I stared at her, hardly able to believe what she’d said. ‘I can’t not tell them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it might be the truth. Surely that’s more important than anyone’s reputation? If he was planning to murder Jasmine, the police need to know. They can talk to Miranda, corroborate what I overheard. Most importantly, if Jasmine’s missing, they’re going to need as much information as possible to find her. I can’t lie to the police.’
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She didn’t look directly at me, but she didn’t shrink away either.
And then a car was coming along the road. It was Susan. She parked in front of us and came over to the car. She was wearing her police uniform, with a high-vis yellow vest on top. She rapped on the window and Holly opened the door on her side.
Susan looked at me, wrapped in my blanket.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Holly shook her head and, although I hated doing something she’d asked me not to, I really didn’t see that I had a choice.
I told Susan everything I’d just told Holly. She listened, standing in the doorway of the car, snow falling heavily all around her. It was already settling on the ground, on the surface of the road. I noticed something else, too, as I talked, something I hadn’t spotted before. A few hundred feet to the east was a darker shape. It appeared to be a small building, no bigger than a hut. It seemed incongruous, and I wasn’t sure, with the snow swirling around me, if it was even real. I blinked and it vanished.
When I’d finished, Holly said, ‘It can’t be true. Lewis wouldn’t kill anyone. He doesn’t have it in him.’ Her voice caught. ‘Didn’t have it in him.’
‘Let’s keep an open mind, shall we?’ Susan said.
She went back to her car to grab a heavy-duty flashlight. She made a call on her phone, then came back over to us.
‘I need you two to wait here in your car. I’m going to take a look.’
She headed off towards the entrance to the caves then vanished from sight.
Holly and I sat in silence for a minute. Then she said, ‘He’s really gone, isn’t he?’
I said that he was, expecting more tears but, instead, she nodded once.
After another few seconds of silence she said, ‘Lewis loved it here. You know he wanted to be a poet when we were teenagers? He used to come up here, like he was Wordsworth or something, and write his poems. They wereterrible.’
She laughed and sniffed at the same time. ‘Miranda used to mock him, and Dad said poetry was a waste of time, but Mum used to encourage him. She would always ask him to write her a poem for her birthday and for Christmas instead of a present. And then, when she died, he stood up at her funeral and read this poem he’d written. It was beautiful. Genuinely. He actually did have talent. Miranda said he must have copied it from somewhere, but it was really him.’
‘I could tell he was creative,’ I said.
‘He was. The problem was, his whole life, he wanted to impress Dad. To win his respect. He was never going to do that with poetry.’
I heard a noise outside and saw Susan coming back towards us through the snow.
Holly put down the window, and Susan said, ‘I’m sorry, Holly.’ Then she moved away from the car, looking around her at the weather, squinting into the snow. I heard her swear, before getting back on her phone. She paced around, frowning deeply. It was almost dark now, the remaining light bleeding from the sky. Sunset on New Year’s Eve, though midnight was still eight hours away.
She came back and addressed me. ‘I’m going to need to take a statement from you.’
‘Sure.’
‘Hold on,’ Holly said. ‘Aren’t you going to try to find Jasmine? And get Lewis out of there?’
‘We will. It just might take a while.’
‘How long?’
Susan gestured towards the sky, all traces of blue smothered by thick clouds that hung so low I thought I might be able to touch them. She was covered in thick snow which clung to her clothes and hair and glistened on her eyelashes. I thoughtabout Jasmine, suitably dressed for a short trip to the caves but not for a prolonged spell in this bitter weather which we already knew could kill.
‘It’s difficult to say. But I’m afraid that, right now, it looks like we’re on our own.’
21
