave you this “lead”. I handed it to you on a plate and I really, really thought you’d do the honourable thing. Just goes to show how much I know about the world, doesn’t it?’

At that moment the door opened. Zoë swivelled round. Debbie was standing there, serene in her white lacy clothes. She had started to speak, but when she saw Zoë her face changed. ‘Aaah,’ she said apologetically. ‘Sorry.’ She held up a hand and backed out of the room. ‘Crap timing – not my strong point.’

She closed the door. There was a moment’s silence. Then Zoë turned back to face Ben. She shook her head and gave a small, mirthless laugh. ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘You never usually let anyone in without knocking. Unless they’re … you know …’ She made her hands into a cup on the desk. ‘Unless they’re inner circle. Is she inner circle now?’

Ben stared back at her stonily. ‘Have you got any better leads than Ralph Hernandez?’

‘So whatever she says you’ll believe it? You’ll convict that kid in there because of it?’

‘My alternative is what? Choosing anyone, any route, any lead, just anyone because they don’t fit the profile she drew up? I’ve been watching your inquiries, Zoë, and what it boils down to is that you’d rather let the killer go free than have Debbie be right. So who is worse? You or me?’

Zoë’s face burned. ‘This is all because of whatever it was I said the other night, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Well, Ben, let’s be honest. One minute we were fine – doing fine. The next, everything’s gone. Just …’ she flattened her hand and mimed an aeroplane flying ‘… like that. Gone. And you’re hostile and distant, and, frankly, acting like a dickhead.’

Ben gave her a cold look. ‘We’ve got no future, Zoë.’

‘What? Because I don’t pretend to give a shit about people I really don’t give a shit about? Because I don’t make a pantomime about how caring and simpatico I bloody am? Is that my sin?’

‘Why do you have to insist you’re bad?’

‘Because I am.’

‘Why do you insist you don’t care for anything?’

‘Because I don’t. Because I don’t care for anything and I don’t need anything.’

‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t jump all over me and make me feel small when I say this, but, Zoë, some people like to be needed.’

‘Like to be needed? Well, that’s not me.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘It’s not fucking bullshit.’ She pushed her chair back and leaned across the desk, putting her face close to his. ‘I drove around the world on my own. I don’t need you or anyone else. That’s why I’m solid and I’m efficient. And anyway …’ She took a breath. Tried to put a bit more width and height into her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter because next thing we know you’ll be having it off with Miss Cracker out there.’

He held her gaze. He had still, clear green eyes. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I already am.’

Zoë stared at him. Something inside her was falling away. Dropping and dropping down into the floor. ‘What?’ she murmured. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But it’s true.’

She was motionless, absolutely speechless. The scars on her arms ached, made her want to rip her sleeves up, but she held herself steady. She wouldn’t let him know he’d poleaxed her.

‘OK,’ she managed to say. ‘Then I suppose it’s time I went.’

He nodded. The politeness, the openness of the nod, was the worst of it. This wasn’t hurting him at all.

‘But I’m right about Ralph,’ she said. ‘One hundred per cent right. He didn’t kill Lorne.’

‘Of course, Zoë.’ He turned his computer screen around and put on his glasses. ‘You’re always right.’

Chapter 32

Sally called the NHS helpline. The woman she spoke to said Steve should go to his GP, but Steve had looked carefully at the wound and said that would be overreacting, that really it was just a hole in the skin, nothing more. Together they disinfected and bandaged it, cleared up the blood and put the nail gun, chisels and hacksaw into the boot of her car ready for the DIY on her house. After that they got on with lunch – eating the tuna, picking through a bowlful of mango and raspberry sorbet, drinking coffee, and loading the dishwasher shoulder to shoulder, all without alluding to the conversation about David Goldrab. As if they’d decided, in a curious telepathic manner, to pretend it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t that they were solemn either – in fact, they were light-hearted, making jokes about Steve’s wound going gangrenous. How would it be if he lost his arm and had to walk around like Nelson for the rest of his life? Sally wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing. If shady, raw acts like contract killings really happened, or if she’d somehow misunderstood what Steve was saying.

She got a text from Millie, who said she was getting a lift home in Nial’s camper-van, and not to worry about coming to school, she’d see her at Peppercorn. She sounded happy, not nervous. Even so, Sally still made sure she was home by four thirty, waiting by the window in plenty of time to see Nial’s half-painted van trundling along the driveway. Peter was sitting on the back seat, shades on, one arm draped casually around Sophie’s shoulders. All of them were in summer school uniform, their hair gelled, spiked and decorated as much as they could get away with at Kingsmead. The van stopped and Millie got out without a word to the others. She slammed the door and strode up the path, her face like thunder.

‘What’s going on?’

She walked straight past Sally, down the corridor, into the bedroom and slammed the door. When Sally padded softly after her and listened, she could hear muffled sobbing coming from inside. As if Millie was crying into the pillow. She opened the door, tiptoed in and sat on the end of the bed, resting her hand on Millie’s ankle. ‘Millie?’

At first Sally thought she hadn’t heard. Then Millie sat up and threw herself at her mother, arms round her neck, head pressed against her chest, like a drowning victim. Sobbing as if her heart would break.

‘What on earth’s happened?’ Sally pushed her back so she could see her face. ‘Is it him? Jake? Did you see him?’

‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘No, Mum. I can’t handle it any more. Now he’s with Sophie of all people. She’s not even that pretty.’

‘Who’s not even that …?’ She thought about Sophie, with a dreamy look on her face in the back of the van, Peter’s arm around her. She remembered what Isabelle had said about Peter being in love with Lorne and how it had upset Millie. This was all about him. Half of her was bewildered that her daughter couldn’t see past Peter’s blond hair and height, couldn’t look into the future and see his beery red face at forty, his thick torso and rugby-club nights. The other half was relieved that this wasn’t anything to do with Jake. Or Lorne.

‘Hey.’ She kissed Millie’s head, smoothed her hair. ‘You know what I’ve always told you. It’s not what’s on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside.’

‘Don’t be stupid. That’s just crap. No one looks on the inside. You’re just saying that because you’re old.’

‘OK, OK.’ She rested her chin on Millie’s head. Looked out at the fields and the trees and the clouds piled up like castles in the sky and tried to span her memory across the distance between fifteen and thirty-five. It didn’t seem an eternity. But when she put herself in Millie’s shoes and thought about her own mother fifteen years ago she saw how honest and clear that comment was. She let Millie cry, let her soak the front of her blouse.

Eventually the sobs died down to the occasional hiccup and Millie straightened up, her bottom lip sticking out. She wiped her nose with her sleeve. ‘I don’t really like him. Honestly. I really don’t.’

‘Is that it? Is that all that’s upsetting you?’

‘All?’ Millie echoed. ‘All? Isn’t that enough?’

‘I didn’t mean it was nothing. I was just thinking – you’re so unhappy. Unsettled.’

Millie shivered. ‘Yeah – it’s been such a bloody horrible day. Everything’s wrong. It’s been just pants.’

‘Everything?’

She nodded miserably.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t think you want to know that.’

‘I do.’

Millie gave a long-suffering sigh and stretched her blouse so the cuff came down over her knuckles and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them. ‘OK – but I warned you.’

‘What?’

‘I saw Auntie Zoë.’

Sally had opened her mouth to reply before what Millie had said sunk in. When it did she closed it. It was the last thing she’d expected. Zoë hadn’t been mentioned in their house for years. Years and years. In all of Millie’s lifetime they’d run into her twice – once in the high street, when Millie had been about five. That time Zoë had stopped and smiled at Millie, said, ‘You must be Millie,’ then looked at her watch, and added, ‘Well, got to go.’ The second time, two years later, the two women had simply nodded in acknowledgement and carried on their way. Afterwards Sally had been quiet for hours. These days, sometimes, she dreamed about Zoë – wondered what it would be like to see her again. Now she pushed the hair gently out of Millie’s face. She hadn’t even realized she knew Zoë’s name. ‘You mean you – uh – saw her walking down the street? Or you spoke to her?’

‘We went to see her at the police station. The head said we could take the morning off to do it. Nial and Peter and Ralph had something to tell her.’

‘Ralph? The Spanish one?’

‘He’s half Spanish. And he was seeing Lorne.’

‘Seeing her?’

‘Yes, and he tried to keep it secret. But it’s out now and it’s no big deal. I mean, he was seeing her, but he didn’t kill her, Mum. He didn’t have anything to do with it.’

So Isabelle had been right, Sally thought. About the secrets. The whispering. She wondered how it could be that the children they’d given birth to could have gone from curly-haired toddlers sitting on their laps to complete human beings with secrets and codes and plans.

‘He stayed at the station. With Auntie Zoë. She was, like, so nice to him. So nice.’

Sally heard the admiration in her voice. Unmistakable. She knew what it felt like to admire Zoë. ‘How is she? Zoë, I mean.’

‘She’s fine.’ Millie sniffed. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘How did she look?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sally hesitated. ‘Is she tall? Years ago she always seemed quite tall to me.’

‘Yeah,’ Millie said. ‘She is. Really tall. Really, really tall. The way I’d like to be.’

‘What’s her hair like? She had amazing hair.’

‘Still has. It’s like mine – sort of reddy colour. A bit mad, actually – and it looked wet. Why?’

‘I don’t know. Just wondering.’ She gave a small, rueful smile, then said, ‘She’s doing well in her job, I suppose. She’s really clever, you know. You’d never think we were related.’

‘She’s got her own office and stuff. She doesn’t seem the type to be in an office, though.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. She’s …’ Millie searched for the right word and failed to find it. ‘She’s just too cool to be in the police. That’s all. She’s just too cool.’

Chapter 33

The most private ladies’ toilet at Bath police station was on the ground floor, just past the front office. Zoë walked through the foyer with her head lowered, in case anyone saw her, and pushed the door open. The toilets were empty. Just the smell of bleach and the vague plink-plink of a leaky cistern in one of the cubicles. She ignored her reflection and went straight along the line of doors, choosing the last one, furthest from the entrance. She went inside, closed the toilet lid, locked the door, pulled off her jacket and dropped it on the floor. She sat down, her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands.

Actually, I already am …

It was none of her business who Ben slept with. There had never been any promises like that. It had never been part of the deal. But it had never been part of the deal either that he’d freeze over the way he had. She’d known him for years. Years and years they’d worked together before they’d started sleeping together – he should know every inch of her personality by now. So what had changed? It couldn’t be that he’d got a glimpse inside her, seen the nasty dark thing she worked so hard to keep down. No, it couldn’t. She was sure he couldn’t see that. Then what?

She dragged her sleeve up, rolled it tightly at the biceps, the way an addict would. She found a spare centimetre of skin and used the nails on her thumb and forefinger to find a demi-lune of flesh. She closed her eyes and dug them in. Harder and harder. The pain was like a sweet black thread moving through her body. Like a drug. She put her head back and breathed slowly while it moved up to her chest, wrapped itself round her lungs and heart and made everything go dark and still. The blood rose up in the pinched flesh and slid coldly down her arm to splash on to the white tiles. She didn’t let go. Just held it there. Held it and held it.

And then, when she was sure the scream had been stopped, she dropped her hand. She opened her eyes and blinked at the white light, the blood all over her nails, the cold Formica of the toilet door.

Ben was nothing. He didn’t matter. It would be a battle, but slowly it would pass. She was exhausted, wrung out with the case, and she needed space to breathe. She would take some time off work – God knew, she had enough time owing. She’d take the Shovelhead and disappear for a while. Sleep rough and drink Guinness out of the can. Forget the case, lose interest in who had killed Lorne, let the memory of that nightclub in Bristol be whipped out of her head by the slipstream on the motorway.

She unravelled some toilet tissue and began to clean herself up. She bent over to wipe the blood off the floor and saw her wallet had spilled out of her jacket. She paused, the tissue wodged on the floor. Peeping out from one of the compartments was a curved pink sliver of card: the top of the business card she’d been given at Zebedee Juice.

‘Shit.’ She sat up again, leaning back against the cistern, the bloody tissue hanging limp in her hand, her head lolling. The fluorescent tubes pulsed on the ceiling above her. ‘OK, Lorne,’ she muttered. ‘OK. I’ll give you one more day. Twelve more hours. And then, I’m sorry, but I’m out of it.’

Chapter 34

When Sally came out of Millie’s room she was surprised to find Nial in the kitchen, standing awkwardly near the table, arms folded, head lowered. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

‘Yeah I … I sort of needed to make myself scarce.’ He gestured out of the window to where the van was parked. ‘They needed a bit of time. You know, before I drop Peter home.’

She looked up and saw Peter and Sophie on the back seat of the van, locked together in a kiss. Peter must have been standing up because he looked much bigger and taller than Sophie, bearing down on her, pushing her into the seat with his mouth. Sophie wasn’t resisting. In fact, quite the opposite. She was clinging to his neck as if she was afraid he’d disappear. There were a few moments of uneasy silence. Then Nial cleared his throat, said in a small voice, ‘She’s in love with him, isn’t she?’

‘It certainly looks like it.’

‘I don’t mean Sophie, I mean Millie. Millie’s in love with Peter.’

She turned woodenly to him, hardly believing what she thought he was saying. ‘Nial?’ she said curiously. ‘You don’t mean you …’

He gave a weak, embarrassed smile. ‘Yeah, well – nothing I can do about it, is there?’

She stared back at him. Good God, what a mess. No reciprocity – no returns. Sophie in love with Peter, Millie in love with Peter, and Nial in love with Millie. Poor little Nial. It was like watching elephants in a circus ring, each with its trunk linked round the tail of the animal in front, plodding on, blind to the futility of it all. Really and truly, life just wasn’t fair.

She sighed. ‘Oh, God, you’re probably right. At the moment. But you wait. You wait.’

‘What?’

‘One day, Nial, Millie will see you in a different light. I promise you that.’

He blinked. ‘Do you?’

‘Oh, yes – oh, yes.’ And in saying it she prayed, with all the hope in the world, that she was right.

Chapter 35

Zoë had taken a sleeping pill last night – she’d needed something, anything, to help escape the persistent voice in her head. At first it had been bliss, sending her sliding over the edge into oblivion. But she woke with a jolt five hours later, the first light of dawn at the window and the same clawing pain in her centre that she’d gone to sleep with. She didn’t look at her reflection when she got dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed and carefully wound a bandage around the wound on her arm, holding its end in her teeth. She selected a heavy black-cotton shirt with sleeves that buttoned securely at the wrists. She pushed her arm into it gingerly, not wanting to make it bleed again. She was an old hand at this.

She drove across town with the radio on, trying to keep her mood up, but the sight of the battered sign in the doorway of Holden’s Agency, the steps up to it, covered with chewing gum and stained with God only knew what, sent her resilience for the day down another notch. She hesitated – suddenly reluctant. But it was too late. Through the wire-meshed glass the man inside had noticed her. He came to the door and swung it open. He was suntanned, in his sixties, wearing a cheap pinstriped suit and a neat white shirt that were both a size too small. He was obviously trying to beat the smoking habit, because he had a Nicorette inhalator tucked in his breast pocket and the faint tang of tobacco smoke lingering around him.

‘Hi.’ He gave her his hand to shake. It was huge and meaty and he had the big grin of a Texan car salesman. She expected him to say, ‘How can I be of assistance to you, ma’am?’

‘Zoë,’ she said.

‘Mike. Mike Holden. What can I do you for? You’re not looking for the health-food shop, are you? It’s round the corner.’

‘No – I—’ She fumbled for her warrant card. Gave it a quick flash. ‘I’m from CID. In Bath.’

Holden paused at the sight of it. ‘Wendy? Is it Wendy? Has something happened to her? Just say it if it has. I’ve been preparing myself.’

‘Wendy? No. It’s an investigation. Something that happened in Bath. No bad news.’

He took a step back, breathing slowly, calming himself. ‘That’s good. Good.’ He looked her up and down – seemed to notice her for the first time. ‘I’m sorry – no manners. You’d better come in.’

The office was clean and less depressing than it was on the outside. It had the smell of a kitchen showroom, with industrial-grade brown carpet and a few pieces of furniture that looked a little lost in the large area. On one wall there was a line of framed black-and-white prints. Girls in bikinis, girls in swimsuits. Nothing topless.

‘You’re a model agency.’

Holden nodded. He sat at his desk, gestured for her to take a chair and turned a book towards her. ‘Our portfolio.’

She leafed through it and saw what the manager at Zebedee Juice had meant. These were nothing like the feral, challenging creatures on the morphing screen. These were pretty, sexy and well fed. Lorne would fit well in this portfolio. ‘Some of them are topless.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what we do. Everything from swimsuits to lingerie to page three. This year we’ve had two girls in the Pirelli calendar and we’ve had page three eighteen times. The West Country produces some of the best-looking girls in the land. It’s the warmth and the rain.’ He winked. ‘And the clotted cream. You know – all that fat.’

‘These girls, these models, do they go further than topless?’

‘Of course. The human body is a great instrument for artistic expression. If a girl is liberated, comfortable being naked, then she can get a lot of satisfaction from this sort of work. Most of them love it – really love it.’

‘Do you believe that? Or, rather, do you expect me to believe that? I mean, really they’re in it for the money.’

He was silent. Only his jaw showed agitation: it moved, very slightly, from side to side, as if he was working a piece of food out from his teeth. At last he raised his hands. ‘You’re not stupid and neither am I. Of course not. They do it for the money. And most of the time it’s not cos they have to – it’s not cos they were trafficked, or cos they’re having to put food in the mouths of their disabled babies or their dying mothers or whatever. Not even to feed their drug addiction, because most of them are clean. No – in my experience most of the time they’re doing it cos it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day. Quicker and easier – and, honestly, you get more respect from the photographer than you do from your average shopper. And I say hats off to them. Not that I’ve ever, in my ten years in the business, ever seen a girl do something sensible with the money. No investing it or anything like that. They spend it on clothes and, frankly, tit jobs. So they can – what? Go on doing modelling. A bit of a mindless cycle, if you think about it – men getting what they think they want from women, women getting what they think they want from men.’

Actually, Mr Holden, Zoë thought, not all of them spend their money on clothes and tit jobs. Some of them spend it on escaping something. Buying their freedom. ‘Have you been watching the news? The local news? There was a murder in Bath the other day.’

‘I know. Young girl. Pretty. Lorraine, was it? Lorraine someone.’

‘Lorne. Lorne Wood. The name doesn’t ring a bell?’

He frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t remember her coming to you?’

‘She was a schoolgirl, I thought.’

‘Yes, but she wanted to model. And she might not have used her real name.’

She pulled from her satchel a laminated set of pictures that the reprographics unit had produced. A set of photos of Lorne. The billions poured into developing facial-recognition technology had done little more than raise an important issue: the human face is so multi-faceted that it can vary wildly just from the smallest change in angle and lighting. The chief constable had picked up on this and now the force was inclined to use a selection of photographs for identification purposes. On this sheet many of the photos collected from Lorne’s wall had been collaged. Zoë leaned half out of her chair and placed the sheet under Holden’s nose.

He looked at them. Frowned. Shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so. I get scores of photos from girls who think they’re going to be on page three, or the cover of FHM. The faces, I’ll be honest, merge into one eventually, but I don’t think I remember her.’

She took the sheet back and sat for a moment, eyes on Lorne’s Hollywood smile. None of these looked anything like the photos on the camera chip. They were in a totally different mood. She reached into her pocket for her iPhone, to which she’d transferred all the photos from Lorne’s chip, and brought up one of Lorne in underwear on the bed. Not the topless one. She’d protect Lorne from that at least. ‘How about that?’

This time Holden’s face changed. ‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘That alters things. I do recognize her.’ He went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, riffled through the photos and printed pages in it. ‘I would never have recognized her from the other photos – but seeing that, I remember.’ He pulled out a photo and held it up. It was one of the topless ones from the camera chip, printed out. ‘She emailed it to me – didn’t use that name, though. Called herself –’ he checked on the back ‘– Cherie. Cherie Garnett.’

Zoë’s whole body felt tired. She wasn’t glad she’d been right, just enormously depressed. ‘And? What did you say?’

‘Nah. I thought there was something a bit suspicious about it, to be honest. I thought right away she was younger than she said she was.’

‘That stopped you, did it?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s a serious offence. You really can’t be too careful. I told her I’d keep her on file.’

‘So you told her no. Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

She looked at him, trying to get the measure of him. She thought he was telling the truth. ‘Do you think she’d have gone somewhere else when you turned her down?’

He was silent for a moment. Then he got to his feet and opened a filing cabinet. He took out a written list and handed it to her. ‘Listen,’ he said seriously, ‘I don’t know you and you don’t owe me a thing. But if you tell any of them who put you in touch and it comes out it’s me – well, I’m just saying.’

Zoë scanned the sheet. It had about fifty names printed on it with contact details. A lot of them seemed to be agents around the West Country, but several were lap-dance clubs. ‘Did you give her this list?’

‘I didn’t. I give you my word on that. But I’m not the only show in town. Someone else may have.’

She folded the page of addresses, put it into her pocket and got to her feet. ‘Just one last thing,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘If you have any more thoughts on this don’t call the police station. None of the others are working on this lead so you need to speak to me direct.’ She pulled a business card out of her pocket and laid it on his desk. ‘And don’t leave any messages except on my personal voicemail. If you do that for me …’

‘Yes?’

‘Your name won’t be mentioned to anyone on this list.’

Chapter 36

Sally found herself staring at David Goldrab as she cleaned his house that day. She kept trying to catch glimpses of him as he wandered around after his visit to the stables, opening a bottle of champagne, tapping his whip on his calf as if keeping rhythm with some song he was humming. She stood at the sink opposite him, in her rubber gloves, wiping the surface over and over, not looking at it but at him – his skin, his hands, his arms. The moving parts of him that made him living. Someone wanted him dead. Actually dead. Not pretend dead. Really.

She finished her cleaning chores and went to the office to start entering the household expenses into the database. She’d been there for about ten minutes when she heard him go upstairs to the gym, which faced out over the front of the property. Soon she heard the familiar whirr of the treadmill, then the thud-thud-thud of him running. Her eyes drifted to the bank of computers on the other desk. His ‘business’ section. She thought about what Steve had said. Porn. But nasty porn. Something dark and enveloping. She bit her lip and tried to concentrate on the column of figures. Earlier she’d noticed a light on the other computer. It meant it was on standby – not actually switched off.

After a while she couldn’t stop her attention wandering to it. She stood up and, tongue between her teeth, leaned over and touched the mouse. The computer whirred and began to come to life. Suddenly scared, she got up and went to the open door, looking up at the ceiling. Bang-bang-bang, came the noise from the treadmill.

Quickly she went back into the office and to the computer. David hadn’t logged out of the session – everything on the screen was plain to see. The wallpaper for the desktop was a scanned newspaper page. It showed a man in his forties, heavy chin, thinning hair, dressed in a suit. The photo seemed to have been taken in the street somewhere: he was holding his hand up to the camera as if he’d been caught by photographers. The headline read: ‘Top MoD man Mooney heads Kosovan sex unit’. It looked as if the article had come from the Sun or the Mirror or another tabloid. She scanned the article – something about a unit that had been set up within the United Nations to stop women being brought in as prostitutes for the peace-keeping forces. Then she examined the man’s face. Mooney. Steve’s client. Did the fact it was on his computer mean David knew Mooney was watching him?

She bit her lip and glanced up at the doorway. Overlying the photo on the screen there were ten icons on the desktop, each with the file extension ‘mov’. Videos. Still David was pounding on the treadmill. She let the mouse trail over the icons. It was ridiculous, when she thought about it, but she was thirty-five and she didn’t remember ever having seen a porn movie from beginning to end. She must have seen snippets, though, somewhere along the line, because if she really concentrated she had an idea of what to expect – very tanned women with blonde hair and bouncy breasts and lips painted pillar-box red. She thought of faces contorted in ecstasy. What she didn’t expect was what she saw when she got up the courage to click on the first icon.

It was set in what looked like a large livestock pen, with whitewashed concrete walls and grid-shaped floodlights suspended overhead. At first all Sally could see were the backs of people gathered around, as if they were watching something on the floor in the centre of the pen. They were all men, dressed averagely enough from the neck down – jeans, shirts, sweaters. Their faces were covered – some wore scarves tied so that only their eyes showed, others had ski masks or balaclavas. A few wore rubber party masks: Osama bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Barack Obama. It would seem bizarre and even comical if it hadn’t been for the fact that all the men had their flies undone and were openly masturbating.

The camera panned up, the picture became clearer, and Sally felt herself go numb. In the centre of the ring someone lay naked on a tattered mattress – a girl, though at first it was difficult to see her sex, she was so emaciated. Her tiny ankles were manacled to the floor, her legs forced apart. Her face wasn’t visible, but Sally could tell she was young. Very young. Not much older than Millie, maybe.

A man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his face pushed his way through the crowd. He wore jeans and a tight T-shirt and, although his face was half covered, she immediately recognized him as Jake. It was the tan and the muscular arms that did it. He approached the girl and straddled her, one foot on either side of each shoulder, so he was looking down at her head. He began to unzip his flies – and as he did Sally realized the noise of the treadmill had stopped.

She clicked off the video and hurriedly went to the shut-down button. And as she did she remembered it had been on standby, not shut down. Quickly she changed her mind. Chose Sleep. She jumped up from the seat and went to sit at the other desk, her back to the computer, willing it to close down faster – wishing she’d just unplugged it. But then David appeared in the office doorway, dressed in his jogging pants and trainers. The postman must have been because he had a glass of pink champagne in one hand and a stack of letters in the other. More letters still were wedged under his chin. He was shuffling through the envelopes, murmuring under his breath, ‘Bill, begging letter, sell sell sell, fucking credit-card company shite.’

Then he saw that the computer was alive and that Sally was sitting, stony and still, eyes locked on the database, her face flushed.

Slowly, he lowered the handful of letters. ‘Uh, ’scuse me for pointing this out, but someone’s been titting with my computer.’ He stood in front of it, frowning, watching the screen whirr itself into darkness. There was a long silence, in which all Sally could think about was her heart thudding. Then David turned.

‘Sally?’

She was silent.

‘Sally? I’m speaking to you. Look me in the eye.’ He reached over and pulled her shoulder. Reluctantly she turned. He made a bull’s horn with his pinkie and his thumb, jabbed his hand at his eyes. ‘Look me in the eye, and tell me why you did that.’ A vein was pulsing in his forehead. ‘Eh? When I told you to keep away from that side of the room.’

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She thought she might be sick, any moment.

‘Don’t give me that patronizing look. I’m not the lowlife shit on your shoes, Sally, it’s the other way round. Has it escaped your attention that I’m the one employing you? Just cos you speak like you got coughed out of some hoity-toity fucking finishing school that teaches you how not to flash your snatch when you’re getting out of a Ferrari doesn’t make you better than I am – you still gotta pretend to like me. Because you’re desperate and you—’

He broke off. Something else had caught his attention. The TV monitor on the wall. He raised his chin, gazed at it, his mouth open. Shakily, Sally looked up and saw on screen, behind the electronic gate, the familiar metallic purple jeep. Jake was leaning out of the window, pushing the buzzer.

‘Well, that’s fucking mint.’ He slammed the post down. ‘That has really made my day.’ He snatched up a riding whip that was propped against the wall and strode into the hallway, bending every three steps to slap it furiously on the floor. The gate buzzer echoed through the hallway. David didn’t go upstairs to get the crossbow. Instead he went straight to the door and pressed the button to open the gates. Seeing her chance, Sally silently grabbed her bag and jacket and crept down the corridor. She came into the kitchen as she heard the jeep pulling into the driveway. She grabbed her cleaning kit from the work-surface, went quickly to the door that led out across the terrace, and put her hand on it, expecting it to open.

It didn’t. It was locked.

She jiggled it and tugged, but there was no mistake: it was locked. She hunted around for a key, picking up pots and vases to check under them. The utility room. She knew for sure that that door was open – it always was. But before she could get across the kitchen the front door slammed and the two men came into the hallway. She stood, frozen, her heart thumping. There wasn’t any escape from this – she couldn’t go back to the office without passing the hallway. She couldn’t get to the utility room either. She was trapped.

Quickly she slipped into the huge glass atrium that was tacked on to the back of the house. The doors that opened from it five yards away were closed, but she couldn’t risk crossing it to check if they were locked because the men were nearly in the kitchen and they’d spot her. A chaise-longue was set against the wall, just out of sight of the kitchen – she could hide there for the time being. She sat down silently. The men came into the kitchen and at the same time a long bar of light moved across the atrium windows. A reflection. She realized she could see all the familiar things across the kitchen and into the hall: mirrored in the panes. If the men stood at the right place and glanced across they’d see her reflected back at them, but it was too late to move. She pulled her feet up tighter, her case and jacket crunched against her stomach, and kept as still and quiet as she could.

‘Jake.’ David stood a few steps back from the doorway, silhouetted in the sunlight, his feet planted wide, his arms folded. Sally couldn’t see Jake’s face clearly in the reflection, but she could feel the seriousness of his mood. He was wearing a leather jacket and gloves, and was carrying a large holdall. He kept his chin down slightly. She thought of him straddling the girl in the video. She couldn’t get it out of her head how thin the girl had been.

‘David.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

There was a long pause. Sally’s attention stayed on that holdall. It had caught David’s eye too. He nodded at it. ‘What’s in there, Jake? Brought me a present, have you?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Can I sit down?’

‘If you tell me what you want to talk about.’

‘This.’ He raised the bag. ‘I want to show you.’

For a few seconds David didn’t move. Then he stood back and held out his hand towards the table. ‘I’ve just opened a bottle of champagne. You’ve always had a taste for champagne, Jakey boyo.’

The two men moved to the table, their reflections a shoulder’s width apart. David pulled back a chair and Jake sat down, the holdall in his lap. David got the champagne bottle out of the cooler and unstoppered it, then poured some into a long flute. ‘Just the one, mind. Don’t want my Jakey boy driving under the influence. Would never do. Terrible waste of talent, you with your brains smeared all over the M4.’

David got himself comfortable, raised the glass. Jake raised his in reply, drank. Even in the conservatory Sally heard the hard, metallic clink of it knocking against his teeth. He was nervous. He didn’t know she was here – her car was parked at the bottom of the grounds, out of sight. As far as he was concerned he was on his own with David.

‘Nice camera system you’ve got out front. Records everything, does it?’

‘Oh, yes. Records everything.’

‘I’ve got a system like that. After a week the image gets recorded over. Unless you wipe it.’

‘Yes,’ David said reasonably. ‘But to do that you’d have to have a code.’

‘Yeah. A code.’

‘Which the owner of the system would change on a regular basis. The same way he’d change the code on the security gates. I mean, say, there was someone that person had had confidence in at one point. Such confidence that they gave him – or her – their security code. Say, then, those two people developed differences, little niggles they couldn’t iron out – well, the system owner would be a mug, wouldn’t he, not to change the codes? Otherwise what’s to stop the guy with the codes coming in and misbehaving in the house? Even, God forbid, doing something silly to the owner.’

‘Something silly.’

‘Something silly.’ There was another silence, then he said, ‘What’s in the bag, Jake?’

Sally closed her eyes for a moment, put her head back and drew a slow, silent breath – tried to get her heart to stop throwing itself against her ribcage. When she opened her eyes Jake was opening the bag and everything in the house had a vague silvery glaze, as if it was holding its breath too. Even the big clock on the conservatory wall seemed to hesitate, hold its hand still, reluctant to click forward.

Then Jake pulled a DVD out of the bag. He placed it on the table. David looked at it in silence. After a moment or two, he held out his hand.

‘And the rest,’ he said. ‘Show me whatever else is in there. I ain’t scared of you.’

‘There’s nothing. Just more of the same.’

David nodded. ‘Yeah. Of course. Let me see.’

Jake held the bag out. David took it, gave it a shake, peered inside. Put his hands in and sifted around. He raised puzzled eyes to Jake, as if he still suspected him of something underhand. Jake shrugged. ‘What? What now?’

David gave him a suspicious glare, but he handed the bag back. Sally slowly let out her breath. In her chest her heart was still bouncing around like a rubber ball.

‘DVDs? What are they?’

‘My latest venture.’ Jake inched forward on his chair, suddenly enthusiastic. ‘Jake the Peg’s done every city in the UK – I couldn’t afford to take it out of the country so I had to look for something cheap and I thought, Hey, old man, how about Jake the Peg does the alphabet?’

‘The alphabet?’

‘A girl whose name starts with every letter of the alphabet. She wears the letter on her outfit here.’ He put a hand to his stomach. ‘I got one of those basque things and had a letter A stitched on. A for Amber. B for Brittany. C for Cindi. We’ve got to F for Faith so far. Her real name was Veronica. But serious mahongas. The type they like in the States.’

‘Shows a touching faith in your audience, boyo, thinking they know the alphabet.’

‘If I put the letter on the spine they become a set – a collection. The real fans’ll want to have the whole lot – A to Z – on their shelves.’

David turned one of the DVDs over, studied the back. ‘Very creative. But they do say that about you lot, don’t they? Good with colours, wallpaper, soft furnishings, that sort of thing.’

‘I need some start-up capital.’

‘From me? Well, I would, my old friend, but they say bukkake doesn’t sell any more. Did you know that? Apparently more women are watching porn. Apparently they don’t get off on seeing some slag getting wanked over by twenty men. God knows why, it’s a mystery to me, but you do hear the word “degrading” bandied around, these days.’

Sally massaged her temples. So what she’d seen on the video had a name. Bukkake. Somehow it made it worse, to put a word to it, made it more real. No pretending she’d dreamed it.

‘Course, maybe you could flog it to the gay market – could be a new opening. I mean, it was always beyond me why any red-blooded male would want to watch a bunch of other men jacking off. Where’s the hetero in that formula, eh?’

Jake ignored the dig. ‘I was thinking we’d go forty:sixty. You put in the copying facility, the packaging and the marketing. I put in the product.’

David was still for a moment. ‘Forty:sixty? Who’s the forty?’

‘You. Let them go out at six ninety-nine. The same strategy we had with the last series.’

David got to his feet. He went to the fridge and poured himself another glass of champagne. He closed the door and stood for a moment or two, his back to Jake, as if he was composing himself. Then he came back and sat down. ‘Look, boyo, we had a falling-out the other day when you were here. I was rude, I grant you.’

‘Yeah – you were pissed off.’

‘Pissed off. That’s right. And I told you not to come back. You chose to ignore that. So you must, I think, be asking yourself why the hell I let you back in today. Aren’t you?’

‘I dunno. Maybe.’

‘Let me explain. I opened the door to you for one reason. Curiosity. I’m a curious man, see, always have been. Used to love, as a child, going to the zoo. Nice family outing to see the monkeys playing with their peckers, know what I mean? Used to be curious about that and I’m like that even now. For example, I’m intrigued by the amazing variety of things some of the Kosovan slags’ll shove up their snatches for a few euro. That, believe me, never fails to make me curious. And Jake, my old friend, that’s why I’m welcoming you in here.’

‘Because you’re curious?’

David laughed expansively. He leaned over and slapped Jake on the knee. ‘Oh, I love it – I love your expression. You think I’m going to ask you to pull out your pecker like those monkeys, doncha? Or ram an onion up your jacksy? Don’t worry – I’m not going to ask you that, though I’m sure you would, you being a bum-boy and all. No – I’ve seen your legendary whanger enough times to satisfy that curiosity, eh? Like half of Britain. Sad your one-handed audience can’t applaud, isn’t it? Might make you feel better about yourself. No, Jake, I’m not curious about any of that. And yet I am still curious. Still curious …’

‘About what?’ Jake blurted.

‘About what the fuck you were thinking!’ He rammed a finger hard into his temple. Spittle flew out of his mouth. ‘Have you fucking lost it up here in old Mission Command, boyo, mincing back, trying to sell me my own fucking speciality? I’m the bukkake king, you queer piece of shit. I’m the one got you started. I made you, Jake. I. Made. You.’ He shook his head sorrowfully. Let out all his breath wearily and opened his hands as if he despaired. ‘Honestly, Jake, if you had an extra brain it’d be lonely. Now, get the fuck out of my house. And this time don’t come back.’

Jake stared at him.

‘What’re you fucking looking at? You deaf or something?’ David slammed a fist on the table, making the DVDs rattle. Jake jumped to his feet and hastily swept the DVDs into the bag. Throwing it over his shoulder, he backed out towards the door, his hands up. David followed him as far as the hallway, then swung loosely around the banister and disappeared from Sally’s view up the stairs.

Going for the crossbow. He had to be.

She got up and went quietly to the door. Jake was outside on the gravel, patting his coat, trying to find his keys, glancing anxiously at David, who had come downstairs and was standing a few feet away in the sunshine, his back to her, the crossbow raised. She looked across the kitchen to the utility room – just ten feet to cover, then she’d be out. She was about to scamper across when there was a loud thwack and a bolt was fired. A fountain of gravel spurted into the air about ten feet away on the driveway near the jeep. Jake put his hands in the air defensively.

‘What’s wrong, boyo?’ David called pleasantly. ‘Still struggling with the meaning of “fuck off”?’

In an act of defiance, Jake stooped, snatched up a handful of gravel, and threw it at him. Then, before David could react, he was in the jeep, powering up the driveway, the automatic gates swinging open to let him go. And Jake was gone, the butterfly flash of his jeep bumping along the tiny lane that wound down to the road.

David trudged back into the house. Immediately he caught sight of Sally shrinking back into the atrium.

‘What’re you staring at?’ He glanced over his shoulder as if there might be someone else in the hallway who was making her gawp like that. ‘What? So I lost my temper. Don’t get all weepy on me, Princess – if you hadn’t been cunting around with my private affairs I wouldn’t’ve been so pissed off in the first place.’

Sally gaped at him, lost for words. Her face was on fire. She was thinking about the girl in the video, strapped to the floor.

‘What?’ His chin jutted forward aggressively. ‘Don’t give me that fucking superior-bitch look – I’m fed up with seeing it. You stand here in my house judging me? Well, there’s a simple solution to that. You fuck off. If you don’t like it, then just fuck right off.’

She was still for a moment longer. Then she turned on her heel and began to walk towards the utility room. ‘You bastard,’ she muttered, under her breath.

‘I beg your pardon?’

She shook her head. Kept walking.

‘You’ll apologize for that,’ he yelled behind her. ‘You’ll fucking apologize.’

She got to the door of the utility room. Mercifully it opened smoothly and she was out in the sun, her bag over her shoulder, her jacket bundled up in the cleaning kit. She was trembling but she didn’t run, just went fast and steady, her head up and straight, ferreting around with one hand in her bag for her keys. She could hear him behind her. Also not running. But keeping pace.

‘I said apologize. Say it. Tell you what, I’ll make it easy for you – give you the script. “I’m truly sorry, David, for calling you a bastard. I’m sorry.” Just say it and it’s over.’

As she got to the bottom of the path and swung the little gate open, the keys in her bag suddenly seemed to leap into her hand. Thank you, thank you, thank you, she thought, hoisting them out and aiming them at the car. The locking system beeped and clunked reassuringly; the indicators flashed. The gap from the parking area to the gate was only a few yards. As soon as she was in the car she’d be fine.

But David caught up with her on the gravel. ‘You really take the fucking biscuit, Sally.’ He ran forward a little so he was in front of her. He wanted her to look at him. ‘Never known anyone like you for bare-faced stupid cuntness.’

She dodged past him, opening the car and throwing her jacket and bag on to the passenger seat. Then she went round to the back, weaving past him, still not meeting his eye. She opened the boot and threw her kit inside. As she was straightening, he came up behind her and struck her on the back of the head with such force that her face went forward, her cheek hitting the underside of the opened boot lid. As she bounced back, her left elbow slammed the inside of the boot at speed, breaking the motion. She jerked sideways in an undignified scramble to right herself. Before she could catch her breath and twist to face him he was on her back, gripping her by the throat from behind, pinning her face down into the boot.

‘You fucking apologize. What do you take me for? Eh?’ He shook her forcefully. ‘Apologize now.’

She scrabbled at his fingers. Felt the hot, fat pressure of blood squeezed into her brain. Her arms tingled – static crackled in her ears. This was insane. It couldn’t be happening.

‘I ought to fucking take you out here and now, you bitch. Taking my fucking money and judging me at the same time?’ He shook her, his body weighing flat against her back. ‘I ought to rip your head off and shit down your neck. I thought Jake was bad.’

She couldn’t swallow. There was blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten her tongue – it dribbled out of her lips and down her chin. All the objects in the boot seemed to bulge out at her, as though behind a fish-eye lens. Then she realized what she was looking at. Something smooth and black. She recalled Steve, standing at the wall, bouncing nails into the door frame. The nail gun, a dim red light on the base. Steve had shown her how to use it before he’d put it in here, and he’d said the light only came if it was switched on. Maybe it had been switched on all this time.

‘Apologize.’

‘No.’ Her speech was slurred with the blood that webbed her mouth. She tightened her fingers around the gun. It felt smooth. Curiously warm. ‘I won’t.’

He kicked the car, making it rock. ‘Don’t take the fucking piss. You’re worse than Jake for not knowing when you’ve got shit all over your face. Now apologize.’

Her finger found the trigger. Found the parts that Steve had used to start it. You had to pull back the guard on it, make sure the nail strip was in place, hold the muzzle flush against the surface and depress the trigger. If she could find a place on David’s arms, or his legs. Somewhere that would hurt, but not injure him seriously. Just stop him long enough for her to get into the car.

‘You know what happens to tarts like you who take the piss?’ He gave her another shake. ‘Say it,’ he hissed in her ear. His breath was sour and hot. ‘Say it now. Cunt.’

Sally took a breath and wrenched her body sideways out of his grip. The car suspension creaked, she staggered against the bumper, waving the nail gun at David. He came at her again and she lashed out blindly – at the first and easiest place she could reach. His leg. Before he could react there was a loud whoomp and she had landed a nail in his thigh. He crumpled with the pain, wheeling away. Took a few staggering steps away from the car, clutching his leg. She tottered sideways, staring at him, hardly believing she’d done it.

‘Fuck. What the fuck did you do that for?’ He sank to the ground, scrabbling at his jogging trousers, pulling frantically at the nail. She dropped the nail gun and stood there, like a dummy, mouth open, knowing she’d hit something big because blood was already soaking his jeans. Thick pulses of it ran over his hands. ‘You made your point, Sally. You made your point.’

‘No,’ she said, horrified. ‘What have I done?’

‘I don’t fucking know, do I? Get the fucking thing out.’

She crouched, fumbling for his leg, trying to find where the wound was, but the blood seemed to be everywhere, mushrooming up like a spring. On Wednesday when Steve had nailed himself to the wall she’d been completely calm. Now her body was seized up in panic. She seemed to move in creaky slow motion, pushing herself upright and stumbling to the front of the car to get her jacket. She came back, threw it on to the wound and groped around helplessly, trying to tighten it.

‘Call an ambulance.’

To Sally’s horror she saw his lips had gone blue. His hands were flailing, trying to grab her wrist. They kept slipping in the blood and losing their grip.

‘Get me back to the house.’

‘Keep still,’ she panted. ‘Keep still.’

He lay there for a moment, breathing hard, while she wrapped the jacket around his thigh. But even before she could tie it at the back she saw it was useless – the blood had soaked through the fabric, pushing through the herringbone stitch as if it was squeezing through a grid. And then that awful pulsing fountain of red again.

‘God God God.’ She glanced frantically up at the house. Jake? No – he was long gone. ‘What do I do? Tell me what to do now!’

‘I don’t know.’

She leaped up and grabbed her bag, tipped out the contents and snatched up her mobile. With shaking fingers she began to dial, but before she’d got to the second nine, David let out an odd whine. He half sat up – his mouth open in a grimace as if he wanted to bite her. He froze like that for a moment then fell back, jerking and spasming, as if an electric current was going through him. His legs kicked involuntarily, making him circle like a broken Catherine wheel. Then his back arched, his head twisted painfully, as if he was trying to look over his shoulder at the wheel of the car, and he went limp, lying on his back, one arm trapped under him, the other stretched out to the side.

There was silence. She stood, the phone forgotten in her hand, staring at him. He wasn’t breathing. Or moving. A smell of urine and blood rose up off him.

‘David?’ she whispered. ‘David?’

Silence.

Shaking, she fell to her knees in the spreading pool of blood, her heart beating like thunder. His eyes were open, his mouth too, as if he was shouting. It was like seeing a machine stopped in mid-action. She sat back on her heels. Numb. No, she thought. Christ, no. Not this on top of everything else.

The evening sun shone warm on the back of her head, and a sudden gust sent a swirl of blossom dancing past her gently, as though this was just another late-spring evening. Nothing unusual about it – nothing unusual about a small woman in her thirties killing a man, quite unabashedly, out in the open air.

Chapter 37

It took all of Zoë’s reserves, that day of work. It took going into the sort of places she’d hoped for years she’d never have to see again. The club she’d worked at in the nineties was closed now – it had turned into a betting shop – but driving round the streets of Bristol that day, the list Holden had given her taped to the dashboard, the sheer misery of it came back to her like a slap. Nightclub after nightclub after nightclub, all across the city. Most of them were just opening in the afternoon, and from some the cleaners were coming out, dragging their heels, knowing their lot in life was to wash floors that had had every kind of bodily fluid spilled on them. The places smelt of bleach, stale perfume and stomach acid. The majority of the girls were East European. They were generally open and pleasant, unobstructive, but none of them had ever seen Lorne Wood, except on the front page of the newspapers. When Zoë mentioned there was a chance Lorne had wandered into topless modelling, maybe into the clubs, one or two of the girls had given her a look as if to say, was she nuts? Someone like Lorne ending up in a place like this?

By nine that evening, when she’d got to the end of the list, she was starting to think the girls were right, that Holden’s agency really was where Lorne’s trail had run cold. She was coming to the end of the day – the end of her promise to Lorne. Just one more knock and she’d admit defeat. Go home and watch TV. Go to a movie. Call one of the biker friends she sometimes met up with for a beer and sit in a bar planning her week’s bike ride.

Jacqui Sereno’s was the last name. She lived in Frome and had cropped up in a conversation with a bouncer at one of the clubs. Zoë drove the old Mondeo out there, both hands on the steering-wheel, her eyes fixed doggedly on the road. The address was a private house – and for a moment she thought she’d got the wrong place. But she checked the list and it was right. Apparently Jacqui operated a webcam service, letting out rooms, computer equipment and bandwidth, from this small, ordinary house, only distinguishable from all the others on the estate by its tattiness. The door of the gas meter hung open at an angle, broken on the hinges, and a dustbin overflowed on the front path. The windows hadn’t been cleaned in years. With a deep sigh, Zoë swung her legs out of the car and walked up the path.

The woman who opened the door was in her fifties, small, thin and bitter, with a dark suntan and an old-fashioned beehive she had decorated with plastic flowers. She wore tight black leggings, a T-shirt and red high-heeled mules. She was sucking at a cigarette, as if she needed the nicotine so much she’d like to swallow the thing whole.

‘Jacqui?’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘Police.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Have you got a few moments?’

‘S’pose.’

Jacqui kicked aside a fluffy pink draught-excluder and opened the door. Zoë stepped inside. It was hot – the central heating was on high although it was spring. She followed the woman into the kitchen at the back of the house. It was neater inside than out – there were lace curtains in the windows, with a mug tree, matching tea-towels, and biscuit tins piled in a pyramid on top of the fridge. The only thing out of place was a yellow and black sharps bin on the work-surface.

‘Insulin,’ Jacqui said. ‘I’m a diabetic.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Now, make yourself comfortable, pet, and I’ll put on the kettle because you’ll be here a while.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re going to sit here and threaten me, pet, and I’m going to come back at you over and again, explaining how I’m not running a brothel. How what I’m doing here is not illegal. How you have to define what the girls are doing as lewd or likely to cause offence. You’re police but you’re out of your depth.’ She smiled and plugged the kettle in. Threw a couple of teabags into mugs. ‘I mean no personal offence, pet, but since they’ve got rid of the specialized cops – the street-offences crew – I’ve been able to run rings around you CID muppets. Shame, I had a lot of friends in that team.’

Zoë didn’t want to get into the small print of the Sexual Offences Act. From her own experiences, she knew the earlier legislation – a lot of it was written in stone on her heart – but over the years her knowledge had slipped. A lot of the stuff relating to lap-dancing clubs was governed by local bylaws, and a huge Act had been passed in 2003 that overturned a lot of what she’d learned. The only part of the new Act she could quote for sure was the bit about assault by penetration with an object – and she only knew that from the discussions in the incident room over what Act they might charge Lorne’s killer under. She’d be no match for the hard-bitten Jacqui.

‘I’ve been over and over this. The point is that no sexual gratification actually takes place on the premises.’ She dug a wrinkled finger at the table. ‘I can promise you that. If there is any sexual gratification occurring it ain’t here. It’s happening in New York or Peru or bleeding Dunstable, for all I know.’

Zoë raised her chin and looked at the ceiling, imagining a warren of rooms up there. ‘How does it work?’

‘They’re “chat hostesses”. That’s all. Sitting in front of a web cam and “chatting” – or whatever they have a mind to do, if you get my drift. Catering to the more discerning gentleman who’s had his fill of the Asian girls. A little pricey, but you get what you pay for. Two dollars a minute. Not that I see a penny of it. Because this ain’t a brothel. My only comeback is the rental of the equipment and bandwidth with it. What they do ain’t my affair.’ She put a mug on the table. ‘There you are, pet. Drink up. You look like you need it.’

‘Are they up there now?’

‘Just one. Our big clients are South America and Japan.’ She looked at her watch. ‘South America’s in the office now, and doesn’t like to get caught with his trousers round his ankles by the boss, and Japan? Well, he’s only just waking up. We won’t catch him at his randiest for another twelve hours. So?’ She gave Zoë a friendly smile. There was a smudge of red lipstick on her front teeth. ‘What section of the law do you want to argue about? You see, me,’ she held the hand with the smouldering cigarette against her chest, ‘I love a good debate. I should have been on Question Time, me. One day they’ll ask me.’

‘They will. They surely will.’ Zoë cleared her throat and reached, for the hundredth time, into her satchel. Pulled out the photos of Lorne. ‘Jacqui. Look, I’d love to have a debate. But I’m not here about the setup you’re operating.’

‘Operating? Be careful the vocabulary you use.’

‘The equipment you’re renting.’ She rubbed her forehead. She was hot and sticky in this shirt, and Jacqui’s tea tasted awful. She so, so wanted to go home – forget all this. ‘What I really want to know is if this girl ever passed across your radar screen.’

She spread the photos out. Jacqui took a long puff of the cigarette, pushed the smoke out of her mouth in a thin, straight stream, and squinted down at the photos, taking in every detail. She’d done this before, Zoë thought. Probably, if she’d been in the business a while, she’d done it a lot of times – speaking to the police about the victims of rape, abuse, domestic violence. Prostitution, lap-dancing, pole-dancing. Lying naked on a bed in front of a tiny video camera and a mic. All these things lived in a hinterland just on the other side of the law – sharing boundaries with the dangerous and the violent.

‘No.’ She sat back, closed her eyes and took another puff. ‘Never seen her.’

‘OK.’ Zoë put the wallet into the satchel and began to get up. She’d done what she could.

‘But …’ Jacqui said. ‘But wait …’

‘But?’

‘But I know who would like her. For his videos. He’s cornered the young totty market, hasn’t he? He likes them to look like teenagers.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘I don’t know his name. Not his real name. London Tarn they always called him. London Tarn.’

Zoë sank slowly back into her seat. ‘London Tarn?’

‘It’s London Town,’ Jacqui explained. ‘Just “Tarn” because of the accent. You know – like in EastEnders, but he—’ She broke off, squinting at Zoë suspiciously. ‘What? You look like someone just sucked the blood out of you. You’ve heard of him, have you?’

‘No.’ She clutched the satchel to her chest. Drew her knees together. ‘No. I’ve never heard of him.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘It’s just that for a minute there, when I said his name, you looked like—’

‘I’m sure.’ She started tapping her foot, suddenly irritable. She was awake now. Wide awake. ‘Tell me about him. London Tarn. He makes videos?’

Jacqui took another slug of smoke and eyed her. ‘Yeah – he’s been around years now, must be pushing sixty. When he started, he used to be just soft porn. Hi Eight. He used to run a club too – out in Bristol, one of your old-fashioned strip clubs – and when that closed down he put everything into the videos. He didn’t have any proper production equipment – the only time I went to his place it was just him in a flat in Fishponds, with one VHS here,’ she put a hand out, ‘and another here, and a bit of wire between them, and that’s how he’d copy them. Then he’d sell them in the markets. You know, the stalls at St Nicholas.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that he was a gonzo.’

‘A gonzo?’

‘Yeah. He’d make vids of himself. This was in the nineties, mind.’ She tapped her ash into the ashtray and crossed her legs – getting comfortable for this reminiscence. ‘I never knew him then, that was after my time, but I seen the movies. He’d be there in his glory with some poor girl he’d talked into doing whatever. Never bothered with lighting or anything, which I always thought wasn’t professional. A bit slack, if you want my way of looking at it. But they do say, don’t they, some people like it – the, you know, warts-’n’-all look. Either way up, it was a seller. And on the back of that he picked up pretty swift on the Internet deal. Give him his due, he was in there. And after that came the bukkake stuff.’

‘Bukkake?’

Jacqui laughed. ‘Doncha know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘It’s all about humiliating the woman. They say it was an old Japanese custom – what they’d to do to the womenfolk if they got caught putting it around. The men of the village would take them out and bury them up to their necks. Except instead of stoning …’ She broke off. Gave a nasty smile. ‘Nah, you’re the detective. You go and find out. But, anyway, it’s what he built his empire on. Bukkake, the nastier the better. I’ve seen some of it – looked like some sort of snuff movie, really dirty. Gritty. You’d think looking at it the girl was going to be butchered. Still, it sold by the shedload – just stacks of the stuff. Makes you wonder about human nature, don’t it?’

‘OK,’ Zoë said, very slowly, ‘what’s he doing now? Where is he?’

‘Oh, he’s mega. Mega-mega.’ She waved a hand in the air as if they were talking about a different universe. ‘Private jet, probably, servants. The works. He’s up there, now, sweetie, and there’s no taking him down.’

‘Which country?’

‘Here. In the UK.’

In the UK. Zoë cleared her throat. She’d just changed her mind about having a week off. ‘You mean, in this area?’

‘I think so, yes. And, believe me, if he set his eyes on a girl like that one on your photos he’d get dollar signs lighting up in his eyes. Why? What’s happened to her? Is she hurt?’

‘You don’t know his real name? Do you? London Tarn?’

Jacqui gave a low, guttural laugh. ‘No. If I knew his real name I’d be after him. For that tenner he borrowed off me in the nineties.’ She tapped another column of ash off her cigarette. ‘I mean, fifteen years. The interest he owes me, I could fly round the world. Go and say hi to my customers in South America, eh?’

Chapter 38

The sun had already left the north-facing slopes outside Bath. The garden at Peppercorn Cottage would be in darkness. But the fields up at Lightpil House were slightly angled towards the sun and got more daytime. Another two or three minutes. The sun melted down over the hill, spread itself out, and then it was gone, leaving just a few flecks of grey cloud in the amber sky.

Sally couldn’t move David Goldrab’s body so she’d reversed her car to block the entrance to the parking area so it couldn’t be seen. Not that anyone ever came up here. Then she found a cardigan in the Ka, pulled it on and sat on the bonnet with her knees drawn up. She wondered what on earth to do. The muscles in David’s face had tightened, drawing his eyes wider and wider open, as if he was amazed by a rock that lay a few feet from his face. It was cold. She could hear everything around her, as if her ears were on stalks – the hedgerows, the fields, the faint shift of breeze in the grass, the dry rustle of a bird moving in the branches.

After a while she saw that the blood on her hands had dried. She did her best to flake some of it off with her nails. She cleaned off the phone, too, on the sleeves of her cardigan and dialled Isabelle’s number. ‘It’s me.’

‘Hey.’ A pause. ‘Sally? You OK?’

‘Yes. I mean – I’m …’ She used her fingers to press her lips together for a moment. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t sound it.’

‘I’m a bit … Issie, did you pick up Millie from school like you said?’

‘Yes – she’s fine.’

‘They haven’t gone out?’

‘No – they’re all watching TV. Why?’

‘Can she stay with you tonight?’

‘Of course. Sally? Is there anything I can do? You sound terrible.’

‘No. I’m fine. I’ll come and get her in the morning. And … Issie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you, Issie. For everything you are. And everything you do.’

‘Sally? Are you sure everything’s all right?’

‘I’m fine. I promise. Absolutely fine.’

She hung up. Her hands were trembling so much she had to put the phone down on the car bonnet to jab the next number into it. Steve answered after three rings and she snatched it up.

‘It’s me.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Something’s happened. We need to speak. You need to come to me.’

‘OK …’ he said cautiously. ‘Where are you?’

‘No. I can’t – I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t say on the phone.’

There was a pause while Steve seemed to think about this. Then he said, ‘OK. Don’t. Think carefully about every word. Are you near your place?’

‘Further.’

‘Further south? Further north?’

‘North. But not far.’

‘Then you’re …’ He trailed off. ‘Oh,’ he said dully. ‘Do you mean you’re at the house of someone we’ve spoken about recently?’

‘Yes. There’s a car-parking place. Take a right fork as you come to the house. Don’t go past the front, there are cameras. Steve, can you – can you hurry?’

She hung up. A sound – very distant in the evening air – of a car revving on the road to the racecourse. Then headlights coming through the tree-line. She lowered her head, cowering, even though it would come nowhere near Lightpil. It changed gear and continued up the hill. But she pressed her forehead against the cold windscreen, trying to disappear, trying to bring something peaceful into her head. Millie’s face, maybe.

It wouldn’t come. All that came was a bright zigzagging light, like the after-image of a firework.

About ten minutes later another car on the main road indicated left and came off on the small turning. Slowly it climbed the road that snaked around the bottom of Hanging Hill. She saw the sweep of headlights and slithered off the bonnet, going to crouch behind the shrubbery at the edge of the parking area as the lights came nearer. The lights turned into the track, rattled over the cattle grid, then came to a halt. It was Steve.

He got out, and, silhouetted, tall against the darkening sky, pulled on a fleece, glancing around himself. She pushed herself out of the hedge and stood there, the cardigan wrapped tight around her to cover the blood on her clothes.

‘What?’ he whispered. ‘What’s happening?’

She didn’t answer. Head down, hands tucked into her armpits, she walked around her car and led the way into the parking area. He followed without a word, his feet crunching in the gravel. At the back of the Ford Sally stopped. Steve stood next to her and they were silent for a long time, looking at David Goldrab’s body. His running T-shirt was rucked up, showing his thick, tanned torso, his hair matted with blood. His face seemed calcified, his mouth widening around his gums. She realized she could still smell him. Just a little of his essence, streaking the grey air.

Steve crouched next to the body. Putting his bandaged hand tentatively in the gravel he leaned closer, peering at David’s face. Then he rocked back on his heels and wiped his hands. ‘Jesus. Jesus.’

‘There was an argument. He followed me out to the car and hit me on the back of the head. He was forcing me into the boot. Your nail gun was in there and I had to—’ She drew her hands down her face, felt the soreness where he’d pushed her into the boot lid. ‘My God, my God, Steve. It was over so quickly. It wasn’t what I meant to happen.’

Steve let all his breath out at once. He came and hugged her. She could feel his pulse jack-hammering against her own. The awful crackle of David’s dried blood on her clothing.

‘It just happened,’ she said. ‘Just like that.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘No one’s going to believe it was an accident.’

She cried then – long, drawn-out sobs. Steve said nothing, just kept his hands on her back, rubbing her soothingly. When at last she’d stopped, he let her go and walked back to the parking area’s entrance. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the landscape. She knew what he was seeing – the whole of the valley spread out. The beginnings of the city on the horizon. Her childhood land. The places she’d dreamed in, the places she’d cried and had hopes and fears in. All the valleys and the brooks and the glades – all the places she’d been and never spied this future crouching in wait for her behind the trees.

After a long time he turned round and came back down the slope. ‘What have you got in the car? Have you got your cleaning kit?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rubber gloves?’

‘Yes.’ She opened the boot, rummaged in her cleaning kit and held out a pair still in their pack. Steve took them. His face was white and controlled. He ripped the pack with his teeth and began pulling on the gloves.

‘Steve? What’re you doing?’

‘I’ve got a meeting at nine in the morning. That means we’ve got thirteen hours.’

Chapter 39

Steve’s plan, he said, was the best possible solution. But if they were going to do it, it would have to be done quickly, and to start with they needed to find some plastic. Sally knew David kept a lot of his equipment in the garage, but it was at the side of the house where the camera was, and she worried they’d be caught on video. She wanted to check on the monitor inside what could be seen so she and Steve went back up to the house. Even in the daytime David was in the habit of leaving lights and TVs on, and now that it was getting dark the place seemed to be lit up like a bonfire. The halogens in the glass atrium blazed, casting the shadows of huge potted plants out into the garden. The utility-room door stood open, the TV blasting out from inside.

Steve waited on the deck, keeping an eye on the road, while she crept in alone. It seemed so hot inside, stifling, as if the heating had been turned up high. The air was as still as the grave, and even in the familiar rooms and corridors, she found herself jumping at every shadow, as if David’s’s ghost was waiting to leap out at her. She wondered if it would be like this for ever, if she’d be driven mad by the guilt. You heard about that happening, people haunted all their lives by the spirit of the person who’d died.

When she checked the monitor in the office she saw that a huge part of the driveway wasn’t covered by the camera – plenty of room to get into the garage without being seen – so she collected a bunch of keys from the hooks in the kitchen where David kept them and went with Steve around the side of the house.

‘Holy shit,’ he muttered, when she pressed the fob and the door opened to reveal a huge, shiny car. ‘It’s only a Bentley.’

‘Is that good?’

He gave a small wry smile. ‘Come on.’

Behind a row of motor-oil cans they found a roll of plastic and some old ballast bags, some tape and a Stanley knife. They carried it all back to the parking area and unrolled the plastic on the ground next to the body.

‘Take his feet.’

‘Oh, God.’ She stood a yard away, staring at the body. Her teeth were chattering. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘Sally,’ Steve said steadily. ‘You can do it. I know you can – I saw you the other day with that hacksaw. You can do this.’

‘We’re really going to do it, then? Really not report it – and just get the money?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘You tell me. You could have called the police but you didn’t.’

She closed her eyes and put her fingers on her temples. He was right, of course. She could have called the police at any time. Had she decided already – subconsciously – that this was what they’d do?

‘But …’ She opened her eyes. ‘Is it the right thing? Steve? Is it?’

‘How do you quantify right? Is it the legal thing? No. But is it the best thing? You’ll get thirty K for offing this old pervert. Is that the best thing? You tell me.’

Sally didn’t answer. She kept her attention on David’s face. Pale and rigid now. His eyes had changed. They no longer had a shine to them, the way normal eyes did. They were cloudier and flatter, she thought, as if they were sinking backwards into his skull. Earlier she’d seen a fly try to land on the right one. An image popped into her mind. A bruise. It was on the thigh of the girl that had been on the floor of the livestock pen. Just a single bruise, but it came at her like a punch.

‘OK.’ She came forward, rolling up her sleeves. ‘What do I do?’

David was heavy, but he wasn’t going stiff the way she’d imagined he would. Steve said not enough time had passed for that to happen. The body flopped around as they tried to move it, his arms lolling all over the place, but eventually they got him on to the plastic sheet. They folded it around him like a cocoon and lifted him into the boot of Steve’s Audi. Then Steve searched in the pool-maintenance shed until he found two buckets and, for the next twenty minutes, the two of them toiled up and down the path from the outdoor tap to where the body had lain, sluicing the ground with bucket after bucket of water until the blood, hair and urine had been rinsed into the ground.

Steve got into the Audi and put the key in the ignition. ‘Is there a back way to yours? A way we don’t have to use main roads?’

‘Yes. Follow me.’

She got into the Ka and reversed back along the track to the lane. The Audi headlights followed her. The countryside was pitch black now, a low cloud covering the moon. She took the switch-backs and narrow lanes that crisscrossed the land. They got back to Peppercorn Cottage without seeing another car. The porch light was on – it looked so welcoming that she had to remind herself there was nothing warm on the stove, no candles in the window or fires in the grates. That she and Steve weren’t going to spend the evening eating a meal or watching TV or chatting over a glass of wine. She stopped the car in the driveway, got out and pushed wide the doors of the huge garage for Steve to drive the Audi through. He cut the engine and got out, pulling off his gloves.

‘I never noticed this before.’

‘Because I never use it.’ She switched on the light – just a bare bulb in the rafters that did nothing except illuminate the spiders’ webs and fossilized swifts’ nests. There were a few rusty tools that the previous owner had left. Steve walked along the racks, checking them all. He stopped at a chainsaw, took it off its hook and examined it.

‘Steve?’

He looked round at her. ‘Get us a drink.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Something clean. Whisky. Not brandy.’

Inside the cottage smelt of candlewax and the blue hyacinths Millie had potted. They sat on one of the window-sills, drooping. Sally stood for a moment, her head resting against the cool plaster wall, looking at the flowers. After a while she took off her shoes and rested them on a carrier bag in the corridor, then rolled up her coat and pushed it into a bin liner. She walked in her socks to her bedroom with the bag and stripped to her underwear, adding all her blood-soaked clothes to the bin liner. Then she found a T-shirt and a pair of ski pants she’d bought for one of Julian’s business trips to Austria, pulled them on, shoved her feet into trainers, and went back down the corridor, looping her hair into a ponytail. She got towels from the airing cupboard and a pile of tea-towels from the cupboard under the sink. The whisky was at the back of the cupboard, behind all of Millie’s school books. Sally hadn’t touched it since they’d arrived, she only really kept it for visitors. She rested the bottle on the towels, added two glasses to the pile, a plastic bottle of sparkling water, and carried it outside.

The moon had broken through the clouds and as she crossed the lawn the awful beauty of the garden hit her. It had always reflected warmth and health back to her, even in the depth of winter, but now it seemed to be the silvery reflection of something old and sickly. She stopped for a moment and turned her face to the west, thinking she might catch something watching her. The fields on the other side of the hedge, which always seemed friendly, tonight were full of shadows she didn’t recognize.

Steve was standing in the garage with the boot open. In the electric light his face was yellow – hollow under the eyes. She put down the towels and poured two glasses of whisky – not too much – and handed one to him. They stood facing each other, held up their drinks – as if they were toasting something good – and drained the tumblers. She grimaced at the taste of it and took a hurried swig of the water.

‘We’ve got to put him outside. On the grass.’

Sally lowered the water bottle. ‘Why?’

‘Just help me. Get the plastic.’

They put the bottle and the empty tumblers on the window-sill and pulled on their rubber gloves. Together they went to the boot, got hold of each end of the plastic cocoon and pulled. David’s body came rolling forward with one hand up, almost as if he knew he was toppling on to the ground. Steve caught his weight, wincing at the pressure on his wounded hand, then together they lowered the body. Through the plastic David’s face was visible, as though he was pressing it against a window.

‘Jesus.’ Steve wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked sick. ‘Jesus.’

Sally stared at him. He couldn’t give in. Not now, after what they’d already done. There was no going back.

‘Steve?’

‘Yeah.’ He wiped his forehead again. Gave himself a shake. ‘OK,’ he said, suddenly sharp. ‘Roll up your end.’

‘Right. Yes. Of course.’

They knotted the ends of the plastic and between them shuffled the body out of the garage on to the driveway. They walked sideways, down the two stone steps that led to the lawn, struggling with the weight.

‘Here,’ Steve said, and they dropped the bundle in the middle of the grass.

He straightened and looked around him. There were no lights as far as the eye could see, only the first stars pricking at the sky. He felt in his pocket and brought out his phone, flicked it on with his thumb. Holding it in one hand, he walked around the body, firing off photos, making sure he got the face from every angle.

‘What’re you doing?’

He gave a grim smile. ‘I haven’t a clue. I’m just pretending I’m in the movies. Pretending I’m de Niro. Or Scorsese. Doing what one of their hitmen would do.’

‘Oh,’ She rubbed her arms. ‘God.’

He crouched again, and gingerly inspected David’s right hand.

‘What is it?’

‘His signet ring. With four diamonds and an emerald. It identifies him.’ He took several photos of the ring then pulled it off and slipped it into his pocket. Then he pocketed the camera and shuffled sideways. He hooked his index finger behind David’s front teeth and, with his other hand, cautiously prised the lower jaw open. He pulled the face to one side. The corpse gave a long, soft sigh.

Sally shrank back against the car. David’s head fell sideways, slack on the ground, his eyes staring.

‘It’s OK,’ Steve murmured. ‘Really – it’s OK. It’s just air coming out of his lungs.’

Sally sank to a crouch, trembling. Steve licked his lips and went back to exploring inside David’s mouth. He tilted his chin down and squinted inside, grunted approvingly.

‘That’ll do.’

He put his elbow on the grass and lay almost full length next to David’s body, facing him as if they were going to have a long and involved conversation. With his free hand he fumbled out the phone again and spent almost five minutes photographing the face and teeth. When he had finished he got to his feet and looked at Sally.

‘What?’ she hissed. ‘What now? What happens now?’

‘I told you – I haven’t done this before.’

He went back into the garage and pulled more things from the shelves. She saw him in the weak light pouring petrol from a plastic container into a power tool. The chainsaw. He brought it out and stood in front of the corpse.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. We can’t.’

‘We haven’t got a choice. Not any more.’

She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath. Something was trying to thump its way out through her chest. She breathed hard, counting to twenty, until the static in her head eased and the thing in her chest stopped moving.

She opened her eyes and found Steve watching her expectantly.

‘OK,’ she murmured. ‘OK. Where do we start?’

‘His face,’ he said tightly. ‘Because that’s the worst part. We start with his face.’

Chapter 40

The whisky wore off quickly. They kept themselves together by setting a timer to fifteen minutes. They’d force themselves to work for those minutes, but the moment the timer went off they’d rip off their gloves, drop them on the plastic next to the remains of David Goldrab, and go back into the garage, where they’d stand with their backs to the mess in the garden, drinking another whisky, washing it down with water. They didn’t speak, just drank in silence, holding each other’s eyes as if they needed to look at a living human being. To see flesh that had blood and heat and life moving through it.

‘We can’t go on drinking,’ Steve said. ‘We’ve got to drive.’

Sally let her eyes stray outside to the plastic mat – slick purple lumps shining in the moonlight. Steve kept saying he had good reason to know what the police were like – that without a body and a motive they’d have nowhere to start. He said that human remains were easier to hide than anyone believed – that most criminals just lacked the time, resources and basic balls to hide their victims properly. That it was easy as long as you had the stomach to make the remains unrecognizable as human. Then you could hide them under the noses of the law and they’d walk straight past them. Sally thought he was only talking as if he knew what he was doing to reassure her, but she said nothing. ‘It’s easier from now,’ he said. ‘The worst bit’s over. We can stop the whisky. And we should try to eat something.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m never going to eat again.’

‘Me neither. I’m just saying we should.’

They went back outside and began dividing the pieces into eight piles. Steve had a pair of pliers, which he used to remove some teeth from David’s broken bottom jaw. There was no vice in the garage so he had to hold the jaw between his knees to get a purchase on it. Sally took photos using his camera. She heard the noise of gristle tearing as the teeth came from their sockets, and knew she’d never forget it. To the electric drill he fitted an attachment with a helical blade, meant for mixing paint, then together they loaded joints of bone and flesh into a bucket. They used more plastic sheet taped down around the drill to stop the contents spraying out and Steve switched it on, ramming it into the bucket over and over again, pulverizing the pieces.

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.’

Chapter 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, watched it in the wing-mirror, like confetti, lit red by the rear lights. It was so beautiful it could have belonged to a celebration. Funny, she thought, how everything in life was so deceptive.