Part 34 (2/2)

'But what about the pattern?'

Zoe smiled and let her eyes wander over to Ben's car. 'The pattern?' she said softly. 'Oh, that always works itself out in the end.'

Sally smiled at that, and blushed, and looked down at Steve's hands, linked across her lap. She thought about the three of them, she and Zoe and Millie, locked for ever to one person by a secret. For Zoe it was Ben and for her it was Steve. And that was OK. They were the people they wanted to be locked to. But for Millie ...?

Well, for Millie it would happen eventually. One day she'd look at Nial and know she'd met the one.

3.

As soon as Zoe got into the car she saw that Sally had been right: Ben really was in a mood. His expression was solemn. Guarded.

'What?' She buckled the seat-belt and glared at him. 'Because I went to his funeral? Well, I know why now. We wanted to show strength, not cowardice, like he did. Is that a sin?'

He took off the sungla.s.ses and started the car. 'It's not that.' He checked the rear-view mirror and pulled out of the parking s.p.a.ce. 'Not that at all.'

'Then what? For Christ's sake.'

'We've got to talk. About all of this.' He waved a hand behind him to indicate the church. 'Something's gone seriously awry.'

Zoe stared at him. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. 'Awry?' she said carefully. 'What does ”awry” mean?'

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

'I know.'

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

'Did you find anything?'

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

'What? What have you found? Something I left? My phone?'

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

4.

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

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

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

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

5.

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

'What did you find? Something to do with Goldrab?'

'Sit down.'

s.h.i.+t, she thought. Sally had been right. Kelvin had had taken photos of her that night. taken photos of her that night.

'Ben just tell me. What have you found? Is it Goldrab?'

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

'And?'

'We found Goldrab's teeth buried in Kelvin's back garden.'

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

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

'Now what?'

'I've decided he didn't kill Lorne.'

She gaped at him. 'Didn't kill kill her?' her?'

'Or rape her.'

'Jesus. What the h.e.l.l did you find?'

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

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

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