by Tim ORourke
Chapter Nineteen
"Just the one for me," I said, leaning against the doorframe.
"Mm?" Vincent said, a spoonful of sugar hovering over a cup full of tea.
"One sugar," I said, my voice losing some of the frostiness for him.
"Sweet enough, are you?" he said with a smile.
"Why do you keep saying all this stuff?" I asked, taking the cup and stirring it contents with a spoon. "Are you trying to flirt with me?"
"Who, me?" he said, sounding surprised.
"Who else would I be talking about?" I said, placing the spoon in the sink and taking a sip of the tea.
"I don't s'pose you remembered to get some biscuits," he said, changing the subject.
"Sorry," I said. "I just haven't had a chance. I've been too busy. . . "
"Good job I remembered then," he beamed, brushing past me and heading back to the living room.
I followed. He went to his coat, which hung from the back of the armchair, and took something from the pocket.
"Jammie Dodgers," he smiled, holding up a packet of biscuits.
Vincent sat down and opened the packet of biscuits, dunking one of them into his hot tea. Looking up at me as he munched happily away, he said, "Sorry, Sydney, would you like a biscuit?"
"No, thanks," I said, taking a seat on the sofa opposite him. I sat and watched him. "You never answered my question. "
"Huh?" he said, glancing up at me.
"Never mind, it's not important," I said with a shake of my head. "So to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"
"Oh yes, I was forgetting," he said, placing his cup and biscuit onto the small coffee table in front of him. The light from the lamp in the corner made the numbers on his epaulettes shine brightly. I could see that his police collar number was 5013. Vincent reached inside his jacket and pulled out a beige coloured file. "You said to let you know if I found any more paperwork on that girl who died at the bottom of the well. "
I looked at the file and my nerve endings started to tingle. Vincent crossed the room, sat next to me on the sofa, and opened the file.
"There isn't a great deal to go on," he said, taking out a piece of paper. "The file room back at the station is a real mess. I'll carry on looking, though. "
"So what have you found?" I asked him, eyeing the piece of paper he held in his hand.
"A letter from the deceased father," Vincent said.
"That was the old guy who died out on the road the other day," I breathed, my stomach beginning to clench up.
"His name was Jonathan Smith," Vincent said, looking down at the letter which he held.
To hear the old man's name for the first time made me feel queasy. It made what I had done seem more real somehow. I could no longer just think of him as an old man - a nobody - as my father had described him. This man had a name. He had been a real person - not just a ghost who haunted my dreams.
"What's the letter about?" I whispered.
"Okay, so it was his eighteen-year-old daughter, Molly, who fell into the well," Vincent explained.
That was the name Michael had told me.
"Her father, Jonathan Smith, wasn't convinced that his daughter's death was an accident," Vincent continued.
"Why?" I asked, looking down at the letter then at Vincent again.
"Read the letter for yourself," he said, handing it to me. "It was written to the station sergeant at the time. His name was Skrimshire. "
"He's now the inspector at Penzance," I said, taking the letter from Vincent. The sheet of paper was dog-eared and old. The writing across it was a spidery-scrawl, but legible. It seemed odd to be reading something which had once been held by the man I had killed, and my heart began to quicken. I took a shallow breath and began to read.
15th February 2003
Sergeant Skrimshire,
I write concerning the tragic death of my daughter, Molly Smith, who was found at the bottom of the well on the Grayson farm two nights ago.
Unlike what has been reported by you to the local press, I do not believe my daughter's death to have been an accident. It has been a suspicion of mine that my daughter had been in some kind of a relationship with a local man. Although my daughter never said who, I knew that she intended to end this relationship, as we were to move away from the area because of hostilities shown to us recently by members of the local community.
Unlike firmly held beliefs by some residents of Cliff View, neither me nor any other members of my small family are criminals. Despite what has been reported in the local press, my daughter was not trespassing on the Grayson land to steal or commit any other type of crime the night she died.
It is my belief that my daughter had arranged to meet this man to discuss their relationship, during which time an argument occurred which resulted in my daughter being pursued and then pushed into the well to silence her. The fact that police also saw my daughter walking along the Buckmore Road. . .
"Where is the rest of the letter?" I asked Vincent, holding out my hand.
"Missing," he said, taking the piece of paper from me and placing it back into the file. "Or at least I can't find the rest of it. But I have found some more paperwork which I thought you might find interesting. "
"How come?" I quizzed.
"Okay," Vincent said, taking several more sheets of paper from the file. "You'll notice that at the end of Jonathan Smith's letter he mentioned that police had seen his daughter walking along the Buckmore Road. "
"Okay?" I said, trying to figure out where he was going with this.
"Well, there were four officers crewed up in a van that night out on patrol," he said, looking at me. "One of them was your father. He was still a constable at the time. He was one of the officers who saw Molly Smith walking along the road that night. " Handing me some sheets of the paperwork, he added, "This was your father's statement. "
I took the paperwork from him, which had gone an off-white colour with age. Across the top of the first piece of paper, written in thick black ink, were the words: WITNESS STATEMENT. Just below this was my father's name and signature. Holding my father's statement in both hands, and feeling as if I were spying on him, I read what he had written all those years ago.
