Witch (6 page)

Gasping for breath, I lay at the bottom of a deep well. It stank of decay – meat that had turned bad. My hair hung over my eyes and across my face.

“Help me!” I called upwards, my voice echoing back off the circular walls.

There was a face peering down into the well at me. It was white, like a full moon set against a dead black night.

“Help me!” I cried, reaching up at the face. “Please, help me!”

“Sydney!” the face called down into the well. “Sydney!”

It was my father’s voice.

“Daddy!”
I screamed, feeling relieved to hear his voice. He had come to save me. He had come to lift me out of the hole I now found myself in.

“Sydney!” he called, his voice sounding as if it were coming from miles away. “Sydney, open the door!”

“Door? What door?” I sobbed. “There isn’t a door...”

“Open up, Sydney!” his voice came again, but this time louder.
Closer.

“Daddy...” I sta
rted to sob, just wanting him to lift me from the hole. I could feel hot tears on my cheeks.

There was a banging sound, and I turned around and sat up...in my bed. My hair was plastered in damp streaks to my forehead and cheeks. My mouth felt dry, throat raw.

“Sydney!” I could hear my father’s voice. “Sydney – are you in there?”

I looked about my bedroom, my head aching, heart racing. The sound of banging came again.

“Sydney!” my father called again from the other side of my front door.

With my tongue feeling like a thick length of carpet, I croaked, “Okay, I’m coming!”

I doubted he heard me, because no sooner had the words left my mouth, he was banging on the front door again. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I got up, took a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms from my wardrobe, and quickly threw them on. A thin splinter of daylight cut through a gap in the curtains. I glanced down at my wristwatch and could see that it had gone half past eight in the morning.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

“Okay, okay! I’m coming,” I said, leaving my bedroom and heading for the front door.

I opened it to find my father standing on the other side.

“Christ, you look like shit,” my father snapped, brushing past me and into the lounge.

“Thanks, dad,” I said, closing the door behind him.

Chapter Seven

I caught my father eyeing the room. I was glad it was relatively tidy. There were a couple of Elle magazines scattered on the floor, so I discretely pushed them under the nearest armchair with my foot. With a grunt, my father turned to face me. He was wearing his uniform, and as always, he looked immaculate in it. He took a beige coloured file from under his arm and handed it to me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s your statement about what happened yesterday,” he said, crossing the room to the window and pulling back the curtain.

“I haven’t written my statement,” I said, opening the file to find several typed sheets of paper.

“I wrote it for you,” he said, turning to face me.

“I think it’s best if I were to write my own...” I started.

“We all need to be saying the same thing,” he said, taking a pen from his shirt pocket and offering it to me. “Besides, I’ve spoken to Inspector Skrimshire in Penzance this morning. I’ve briefed him on our version of what happened yesterday, and he seems quite satisfied. He does, however, want to see copies of all our statements ASAP. So just sign the statement and I can get one of the team to run him over a copy.”

“But...” I started, quickly skimming over the statement. It read just how my father had described the incident yesterday as we stood in the
road together. I had been driving down the Old Buckmore Road, lights and sirens flashing. The driver of the cart had either refused to steer his horse off the road to let me pass or he hadn’t seen the vehicle because of the state of his poor eyesight, in which case he was himself at fault and caused his own death and that of his family. I had given a negative breath test and received minor scrapes and bruises.

“Sign it,” my father said, waving the pen before me.

Slowly, I took the pen from him and signed the bottom of each page. I closed the file and handed it back to him with the pen.

“What about those people?”
I asked him, my heart beginning to race again.

“The drifters?” he said, cocking one of his thick, black eyebrows at me.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“In the morgue,” he said flatly, tucking the file back beneath his arm, and the pen into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Don’t worry, the post-mortem has been carried out on the old guy and the pathologist noted the state of his eyesight. The old fella was practically blind.”
Then, placing a hand on my shoulder as if to reassure me, he added, “See? It wasn’t your fault. The old boy shouldn’t have been on the road with that horse and cart. The pathologist reckons he wouldn’t have been able to see more than a few feet in front of him. The truth of the matter is, the old sod probably steered that horse and cart into you and not the other way around. You’re lucky to still be alive.”

“I guess,” I said thoughtfully. Perhaps my dad was right. Okay, so I had had a couple of whiskeys, but I wasn’t drunk. I could hold my liquor – most of my teenage years had been spent in a drunken blur. I knew when I was drunk, and I hadn’t been yesterday.

“I’ll get the paperwork over to Inspector Skrimshire today so he can contact the coroner,” my father explained.

“Coroner?”
I gasped. “Will there be an investigation?”

“Calm down,” he hushed. “I’m doing the investigation. I’ll hand everything over to Skrimshire and he’ll pass it onto the cor
oner’s office. There’s always an inquest into these things. The coroner will simply want to decide how and when those people came to die, so it can be marked on their death certificates. It’s just so they can be buried and their estate can be settled.”

“Do they have any family?” I asked him.

“Mac is looking into it, but it will be like searching for a needle in a haystack,” he grunted again. “Like I said, these people don’t hold down roots like us. They flutter through life like litter on the wind, moving from one place to the next. Christ, we can’t even be sure of their names, let alone anything else. No one is going to miss them. No one cares what happened to them.”

I thought that to be very sad. To spend a lifetime and not have anyone miss you when you’re gone. Not even to care. With his hand still on my shoulder, my father leant forward and did something he hadn’t done since I was a little girl. He kissed me gently on the forehead.

“I know you’re tearing yourself up inside over what happened, but it was an accident, Sydney. Take a couple of weeks off from work – get a different perspective on things and you’ll feel better for it, I promise.”

“I’m not due any leave until...” I started.

“I’m not just your father, I’m your sergeant, and I’m telling you to take some time off,” he said. “Get your bearings, clear your head, and come back when all of this has died down.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering if I couldn’t book myself a cheap flight and go visi
t with my mother in Spain. Then again, the last time I’d visited, I felt as if I were just in the way. Julio had those smarmy-looking friends who hung about all the time, leering at the English girls. They made my flesh crawl. Maybe I would just stay at home, read a few books, go walking along the shore. I could find plenty to do if I really thought about it. Maybe go and max out the credit card in Penzance? That would be reckless – but fun. There was nothing like a good bit of retail therapy.

Taking his hand from my shoulder and heading for the door, my father looked back at me and said, “If I were you, I’d keep away from work. You know what some of them can be like – real gossips. Anything you say will only get bent all out of shape, and we need to keep our stories straight. The less you say about this to anyone, the better. I’ll keep out of your way, too, until you get yourself sorted out. Give me a call when you feel like coming back.”

He opened the door, and just as he was about to disappear, I said, “Thanks, dad.”

He looked back at me. “Just keep a low profile for the next week or two until this whole thing blows over.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And promise me, no more screw-ups.”

“I promise,” I whispered as he shut the door, leaving me alone in my apartment.

Chapter Eight

I drank straight from the bottle of milk in the fridge. Wiping away the white moustache from my upper lip, I went back into the living room in search of my iPod. I’d decided to go for a walk along the beach. I found the whole exercise thing easier if I was listening to music. The scenery nearby was beautiful, but perhaps I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should. I’d grown accustomed to it over the years. It was wasted on me, I guess, not like the visitors who came from the overcrowded cities in the summer months. They acted as if they’d never seen a freaking hill, the sea, or sand before. Perhaps they hadn’t.

After searching beneath the pillows on the sofa and in the armchairs, I checked my bedroom but couldn’t find my iPod anywhere. I’d have to go for a walk without it. The morning was moving closer to lunchtime, and I wanted to get some fresh air before I spent the afternoon curled up on the sofa reading the rest of my book called
Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos by Tom Graham
, which I recently downloaded to my iPad Mini. I hoped that it would take my mind off recent events. I had frozen pizza in the freezer, which I could cook for my dinner. There was a couple of bottles of red wine, too, somewhere.

I put on a pair of jeans, a coat, and a pair of boots. I left my apartment and made the short walk down to the shore. The beach was empty, apart from a couple of dog-walkers way off in the distance. I
turned my back on them and began walking in the opposite direction, towards the massive black cliffs which loomed in the distance like giant ogres. Waves crashed up the beach, then retreated again. The sea was a dark green and looked uninviting. Pieces of dirty wood wrapped in black seaweed floated in the foamy waves. The wind was cold and it made my lips taste salty. With my long, blond hair down, it blew about my face like a mask. I liked that, I wanted to be hidden. I wanted time to clear my head, just like my father had suggested. I didn’t want to dwell on what had happened, I’d done enough of that in my nightmares, and part of me feared falling to sleep that night. Would my dreams be haunted by those dead people again? I guessed I had a few more nights of disturbed sleep before I’d truly come to terms with what I had done – before the
accident
.

Bent against the bitter wind, I headed along the shore, a set of footprints trailing away behind me. I’d been walking for about ten minutes or so, when I thought I heard someone calling my name. At first I wondered if it wasn’t my imagination, or a trick being played by the howling wind. I looked back in the direction I had come, but all I could see was the tiny black outlines of those dog-walkers way off in the distance.

“Sydney!” the voice came again.

I looked to my left to see someone running down the grassy sand dunes towards me. It was Michael.

“Oh, Christ,” I murmured under my breath as he ran towards me.

I turned around and set off at speed in the direction I had come from. I didn’t want to see Michael – I had nothing to say to him.

“Hey, Sydney!” he called after me. “Wait up!”

Over the sound of the wind and the crashing waves, I could hear his heavy footfalls as he came running after me across the wet sand.

Burying my chin into my chest, I leaned forward and sped up almost to a slow trot. It wasn’t long before Michael had caught up with me.

He gripped my arm and said, “Hey, what’s the rush?”

“Leave me alone,” I snapped, yanking my arm free and setting off up the beach again.

“I just want to talk to you,
that’s all,” he said, walking beside me.

“About what?”
I said, refusing to look at him.

“What happened yesterday, of course,” he said.

“That was a mistake,” I said coldly. “Nothing like that will ever happen between us again.”

“I wasn’t talking about that,” he said. “I was talking about the accident you had. You
know, that family dying and all.”

I stopped mid-stride as if walking straight into an invisible wall. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I hissed, glancing sideways at him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice soft.

“Who said it was my fault?” I glared at him.

“No one said it was your fault,” he said, looking startled by my overreaction. “It’s just that I thought you might be feeling a bit guilty as you had been drinking whiskey with me.”

To hear him say that felt as if I’d been slapped in the face. Despite all the efforts my father had taken to provide a fake breath test and witnesses, here was someone who could testify I’d been drinking before the crash. He would know, as he was the person who had given it to me.

“That wasn’t enough to make me drunk,” I said dismissively, and turned away, wishing that he would just fuck off and leave me alone.