I walked into Port Sentinel’s police station later that evening with the usual feeling of foreboding. It was Dan’s domain. You challenged him there at your peril.
I was too familiar with peril of various kinds to take the hint.
And I’d spent the hours since I spoke to Gilly’s father wondering what I should do. Now that I’d made up my mind, I wasn’t about to back away just because it involved talking to Dan.
“Can I speak to Inspector Henderson, please?”
The woman on the reception desk looked pitying. “He’s a little bit busy, dear. I can take your details.”
“It’s about Gilly Poynter.”
She raised her eyebrows, but took out a piece of paper. “What’s your name, dear? I’ll let him know you’re here.”
She was a large, comfortable sort of older lady, and it took her a little while to get up and put in the code to the keypad that unlocked the door behind the counter, while I simmered with impatience on the other side of the desk. The door led into the rear of the police station, and it wasn’t long before Dan yanked it open and beckoned to me. I ducked under the counter and passed through into the business end of the police station, a place I found completely fascinating. Previously I’d spoken to Dan in his office, but he kept me in the corridor this time, just inside the door, as if he couldn’t even spare the minute it would have taken to go down the hall. He looked tired and cross. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was pulled down.
“What do you want?”
Good start. “To talk to you about Gilly.” I was half expecting him to throw me out then and there, but he was still listening. I went on, “I was talking to Mr. Poynter and I have an idea about what might have happened—”
Dan held up a hand. “Unless you have actual, solid evidence, I don’t want to hear it. I’m too busy to listen to a wild theory.”
“It’s not a wild theory,” I said. “It’s based on fact. Completely.”
“I’m a bit beyond theories, Jess. I’ve been interviewing a suspect all day and I’m about to charge them with kidnapping.”
“Gilly’s mother?”
Dan frowned. “Obviously not. Max Thurston.”
“You’re charging him? Has he said he did it?”
“No. He’s not telling us anything. His parents got hold of a solicitor who’s annoying the life out of me and won’t let him say a word in case we use it against him.” Dan shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall. “I just want him to tell me where I can find Gilly. It’s in his interests to talk. He’s in a world of trouble and he needs to give us all the help he can to get out of it.”
“Why do you think he did it?”
Dan looked down at me as if I was insane. “You know very well. He’s the ex-boyfriend. He borrowed the car. All he can tell us is that he drove around for a while that night, with no particular destination in mind. That’s not an alibi, and neither is seeing you at the library, whatever he may have thought. And we’ve got his phone records. He got a call from the landline at fourteen Pollock Lane at six minutes past four on Friday. It lasted fifty-three seconds. Immediately after that he sent a text message to Ryan Denton’s phone asking to borrow his car. Ryan didn’t respond until forty-three minutes past four. And you know that he agreed to lend Max the car. We’ve taken it away for forensic examination, and if there is an eyelash that belongs to Gilly Poynter in it, we will find it.”
“But kidnapping … What if she went willingly? If she rang him and asked him to help her…”
“Then she’d better come to the police station and tell me that.”
I saw his plan. If Gilly was alive, arresting Max might be enough to bring her out of hiding. If she wasn’t—well, Max was as good a place to start as any. Until they found her, alive or dead, they wouldn’t be sure what had happened to her. Dan was groping in the dark just as much as I was, even if he had all the resources of the police and I only had a gut feeling that he was wrong.
Dan straightened up. “I’d better get back. They’ll be waiting for me.”
“Please, just give me five minutes,” I begged. “It’s not that long for them to wait. It might even help.”
He sighed. “Five minutes. Not a second more.”
“OK. Good.” I gathered my thoughts. “Right. I was talking to Mr. Poynter earlier, and he told me that Gilly’s mother was capable of harming her.”
“He said that to me too.”
“And?”
Dan shrugged. “Bitter ex-husband. It’s not all that unusual for them to point the finger at their partner when a child goes missing.”
“You mean you didn’t take it seriously?”
“I didn’t say that.” Dan glared at me. “I take everything seriously. I looked into it and I didn’t find anything to concern me.”
“She took Gilly’s mobile phone. She cut her off from her friends, her dad—she was keeping her a prisoner. You read the diary. Gilly just wanted to be normal like everyone else and ‘M’ wouldn’t let her do anything.”
“Speaking as a policeman who has to deal with the teenagers in this town, I wish there were more parents like that.”
I kept a grip on my temper with difficulty. “But don’t you see? She was controlling Gilly. She would have been furious if she’d found out that Gilly was planning to leave Port Sentinel, Mr. Poynter said. She could have harmed her. I told you she was out of it on Friday night.”
Dan’s eyebrows drew together. “You did. How does that fit in? Because she got wasted from guilt after hurting Gilly?”
I shook my head. “I found a mug with some sort of powder in the bottom in the kitchen, and she was slurring her words, half asleep. I assumed the two things were connected. But what if Gilly was the one who was drugged. What if Mrs. Poynter was faking?”
Dan sighed. “The residue in the mug was gone by the time we searched the house so we’ll never know what it was. And we weren’t in a position to test Mrs. Poynter’s blood so I can’t confirm that she was drugged. You’ll have to let that go.”
“It’s just that she came upstairs while I was looking around Gilly’s room. She’d been practically comatose in her chair, but she made it up the stairs to see what I was doing, and they’re steep. I fell over and I was stone-cold sober.”
“So I should hope,” Dan said automatically. “But you don’t live in that house. She does, and she’s familiar with the stairs. You’d be surprised what people can manage through sheer muscle memory.”
“OK,” I said, “but what about the tissues in Gilly’s wastebasket and the blood I saw on the wallpaper?”
He held up a hand. “Let me stop you there. We collected the Poynters’ rubbish and went through it. We found the strips of wallpaper and tested them. It wasn’t blood. It was coffee.”
“How could I confuse coffee with blood?”
“You said it was dark in the bedroom. Blood looks black in the dark.”
I shivered at the very thought. “And the tissues in the bin?”
“The blood was Gilly’s. There wasn’t a lot of it.” Dan rubbed his left eye with the heel of his hand and yawned. “We’re still waiting for it to be analyzed further, but it looks innocent enough. If she’d been stabbed or injured in some other way, we’d have found blood in the house, on the furniture or the walls or the floor, and we didn’t.”
“But Mrs. Poynter had cleaned up. The whole house smelled of bleach when I went round to get my notebook.”
“Bleach isn’t enough. We look at the cracks in the plaster and the gaps between the floorboards. If there was any blood shed in that house, it was on a small scale.”
I changed tack. “That doesn’t mean nothing happened. If Gilly was the one who was drugged, she would have been passive. Her mother wouldn’t have needed to hurt her. Before she disappeared, she’d been lying on her bed. She might have been unconscious.”
“Or she was waiting for her ex-boyfriend to turn up with a borrowed car and take her to her dad’s house. Except that she never got there, so Max has some explaining to do.” Dan peeled himself away from the wall again. “Which is where you came in, I think.”
“But—”
“I’ve listened to you, Jess, and I’ve told you what we’ve found out. It rules Gilly’s mother out. I know she’s not the most likable person, but that doesn’t make her a suspect.”
“Gilly was frightened. Don’t you remember what she said in her diary? I was scared before, but now I’m terrified something bad is going to happen. She felt trapped. She wouldn’t let me anywhere near her house. She didn’t feel safe there.”
Dan sighed. “Jess, ninety-nine percent of the time, when a teenager goes missing it’s because they’ve run away from their parents. And if you listened to them talk about their reasons, you’d think the parents were evil incarnate. Almost always, they’re not. They’re doing their best to guide and protect their children from doing stupid, impulsive things.”
“I just—”
“I’ve listened to you and I’ve explained to you that we investigated Mrs. Poynter as best we could. We don’t have any reason to suspect her. We do have some excellent reasons to suspect Max Thurston. And now I really have to go.” Dan reached past me and opened the door that led to the reception area. I went, without even trying to argue.
For one thing, I had nothing left to say. I’d tried my best to persuade him. I could go and confront Mrs. Poynter, but I shrank from doing that. As a course of action it hadn’t worked out all that well for me in the past.
I walked down the steps of the police station, not knowing where to go. There was a bench just outside it and I sat down, shoving my hands into my pockets to keep them warm. It was dark, cold, and town seemed to be deserted. The forecaset for the night was terrible—gales, a high tide, driving rain. It hadn’t started to rain yet, thankfully, but the wind was catching the tops of the trees, tossing them about, and my hair blew into my face. Behind me somewhere, Max was facing an increasingly frustrated Dan. If Dan was right, it was no less than he deserved. But I couldn’t understand why he’d been so obvious about giving Ryan the car key back, or why he hadn’t had the car cleaned when Ryan would have suspected nothing, or why, if he knew where Gilly was, he had been wandering around town like a lost soul ever since she disappeared.
Unless he’d harmed her.
I tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. But I remembered Max trying to put the blame on Nessa. I remembered the look on Gilly’s face when she cut herself; how Max had apparently been standing right behind me; how his could have been the voice that had prompted her to break the glass. I remembered him standing outside the classroom at school, waiting to talk to Gilly, and how frustrated he’d been. I remembered the look on Gilly’s face when she doubled back to talk to Mr. Lowell: desperation. You would have to be feeling desperate, I thought, amused in spite of myself, to want to talk to Mr. Lowell instead of—
And the smile died on my face.
Oh. My. God.
The moments clicked through my mind like images in a slideshow.
She would rather work with a girl … Take it from me, she feels strongly about it.
I knew what X wanted me to do and say, so I did it.
I’m such a coward.
Gilly’s good at history. She’s going to study it at university.
All that extra work for history is a giant pain in the ass. I know I should be grateful to Mr. L for taking an interest—I wouldn’t even have a computer if he hadn’t said I needed one—but I just can’t deal with all the reading and the extra essays.
I always wanted someone to love me. I thought it would make everything better.
Now I understand that you should be careful what you wish for.
I got up and ran back into the police station, colliding with the reception desk in my haste. The woman looked up in surprise, and then she frowned. Whatever Dan had said about me, it hadn’t been too complimentary, I guessed.
“Please, I really have to speak to Inspector Henderson again.”
“He’s busy.”
“It’s hugely important. Massively. I really need to see him.”
“I’m sorry, dear, I can’t let you disturb him.”
I bit my lip, then ducked under the counter and made for the door. There was a keypad beside it and I tapped in the code I’d memorized when she went through it the previous time.
“Where are you going? You can’t touch that.” The receptionist was getting up, too slow to stop me. I slammed the door in her face and took off down the corridor, heading in the opposite direction from Dan’s office. One of the female detectives I’d seen talking to Dan earlier came out of a room carrying a folder.
“Hi,” I said. “Have you seen Inspector Henderson?”
“What—who are you? What are you doing back here?”
“I need to see him.” I glanced back to see the receptionist thundering toward us and I turned back to the detective. “Please. I need to see him right now.”
“Come with me, please. You’re not allowed back here.” The receptionist grabbed hold of my arm.
“Please.” I hadn’t taken my eyes off the detective’s face. “I know what happened to Gilly. I know who took her.”
The detective seemed to make up her mind. “Hold on, Becky.”
She walked down the hall and knocked on a door. There was a pause and then it opened.
“Sir, there’s someone here to speak to you.”
Dan looked down the hall and his face changed from surprise to thunderous anger in a split second. “I thought I told you—”
“It wasn’t Max,” I said, pulling my arm out of the receptionist’s grasp. “It was Mr. Lowell, our history teacher. He’s X. He’s the one she was sleeping with.”
Dan strode toward me, his jaw clenched with rage. “Jess, this isn’t a game. That’s a serious accusation to throw around.”
“I know. But it’s true.” My arm ached where the receptionist’s fingers had dug in, and I rubbed it. “He was controlling her. He made her refuse to work with Max when he picked her name. He was giving her extra history lessons when she wasn’t even that interested in the subject. Her mum thought she was brilliant at it, because Mr. Lowell told her that, so she was allowed to go for extra tuition with him. He was the reason she got a computer. Where they had sex at school—that’s right beside the staff room.”
Dan was shaking his head. “Come off it, Jess.”
“She couldn’t tell anyone about it. It was a huge secret. They weren’t a normal couple and people wouldn’t understand, she said.” I played my trump card. “And he was part of the search party yesterday. He was standing right beside me. One of the search dogs barked and jumped up at him. He said it was because he had food in his pocket, but what if the dog was trying to say that he smelled of Gilly?”
Dan closed his eyes for a moment. The anger had faded out of his face, to be replaced by utter fatigue. “Right. For the record, I think you are insane. But I am prepared to go and speak to Mr. Lowell. I’m going to go and see if he’s at home, first of all. If he is, and he can explain everything you’ve just told me, I do not want to hear one more word about him or anyone else being responsible for Gilly’s disappearance.”
“OK,” I said, weak with relief.
“What about Max Thurston?” the detective asked.
Dan checked his watch. “We have a couple of hours left before we have to charge him or let him go. No harm in leaving him a bit longer. It might persuade him to start talking.”
She nodded.
“Can I come with you?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Dan said. “You’re going home, and that’s where you’re going to stay. If you were a dog, I’d suggest your owner got you microchipped.”
I grimaced. “We could go to Mr. Lowell’s house on the way.”
“It isn’t a fun outing, Jess. It’s my job.”
“I know that. Look, just please let me come with you to Mr. Lowell’s house.”
“And say what? That you’re doing an internship with me? I don’t think so.”
“I can stay in the car.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“I don’t know,” I said, desperate. “Maybe I might see something useful. Please.”
Dan sighed. “Let me find out where Lowell lives. If it’s on the way, I’ll deal with him first, then you.”
“OK.” I was crossing my fingers as the detective disappeared into the room she’d come out of originally and looked Mr. Lowell up on the computer. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that crossing your fingers doesn’t work, by the way, because it turned out that Mr. Lowell lived at a point that was almost exactly halfway between the police station and Sandhayes.
I beamed at Dan. “So I can come.”
“And stay in the car.”
“Fine.”
“And this is the last of it. You’re not involved in this little adventure anymore. The end.”
“Right.”
“Promise me you won’t try to get involved anymore.”
“I promise,” I said, glad beyond words that I hadn’t uncrossed my fingers yet. I promise to stay out of your way, maybe.
Because until Gilly Poynter was safe and well, I wasn’t going to make any other promises at all.