It is only just past lunchtime but already the day is darkening again. The waves continue to crash onto the shore in angry bursts, the sound a constant rebuke to the coastguard that what they are doing isn’t enough. Twice now, they have had to call off the search by lifeboat, the foam-crested waves too high for them to be out there safely. Sea spray hampers visibility to impossible levels on the beach and in the water. Conditions are not yet as treacherous as they were yesterday, but the gale is once more heightening to a storm and the coastguard’s helicopter is grounded yet again.
Hillier has been standing on the cliff top, looking down at the shapes on the beach scuttling forward and back, battered by the wind. Her feet are like ice in the boots she has put on to come outside and she can no longer feel the tip of her nose. Her boss, DS Gordon, has arrived and declared himself Senior Investigating Officer. Having updated him, she has retreated outside to think, breathe in the landscape, and wonder again where Georgie has gone.
Once Gordon heard about Hazel Archer’s identity, he was convinced she was behind the little girl’s disappearance. But, Hillier thinks, even if that’s true, there’s every chance Georgie is still alive. It is still less than twenty-four hours since she went missing. Looking down at the sea, Hillier doesn’t believe that the girl is in those gritty, frightening towers of water. Some instinct in her feels certain the child is huddling somewhere out of view, cold and terrified.
But alive.
Something at the edge of her vision catches her eye and she spins round. Marek Kaczka is standing outside the kitchen door at the back of the hotel, exhaling smoke into the slowly bruising sky. Meeting her eyes, his lips flicker in a smile before he casually drops his cigarette where it fizzes out in the snow.
Filled with disgust at the insouciance of the chef, and frustration that the investigation is now out of her control, Hillier spins round and strides towards the beach. What are the coastguard doing, for God’s sake? She will look for Georgie herself, and she will find her. The feeling grows in her gut, propelling her down to where the waves crash like toppling skyscrapers onto the shingle. The wind is dogged in her face and she bends her head against its strength. The pathway is bracken- and briar-filled and the ice underfoot causes her to slip several times. She can make out the full curve of the beach by now, a scythe of melancholy, bending away from her in the wintry light. The ochre sandstone of the cliffs appears almost bleached in amidst all of the snow. She peers out, searching the white-blanketed terrain before her, for any nooks or holes where a small child might be cowering.
Or lying unconscious.
She carries on for a little while, running over the events of the last twenty-four hours in her mind. She thinks about Hazel and Kaczka. About how Georgie could slip away from her parents and the timings of it all. It gets dark at four p.m. at this time of year. It would have been easy for the child to have become disorientated outside as the ice and the rain descended.
Hillier stops to catch her breath. She looks ahead of her and then behind, chest heaving, her anger dissipating. Snow again is falling from the sky and, reluctantly, she decides to return to the hotel and succumb to Gordon’s control of the situation. As she turns, just along the coastline, about a metre down from the top of the cliff, she spies what looks like nothing more than a dark shadow. But something about it makes her heart-rate spike.
She leans forward, trying to make out its edges, discern its shape. Tilting herself too far, she overbalances and stumbles. With sheer effort, she digs in her heels so that she lands on her rump and not face-first, sliding into a frozen bramble bush. She is now perched on a ledge, boots hanging into the void. Breathing hard, she pulls herself back up onto the flat cliff top. Mumbling swear words, she fixes her sights again on the dark shape below. Is it a cavern in the cliffs? Or is it a tiny figure?
She bites her lip, fumbling for her radio, relaying her sighting to the coastguard, trying to describe the exact location of the shape.
‘It might not be anything,’ she says with urgency. ‘But you need to check.’
She hauls herself round, onto her knees, trying to get a purchase on the icy bracken. Getting to her feet, a particularly violent gust of wind buffets her and she wobbles precariously. The weather is vicious, howling around her, biting into her cheeks, causing her eyes to water. As she carries on towards the shape, she begins to doubt herself. Maybe it was just a hollow in the side of the cliff? Maybe, in her desperate need to find Georgie, she has fabricated a place where the girl might be hidden. Can it be possible that she alone has seen what a trained search team has failed to spot? But then again, the force of the storm has meant they have been combing the beach from the bottom. They wouldn’t have reached the cliff edge last night. They wouldn’t have had the same perspective.
Hillier mutters to herself as she struggles on, hot and out of breath. She has now nearly reached the curve in the cliff top that would be above where she saw the dark hollowed-out shape. She trudges across the hardening snow through the sea mist, stopping for a moment to catch her breath. And that is when she sees it. The dark spot she had noticed is moving. Hillier’s eyes narrow, her stare trained on the approaching figure. She shakes her head like a dog worrying a rabbit, trying to see past the spray shooting up from the beach and the rocks. The shape is shimmering in the white but as it gets closer, she can see its arms tucked round its body, its shape hunched into itself, a tiny, tramping figure. She violently pushes back her hood and starts to run, pounding over the snow in her boots, tripping over herself, arms flailing.
‘Georgie!’ she yells, sprinting until her lungs are fit to burst. ‘Georgie Greenstreet! Is that you?’
She reaches the frozen creature. Its eyes are large as planets, red-rimmed and filled with water. She rips off her jacket and kneels down, wraps it around the child. At the same time, she removes the frozen lifeless bodies of the kittens from Georgie’s arms and lays them gently on the ground. She pulls the child in against her chest and rubs her fragile limbs as if coaxing the very life back into her. ‘It’s OK, Georgie,’ she says, her voice a grateful whisper. ‘You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.’