Black Flowers (30 page)

Hopeless. But what else was I going to—

I saw something else, and my finger stopped moving.

Halfway between here and Thornton, where the map showed little but space and thin, empty lines for roads, my father had drawn a tiny cross on the page in black biro. It was almost impossible to see, which must have been how I’d missed it on the drive over, but it was there. Just beside a tiny village called Ellis.

Ellis F??

I stared down at the map, feeling cold, my heart tingling. Dad’s calendar – the itinerary he’d marked on it. The first note had been ‘Haggerty A’, and then, on the day he was to travel
to Whitkirk, he’d written ‘Ellis F’ – with two question marks afterwards, as though he wasn’t sure whether it was worth going or not.

I’d presumed it was another appointment to see a person, the same as Haggerty, but as I looked down at the cross he’d drawn, right there in the open countryside, another idea began humming inside me. One that didn’t necessarily make sense, but which wouldn’t go away.

Ellis Farm?

Patterns
, Hannah thought.

It was so easy to be fooled into seeing them. A long time ago, her father had taught her some of the constellations in the night sky, and then told her the truth about them: that in reality the stars people grouped together were light years apart and had no actual relationship to each other. But our ancestors found patterns in the sky and named them after gods and animals and heroes. They named them after stories, or else made-up stories about them. And yet, even now, when we look up we see constellations, and believe they’re real, because that’s what we’ve been taught to see.

She’d made a mistake with her father’s map. From what was found at the viaduct, she’d imagined it showed the location of bodies, but all she’d been doing was forming her own pattern from those crosses. In reality, it marked the distressing, final path a little girl – Anna Price – had taken one afternoon a long time ago. It was a record of her father’s grief and anger and self-recrimination.

Hannah stood in his kitchen again now, slowly turning the pages of her treasured photograph album. She started at the beginning, with what she now knew was a picture of another girl entirely, cradled in Colin Price’s arms, and worked her way through to the page that Barnes had stopped at earlier.

You would have been five years old when all this happened
.

The little girl, riding her bicycle unaided for the first time, with her knitted red jumper and a face creased up with a huge smile. Her father in the background, equally delighted. The last photograph of Anna Price.

Feeling blank, Hannah turned the page.

The girl in the next photograph was older, but not by much: not enough to arouse suspicion. This girl had been caught sideways on, kneeling down in the lounge by the fireplace, dressed in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt. Her hair was the same colour. Her face – it was impossible to tell.

Hannah flicked through a few more pages, searching for a shot of herself facing the camera head-on. Page after page, there were none. Not until she reached her early teens, by which time it was pointless to compare faces and evaluate their likeness.

He was a very clever man
.

Yes, Hannah realised now, he was. He’d been very careful in his construction of this album. Again, patterns. It looked like a straight line from the beginning to the end, one whole childhood, bookended by creaking leather covers, and there had never been any reason to question that because the lie inside was so well concealed. The edges of the ground where it was hidden had been smoothed over, so it was almost impossible to see the join.

She rubbed her face.

I don’t know who I am
.

The album showed an amalgam of two girls – and perhaps that was right, that she was a mixture of both. In some ways, she really was the little girl her father had loved so dearly in that first photograph, or at least she might as well have been. But she was also the grown woman who could look at death and violence and see it as matter of fact, just a progression, one thing transforming into another. Born as “Charlotte”, then raised as Anna in all but name, and nearly even in that as well. Her father had told her stories as truths and truths as stories, and now she was an unweavable tapestry of both.

He had done so with good intentions. She kept telling herself that – that as well as healing himself, he had done it to heal her. He had taken the horrors of her childhood and hidden them away; kept her safe and changed her from a hurt and scared little girl into a woman who could do anything.

You are DS Hannah Price. Daughter of DS Colin Price
.

Except she wasn’t.

It wouldn’t matter how many times she told herself that any more. Her father’s words had been designed to make her feel safe and untouchable, but they were lies. She couldn’t remember her early years on the farm right now: all that came to mind was the story he’d told her, and the familiar, now growing, feeling of dread and fear. But the story was a lie, and it wouldn’t last. There was nothing to stop the dread taking over. Hannah Price’s life was built on the foundations her father had laid, and those foundations had been destroyed.

She closed the album, leaned down on either side of it and rested her face in her hands.

And she began to collapse.

A little time later, her mobile rang. She ignored it. Shortly afterwards, it beeped to let her know she had voicemail, and this time she took it out and listened to the message.

‘DS Price? This is Simon at the office. I’ve got the files up now, and … I don’t know, maybe you’re on your way in like you said, but if not can you give me a ring? It’s about DCI Barnes. I really need a word.’

Beep.

Simon was one of her sergeants. She stared blankly at the phone for a few moments, unsure what to do. She didn’t feel up to having a conversation about the case right now, but if it was about Barnes she should take the call. His words came back to her.
There’s one last thing that needs to be taken care of
.

What had he done?

She hesitated for a moment longer, then called the office.

‘Simon,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

‘Hi there. Thanks for calling me back so quickly. This is … it’s a bit of a weird one actually. Have you seen DCI Barnes today?’

‘No.’ The lie came easy. She had no idea if it would come back to haunt her. ‘Why? What’s “a weird one”, Simon? Spare me the fuzzy talk.’

‘Sorry, boss. It’s just that a witness reported seeing someone fall from the clifftop earlier on. A possible jumper.’

Hannah went cold inside.

There is a way out of this. It won’t protect you from the truth, but it might at least protect your father’s reputation
. Barnes’s name was all over the file on Dennison too. He’d been questioned. He’d be a suspect.

I’ll never go to jail, Hannah
.

She forced herself to ask the natural question.

‘What’s that got to do with Barnes?’

‘Well, his car is in the car park at the top.’ The sergeant gave a nervous laugh, as though he couldn’t quite believe the implications of what he was saying. ‘It’s locked up and everything, but it’s just abandoned there. I’ve tried various numbers and he’s not answering.’

I needed to make sure you did what I wanted you to
.

Hannah closed her eyes. Barnes was going to take the responsibility, she realised.
Paying penance
. He’d told her everything he could bring himself to, and planted the photograph in the file to make sure she read the rest before anyone else did. He’d made sure she was prepared for what was to come. And then he’d done this.

You’ll understand when you read the details. It’s not going to be easy though
.

I’m sorry
.

She said, ‘You’ve got the coastguard out?’

Simon had, but Hannah barely listened to his answer.

Where did this leave her, if Barnes really had done what she
thought? Was it possible to save her father’s reputation? Once the bodies were identified as Dennison and Wiseman, questions would get asked, and in the light of his suicide the answers would now point towards DCI Graham Barnes.

Hannah’s real identity – or, at least, the murder of her father’s real daughter – might be revealed when people put the details in the files together, but technically that was a separate issue. She hadn’t committed a crime by being adopted, presuming that was what had happened, or by forgetting where she’d come from. Nobody had broken the law. Regardless, she could certainly lobby hard to keep it out of press announcements, and the force would close ranks to protect their own.

Your father was a good man, and he always kept you safe
.

Now it’s your turn to repay that
.

Yes, she thought. Whatever he’d done, and whoever she had been once, Hannah Price probably owed him that much. There was the slightest of possibilities that she could weather all this. On the outside, at least.

‘All right.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Let’s try not to worry too much in the meantime. I’ll be in shortly.’

‘Okay. Oh, there’s one other thing. I’ve had a message passed through from Neil Dawson.’

‘Finally. And?’

‘He’s on his way back to Whitkirk and wants you to call him. Says it’s urgent, apparently. About … Charles Dennison and Robert Wiseman? Those names mean anything to you?’

Hannah shook her head and didn’t reply.
There it is
. Barnes had claimed he’d no idea if Christopher Dawson and the mysterious woman were connected to the older case. Obviously, somehow they were, and Neil Dawson had independently discovered the identities of the bodies at the viaduct. So she wasn’t in the clear after all. So there it was: the unknown you didn’t expect and never saw coming; the thing that trips you up and sends you sprawling on the ground.

‘Boss?’

‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘I’ve heard of Wiseman. You don’t recognise the name?’

‘Nope.’

‘Never mind then.’

Hannah took a deep breath.

You can do this
, she told herself.
You’re going to have to do this
.

‘Did Dawson leave his mobile number?’

Extract from
The Black Flower
by Robert Wiseman

 

There is the steady sound of a shovel crunching into the earth.

Sullivan is staring across a field of unkempt grass. There is a pale concrete bunker to the side on the right, while, ahead of him, he sees a row of apple trees at the edge of a wood. Before them, a fat, bald man is working at the ground. He is sunned-pink and sweating, cumbersome as a pig in his denim overalls, digging at the soil beneath the trees. He finishes and leans the spade against a tree. Sullivan watches as the man pitches something white and flopping into the hole at the roots, then begins to shovel dirt back on top.

He understands what he is seeing.

Beneath the house behind him, Jane Taylor was buried up to her neck and left to die. All around her in that dark crawl space were the black flowers that had grown there, feeding on her life as it ebbed into the soil. Now this man is seeding another victim, only this time in different soil. This body will be drawn up into the trees above it, recycled into bark and leaves and fruit.

When he is finished, the fat man reaches up and clips an apple from the lower branches. Then he bites into it, and the noise is like bone snapping.

Sullivan wakes up with a start.

His small bedroom has an atmosphere of shock in the air, as though someone has just cried out, startling it. But he is the only person here, and he doesn’t want to think of himself as the sort of man who screams in his sleep.

He lies there for a while, his body hot and slick with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest.
You didn’t scream
.

But he knows that he might have done.

It has been seven months since Charlotte disappeared. Four since Pearson’s suicide. And two months since he separated from his wife and moved into this small terraced house. On the outside, the red brick
façade is dulled almost to black in places; the inside is even more dour. All the furniture came with the property, and he spends most of his evenings sitting on the dusty settee, drinking, and then most of his nights dreaming of awful things.

He is no longer a DS. He is no longer much of anything.

Except, in that time, he knows he has become exactly the sort of man who screams in his sleep. His behaviour has grown erratic and strange to the outside world. Hygiene tends to be an afterthought; he washes every three days at best, and never deliberately in time with his occasional trips from the house. When he goes out walking, he wanders aimlessly along country roads, or sometimes through the streets of Thornley. Trying to think. But his thoughts are so random and dislocated that making sense of them is like staring down at a milling crowd and willing it into a straight line.

Today, he showers – or as close as he can get to it in the house. There isn’t a shower: just a stethoscope of white plastic tubing, two ends of which go on the taps in the bath, the other a rudimentary sprinkler he holds overhead while sitting in the tub. The water is always too cold; bathing is a feat of endurance. As he sits there, head bowed and shoulder aching, shivering below an ice-cold trickle, he tells himself this is the reason he often doesn’t bother washing any more: too much effort; too much indignity. But the truth is that he doesn’t bother because he isn’t bothered.

Sullivan turns the taps off, one by one, and receives a burst of colder water on his toes. As he towels himself dry in front of the small cabinet mirror, he can see his body is deteriorating in tandem with his mind. The months seem more like years. He is gaunt and drinking too much. The effects are clearly reflected in the mirror. The alcohol is reducing him, so that he is almost painfully aware of his internal organs. It is as though his body is thinning out in preparation for a period of hibernation, or perhaps something worse. As though it is purifying itself in advance of an ordeal.

Downstairs in the front room, the carpet is gritty under his toes, and dust hangs in the air – the whole house is stagnant. Increasingly, he can imagine it eating itself: gnawing away at its insides, the way his
own body is beginning to do. The walls seem to be closing in a little more every night, attempting to squeeze him out of existence without anybody noticing.

He makes himself a coffee, then sits at a table by the front-room window, peering cautiously out through the curtains. The gap is the smallest he can make without drawing attention from the street outside.

This is how he spends much of his time. He keeps an eye on the people out there, and watches the vehicles. He always expects to see a rusted red van parked outside, or drawing away slowly down the road, but it is never there. It is only never there because he doesn’t look out at the right moment to catch it.

Sullivan thinks constantly of Charlotte.

He remembers how frightened she was when he found her that day on the promenade, and how he tried to show her kindness in the days afterwards and promised to look after her and keep her safe. How he gave her a glimmer of hope and then failed her utterly. She should never have trusted him. Some things, perhaps, it is better not to have had.

And there is something worse even than that. The foster home of Mrs Fitzgerald was never officially listed, and so there is only one possible way Charlotte’s family can have located it. However careful he thought he was being, they must have followed him on one of his evening visits. He led them to her. And while he was otherwise occupied, they had taken her away.

That is all he can think of. The only saving grace is the corresponding knowledge that if they were following him back then, perhaps they are still following him now. Perhaps they are a little like Clark Poole in that way. Which is why he keeps looking.

Which is why he opens the curtains a fraction wider now.

The van is not there.

Later, he drives to Thornley.

It is a smaller town than Faverton, and further away, but Sullivan prefers to do his shopping here. There are no familiar faces, and less
chance of an awkward encounter with someone he no longer has any interest in talking to. Nobody knows him here. On the ladder of social respectability, nobody he encounters is ever surprised to find him so low down.

It is an ordinary day with no hint of magic to it. Rain speckles the tarmac and the air smells of the sea. He loads heaving bags of groceries and bottles into the boot of his car; the weight makes the handles twist awkwardly, cutting off the circulation in his fingers. Behind him, he hears the rattle and clatter of trolleys being rolled across the stone ground. Sullivan looks around. The car park serves the whole of Thornley’s shopping area. There is the small supermarket, a garage, a DIY store.

Sullivan pauses, one bag half supported by the boot, half supported by his hand.

The van is old, rusted and crimson: the colour and texture of dried blood. It is parked with its nose up to the DIY store, practically pushing into the shelves and buckets lined up outside. From here, he can just make out that the cabin is empty.

Without taking his eyes off the van, Sullivan finishes lowering the bag. It rests down awkwardly, the contents slumping. Red vans are commonplace, he thinks; it means nothing. And yet, after he’s finished loading his shopping, he sits in his car and continues to watch the vehicle.

Rain builds up on the windscreen.

A few minutes later, the door to the DIY store opens and a man emerges. Almost unconsciously, Sullivan leans forward on the steering wheel. The man is weathered and rough-looking, as though he spends much of his time outdoors. He has no coat, and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, his forearms like thick lengths of rope. His hair is dark but greying, medium length and ruffled immediately by the wind. The face it frames is tanned and impassive. He is carrying a large, brown paper bag; Sullivan can’t see what’s inside.

Behind him, a little boy trails out of the store.

Sullivan watches, heart alive.

But a moment later, the shop door closes. It is only the two of them:
father and son. As they get into the van, Sullivan leans back again. He wants to tell himself it is nothing; he
does
tell himself that. The man he’s just seen is very different from the pig-man of his nightmares.

But then, why wouldn’t he be?

As the van reverses out of its parking spot and swings around towards the exit, Sullivan makes a decision. What is worse? Following for the sake of it and wasting his time? Ultimately, that is no different from how he’s lived these last few months.

He starts the engine and the wipers squeak the rain from the glass.

No, what would be worse is
not knowing
. Sitting at his table, peering through his curtains at an empty street and thinking, endlessly,
what if?

He follows the van cautiously, maintaining the kind of careful distance that, if this is the man, he himself must have kept seven months ago while following Sullivan. They pass through a small, rural village: little more than a row of old, conjoined cottages, a post office, pub and grocery shop. The road curls through the middle. He drives past an old black church sitting in a yard dotted with gravestones, then he is out the other side.

As the vehicle rumbles ahead of him down the endless country lanes, Sullivan feels a thrill inside him. A glimmer of hope. It does not occur to him that the world does not work this way – that it never gives, only takes – or that he no longer has any real idea where he is.

He allows himself to believe that he is following rather than being led.

He has forgotten that it does not happen like this.