Part 27 (1/2)

'Does he know your name? Where you live?'

'I'm not completely thick, Mum. I went into his back garden. He showed me the baby pheasants and that was it. I came back. He let me put some hoods on them, which was kind of cool. Except you don't want to get too friendly with him. He attacked a girl in Radstock went to prison for it. That's why I didn't tell you I'd been there. Thought you'd freak.' She lowered her chin and gave her mother an appraising look. 'And I was right.'

'Get dressed, Millie.' Sally gave an involuntary s.h.i.+ver. 'I'm taking you to school.'

26.

Sally couldn't face parking in David's parking area again. It was as if the blood that had seeped out of sight into the ground might mysteriously find her car and soak its sly way up into the tyres, into the sills and the upholstery. So at half past nine, when she arrived after dropping Millie at school, she stopped the Ka twenty yards short and inched it into a pa.s.sing s.p.a.ce, out of sight.

She got out slowly, straightened, her back to the car, and scanned her surroundings. It was a clear day, just a few clouds on the horizon. The distant line of yews that marked the northern perimeter of Lightpil House seemed etched hard against the sky. The roof of the gamekeeper's cottage, with its mossy tiles, was just visible to her right beyond the trees that ran down to the valley.

She moved along the perimeter of David's property to where the wall ended and a hedge began, and peered over it. In front of her, surrounded by copper beech and leaning poplars, was the cottage. Small, stone-built, a typical eighteenth-century worker's home, with a low, tiled roof and chimneys. The gardens were a mess overgrown and filled with junk; a yellow Fiat with a fading canvas roof was parked with its nose in a collapsed hay barn, some rusting disused chicken coops were piled against the far hedge, and, in the centre of the overgrown lawn, an old mower lay on its side, a roll of chicken wire abandoned next to it. Beyond the house was a huge mill shed. Maybe that was where the pheasants were reared. David had talked about his gamekeeper, but she'd forgotten about it until Millie had mentioned him.

After five minutes or more, when nothing in the house or garden had moved, she pushed through the hedge into the garden. The place was eerily quiet, just the faint sound of water running maybe the stream that came down from Hanging Hill. The driveway was empty. No cars. She turned and went to the bottom of the land the spoon shape she'd seen on Google Earth. The view here was quite different from up at Lightpil House: this land faced in a more westerly direction, towards Bristol. Where the trees bordering David's estate stopped, the land fell off, the garden giving way to patchwork farmland. And between them, wide and open like a wound, the yellowish smudge of gravel where it had happened.

She turned and looked up at the cottage. The windows were blank, the sky reflected in them. No movement. Nothing. She glanced again at the parking s.p.a.ce, trying to judge what could have been seen. What if there were photographs? What if Kelvin hadn't only seen her and Steve but had made a record of the whole thing? She thought about Steve, thousands of miles away, sitting in a restaurant in Seattle, drinking wine and those endless gla.s.ses of iced water they served out there. She wished she'd asked him to come back, wished she hadn't been so proud and determined.

A breeze came through the wood, making the branches lift and sigh. Slowly she began to head up the hill towards the cottage. Closer, she saw how old and threadbare it was. There were animal traps everywhere and more bales of chicken wire piled against the wall. He attacked a girl in Radstock went to prison for it He attacked a girl in Radstock went to prison for it.

The front door was flaked and old, with years of scuffing from wellingtons and maybe dogs. A name, faded by sun and rain to a pink, illegible smudge, had been written on paper and fastened under the bell with a rusting drawing pin. She stood on the step, put her head near the letterbox and listened. Silence. She went around to the back, looking up at the windows, trying to see a way in. Dirty sc.r.a.ps of lace curtain hung behind most of the panes, blocking her view, but she could see through the windows in the back extension to a galley-shaped kitchen with yellow Formica cabinets. There was a packet of Weetabix on the table, a dirty plate next to it and a couple of Heineken tins flattened ready for the rubbish. No one to be seen. To her surprise, when she stepped back she noticed the door was open a fraction.

She stared at it, her legs suddenly like wood.

No. You can't ... ...

But she did. She opened the door. The kitchen was small, the floor muddy, and the cupboards streaked with dirt at calf height, as if someone had been walking around wearing wellingtons. At the end a doorway led to the hall. Cautiously, she tiptoed over to it and peered through. It was a small hallway panelled in dark wood. No sound or movement. Just a curtain lifting lazily at the landing window.

There were two rooms opening from the main pa.s.sageway. With a quick glance upstairs she went to the first, at the front, and peeped round the door. It was a small parlour, still with its picture rails and ornately tiled fireplace intact. The curtains were drawn but enough light was coming through for her to see it was almost empty just an expensive TV on a black stand positioned about four feet in front of a sofa. The walls were bare, scruffy with years of grime. It didn't look like the home of someone organized, a person with the sort of technological know-how to have photographed or videoed people in a distant parking s.p.a.ce.

The second room, at the back, had been turned into a makes.h.i.+ft office, with an IKEA flatpack desk, covered with piles of paperwork, and a swivel chair, all muddied and scuffed. She went to the desk and began opening drawers. In the top two she found a few boxes of shotgun cartridges and an oil-stained bandoleer. In the bottom one there was a small handbook, divided into sections marked 'Beaters', 'Dogs', 'Clients'. She was about to close it when she saw something gold glinting up at her. She squatted and tentatively moved things around it until she could see what it was. A lipstick case. She took it out, removed the lid and twisted up the lipstick. The little that was left of it was a distinct orange-red. She put her head against the desk and took long breaths, thinking of the little boy she'd played Lego with all those years ago, wondering why he'd grown up so angry and dangerous. And what he wanted from her.

A noise from the front of the house. Nothing much, just a vague whisper. Moving silently she closed the drawer, straightened and went to peer down the hall to the front door. The breeze outside was stronger now. It was making the curtains on the landing flutter, sending shadows like flapping wings on to the hall floor. A figure moved on the other side of the frosted gla.s.s.

She shot a glance behind her at the kitchen. The door was still open. Another noise and then, shattering the silence, the person began to knock at the door, the noise echoing through the house. It pushed her into action. She slid silently back the way she'd come, out of the kitchen, into the garden, walking fast in a straight line away from the house where she wouldn't be seen from the front, her hands in her pockets, her head down. It was only when she got to within ten yards of the gap in the hedge that she broke into a run.

She ran as fast as she could, fumbling in her pockets for her keys. The thorns in the hedge tore at her, the gravel in the parking s.p.a.ce made her stumble. She was sweating and trembling as she got to the car. She wrenched the door open and threw herself inside.

As she got the key in the ignition Steve's voice came back to her. You won't get punished You won't get punished.

'Steve, you were wrong,' she muttered, starting the engine. 'You couldn't have been more wrong.'

27.

Zoe stood on the doorstep, her arms folded, her back to the gamekeeper's cottage, waiting for someone to answer the door. She surveyed the garden. It was a mess, with overgrown gra.s.s and a derelict garage, the weatherboarding rotting and hanging off. Over at the entrance, where a vegetable plot had been dug out, there was a stack of metal cages fox 'trods' for trapping the animals. A keeper would need these especially at this time of the year. The foxes were only just recovering from the winter. This was their rebound time, and because it coincided with the young pheasants being at their most vulnerable, still too weak to fly into the trees, you'd often see keepers 'lamping' in their Land Rovers b.u.mping across the fields aiming their huge torches out into the darkness, attracting the foxes out of the hedges to be picked off one by one by a twelve-bore shotgun.

No one came to the door so she bent and looked through the letterbox. She could see a small hallway with dark polished floors and a patterned runner on the narrow staircase. No one in there. Strange. She'd had the sense there was. She checked her watch. Most people would be at work now, but a gamekeeper could keep any hours. If Goldrab had run a lot of driven pheasant hunts during the season they'd be breeding them on an intensive scale. A lot of places around here still did that in spite of the animal rights movement and at this time of year there were scores of chicks at different stages of hatching. The keeper could be anywhere.

She realized she could hear water. Just a faint noise coming from somewhere behind the cottage. She went round the side and saw a dilapidated stone mill building with slate tiles stretching out at right angles to the cottage, spanning the stream, which rushed and echoed in a tunnel under the foundations. The braced redwood doors had been slid open to reveal the mill's concrete floor, lightly strewn with straw.

'h.e.l.lo?' she called. 'h.e.l.lo?'

No reply or movement, just the distant sound of a woodpigeon cooing, the constant undernote of running water.

'h.e.l.lo?'

She stepped inside the mill. The air was warm, full of noise. A giant waterwheel would have once been mounted at the far end of the building where the stream rushed under the boards, but it had been dismantled and a floor put over the open area. A concrete aisle ran down the centre, on either side of which were four wire-mesh holding pens with aluminium drop pans and red heat lamps hanging above them. A murmur was rising from the scores of pheasant chicks in the pens that squeaked and shuffled and ruffled their feathers.

'Hey.' Zoe leaned over the pen and held her hand out to them. 'Hey, little guys.' They scattered away from her, running off, banging into each other and gathering in a group at the rear of the pen, eyeing her nervously. She wandered around a bit longer found a large, netted cage at the end of the building with older pheasants, all fitted with little face masks to stop them pecking each other. They straightened their necks and blinked at her, ratcheting their heads from side to side.

Behind the pen was a bench with a vice, several jam-jars full of nails and screws and, mounted on a magnetic strip above the bench, a set of hunting knives the type that could be used to field-dress and skin animals. Zoe studied them for a while, wondering if they'd been used to skin David Goldrab. She eyed the pheasants with the masks were they fussy about what they ate? A body could disappear like that and never be found.

She went back into the open air. Near the mill doors, set at an angle in the gra.s.s, there was a hole with a grate an entrance to an oubliette or an old ice house for a forgotten manor, maybe with a big, padlocked chain linked through it. She made a mental note of it, then wandered back to the cottage, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pausing to put her nose to the windows and peer inside. Idly she tried the back door. It opened. She hesitated, looking down at the handle, half surprised. Then she stepped inside.

'h.e.l.lo?'

No reply, so she went into the kitchen and along the hallway, opening doors as she went, checking inside. No one here. She went upstairs, the curtain on the landing flapping and twisting like a ghost in front of her. She found two bedrooms one with a bed against french windows that opened, improbably, on to a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the stream, the second empty save for a pile of cardboard boxes and an old poster of a football team Blu-tacked to the wall. A tube of tennis b.a.l.l.s lay on the floor. Christ, there were b.l.o.o.d.y tennis b.a.l.l.s everywhere she went, these days. Lorne. Don't think I've forgotten you. I'm going to find out if you're somewhere in all of this.

There was a bathroom with greying towels left to dry on the radiator, a framed needlework sampler resting on the window-sill that read 'I'm not a pheasant plucker, I'm a pheasant plucker's son. I'm only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes'. In the cabinet there was a box of medicine, open, the blister packs spilling out. 'Catapres', the label read. She'd heard of it. It was something to do with post-traumatic stress. She put the box back, leaned across the bath, opened the window and peered out at the tops of the trees. From here you could see parts of David Goldrab's house, with its reconst.i.tuted stone tiles, its coynes and laughable attempts to blend into the area. The panes of its huge atrium reflected lozenges of sunlight back through the yew trees. Yep, if she was Mooney, the gamekeeper would have been the first person she'd approach.

She went back downstairs. There was nothing much in the front room, just a wide-screen TV and a load of DVDs, but in the back there was an office with paperwork stacked in rickety heaps. She sat down and began leafing through them, hoping to get an idea of this guy. There was a pile of invoices from Mole Valley Farm Supplies with black fingerprints on them. A series of letters from the Royal United Hospital about medical treatment he was receiving. Something to do with a head injury. Sheet after sheet of details of operations and medication and X-rays and ...

She stopped, half the pile of paper in one hand, half in the other. She was looking at an image she couldn't quite fathom. At first she thought it was some kind of Photoshopped joke, the sort of thing people loved to post online outsize animals, one celebrity's head spliced on to another's body, ridiculous fake X-rays of all the weird objects a person had swallowed because it seemed so outlandish. But when she studied it some more she saw it was real.

Watling and Zhang's unit would love to see this, she thought, a little shakily. It was the sort of photo there'd been a big thing about recently the sort taken by servicemen on their mobiles. It showed a pile of bodies men, skinny and half dressed, darkened by the sun and death into leathery strips of flesh. It looked like Iraq or Afghanistan, because there were plenty of keffiyeh keffiyeh scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Maybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. scarves among the clothing of the corpses. Nasty, nasty. Maybe the gamekeeper had been a serviceman. That That could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best a.s.sa.s.sins. could be another reason Mooney approached him. Ex-military, Watling had said. They were supposed to make the best a.s.sa.s.sins.

There was a noise from the doorway, and when she looked up a man was standing there, staring at her with his mouth wide open, as if he was more shocked to see her than she was to see him.

She dropped the photos and fumbled shakily inside her pocket for her warrant card, getting to her feet. 'You scared me for a moment there.'

He was tall and bearded, hair flecked with grey. He had a protruding stomach inside his checked lumberjack s.h.i.+rt, and he'd covered his jeans with snap-on waterproof leggings, like a cowboy's chaps. In his hand was a roll of garden twine. 'Don't think you'll get away with this again,' he said. 'Don't.'

'Sorry, I ...?' She trailed off. Her hand was frozen on the card, half in, half out of the pocket, as she stared at the scar on his head. 'Kelvin?' she said lamely. 'Kelvin?' It had taken a moment but she had recognized him. After eighteen years his name had popped into her head as if it was on a spring. Someone she'd been a tiny kid with at nursery school, and who, years later, had been a maintenance man in the Bristol strip club.

And at the moment she recognized him, he recognized her. He stepped forward, bent at the waist, an intrigued smile on his face. 'Zoe?'

She let the warrant card drop into her pocket. Slowly she took her hand out, holding his eyes. He knew her name. She couldn't show him the card, couldn't let him know she was a cop now. He knew everything about her. Everything.

'Wait there.' He smiled. He had good teeth. She remembered that from before. Above everything, she remembered his teeth. 'I'll be straight back. I've got something to show you.'