With the realisation of my father’s true deceit becoming clear before me, I leapt towards him and started to slap him and beat him with my fists. With tears streaming down my face, I screamed, “How could you let me think I had killed that family? How could you have used me like that? Scare me that I was going to go to prison? You’re meant to be my father. I’m your daughter – your little girl. All I ever wanted to do was make you feel proud of me,” I sobbed. “How could you let me carry that guilt around...”
My father pushed me away. I fell backwards into the mud. “You have nothing!” he screamed at me, a flash of bright, white lightning appearing in the night sky over his shoulder. “I have your signed statement, remember? The one you signed to say that you were the one who hit those people? Not me.”
“I have statements, too,” I screamed back at him, clawing myself out of the mud and back to my feet. “I’ve seen the statements you changed the night Molly died.” Then remembering how Vincent had told me that two patrol cars were out of use because they had been damaged, I said, “I know your patrol car is in the garage being fixed up from the damage caused by hitting that cart.”
“Who has these statements? Who told you this about my car?” my father shouted.
“Vincent!” I shouted, as I scanned the shadows for any sign of him.
“Vincent?” my father roared. “Who in the hell is Vincent?”
“The new recruit at the station,” I barked back at my father, now too angry to feel fearful of him.
“What new recruit?” he snapped.
“The one you relegated to the filing cupboard. The one you gave the push-bike to...because the others think he doesn’t fit in.”
And as I started to describe Vincent, my father screwed up his face as if eyeing me with suspicion. “Is this some kind of joke, or have you really just lost your fucking mind?”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped back at him.
“The only copper I can ever remember working in the filing room and riding about on a police push-bike was Constable Vincent Lee. And as we already know, he died at the bottom of that well ten years ago,” my father said, looking confused.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“You can’t be talking about the same Vincent,” I said. “He’s been in my flat. I’ve seen him, touched him and...” I wanted to say fallen in love with him, but something stopped me. I looked at my father and added, “You found my missing iPod. You told Mac to bring it over, but Mac was too busy, so he gave it to...”
“I’ve never touched your iPod,” my father barked at me, then smiled. “I see, so what you’re saying is all of your evidence against me is on the say-so of a dying man who sounded like Elmer Fudd, and a note left by a ghost. I can see the jury now. They’ll laugh you out of court. It won’t even get to court, you stupid girl.”
“Vincent isn’t a ghost!” I screamed back at him, feeling suddenly confused and panicked.
“He’s dead,” my father smiled, as another bolt of lightning zigzagged across the night sky. “He’s rotting in Cliff View Cemetery.”
“You’re lying,” I spat, my heart turning cold in my chest as I took the letter from the bottle.
... This is the dying declaration of Police Constable Lee 5013
I read the line over and over, and in my mind’s eye, I saw those numbers 5013 glisten before me. I had seen those numbers before. They had been pinned to Vincent’s epaulettes. With every part of me beginning to prickle with gooseflesh, I realised how everything Vincent had done had been leading me to this very moment – to discovering the truth about my father. The Police song, Message In A Bottle, which he had downloaded to my iPod, the bottle he had left for me on my coffee table, the file he had shown me with the statements and letter from Jonathan Smith, the scars on his back and head, probably caused as he crashed into the bottom of the well. In my heart, I heard him whisper as he held me close on the bed, ‘I know what it’s like to be scared and alone.’
With my heart aching, I dropped to my knees in the mud, his letter clenched in my fist. Vincent had been describing how he had felt as he lay dying in the bottom of the well. To think of him on his own, dying in a foot of water next to Molly Smith’s broken body, made me feel as if my heart had been ripped from my chest.
“Vincent!” I screamed, throwing my head back, letting the rain fall upon my upturned face.
I couldn’t hear him anymore, just the sound of the rain, the wind, and thunder. I knew he had gone. He had come to do what he had needed to do.