Hide and Seek, page 14
“I didn’t understand everything,” I admitted, “but from what I can tell, she had a brief relationship with Max Thurston.”
Dan’s eyebrows snapped together. “I didn’t know about that.”
“I think it was supposed to be a secret. And then … they broke up.”
“Because?”
“She … um … did something with someone in the disabled toilets at school.”
“Yes,” Dan said. “I understood the ‘I HAD SEX’ part, believe it or not. Who was it with?”
“I still don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to find out. But Max was furious. He dumped her.”
“So they were finished when she disappeared.”
“Yes, but—” I really didn’t want to drop Max in it. On the other hand, I had my doubts about him. Dan was a senior police officer, so I thought I could trust him to make up his own mind about whether Max was really a suspect. “He was still hanging around. Wanting to talk to her. And I had the impression that she didn’t want to see him. She went to great lengths to avoid him.”
“His name again?” Dan had taken out a notebook.
“Max Thurston.” I watched him scrawl it at the top of an empty page.
“Address?” He wrote it underneath the name. “I haven’t come across him before. He can’t be a troublemaker.”
“Or he’s lucky,” I said.
That got me a glance with a gleam of amusement in it. “Is that it? He was hanging around too much?”
“Mm. And a couple of other things. Like he borrowed a car.” I told him about what Ryan had told me, and how I’d seen Max at the library. “He’d just come in from outside because there was rain on his jacket. He sneaked in, behaved weirdly enough that I noticed him, and then ran out again.”
“Making you his alibi.”
“That was what occurred to me. And he didn’t return the car until the following morning. So where was he, and what was he doing?”
“Sounds like the kind of thing I should ask him,” Dan said. “You can point him out to me later.”
“Later?”
“I’ve asked people to volunteer to search for Gilly. Not because I think they’ll actually find her, but I want the pictures for the news. People trudging through a field—that kind of thing. We’ll get more coverage from the national media that way. If I really thought you were going to run across Gilly’s body, you wouldn’t be anywhere near it.”
It hit me like a sledgehammer. “Her body? Do you think she’s dead?”
“It’s a possibility.” Dan looked down at me gravely. “I know you think of this as a bit of fun, Jess, but with every hour that passes there’s less and less chance of Gilly coming home safely.”
I swallowed, trying to come to terms with it. It was stupid, but I really hadn’t considered that she might be hurt or injured. I really believed she’d run away. That was what I’d been told, after all. I put it out of my mind to think about later, and focused on the other thing Dan had said that interested me.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d care about the national media.”
“I care about finding Gilly Poynter,” Dan said soberly. “I don’t like having a missing teenager on my turf, especially right before Christmas. I want a happy ending and I want one soon. So we’re all going to pretend to look for Gilly in some attractive Devonshire countryside, and her dad is going to make an appeal for her to contact her family, and we’ll see if I get my Christmas wish or not.”
* * *
Assembly time for the search party was three o’clock and it looked as if everyone in Port Sentinel had turned out for it. I trudged through the crowds in my rain boots, recognizing neighbors and school friends and people who worked in the local shops.
The search area was across a massive muddy field. At the edge of the field there was a belt of woodland that stretched over the top of a hill, with a small quarry on the far side. The helicopter had already been over the area we were searching with heat-sensitive cameras, and the search-and-rescue dogs had hunted through the dense patches of undergrowth where she might have been lying, unseen. We weren’t going to find anything, but I could see the value of what we were doing all the same.
There was a knot of people I knew near the front—Darcy and Claudia, who had her arm linked with Immy’s. Beyond them I saw Abigail and Louise Manning, and a little further away stood Nessa, muffled in a long gray coat but with her leather jacket underneath. I made my way over to her.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. She was looking past me, though, and I knew from her expression what I was likely to see when I turned round: Max Thurston in a Puffa jacket. I quite wanted to talk to him, to ask him about the car, but for two reasons I didn’t dare. One: he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Ryan and I didn’t want to go anywhere near him. And two: Dan Henderson had warned me in no uncertain terms that if I did or said anything to alert Max to the fact that he was a potential suspect, he’d put me in prison.
“For something. Anything I can think of,” he’d said, and I knew him well enough to realize that he meant it.
“Do you think we’ll find anything?” Nessa asked me, bringing me back to the present.
“Oh—honestly? No.”
She nodded, a little color coming into her cheeks. “I thought not. I don’t want to. You know.”
“I do.”
As if she felt she’d said too much, she turned and walked off a little way, and I took the hint. Besides, I had finally seen Dan Henderson, who was holding a clipboard in one hand, a megaphone in the other, and looking thunderously irritated by the clamoring reporters who surrounded him. I caught his eye and he swept through the ring of journalists, coming to stand very close beside me so I could speak to him without being overheard.
“Is he here?”
“Yeah.” I gave Dan a description of what Max was wearing and where he was standing, and he nodded, not looking anywhere near him.
“Thanks.” He walked off without waiting for a reply, and I was glad he hadn’t prolonged our conversation. I didn’t want to attract too much attention for helping the police. I didn’t look round to see if Max was watching, either. It was all I wanted to do, but I stared out at the horizon instead. The light was going to start to fade soon and I hoped the cameramen would get the pictures Dan wanted.
“Jessica.”
Oh crap.
I turned and found Dad trudging toward me through the mud. It wasn’t his natural habitat—a city street would have suited him much better.
“Dad, what are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d come and help.” He looked past me. “Is your mother here?”
“Is this your way of trying to impress her? By pretending to be a decent human being?”
Dad’s mouth tightened. “You won’t give me any credit, will you?”
“You haven’t earned it,” I pointed out. “Anyway, I don’t know if Mum’s here or not. I haven’t seen her.”
He scanned the crowd. “Well, if she’s not here, I might go.”
“Dad,” I protested. “Even for you, that’s cynical.”
“One person more or less isn’t going to make any difference,” he said, which was true, but not the point. He scowled. “Look at him. He loves this, doesn’t he?”
I looked in the same direction, to see Dan Henderson addressing a group of uniformed officers, issuing instructions. “Dan? It is his job.”
“Playing the hero.” Dad snorted. “He’s all talk. He always was. As if being a police officer makes you an automatic candidate for sainthood.”
Privately, I thought that being a police officer was a lot more important than helping rich people to manage their wealth, but I didn’t say as much to Dad. It wouldn’t have gone down well.
Dan glanced over in our direction and saw Dad. He gave him the full death stare, and I had to resist the urge to duck for cover, even though it wasn’t aimed at me. Dad muttered something under his breath and turned away, very casually, as if he hadn’t just backed down from a staring competition he was never, ever going to win.
“If you see your mother, could you mention to her that I was here? Drop it into the conversation. Don’t say I said to tell her.”
“Right,” I drawled. “She’ll never think that’s a strange thing for me to tell her.”
“Remember, Jessica,” Dad said icily, “it’s in your interests too.”
“If you say so.” I watched him walk away and sighed. No matter how low I pitched my expectations, he still managed to disappoint me.
One of Dan’s officers came over and shouted, “OK, everyone, can you line up beside the other searchers, please? We want to get started. Leave a gap of no more than two feet between you, and try to keep up with the people on your left and right. Please don’t change your positions once you’ve taken up your place in the line.”
I started to walk toward the line and saw Ryan approaching, on a course that would put us side by side. Instinct told me that was a bad idea. I changed direction, dodging behind a group of hill-walkers who were properly dressed and wearing broken-in boots I rather coveted. As they moved into the line, I fell in beside them. I glanced along the line to my right, checking that Ryan was a safe distance away. Then I looked to the left and felt my heart stop, because Will was about the same distance away on the other side. I stared at him, willing him to look round, to make eye contact with me, to acknowledge that I was there in any way. He gave me the benefit of his beautiful profile instead, ignoring me as thoroughly as I had been ignoring Ryan.
“Any room for me?” It was Mr. Lowell, pink-faced in a knit cap and a hideous purple jacket, pushing into the line beside me. Oh great.
He seemed pleased to see someone he knew. “Jess, good of you to turn out.”
“I was thinking the same about you.”
He shrugged. “It’s the least I can do. Poor Gilly. I hope we find her.”
I didn’t dare reveal the truth about Dan’s plan to him, so I just nodded.
He rubbed his hands together. “Cold, isn’t it?”
I agreed that it was indeed cold. The camera crews had set up on the other side of the field, near the treeline. Dan was striding up and down, alternating between his megaphone for barked instructions to the assembled crowd and his radio. The police officers sprang into action, pulling people into line.
“Do you know Inspector Henderson?” Mr. Lowell asked me. “I saw you talking to him.”
“Oh—he’s a neighbor.” I really didn’t feel like going into detail about our exact relationship, especially since I didn’t know. My boyfriend’s dad? My ex-boyfriend’s dad? “He was just saying hello.”
A search dog wandered down the line on a long lead, sniffing the ground and people’s shoes as his handler walked behind, chatting to the search party. It was a spaniel with long floppy ears, and it was just about the cutest thing I’d ever seen in its little police jacket.
“A dog,” Mr. Lowell observed. If he kept up this level of insight, I was going to have to fake a faint, because I wasn’t sure I could stand it.
The dog came closer to us, trotted past, and then doubled back to sniff our feet. I laughed. Mr. Lowell took a short, panicky breath and stepped away a little.
“I don’t like dogs.”
“I think it’s friendly,” I said.
As if the dog knew that Mr. Lowell was uneasy, it followed him, whining a little. The handler caught up with it, looping the lead around his hand.
“Come on, Bertie. What are you playing at?”
Bertie rose up and put his paws on Mr. Lowell’s thigh, his tail wagging. He barked.
“I’ve got sandwiches in my pocket,” Mr. Lowell said. He had his hands curled up to his chest as if the dog was going to snap at him any moment. “Ham sandwiches. That’s probably it, isn’t it?”
“Could be,” the police officer agreed. “You probably think these dogs are infallible but they’re not machines. Bertie gets distracted now and then. He goes chasing after foxes and rabbits and all sorts.” He pulled on the lead. “Come on, Bert. Back to the car, mate.”
Bertie’s tail swished happily. He jumped up at me, his claws scrabbling on my jeans, then allowed himself to be dragged away. I felt hot with secondhand embarrassment. Everyone was looking at Mr. Lowell, laughing at how terrified he’d been. It was attention I could have done without.
Mr. Lowell rubbed at his leg. “Mud everywhere. That’s annoying.”
I looked at the field before us. “I think we’ll get more muddy before we’re finished.”
“You’re probably right.” He came back to stand in the line, still worrying at the mark on his trousers. “All part of the experience, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.” Life on the edge.
At long last we started walking, covering the ground more slowly than I could have imagined. The earlier rain had cleared away and the sky was blue, shading to pink where the sun was starting to set. To the left, in the distance, an enormous cloud of starlings lifted up from the ground and began to perform incredible acrobatics, pure black against the pastel winter sky. They spun and twisted into different shapes that seemed choreographed, always on the verge of making something recognizable, if they would only hold still long enough for me to be able to see what it was.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Mr. Lowell said. “It’s called a murmuration of starlings. Lovely word.”
I nodded and went back to staring at the ground in front of my feet, stepping carefully so I didn’t trip on the uneven earth. I thought about Gilly, and Max, and whether Dan would talk to Max then or later or never. I thought about Ryan and what I should say to him. And I thought about Will, when I could bear to.
The search party was extremely well disciplined, probably because Dan was too terrifying to defy. It wasn’t until we reached the trees that the line began to break as people encountered different obstacles, moved sideways and found themselves separated from their previous companions. I took the opportunity to drop back and hide from Mr. Lowell, not feeling remotely bad about it. I watched him disappear among the trees, the lurid jacket making him easy to spot. Danger: Boring in Progress. I waited for a minute, then moved off in the opposite direction.
And stopped. I could hear something in the distance.
Something that made me catch my breath, then start running as fast as I could.
16
In the still winter air it was easy to follow the sound of raised voices. I scrambled over a fallen tree and narrowly avoided sliding into a hollow full of dead leaves as I ran toward them, saving myself with an awkward, twisting leap. I rounded a little copse of birch trees and finally saw them, not ten meters away, facing each other, anger radiating off them like heat. And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen Will and Ryan fight, but it was the first time I’d seen them do it and mean it. Just as I saw them, Ryan said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, Will stepped forward and shoved him hard in the chest. He fell back a couple of paces, then came at Will with all the frustration and anger he never showed me. If I’d ever wondered whether Ryan really cared about me, I could see it then, and it made me feel worse than ever. He shoved Will in exactly the same way as Will had hit him, and I heard Will grunt as the air exploded out of his lungs. It was his turn to put some distance between his opponent and himself until he’d recovered. Ryan smiled thinly at him, watching him get his breath back.
“Your problem is that you don’t trust her.”
“My problem is you.” There was something terrifying in how calm Will sounded, an absence of emotion that would have had me running scared if it had been directed at me. As I knew only too well, you can dislike your father as much as you want but you can’t duck your genetic inheritance forever, and Will’s was surfacing at just the wrong moment.
“Then deal with it. Because I’m not going anywhere.”
“Stop it, both of you.” I ran up and tried to get between them. I might as well have been a buzzing fly. Neither of them so much as looked at me, too busy staring at one another. Then Will backhanded me out of the way, gently but firmly.
“Hey,” I protested.
He didn’t look away from Ryan. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Stay out of it, Jess,” Ryan said.
“If you’re fighting over me, please stop,” I said.
“It’s not about you.” Ryan glowered at Will. “It’s about the two of us needing to sort some things out.”
So the ceasefire they’d agreed the last time Will was home from school had come to an end, I gathered. That hadn’t lasted long.
“I need to talk to both of you, separately.” I looked from one to the other, not seeing any sign that they were listening. “This isn’t the way to solve anything.” I might as well have been speaking Mandarin. It was like being in a dream where your voice doesn’t make any sound and you can’t run. I felt weak, helpless, and pretty much desperate to stop them. I looked around, but the rest of the search party had broken up, drifting away in groups, so we were alone.
And then they moved. It was like dogs scrapping. One moment it was all raised hackles and growling, the next they had launched themselves at one another. It happened too quickly for me to see who threw the first punch, and maybe they’d both lunged at the same time. Certainly they both seemed completely committed to the task in hand—which was tearing the other person apart. It wasn’t a pretty fight. It was punching and shoving and gouging eyes. It was a kick to the thigh that wrung a string of curses from Will. He tried to hide the fact that it was hurting him, but he limped from that point on and I could tell he was trying to guard it. Ryan saw it too, and concentrated on that side of his body, driving him back against a tree. He tried to smack Will’s head off it and got a solid punch to his chest for his trouble. That gave Will enough space to push off the tree, bent low, his shoulder catching Ryan in the exact spot where he’d just hit him. Then he pulled back and hit him with a jab to the stomach, bringing Ryan to his knees. He bent over, wheezing, holding onto himself.
