“Why didn’t you help him?” I snapped at Michael, feeling sick and confused.
“I was just twenty – a boy,” Michael said, looking at me. “I’m not trying to excuse the fact that I have remained silent for all these years, but they were police officers. I heard the three of them get their stories straight as if it was something that they were used to doing. How did I know that they wouldn’t say that it was me who had pushed the officer into the well? How did I know they wouldn’t give evidence to say I had killed Molly, too? I was just young and scared. So I ran, Sydney. I’m not proud of that. I ran and kept running. Two days later, I left Cliff View and hit the road. I was angry and confused and I hated myself. I started to drink, get into fights to try and release that hatred I had eating me alive from inside out. I began to believe that I had been cursed for my cowardice. Then one night, as I sat and got drunk in that bar, I watched as that guy kept harassing that young girl. In my drunken state, that young woman looked like Molly. I swear to God, Sydney, it was her. She looked at me from across the bar and whispered, ‘Help me, Michael.’ So I got up. I wouldn’t fail her again. I raced across the bar and took hold of that guy. As I had my hand gripped about his throat, it was your father’s face I could see as he had pushed that young copper into the well. So I pushed back, not just for Molly, but for that poor police officer, too. I pushed your father down that flight of stairs,” Michael explained. With tears streaming from his eyes, he looked at my father and said, “But it wasn’t you, was it? It was some drunken punk who thought it would be fun to tease a girl in front of his mates. And when I looked back at the girl, she wasn’t Molly. She was just some girl, who wouldn’t even meet my stare, although I had come to help her.”
I crossed the short gap by the well, and took Michael’s cold, damp hands as thunder began to rumble in the distance. Michael looked at me and said, “Every second I spent locked in my cell, I knew I was paying for being a coward that night – for not coming forward and telling the truth. And I know that the ten years I spent in prison would never make up for what I failed to do. I would never be free of that guilt. Tonight, it stops,” Michael said, looking back at my father. “Tonight the guilt – the curse – I’ve been living with since that night ends. I’m not scared of you and your friends anymore.”
My father looked at me from beneath his cap, and coldly said, “What is done is done. None of this will bring those people back. This will only destroy more lives, like the lives you destroyed out on the road, Sydney. If you tell on me, I tell on you.” I could see a twisted looking smile form just beneath his moustache.
Turning on my father, and a rage burning so deep inside of me for him it was almost overwhelming, I hissed, “I’m not so sure it was me who killed those people.”
“Of course it was you,” he smiled knowingly back at me. “And Michael knows it, too. I know all about your sordid little affair. I know you were busy fucking the farmer’s son that day instead of doing your duty. It’s my business to know everything that goes on in this town. Michael knows you were drinking, too, don’t you, Michael?”
Michael stared back at him without making a reply.
“Are you going to tell the truth about that, too, Michael?” my father teased. “Are you really going to sit back and watch Sydney go to prison for a very long time for killing five people – one of which was a five-year-old boy – because she was drunk thanks to you?”
“Someone else was out on that road,” I shouted at my father over another boom of approaching thunder. “I’ve been back to take a look. There are brake marks at the scene. I never even touched my brakes.”
“Is that it?” my father scoffed. “You killed them, Sydney. Even the old git called you a witch with his dying breath for killing him and his family.”
Then, as if Jonathan Smith were standing right behind me, I heard him whisper, witch, on the wind. Gooseflesh ran up my back and I shuddered all over again.
“He called you a witch!” my father mocked me.
That word went over and over in my head, making me feel dizzy and sick. I could see Smith in the road again, the bubble of blood on his lips as he whispered, the word ‘witch.’
If I hadn’t have been the one who had killed him and his family, perhaps he had been trying to say something else? What if he was trying to say...
Slowly, and with my stomach screwing up into knots, I looked at Michael. “You said that Jonathan Smith spoke kinda funny, right?”
“Right,” Michael nodded.
“You said he spoke like that cartoon character, Elmer Fudd,” I whispered, a blanket of dread covering me.
“Sure,” Michael said.
Turning to face my father, I said, “I’m gonna go and catch me some wabbit.”
“What are you talking about?” my father grunted in anger.
“Jonathan Smith couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘R’, instead he used the letter ‘W’,” I gasped, suddenly realising what it was Smith had been trying to tell me. “He wasn’t calling me a witch, he was saying the name Rich.” I looked up at my father and said, “Jonathan Smith was trying to tell me the name of the person who had really run him and his family off the road and killed them. He was saying the name Rich...he was trying to say Richard. He was saying your name, dad.”
“That’s just ridic...” my father started to say.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed, feeling as if I were going to drop to my knees again. I looked at my father, eyes wide, and said, “It was you! It was you who drove them off the road and killed them.”
“You don’t know what you’re talk...” he started to bluster again.
I closed my eyes and pictured that scene again, the blood on the dead bodies, my father arriving on scene. “You had blood on your boots,” I said, opening my eyes again. “I remember seeing your feet through the window as you rushed towards my upturned patrol car. They had flecks of blood on them.”
“Of course they would, there was blood all over the goddamn place,” he shouted at me.
“But you came from the opposite direction. There wasn’t any blood where you parked your...car,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “The police sign across the bonnet of the car. In my semi-consciousness, I thought that word ECILOP looked distorted and crinkled because I was looking at it through a smashed windscreen. It really was crumpled and distorted because the front of your patrol car was all smashed up. Why was it all smashed up, dad?” I asked, looking at him.
My father made no reply. He looked very pale and very ill as the rain dripped from the peak of his police cap and down the front of his coat.
Desperate to try and keep my voice even and calm when all I wanted to do was scream, I whispered, “It was you who drove them off the road. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill them, but you wanted to scare them. Jonathan Smith was a pain in your arse, because even after ten years, he wouldn’t give up trying to find out what really happened to his daughter that night. He wrote letters, didn’t he? He knew there’d been a cover-up. So every year, he would come back with his family and make a nuisance of himself – ruffle your feathers. You were scared that one day he might just prick the conscience of whoever Molly had been secretly in love with. So you saw them out on the road that day, and decided to scare him away – run him out of town. I bet you put on your sirens and lights to scare the horse. But it went wrong and the horse dragged the cart and the Smiths out into the road and in front of your patrol car. It was you who killed them not me,” I gasped, looking at him. And then everything hit me at once. “You weren’t calling me up on the radio that day because you were searching for me. You‘ve already said you knew I was with Michael, but once you had caused that accident, you needed to get me away from the area; you couldn’t risk me coming across it. You wanted it to look like some unexplained accident by whoever came across it later that day. When you heard me call up for urgent assistance, you knew I’d come across that accident – the accident you caused. That’s how you knew where to find me so quickly. You call
ed up Mac and Woody. That’s why you used your mobile phone and not the radio. You knew they would come out and help cover things up. They weren’t covering for me – they were covering for you.”
With the realisation of my father’s true deceit becoming clear before me, I leapt towards him and started to slap him and beat him with my fists. With tears streaming down my face, I screamed, “How could you let me think I had killed that family? How could you have used me like that? Scare me that I was going to go to prison? You’re meant to be my father. I’m your daughter – your little girl. All I ever wanted to do was make you feel proud of me,” I sobbed. “How could you let me carry that guilt around...”
My father pushed me away. I fell backwards into the mud. “You have nothing!” he screamed at me, a flash of bright, white lightning appearing in the night sky over his shoulder. “I have your signed statement, remember? The one you signed to say that you were the one who hit those people? Not me.”
“I have statements, too,” I screamed back at him, clawing myself out of the mud and back to my feet. “I’ve seen the statements you changed the night Molly died.” Then remembering how Vincent had told me that two patrol cars were out of use because they had been damaged, I said, “I know your patrol car is in the garage being fixed up from the damage caused by hitting that cart.”
“Who has these statements? Who told you this about my car?” my father shouted.
“Vincent!” I shouted, as I scanned the shadows for any sign of him.
“Vincent?” my father roared. “Who in the hell is Vincent?”
“The new recruit at the station,” I barked back at my father, now too angry to feel fearful of him.
“What new recruit?” he snapped.
“The one you relegated to the filing cupboard. The one you gave the push-bike to...because the others think he doesn’t fit in.”
And as I started to describe Vincent, my father screwed up his face as if eyeing me with suspicion. “Is this some kind of joke, or have you really just lost your fucking mind?”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped back at him.
“The only copper I can ever remember working in the filing room and riding about on a police push-bike was Constable Vincent Lee. And as we already know, he died at the bottom of that well ten years ago,” my father said, looking confused.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“You can’t be talking about the same Vincent,” I said. “He’s been in my flat. I’ve seen him, touched him and...” I wanted to say fallen in love with him, but something stopped me. I looked at my father and added, “You found my missing iPod. You told Mac to bring it over, but Mac was too busy, so he gave it to...”
“I’ve never touched your iPod,” my father barked at me, then smiled. “I see, so what you’re saying is all of your evidence against me is on the say-so of a dying man who sounded like Elmer Fudd, and a note left by a ghost. I can see the jury now. They’ll laugh you out of court. It won’t even get to court, you stupid girl.”
“Vincent isn’t a ghost!” I screamed back at him, feeling suddenly confused and panicked.
“He’s dead,” my father smiled, as another bolt of lightning zigzagged across the night sky. “He’s rotting in Cliff View Cemetery.”
“You’re lying,” I spat, my heart turning cold in my chest as I took the letter from the bottle.
... This is the dying declaration of Police Constable Lee 5013
I read the line over and over, and in my mind’s eye, I saw those numbers 5013 glisten before me. I had seen those numbers before. They had been pinned to Vincent’s epaulettes. With every part of me beginning to prickle with gooseflesh, I realised how everything Vincent had done had been leading me to this very moment – to discovering the truth about my father. The Police song, Message In A Bottle, which he had downloaded to my iPod, the bottle he had left for me on my coffee table, the file he had shown me with the statements and letter from Jonathan Smith, the scars on his back and head, probably caused as he crashed into the bottom of the well. In my heart, I heard him whisper as he held me close on the bed, ‘I know what it’s like to be scared and alone.’
With my heart aching, I dropped to my knees in the mud, his letter clenched in my fist. Vincent had been describing how he had felt as he lay dying in the bottom of the well. To think of him on his own, dying in a foot of water next to Molly Smith’s broken body, made me feel as if my heart had been ripped from my chest.
“Vincent!” I screamed, throwing my head back, letting the rain fall upon my upturned face.
I couldn’t hear him anymore, just the sound of the rain, the wind, and thunder. I knew he had gone. He had come to do what he had needed to do.
Lowering my face and turning towards my father, I looked at him and whispered, “I hate you!”
“You’ll get over it,” he grunted.
I leapt at my father again, my hands outstretched before me, just wanting to rake the flesh from his smug-looking face. “Vincent was a better cop than you – he was a better man than you. That’s why you murdered him.”
“Get off me!” my father roared, throwing me from him. “You’ve lost your fucking mind. No one is going to believe a word you say.”
“But they’ll believe me,” Michael said, suddenly stepping forward and smashing his fist straight into my father’s face. There was a sickening crack as my father’s nose spread in a bloody mess. He dropped onto his arse in the mud. “It’s over!” Michael shouted beneath another flash of purple lightning.
“It’s far from over,” my father said, taking his hand from his nose and looking down at the blood.
“It’s over,” Michael breathed.
As quick as the lightning flashed again overhead, my father shot his hand out at Michael. Clenched in his fist was his can of police-issue CS spray. A jet of thick, white fluid shot from the nozzle of the can, hitting Michael in the eyes. Throwing his hands to his face, Michael staggered backwards towards the well. I watched as my father leapt to his feet. He raced towards Michael and pushed him hard in the chest with the balls of his hands. Michael tumbled backwards, blind by the CS spray which was now making his eyes feel as if they were ablaze inside his skull. He hit the wall of the well and disappeared over the edge.
I leapt through the air at my father. Michael had managed to cling to the edge of the well with his fingers. My father had started to prise them free.
“Leave him alone!” I screamed as Michael hung over the deep well of blackness.
“Fuck off!” my father barked, lashing out at me with his arm.
I fell backwards into the wet mud. With the wind knocked from me, I gasped mouthfuls of air into my lungs as I struggled to my feet. I clawed at my father’s legs as I tried to get up. Reaching out, I gripped the end of his baton, yanking it from his utility belt. I staggered to my feet, and locking out my arm, I racked the hard piece of steel. I brought the baton down on my father’s legs over and over again. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground, crying out in pain and clutching his knees. Dropping the baton, I reached down into the well, taking hold of Michael’s wrists. The rain had made his skin slippery, and I could feel him sliding from my grasp and down into the pitch black.
“Help me,” I begged Michael. “Push yourself up.”
“I can’t,” Michael cried out. “I think I’ve broken my hip.”
He screamed in agony as I pulled on his wrists. Michael looked up, his eyes puffed closed and red.
“I can’t do this on my own,” I cried out, knowing I was going to lose him to the well just like I had Vincent.
The rope! I suddenly thought.
I glanced back over my shoulder in search of it, but all I could see was my father shuffling towards me with the baton raised above his head.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Put it down,” I heard someone shout.
I looked over my other shoulder to see Grayson step out of the shadows. He had a shotgun pressed against his shoulder, the barrel aimed at my
father. Jess bounded and leapt about his legs.
“I’m not going to tell you again!” Grayson boomed in that deep voice of his. “Drop that baton or I’ll happily blow your brains out.”
“You’re not going to kill a cop,” my father grinned at him.
“If you don’t shut your fucking face and drop that baton you’ll find out soon enough if I’m prepared to shoot a cop or not,” Grayson threatened.
My father stared back at Grayson, a look of not-knowing on his face. I had never seen such a look on my father’s face before. He had always been so confident. He looked stripped of that arrogance now. Slowly, my father lowered the baton.
“I ain’t gonna tell ya again,” Grayson roared. “Drop the baton.”
Like a sullen child, my father flung the baton into the nearby trees.
Grayson then edged his way over to the well, where I clung to his son. Not once did he stop pointing the shotgun at my father. Jess stood barking and snarling in the rain. “Take the gun,” Grayson snapped at me. “And keep it trained on your father. You can do that, can’t you?” He looked me straight in the eye.
“With pleasure,” I said, taking the gun from him and training it on my father.
Grayson leant into the well, as Michael gripped the ledge with the last of the strength in his fingertips. With one mighty heave, Grayson dragged his son from the well. Michael wailed in pain again, as Grayson laid him on the ground. Once Michael was safe, Grayson took the gun from me and trained it back on my father.
Staring at me through the rain, Grayson snapped, “Well, you’re the police officer around here, ain’t ya? Do something, girl.”
Silently, I walked over towards my father. Our eyes met. “I always wanted you to be proud of me, dad,” I whispered. “I really did want to be a good cop, just to make you proud. But I don’t want you to be proud of me anymore. That’s not what’s important. I want to be proud of myself for once, and I can only do that if I do the right thing. Vincent told me that.”
Witch Page 17
