‘What’s wrong with him?’ Zoë had crept up behind her and was looking over her shoulder. ‘He looks weird. Is he drunk?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘It’s good. He’s useless.’ She put the dragon lamp on the floor and raised the axe. There was bile in her mouth. This was it, then. This was the moment. ‘Don’t look.’
‘Wait.’ Zoë grabbed her arm. ‘Hang on. Something’s wrong.’
Sally lowered the axe and Zoë hefted up the dragon lamp from the floor. It powered blindingly across the tiny room, illuminating the sofa and the sideboard and the tatty curtains, putting Kelvin’s face into sharp relief against the rock. He didn’t react to the light. Not at all. He remained in the same position, his lolling head banging rhythmically into the frame. There was a mark on his forehead where it was making contact, but no blood. And the banging was lackadaisical. More of a spasm than an intention.
‘Why’s he so low down?’
Sally shook her head, transfixed by his face. ‘Isn’t he kneeling?’
‘No. It’s something else.’
Together the two women took a step into the room. Zoë shook the torch, moved it randomly to create a strobe effect. Then she took another step forward and shone it straight into his eyes. Still he didn’t react. His eyes stared forward, black and blank, as if focused on something in the window-frame.
Sally let out all her breath, walked to the window and put the axe straight through the glass. Kelvin’s body swayed a little, but he didn’t look up at her. His head jerked forward and made contact with the frame again, just inches from her face, then snapped back. She saw his eyes under the lowered lids. Saw the blackness. Saw the scar in his skull that snaked down from his ear into the collar of his checked shirt. His face was pulled back in a grimace. There was some blood on the front of his shirt, as if maybe it had come from his mouth.
‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Dead.’
She leaned out of the broken window, angled the torch down, and saw he wasn’t kneeling at all. It was just that he had no legs. What had once been his lower body had concertinaed here. Into a bag of broken limbs half held together by his jeans. A tree branch growing out of the rock had caught him – suspended him there like a puppet, moving him back and forward into the window. Slowly, she raised the torch to the rockface. Saw a tree hanging half out of the rock, pale yellow earth spilling down. A long scar as if someone had tumbled down. She saw it all now – Kelvin and Nial struggling. A long, scrambling fall.
She pulled back from the window, and picked her way back across the litter of beer cans into the hallway. She dropped to a crouch next to Nial, where the ground was tacky with blood. She put her hand on his side, feeling it rapidly rise and fall under her fingers. His body was hot. As if the effort of the struggle with Kelvin was still being released.
He had a tiny ribcage, not much bigger than Millie’s. She pulled his shirt down to cover him. ‘Can you hear me? Where’s Millie?’
He lifted his hands to his face and groaned. He half turned on to his back.
‘Nial? It’s OK. You can tell me – I’m prepared.’
‘She’s OK.’ His voice was thick. ‘She’s safe. I did it.’
‘Did it? Did what?’
‘I saved her. I saved Millie.’
Sally rocked back and sat down, among the beer cans, litter and broken glass. She sat there, holding her ankles, the floor and walls all moving around her. ‘Where, Nial?’ she heard Zoë say behind her. ‘Where is she?’
‘I locked her in the Glasto van. Up near the house. She hasn’t got her phone – it all happened too fast. You must have driven right past her.’
Part Three
Chapter 1
Ben couldn’t understand why Zoë wanted to go to Kelvin Burford’s funeral. What did she think she was going to gain from it? Did she feel sorry for his family? Or did she simply want to be sure he was really dead and gone? Zoë couldn’t answer the question, she just didn’t know, but she went all the same: her, Sally and Steve. Millie, Nial and Peter had come too, still adamant they wanted to be there. So it was six of them that shuffled into a pew that day in the tiny chapel, each a little uncomfortable and awkward, fidgeting in their formal clothing, hoping the service wouldn’t be too long and drawn out.
It was midsummer. The coroner had taken five weeks to call the final inquest on Kelvin Burford’s death and reach the verdict of death by misadventure. The investigation into Lorne Wood’s death, meanwhile, hadn’t officially been closed, but Kelvin might as well have been tried and convicted of it because the whole world knew what he’d done. The scarf at the canal was positive for his DNA, and when his house was searched not only had Lorne’s pink fleece and mobile phone been discovered under the bed, but also, in the desk drawer downstairs, the lipstick used to write on her body and the distinctive filigree earring that had been ripped from her ear. Ironic, really, when Zoë thought of all the planning she, Sally and Ben had put into getting Kelvin nailed – assuming he’d have disposed of the evidence at his cottage and would have to be nailed some other way.
There’d been story after story about the ‘monster’ Burford in the paper, detailing Kelvin’s past, his injury in Basra, his assault on the girl in Radstock. There weren’t many of his friends and family brave enough to turn up to the funeral so the congregation was small. Zoë glanced around – a few police, one or two colleagues who’d served with him in Basra wedged into the uncomfortable pews, not meeting anyone’s eyes, as if they were ashamed. Then she realized with a jolt that the pew they’d chosen was directly behind Kelvin’s sister. She stopped moving around then and, as silence fell in the chapel, studied the back of the woman’s head. Fair hair curling out from under a black straw pillbox hat. It occurred then to Zoë that maybe guilt had sent her here. Shame at the number of ways she’d stepped outside the subtle moral framework of truth and lies that the police were supposed to know and respect. As well as Kelvin, David Goldrab’s disappearance was on her conscience – repeatedly she’d reassured the family that everything possible was being done, while in truth she was silently helping the case to slide further and further down the force’s must-do list.
Air wheezed into the organ pipes, a chord sounded. She picked up the order of service and fanned herself lightly, raising her eyes to the rafters overhead. The cobwebs and the dust. Maybe the eyes of God were beyond all that, peering down at her, seeing all these secrets. She’d been wrong that Lorne was just the tip of the iceberg, that Kelvin had already killed. There had been no traces of human remains anywhere in the house or in the Land Rover – and the photo from Iraq had been downloaded from a website that had got thousands of hits before it had been wiped from the server. Yes, she thought, she’d been wrong about a lot of things in the last few weeks. But some right had come out of it too. Her connection to Sally, to Millie. And maybe, through that, a new way of connecting to the rest of the world. A new dimension in the pattern she was leaving.
The doors at the back of the church opened and the funeral director’s pall-bearers began the long walk up the aisle. Zoë looked down and saw Sally’s hand resting on her lap. She looked to her left and saw Millie’s hand on hers. On an impulse she reached out and took both, and as she did, the answer to Ben’s question about the funeral popped into her head.
Solidarity. That was what it was. She was here to show the world, and Kelvin’s memory, that this family, her family, wouldn’t be pushed apart again. Ever.