Hanging Hill (5 page)

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.