Dan’s voice cuts across everything. ‘Perhaps we should get a lawyer…?’
I turn to stare at him and then I realise that everyone’s doing the same. Olivia’s the first to question him.
‘Why?’
‘Because there are questions that none of us seem able to answer.’
I turn from him to a gaping Liv to a pair of officers with unreadable straight faces. Is Dan right? Are we really suspects and this casual visit is anything but? Does he believe Olivia’s not being entirely truthful? Does he suspect me? Or is it guilt on his behalf? He used the stun gun on Tyler for whatever reason and now he’s scrambling to cover himself?
‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad.’
Olivia’s stung and the air is suddenly thick, like a smoggy August day before a thunderstorm.
‘I’m not saying you have—’
‘So why do I need a lawyer?’
‘It’s complicated, love. I’m not saying—’
She spins back to the officers: ‘Ask me whatever you want. I want you to find him.’
Dan shuts up but there’s a big part of me that thinks he probably knows what he’s talking about. If the officers suspect Olivia for whatever reason, then she could talk herself into trouble even is she’s done nothing. Not only that, the blood might have come from my car. I should be the suspect.
I don’t know what to do, so I end up doing nothing.
And then Olivia proves how much smarter than me she is by saying something that hadn’t crossed my mind.
‘Do you think Tyler broke in?’ she asks. ‘You think he got in through the back door, cut himself somehow and then bled in the garage?’
Sometimes I can be so thick-headed. PC Marks shifts in her seat and it’s obvious that’s what they think. Why didn’t I come up with that? The answer’s obvious. Not only am I paranoid about Dan and his intentions but I’m convinced I did something awful on the night I woke up in the field.
It’s PC O’Neill who answers. ‘That’s a possibility we’re examining,’ he says.
Classic police speak. It’s up there with ‘proceeding in a northerly direction’.
‘Have you noticed anything missing?’ he adds.
Everyone’s looking at Olivia and she must feel it because she hugs herself a little tighter, shrinking under the attention. The thing with Olivia is that, deep down, we really do share a lot of the same traits. I was happy with my own small group of friends when I was her age, never caring for the approval of adults. She’s like that, too – except her look is her shield.
It took me a long time to realise that I picked the wrong battles with her. Her hair’s pink now – and it’s fine. But I was furious when she dyed it black the first time. It seems so silly now and I don’t remember why I cared. I told her to wash it out but she refused. It was permanent, so I don’t even know why I was arguing. When she turned it silver, I said she was blessed with youth; that older people do all they can to not have hair that colour. I wish I’d simply told her that it suited her. I made a fuss over tattoos, over too much make-up, the piercings. In the end, none of that matters. She’s still the vulnerable, shy, introverted kid inside. All of the other stuff is the way she wants to portray herself. The hair colour, the piercings, the tattoos are about confidence. She likes those things, so it gives her self-assurance. That is then projected to everyone else. It’s a good thing, and yet I tried to make it negative. I made it about me instead of about her.
I never understood that until it was too late.
The wrong battles were fought and lost. When it came to the right battle – Tyler – Oliva was too far gone to care for my opinion. And why should she? I’d been wrong about all those other things.
That confidence she portrays through her look is evaporating now as she pulls at the metal bar that pierces her right ear in two places.
‘I’m not missing anything,’ she says.
PC O’Neill looks up to me.
‘There was fifty pounds in the kitchen drawer,’ I say. ‘Or, I think there was. It’s been there forever – emergency money. It’s gone now. That’s the only thing I’ve noticed.’
Dan says he thinks there was money in the drawer, adding that he’s not noticed anything else missing.
The constable focuses back on Olivia. ‘Do you know of any reason why Tyler might have been in the house?’
‘No.’
‘Or the garage specifically?’
‘No.’
‘Did he have a key?’
‘No.’
We go around in circles for a while. The officers clarify some information from the last time they were here, but there’s no getting over that Olivia insists Tyler wouldn’t have been in the garage. She asks if they have any idea where he might be and they tell her they’ve checked his debit card use and mobile phone records, plus the small amount of local CCTV footage, all to no avail. They’re not as brutally direct as they could be but the message is clear – they have no idea what happened to him.
They do say the quality of photos received from Frank weren’t great and ask Olivia if she has anything better. She scrolls through her phone with practised ease, her thumbs a blur until she twists the screen to show them a selection of images. The officers ask her to email the pictures to them, which she does in about two seconds.
They seem in no hurry to leave and it’s PC Marks who picks up the conversation, asking if there’s anything particular by which Tyler can be identified. ‘Does he have any tattoos, for instance,’ she says. ‘We’ve gone through this with his father but figured you might have a better idea.’
‘He’s got the letters TY tattooed on his chest,’ Olivia replies. She pats her left side, pointing out the spot as the officer makes a note.
‘Anything else?’ PC Marks asks.
‘No other tattoos but he always wears his tags,’ Olivia adds.
‘Tags?’
‘Dog tags. I bought them for his birthday last year. He was really into army stuff at the time.’
‘Is there anything distinctive about it? A logo? Something like that?’
‘It has T-Y on one side and O-D on the other.’ She pauses and then quickly adds: ‘Olivia Denton.’
PC Marks nods. We all got it, but her initials are unfortunate when it comes to a gift for her boyfriend, who may or may not be into drugs.
‘Do you have a picture?’
She does, of course. Olivia flicks through her phone, finding another photo and emailing that to the officer as well. Now that she’s mentioned it, I remember the small rectangle of silver attached to a chain that Tyler always seemed to be wearing. I didn’t know Olivia bought it for him. He played with it absent-mindedly and, though it’s really annoying, there were bigger things to be frustrated about when it comes to Tyler.
The officers check a couple of other things with Olivia but I’m not listening. I’ve done my best to avoid the inevitable, to try to forget waking up in that field, but it’s obvious what I have to do. It was apparent before and even more so now.
I need to find out what happened in the Grand Ol’ Royal Hotel.
Chapter Thirty-Six
After the police leave, Dan heads off to the gym for the second time. On this occasion, he doesn’t return with the police after a minute. Olivia has an afternoon shift at the café. She says she’ll be fine and I get the sense she wants to be by herself. I don’t blame her.