Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder Read Free Book Online Page B

tickets were nearly two hundred pounds. There was no way. Absolutely no way.
    ‘Mum? Didn’t Isabelle say?’
    ‘No. And, anyway, I don’t suppose there’ll be any meetings tonight. Not with this news.’
    ‘There is. They’re going ahead – I asked Nial.’
    ‘Well, there’s no point in you going to a meeting if you’re not going to Glastonbury, is there? I’m sorry – but we’ve talked about this already.’
    There was a long silence at the end of the phone.
    ‘Millie? Is there any point in you going?’
    She gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose not.’
    ‘OK. Now, you get an early night. School in the morning.’
    ‘All right.’ Sally hung up and sat for a while with the phone face down on her lap.
    Steve leaned across the sofa and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You OK?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Said something you didn’t like?’
    She didn’t answer. On screen the stuff about Lorne had stopped and the newscaster was talking about more spending cuts. Factories closing. The country going down the drain. Jobs disappearing every second.
    ‘Sally? It’s natural to be upset. It’s so close to home.’
    She looked up at the moon again, a longing tugging at her. It would be nice to be able to tell him the truth – that it wasn’t just Lorne, that it wasn’t just Millie. That it was everything. That it was David Goldrab saying, I promise not to call you a cunt , and the thatch falling in, and the stain on the kitchen ceiling, and Isabelle’s look of dismay when Sally had said she was planning to sell the tarot. That it was having no one to turn to. Basically it was because of reality. She wished she could tell him that.

9
    Bath was nestled, like Rome, in a pocket between seven hills. There were hot springs deep in the earth that kept the old spa baths supplied, kept the people warm and stopped snow settling in the streets. The Romans were the first to build on it, but successive generations had kept up the determination to live there in the warm – whole cities had crumbled and been rebuilt. The past existed in multicoloured strata below the citizens of Bath: like walking on layer cake, every footstep crossed whole lifetimes.
    Zoë had grown up in the city. Even though she and Sally had been sent away as children, to separate boarding-schools, even though her parents had moved long ago to Spain, Bath was still her home. Now she lived high on one of the surrounding hills, where the city had spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Victorian terraced house, all her own. The back garden was tiny, with just enough room for a few plant pots and a shed, but the inside was spacious for a person living alone, with three large, high-ceilinged bedrooms on the first floor, and at ground level a single room she’d made by knocking down the interior walls. It stretched thirty-five feet from front to back door and was arranged into two living areas – the kitchen-diner at the front, with a scrubbed wooden table in the bay window, and a TV-watching area at the back, with sofas and her DVDs and CDs. In the middle, where the dividing wall would have been, sat Zoë’s hog.
    The bike was a classic – a black 1980 Harley Superglide Shovelhead – and had been her only friend on the year she toured the world. It had cost her two and a half thousand pounds and some long, sleepless nights when a drive belt gave up or the carburettor jets blocked in the middle of an Asian mountain range. But she still treasured it and rode it to work now and then. That night, at half past eleven, when the city outside the bay window was lit up like a carpet of lights, the bike was still cooling off, its engine making little noises. Ben Parris turned from Zoë’s fridge and came to crouch in front of it. He was carrying a saucer of milk, which he put at the front wheel. ‘There you go, favoured object.’ He patted the tyre. ‘Fill your boots. And never forget how loved you are.’
    ‘It’s not a bloody affectation, you