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.
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 scraps 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 passageway. 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 space.
The second room, at the back, had been turned into a makeshift 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 glass.
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 space 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.
‘Steve, you were wrong,’ she muttered, starting the engine. ‘You couldn’t have been more wrong.’
Chapter 27
Zoë 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 grass 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 – bumping 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.
‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Hello?’
No reply or movement, just the distant sound of a woodpigeon cooing, the constant undernote of running water.
‘Hello?’
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.’ Zoë 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. Zoë 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.