CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘It isn’t me,’ Hazel blurts, her cheeks flaming under Hillier’s gaze. ‘I don’t know what happened to the little girl but it wasn’t anything to do with me, I swear it. You have to believe me.’

Max is nodding next to her, his breathing calm and unhurried. Unconsciously, Hillier adopts the same rhythm for her own breath – in and out – keeping it steady, keeping everything wrapped up tightly, under control. A helicopter still cleaves through the sky above them, its juddering sound weaving around the room, growing louder, then quieter, as it pitches nearer then heads out again to sea. In the back of her mind, Hillier hopes that, as agreed, Ellis is down on the beach liaising with the coastguard. She knows that uniformed police are standing outside the hotel, forming a barrier against the few cars that have managed to get themselves up the snow-covered roads, cars packed with the sharp eyes and eager cameras of local and tabloid journalists.

She can sense Hazel’s fear. Her checks on the woman’s name on the Police National Computer this morning yielded no results, but still, thoughts of Hazel and Marek circle inside her head like basking sharks. She is certain that one or other of them is connected in some way with the missing girl’s disappearance.

‘Hazel,’ she says smoothly. ‘Why are you telling me that you have nothing to do with what has happened to Georgie? Why would you think that you are suspected of being involved?’

Hazel hesitates as the chasm of the words she is about to speak yawns before her feet. She swallows and steps over the edge. ‘My name is Hazel Archer,’ she says. ‘But when I was a child . . . when I was six years old . . .’ She pauses and briefly closes her eyes. ‘My name was Primrose Bowman. Rosie Bowman.’ She opens her eyes and finally meets Hillier’s stare.

Hillier can’t help herself. She recoils.

Primrose Bowman. The Flower Girls.

Looking at Hazel is like staring into the eyes of a person you have thought and talked about for months of your life, without ever really knowing them. But she feels now as if she does, considers that she understands everything about her. For so long she has debated this woman with her colleagues on the force, with her family; analysed the case on criminology courses she’s taken. She shed tears for Kirstie Swann when her body was discovered, eventually scooped up from the damp ground, abused beyond anything that any living person would ever want to imagine happening to such a small and innocent being.

Primrose and Laurel. Laurel and Primrose.

Those names. So beautiful and yet so vile. So steeped in the evil that had made them who they were. They looked so normal. They had come from such a nice family, their parents as shocked as the rest of the world at the depravity bubbling up from their gene pool.

Evil.

Hillier had used that word only once or twice in her career. Of Hindley and Brady perhaps. Levi Bellfield. And the Flower Girls. Laurel and Rosie Bowman. She had used the word evil about them, and she had meant it.

Hillier rouses herself, conscious that she has said nothing since Hazel’s admission, aware that her mouth is open a little, her lips dry with disbelief.

But there it is.

This is why Hazel’s face provoked a sense of déjà vu. Because she has seen her before. The photographs of the Flower Girls were pasted all over newspapers both national and international when the body of Kirstie Swann was found. They were the most famous faces in Britain, and across the world. Laurel, with her direct stare into the camera, forthright, unashamed, defiant. And Rosie, her eyes dipped downwards, her lips pursed, her brown hair capped tight around her face. Both of them looked tiny, so incongruously small and vulnerable in the midst of such horror. Those faces, put in the mix with words like murder and abuse and torture. Hillier remembers feeling it at the time; the very core of it all was so wrong, it didn’t make any sense.

‘I see,’ she says eventually. She looks down briefly at her hands on the tablecloth, at her mother’s antique ring on her engagement finger. She clears her throat, her mind buzzing. Wonders how on earth to play this, because nothing in her experience has given her any clue as to how to handle such a situation. She looks over at Max, reaching out for something to prop her up for a moment. ‘And you, sir. Mr Saunders, is it?’

Max nods again, his presence oddly reassuring in this cold room. His bulk seems warm, his pallor pink and comforting next to Hazel’s icy sheen.

‘Do you know Ms Archer?’

‘Well, I knew I recognised her from somewhere. She’s older, though. Obviously. And unless you have the association in your mind, it doesn’t immediately ring a bell . . . But then, it came to me suddenly, after breakfast. I found the old photographs online, looked at all the articles again. And, of course, there’s also been all that fuss recently in the papers about Laurel Bowman’s upcoming parole application. Faces change but . . .’ He gestures towards Hazel. ‘Once you realise, you can see.’

Hillier glances again at Hazel and knows he is right. The image of that six-year-old girl morphs over Hazel’s face and Hillier sees her as the child she was. There had only ever been one photograph of Rosie Bowman and then, because of her age and the fact that she would not be standing trial, the courts had banned any further identification of her. All the world really knew of the two sisters were the court sketches of Laurel, along with her mug shot, and the one photograph of Rosie they’d been given of her in school uniform.

‘I went to find her,’ Max continues, ‘and she was terribly upset. Worried, as I’m sure you can imagine, DC Hillier, that she will be considered the prime suspect in the situation we find ourselves in here.’ Max’s voice is rich with rationale, with logic and compassion.

Hillier puts her head on one side, considering this. ‘You have proof of your real identity, I suppose?’ she asks Hazel, the thought coming to her that she’d better check she’s not just dealing with an utter loon, an attention-seeking crazy.

‘Yes,’ Hazel answers, her tone meek. ‘And Jonny . . .’ She stares around the room as if she can magic him here. ‘My partner. I don’t know where he is. But you can ask him. He knows.’ A tear rolls slowly down her left cheek. ‘He’s the only one who does. Apart from my father.’ She lifts her head at that, an appalled expression on her face. ‘We won’t have to involve him, will we? Please, no. He’s old now. He’s been through so much. I don’t want him to know about any of this . . .’

Hillier rubs her nose with her hand. ‘Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?’ She glances over at the window, at the clear white light outside where a cloud of steam is escaping from pipes snaking out from the kitchen. ‘So, from what you said yesterday, you were with your partner all evening, at the time Georgie went missing. With the girl – Evie? She’s your . . . partner’s daughter?’

‘Yes. We all went down to the beach in the afternoon. Jonny used to come here as a kid for his summer holidays. He wanted to show me the coast. Then we hiked back up to the hotel and Evie went to her room while we had tea in the bar. It was cold, we were wet through from the rain. Afterwards we went upstairs to change for dinner. It was my birthday yesterday.’ She bites her lip. ‘It was supposed to be a celebration.’

Hazel looks over at Max as she speaks and Hillier is suddenly reminded that he is still in the room.

‘Mr Saunders, thank you so much for instigating this meeting,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘But perhaps you could leave us to it now?’

Max reluctantly rises, desperate to hear more but realising that his time on the frontline, at least for the moment, is up. He leaves after touching Hazel gently on the shoulder and giving her a weak smile, which she barely returns.

‘It’s just not fair. Any of this,’ Hazel says bitterly after he has left the room. ‘I’m not that child any more, if I ever was. I’m an adult. I’ve lived a life since then. I’m not my sister, Detective. I’m not her.’

Hillier trains her mind back to 1997, when the Flower Girls were arrested. Laurel, certainly, was charged and tried. But why wasn’t Rosie? She frowns, trying to remember. Something about her age. That the younger sister couldn’t legally be held responsible. She studies Hazel who has sunk into her seat, concave with despair. A seagull squawks outside one of the restaurant windows and it brings Hillier back to the present.

‘But you were there, weren’t you?’ she says. ‘Even if you weren’t put on trial. You were there when Kirstie Swann was brutally murdered.’ Hillier leans back in her chair and considers the woman before her, wilted, soft, as if you could put your hand right through her, into her, and you wouldn’t feel a thing.

‘So you tell me, Hazel,’ she says. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t think you’re the most likely person to be involved with the disappearance of Georgie Greenstreet?’