The guests file one by one into the room where Hillier and Ellis sit behind a stack of paper and two cooling cups of coffee. They sit down. Some are nervous, some brash. Most of them have inexplicable guilt washed over their complexions, a desperate need to convince Hillier that they are not the ones responsible, that they have not taken the child.
Hillier recognises this misplaced reaction from the fifteen years she has spent on the force and the seven years before that serving as a lawyer in the Royal Navy Court Martial. She knows it well: that foreign and dirty beast that comes unwarranted to the entirely innocent because – and this is the bit she has never completely understood – it actually represents the thoughts these people are beyond relieved never to have acted on themselves. Hillier is certain that criminal impulses lurk unbidden in everyone. But it is only the people who act on those impulses that guilt can claim as its victims. The rest of us feel it but shake it off, thankful to God, or whatever it is that guides our moral compass, that we are able to control it.
Thus Hillier is confident that most of the guilty-looking guests who come before her and Ellis have no knowledge of what has happened to Georgie Greenstreet.
Most of them.
There are two, however, who interest her.
The first is the sous-chef, Marek Kaczka. It is now nearly midnight, and the witching hour, compounded by the fact that it is New Year’s Eve, means normal response time at Brixham police station is slower than usual with a skeletal overtime budget meaning a skeleton staff. The rest of her colleagues will be tied up dealing with the drunken fights and skirmishes that dominate proceedings this time of year. Instinctively, Hillier feels that Kaczka will have a record, some kind of infraction in his past, but she is not going to be able to trace that tonight. So she bides her time and leaves him to sweat a bit. She interviews him cursorily, suspecting that anything he says will be tainted with untruths in any event.
Her second point of interest is the petite, pretty woman who comes into the room with her partner and can’t look Hillier in the eye.
Hazel Archer.
Something in her face is familiar to Hillier. It buzzes at her, exasperatingly out of reach, like a troublesome fly. The woman has an unusual quality about her. Hillier can’t tell what it is. Either she is entirely cold, or she has buttoned up her feelings and is in fact completely paralysed by fear. She and her partner, Jonny Newell, claim to have been together all afternoon, either as a couple or with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Evie. They arrived at the hotel yesterday morning and today is Hazel’s birthday. They have come here to celebrate that, and the New Year, and they are terribly, awfully worried about Georgie and where she could be.
But something in all that they say rings hollow for Hillier. A glimmer in Hazel Archer’s eyes sparks a feeling in her. It’s an instinct born of hundreds of nights spent dealing with drunks and tramps and burglars, sifting through them to find those people who are truly worthy of her attention: the real criminals. Hillier has refused any promotion up the ranks, has deliberately remained as Detective Constable for the majority of her career. And the reason for that decision is because this exact moment, that dances around her now, is what thrills her, rare as it is. She can leave management evaluations to her superiors, along with budget concerns and staffing problems. As DC, her chief responsibility is to get to a crime scene first and this is the moment she relishes. That flash in time when a hunter trains her rifle sights on an animal quivering in the bush. When she faces the mask of innocence and knows, right down to the marrow in her bones, that it is a lie. Whether Hazel Archer is guilty of the disappearance of Georgie Greenstreet is yet to be determined. But Hillier can feel that Archer is, without a doubt, guilty of something.
The policewoman sniffs and dismisses her for now, stashing her papers away, her mind still whirring with what she has gleaned from the interviews tonight.
One by one the lights are switched off, first downstairs and then above, as the guests all go to bed with tired eyes open, staring into the dark, wondering about the missing little girl and where she might be.
Ellis puts snow chains on the car and he and Hillier drive off into the Devon countryside. She doesn’t look back, as the pale outline of the hotel fades into the ghostly snow-filled night.
She will return first thing in the morning.