Free Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder Page A

down at the cats. ‘They’re eating.’
    Zoë packed the photos into her courier’s satchel and put it next to the front door. She switched the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’
    ‘You’ve fed them,’ he said curiously. ‘They’ve got saucers out there.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘It’s kind of you. A secret kind habit.’
    ‘It’s not kind , Ben. I’m not being kind to them. I feed them so they don’t wake the neighbourhood up. Let’s not have an awards ceremony over it, eh?’
    He turned and gave her a long look. As if she disappointed him and was solely responsible for driving all the fun and light out of his life. She shook her head, half cross with herself. Last night when she’d gone to bed he’d been asleep. Or pretending to sleep – she hadn’t been able to tell. But their conversation about children had allowed something thin and cold and cunning to come in from the dark and slide silently between them. She knew it, he knew it. She made the coffee, banging around, spooning instant granules into mugs and slopping a little milk in.
    ‘There,’ she said, handing him one of them. ‘Do you want anything else?’
    Ben was silent for a while. He looked at the mug, then at her.
    ‘What?’ she said. ‘What is it?’
    ‘Zoë, I’ve been thinking …’
    Christ . She sat down at the table, her heart sinking. Here we go . ‘Thinking? About what?’
    There was a pause. He started to say something, then changed his mind.
    ‘What, Ben? Spit it out – you’ve been thinking about what?’
    Something in his eyes dimmed a little. He shrugged, half turned towards the window. ‘About the phone call.’
    ‘The phone call ? What phone call?’
    ‘The one Lorne had with Alice. There’s something in it that’s important. Something that didn’t come out when Lorne was reported missing.’
    Zoë didn’t move. He’d sidestepped. He’d ducked saying it, whatever ‘it’ was. She stood, tipped her coffee into the sink, found her car keys in her pocket. ‘I’m taking the car today,’ she said. ‘Do you want a lift in or are you going to drive yourself?’

13
    The superintendent at Bath was in his late fifties. He had curly blond hair kept very short and the sort of skin that burned easily. He’d started life in Firearms, then come over to CID and regretted the move to this day. He still wore a blue and yellow National Rifle Association pin in his lapel, had a wall covered with photos of himself in the firing range and seemed to hold every member of his team responsible for his big life-mistake. That morning he looked as if he’d far rather be at the club shooting the crap out of some ‘advancing Hun’ than standing at the helm of the biggest murder case that had hit the city in years.
    ‘This is a nasty, nasty crime. Very, very serious. I don’t need to tell you that – you’ve all seen the post-mortem pictures, you know what’s going on here. But I want to remind you to keep clear heads on this. Concentrate. There are lots of things to cover. Most of them you probably know, but let’s put them in a bundle so nothing’s missed.’ He held up his coffee cup to indicate the points outlined on the whiteboard behind him. ‘To summarize. Lorne – popular girl, very pretty, as you can see. Big circle of friends – though so far no one’s saying anything about boyfriends. First thing I want to run through is the list of items to flag up for the search teams. Bits and pieces here, but mostly things missing from Lorne’s personal effects.’
    He pointed to the picture from the mortuary of Lorne’s bloodied left ear. The killer had ripped her earring out, leaving the lobe sliced from midway to bottom. A photo of her other ear showed the remaining earring intact. ‘Number one, an earring. Quite an unusual design. Apparently it had been bought for her in Tangiers by her father. See this filigree? So …’ He nodded in the direction of the DCs ranked at the back of the room, arms folded across their chests. They had