The gamekeeper. She pushed aside the file. The fucking gamekeeper. Jake had said someone was raising pheasants for Goldrab. Mooney had been shooting at Lightpil House and had to have spoken to the gamekeeper. She put the file away, shoved the photo into her jacket and buttoned it up. Jesus Jesus Jesus. Everyone knew what gamekeepers were like – mad as fishes. And dangerous. With gun licences and plenty of ways for disappearing bodies. If she was Mooney and wanted something done to Goldrab, the gamekeeper would be the first place she’d start.
She went into the living room. Jason was still asleep. She leaned over, put her head close to his face and listened to his breathing. Low and steady. He wasn’t that pissed. Not die-in-a-ditch pissed. He’d live. She crouched and hoisted him further on to the sofa so he wouldn’t roll off in his sleep. ‘Night, dude,’ she murmured. ‘And Godspeed to Mars. You’re going to need that rocket when Mum and Dad get home.’
Chapter 25
Sally didn’t go to bed. She snoozed for an hour or so on the sofa in the living room, but woke, her heart thumping, thinking about that cottage. The snaking path that led down to the bottom garden. She showered and dressed. Steve must have listened to her and gone on to that dinner meeting, because he hadn’t called. And she was determined not to call him. There was a sweater of his he’d left lying around and she pulled it on, stopping for a moment to sniff the sleeve. Then she went into the kitchen and began to get breakfast ready. Millie appeared in the doorway, yawning and rubbing her eyes.
‘Hi.’ Sally stood at the sink, feeling as stiff as a wooden doll. Sore-eyed. ‘Did you sleep OK?’
‘Yeah.’ Millie went to the fridge and poured a glass of juice. She sipped it for a while, then paused and glanced at her mother. ‘Oh, no – you’re looking at me funny again. Like you were last night.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. What the hell’s going on?’
Sally filled the cafetière and placed it on the table. Then she was still for a moment or two, contemplating Millie. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Remember that day last week when you came to work with me?’
‘Yeah.’ Millie used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth. ‘The medallion man? I remember. Why?’
‘What did you do while I was in the house? Where did you go?’
She frowned. ‘Nothing. I wandered around. Walked to the bottom of the garden. There’s a stream there, but it was too cold to paddle. I sat in a tree for a bit. Read on the lawn. Then Jake turned up.’
‘Did you speak to anyone?’
‘Only the freak.’
‘The freak?’ she said steadily.
‘You know – the gamekeeper. He lives in that cottage.’
Sally’s head seemed to lock in place on her neck. ‘Gamekeeper?’
‘Yeah. The one with the baby pheasants. Why? What’re you giving me that look for?’
‘I’m not. I’m just interested. I’ve never met him.’
‘Well, you see him in town sometimes.’ She put a finger to her temple and circled it. ‘You know, few sandwiches short of a picnic.’
‘No. I don’t think I’ve seen him.’
‘The one they said went to Iraq? Now he’s got metal in his head? Ask Nial – he knows the whole story. Me and the others used to go over there, you know, in the old days if we were bored, except the metal in his head means he’s nuts so we stopped. Peter and the others call him Metalhead.’
Metalhead. Sally knew who that was. Kelvin Burford. He’d been at the same nursery school she and Zoë had gone to as tiny children. Kelvin had been a funny little lad – always teased. She hadn’t seen him much after nursery – he’d gone to one of the schools on the other side of Bath – and if she had seen him, it was only in the street, never to speak to. She’d have forgotten all about him if she hadn’t read about him in the Bath Chronicle – how he’d got into the army, had been blown up in Iraq and nearly died. He’d been given a metal plate to replace parts of his skull, and although the doctors had thought he’d made a full recovery, the army wouldn’t have him back because they said he’d gone mad. His talk was all about nightmares and people having their heads blown off. When she’d read in the papers about him being blown up she’d felt sorry for him – she’d even worried about him from time to time. But Kelvin Burford – the man in the cottage? The one who’d put the lipstick in the car? She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse.
‘And the day I was working, did you speak to him? To Metalhead?’
‘I just said I did.’
‘What did you say? You didn’t talk about why you were there?’
‘No. I mean, I said hi and that. I said my mum was working at Medallion Man’s house.’
‘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 shiver. ‘I’m taking you to school.’
Chapter 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 passing space, 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 space, 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 glasses 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.