Witch(63)

“Are you going to tell the truth about that, too, Michael?” my father teased. “Are you really going to sit back and watch Sydney go to prison for a very long time for killing five people – one of which was a five-year-old boy – because she was drunk thanks to you?”

“Someone else was out on that road,” I shouted at my father over another boom of approaching thunder. “I’ve been back to take a look. There are brake marks at the scene. I never even touched my brakes.”

“Is that it?” my father scoffed. “You killed them, Sydney. Even the old git called you a witch with his dying breath for killing him and his family.”

Then, as if Jonathan Smith were standing right behind me, I heard him whisper, witch, on the wind. Gooseflesh ran up my back and I shuddered all over again.

“He called you a witch!” my father mocked me.

That word went over and over in my head, making me feel dizzy and sick. I could see Smith in the road again, the bubble of blood on his lips as he whispered, the word ‘witch.’

If I hadn’t have been the one who had killed him and his family, perhaps he had been trying to say something else? What if he was trying to say...

Slowly, and with my stomach screwing up into knots, I looked at Michael. “You said that Jonathan Smith spoke kinda funny, right?”

“Right,” Michael nodded.

“You said he spoke like that cartoon character, Elmer Fudd,” I whispered, a blanket of dread covering me.

“Sure,” Michael said.

Turning to face my father, I said, “I’m gonna go and catch me some wabbit.”

“What are you talking about?” my father grunted in anger.

“Jonathan Smith couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘R’, instead he used the letter ‘W’,” I gasped, suddenly realising what it was Smith had been trying to tell me. “He wasn’t calling me a witch, he was saying the name Rich.” I looked up at my father and said, “Jonathan Smith was trying to tell me the name of the person who had really run him and his family off the road and killed them. He was saying the name Rich...he was trying to say Richard. He was saying your name, dad.”

“That’s just ridic...” my father started to say.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed, feeling as if I were going to drop to my knees again. I looked at my father, eyes wide, and said, “It was you! It was you who drove them off the road and killed them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talk...” he started to bluster again.

I closed my eyes and pictured that scene again, the blood on the dead bodies, my father arriving on scene. “You had blood on your boots,” I said, opening my eyes again. “I remember seeing your feet through the window as you rushed towards my upturned patrol car. They had flecks of blood on them.”

“Of course they would, there was blood all over the goddamn place,” he shouted at me.

“But you came from the opposite direction. There wasn’t any blood where you parked your...car,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “The police sign across the bonnet of the car. In my semi-consciousness, I thought that word ECILOP looked distorted and crinkled because I was looking at it through a smashed windscreen. It really was crumpled and distorted because the front of your patrol car was all smashed up. Why was it all smashed up, dad?” I asked, looking at him.

My father made no reply. He looked very pale and very ill as the rain dripped from the peak of his police cap and down the front of his coat.

Desperate to try and keep my voice even and calm when all I wanted to do was scream, I whispered, “It was you who drove them off the road. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill them, but you wanted to scare them. Jonathan Smith was a pain in your arse, because even after ten years, he wouldn’t give up trying to find out what really happened to his daughter that night. He wrote letters, didn’t he? He knew there’d been a cover-up. So every year, he would come back with his family and make a nuisance of himself – ruffle your feathers. You were scared that one day he might just prick the conscience of whoever Molly had been secretly in love with. So you saw them out on the road that day, and decided to scare him away – run him out of town. I bet you put on your sirens and lights to scare the horse. But it went wrong and the horse dragged the cart and the Smiths out into the road and in front of your patrol car. It was you who killed them not me,” I gasped, looking at him. And then everything hit me at once. “You weren’t calling me up on the radio that day because you were searching for me. You‘ve already said you knew I was with Michael, but once you had caused that accident, you needed to get me away from the area; you couldn’t risk me coming across it. You wanted it to look like some unexplained accident by whoever came across it later that day. When you heard me call up for urgent assistance, you knew I’d come across that accident – the accident you caused. That’s how you knew where to find me so quickly. You called up Mac and Woody. That’s why you used your mobile phone and not the radio. You knew they would come out and help cover things up. They weren’t covering for me – they were covering for you.”