'I'm a bit ... Issie, did you pick up Millie from school like you said?'

'Yes she's fine.'

'They haven't gone out?'

'No they're all watching TV. Why?'

'Can she stay with you tonight?'

'Of course. Sally? Is there anything I can do? You sound terrible.'

'No. I'm fine. I'll come and get her in the morning. And ... Issie?'

'Yes?'

'Thank you, Issie. For everything you are. And everything you do.'

'Sally? Are you sure everything's all right?'

'I'm fine. I promise. Absolutely fine.'

She hung up. Her hands were trembling so much she had to put the phone down on the car bonnet to jab the next number into it. Steve answered after three rings and she s.n.a.t.c.hed it up.

'It's me.'

'Yes. I know.'

'Something's happened. We need to speak. You need to come to me.'

'OK ...' he said cautiously. 'Where are you?'

'No. I can't I mean, I suppose I shouldn't say on the phone.'

There was a pause while Steve seemed to think about this. Then he said, 'OK. Don't. Think carefully about every word. Are you near your place?'

'Further.'

'Further south? Further north?'

'North. But not far.'

'Then you're ...' He trailed off. 'Oh,' he said dully. 'Do you mean you're at the house of someone we've spoken about recently?'

'Yes. There's a car-parking place. Take a right fork as you come to the house. Don't go past the front, there are cameras. Steve, can you can you hurry?'

She hung up. A sound very distant in the evening air of a car revving on the road to the racecourse. Then headlights coming through the tree-line. She lowered her head, cowering, even though it would come nowhere near Lightpil. It changed gear and continued up the hill. But she pressed her forehead against the cold windscreen, trying to disappear, trying to bring something peaceful into her head. Millie's face, maybe.

It wouldn't come. All that came was a bright zigzagging light, like the after-image of a firework.

About ten minutes later another car on the main road indicated left and came off on the small turning. Slowly it climbed the road that snaked around the bottom of Hanging Hill. She saw the sweep of headlights and slithered off the bonnet, going to crouch behind the shrubbery at the edge of the parking area as the lights came nearer. The lights turned into the track, rattled over the cattle grid, then came to a halt. It was Steve.

He got out, and, silhouetted, tall against the darkening sky, pulled on a fleece, glancing around himself. She pushed herself out of the hedge and stood there, the cardigan wrapped tight around her to cover the blood on her clothes.

'What?' he whispered. 'What's happening?'

She didn't answer. Head down, hands tucked into her armpits, she walked around her car and led the way into the parking area. He followed without a word, his feet crunching in the gravel. At the back of the Ford Sally stopped. Steve stood next to her and they were silent for a long time, looking at David Goldrab's body. His running T-shirt was rucked up, showing his thick, tanned torso, his hair matted with blood. His face seemed calcified, his mouth widening around his gums. She realized she could still smell him. Just a little of his essence, streaking the grey air.

Steve crouched next to the body. Putting his bandaged hand tentatively in the gravel he leaned closer, peering at David's face. Then he rocked back on his heels and wiped his hands. 'Jesus. Jesus.'

'There was an argument. He followed me out to the car and hit me on the back of the head. He was forcing me into the boot. Your nail gun was in there and I had to-' She drew her hands down her face, felt the soreness where he'd pushed her into the boot lid. 'My G.o.d, my G.o.d, Steve. It was over so quickly. It wasn't what I meant to happen.'

Steve let all his breath out at once. He came and hugged her. She could feel his pulse jack-hammering against her own. The awful crackle of David's dried blood on her clothing.

'It just happened,' she said. 'Just like that.'

'It's OK.'

'No one's going to believe it was an accident.'

She cried then long, drawn-out sobs. Steve said nothing, just kept his hands on her back, rubbing her soothingly. When at last she'd stopped, he let her go and walked back to the parking area's entrance. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the landscape. She knew what he was seeing the whole of the valley spread out. The beginnings of the city on the horizon. Her childhood land. The places she'd dreamed in, the places she'd cried and had hopes and fears in. All the valleys and the brooks and the glades all the places she'd been and never spied this future crouching in wait for her behind the trees.

After a long time he turned round and came back down the slope. 'What have you got in the car? Have you got your cleaning kit?'

'Yes.'

'Rubber gloves?'

'Yes.' She opened the boot, rummaged in her cleaning kit and held out a pair still in their pack. Steve took them. His face was white and controlled. He ripped the pack with his teeth and began pulling on the gloves.

'Steve? What're you doing?' What're you doing?'

'I've got a meeting at nine in the morning. That means we've got thirteen hours.'

39.

Steve's plan, he said, was the best possible solution. But if they were going to do it, it would have to be done quickly, and to start with they needed to find some plastic. Sally knew David kept a lot of his equipment in the garage, but it was at the side of the house where the camera was, and she worried they'd be caught on video. She wanted to check on the monitor inside what could be seen so she and Steve went back up to the house. Even in the daytime David was in the habit of leaving lights and TVs on, and now that it was getting dark the place seemed to be lit up like a bonfire. The halogens in the gla.s.s atrium blazed, casting the shadows of huge potted plants out into the garden. The utility-room door stood open, the TV blasting out from inside.

Steve waited on the deck, keeping an eye on the road, while she crept in alone. It seemed so hot inside, stifling, as if the heating had been turned up high. The air was as still as the grave, and even in the familiar rooms and corridors, she found herself jumping at every shadow, as if David's's ghost was waiting to leap out at her. She wondered if it would be like this for ever, if she'd be driven mad by the guilt. You heard about that happening, people haunted all their lives by the spirit of the person who'd died.

When she checked the monitor in the office she saw that a huge part of the driveway wasn't covered by the camera plenty of room to get into the garage without being seen so she collected a bunch of keys from the hooks in the kitchen where David kept them and went with Steve around the side of the house.

'Holy s.h.i.t,' he muttered, when she pressed the fob and the door opened to reveal a huge, shiny car. 'It's only a Bentley.'

'Is that good?'

He gave a small wry smile. 'Come on.'

Behind a row of motor-oil cans they found a roll of plastic and some old ballast bags, some tape and a Stanley knife. They carried it all back to the parking area and unrolled the plastic on the ground next to the body.

'Take his feet.'

'Oh, G.o.d.' She stood a yard away, staring at the body. Her teeth were chattering. 'I don't know if I can.'

'Sally,' Steve said steadily. 'You can do it. I know you can I saw you the other day with that hacksaw. You can do this.'

'We're really going to do it, then? Really not report it and just get the money?'

He raised an eyebrow. 'You tell me. You could have called the police but you didn't.'

She closed her eyes and put her fingers on her temples. He was right, of course. She could have called the police at any time. Had she decided already subconsciously that this was what they'd do?

'But ...' She opened her eyes. 'Is it the right thing? Steve? Is it?'

'How do you quantify right? Is it the legal thing? No. But is it the best thing? You'll get thirty K for offing this old pervert. Is that the best thing? You tell me.'

Sally didn't answer. She kept her attention on David's face. Pale and rigid now. His eyes had changed. They no longer had a shine to them, the way normal eyes did. They were cloudier and flatter, she thought, as if they were sinking backwards into his skull. Earlier she'd seen a fly try to land on the right one. An image popped into her mind. A bruise. It was on the thigh of the girl that had been on the floor of the livestock pen. Just a single bruise, but it came at her like a punch.

'OK.' She came forward, rolling up her sleeves. 'What do I do?'

David was heavy, but he wasn't going stiff the way she'd imagined he would. Steve said not enough time had pa.s.sed for that to happen. The body flopped around as they tried to move it, his arms lolling all over the place, but eventually they got him on to the plastic sheet. They folded it around him like a coc.o.o.n and lifted him into the boot of Steve's Audi. Then Steve searched in the pool-maintenance shed until he found two buckets and, for the next twenty minutes, the two of them toiled up and down the path from the outdoor tap to where the body had lain, sluicing the ground with bucket after bucket of water until the blood, hair and urine had been rinsed into the ground.

Steve got into the Audi and put the key in the ignition. 'Is there a back way to yours? A way we don't have to use main roads?'

'Yes. Follow me.'

She got into the Ka and reversed back along the track to the lane. The Audi headlights followed her. The countryside was pitch black now, a low cloud covering the moon. She took the switch-backs and narrow lanes that crisscrossed the land. They got back to Peppercorn Cottage without seeing another car. The porch light was on it looked so welcoming that she had to remind herself there was nothing warm on the stove, no candles in the window or fires in the grates. That she and Steve weren't going to spend the evening eating a meal or watching TV or chatting over a gla.s.s of wine. She stopped the car in the driveway, got out and pushed wide the doors of the huge garage for Steve to drive the Audi through. He cut the engine and got out, pulling off his gloves.

'I never noticed this before.'

'Because I never use it.' She switched on the light just a bare bulb in the rafters that did nothing except illuminate the spiders' webs and fossilized swifts' nests. There were a few rusty tools that the previous owner had left. Steve walked along the racks, checking them all. He stopped at a chainsaw, took it off its hook and examined it.

'Steve?'

He looked round at her. 'Get us a drink.'

'What would you like?'

'Something clean. Whisky. Not brandy.'

Inside the cottage smelt of candlewax and the blue hyacinths Millie had potted. They sat on one of the window-sills, drooping. Sally stood for a moment, her head resting against the cool plaster wall, looking at the flowers. After a while she took off her shoes and rested them on a carrier bag in the corridor, then rolled up her coat and pushed it into a bin liner. She walked in her socks to her bedroom with the bag and stripped to her underwear, adding all her blood-soaked clothes to the bin liner. Then she found a T-shirt and a pair of ski pants she'd bought for one of Julian's business trips to Austria, pulled them on, shoved her feet into trainers, and went back down the corridor, looping her hair into a ponytail. She got towels from the airing cupboard and a pile of tea-towels from the cupboard under the sink. The whisky was at the back of the cupboard, behind all of Millie's school books. Sally hadn't touched it since they'd arrived, she only really kept it for visitors. She rested the bottle on the towels, added two gla.s.ses to the pile, a plastic bottle of sparkling water, and carried it outside.

The moon had broken through the clouds and as she crossed the lawn the awful beauty of the garden hit her. It had always reflected warmth and health back to her, even in the depth of winter, but now it seemed to be the silvery reflection of something old and sickly. She stopped for a moment and turned her face to the west, thinking she might catch something watching her. The fields on the other side of the hedge, which always seemed friendly, tonight were full of shadows she didn't recognize.

Steve was standing in the garage with the boot open. In the electric light his face was yellow hollow under the eyes. She put down the towels and poured two gla.s.ses of whisky not too much and handed one to him. They stood facing each other, held up their drinks as if they were toasting something good and drained the tumblers. She grimaced at the taste of it and took a hurried swig of the water.

'We've got to put him outside. On the gra.s.s.'

Sally lowered the water bottle. 'Why?'

'Just help me. Get the plastic.'

They put the bottle and the empty tumblers on the window-sill and pulled on their rubber gloves. Together they went to the boot, got hold of each end of the plastic coc.o.o.n and pulled. David's body came rolling forward with one hand up, almost as if he knew he was toppling on to the ground. Steve caught his weight, wincing at the pressure on his wounded hand, then together they lowered the body. Through the plastic David's face was visible, as though he was pressing it against a window.

'Jesus.' Steve wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked sick. 'Jesus.'

Sally stared at him. He couldn't give in. Not now, after what they'd already done. There was no going back.

'Steve?'

'Yeah.' He wiped his forehead again. Gave himself a shake. 'OK,' he said, suddenly sharp. 'Roll up your end.'

'Right. Yes. Of course.'

They knotted the ends of the plastic and between them shuffled the body out of the garage on to the driveway. They walked sideways, down the two stone steps that led to the lawn, struggling with the weight.

'Here,' Steve said, and they dropped the bundle in the middle of the gra.s.s.

He straightened and looked around him. There were no lights as far as the eye could see, only the first stars p.r.i.c.king at the sky. He felt in his pocket and brought out his phone, flicked it on with his thumb. Holding it in one hand, he walked around the body, firing off photos, making sure he got the face from every angle.

'What're you doing?'

He gave a grim smile. 'I haven't a clue. I'm just pretending I'm in the movies. Pretending I'm de Niro. Or Scorsese. Doing what one of their hitmen would do.'

'Oh,' She rubbed her arms. 'G.o.d.'

He crouched again, and gingerly inspected David's right hand.

'What is it?'

'His signet ring. With four diamonds and an emerald. It identifies him.' He took several photos of the ring then pulled it off and slipped it into his pocket. Then he pocketed the camera and shuffled sideways. He hooked his index finger behind David's front teeth and, with his other hand, cautiously prised the lower jaw open. He pulled the face to one side. The corpse gave a long, soft sigh.

Sally shrank back against the car. David's head fell sideways, slack on the ground, his eyes staring.

'It's OK,' Steve murmured. 'Really it's OK. It's just air coming out of his lungs.'

Sally sank to a crouch, trembling. Steve licked his lips and went back to exploring inside David's mouth. He tilted his chin down and squinted inside, grunted approvingly.

'That'll do.'

He put his elbow on the gra.s.s and lay almost full length next to David's body, facing him as if they were going to have a long and involved conversation. With his free hand he fumbled out the phone again and spent almost five minutes photographing the face and teeth. When he had finished he got to his feet and looked at Sally.

'What?' she hissed. 'What now? What happens now?'