I drove along the road my father had marked on the map.
Fields stretched out to the left: grey and gloomy in the dying light. To the right, there was a wood of sorts, where the trees were tall and bare and the ground below was carpeted black with broken twigs and branches. Glancing down at the map on the passenger seat, the cross was about halfway along this stretch of road. Not far now.
Now it was just a matter of keeping an eye out.
And keeping calm
, I told myself.
Not getting your hopes up
.
The excitement I’d felt back at the hospital had faded slightly now. My father had drawn a cross on a map, but that didn’t mean there was anything conclusive there in real life, regardless of whether it turned out to be a farm. He’d been researching a book, after all, not setting out to solve a crime. And, more than anything else, my father had been a careful, sensible man. If he knew the farm in
The Black Flower
really existed, and if he’d somehow discovered its location, he’d have gone straight to the police and done his best to make them believe in it too. He certainly wouldn’t have just pencilled a trip there into his itinerary as though it was no big deal.
So it
couldn’t
be that. It had to be something else entirely.
And yet … from the calendar, he had probably come here before going to Whitkirk, where he’d found Charlotte on the
promenade and gone to the viaduct with her. The old man at the hospital had never figured out how to find her for himself, but he’d killed my father in the woods. How had he ended up there? All I could think was that he must have been following Dad, so he had to have started following him for a reason – their paths needed to have crossed. My father must have turned up at the wrong place and attracted the old bastard’s attention somehow.
Why here, Dad?
What brought you here?
The question was preoccupying me so much that I drove straight past the entrance. Without warning, the trees to the right were suddenly replaced by a drystone wall and open fields. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I could see a gap between the woods and the wall. I slowed down. The road behind was empty. The car whined angrily back up the road until I drew level with the end of the trees.
It was an entrance, all right, an opening onto a dirt track, only just wide enough for a vehicle to fit through. The track cut down the edge of the field, holding tight to the treeline. A constant tread of tyres had worn the grass away, leaving two strips of bare land separated by a raised, tatty ridge of turf.
An old sign was nailed on a post behind the wall. Red letters, painted on white.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO ACCESS
No other indication of what was down there.
On the right side of the track, pressing against it, the stripped-down woodland was dark and forbidding. The field on the open side seemed unkempt and unused. About fifty metres further along the road, it was separated from the next field along by another drystone wall running parallel to the track, and there was nothing to see beyond that except a pylon, standing on splayed metal legs a few hundred metres away.
I turned off the engine and was met by the heavy silence of the
countryside. A moment later, I began to notice little clicks and rustles of undergrowth, the sigh of the breeze.
I checked the map again. This seemed approximately right, and there was nothing obvious further down the road. So this had to be place, didn’t it? I stared down the track. It was difficult to imagine there was anything
bad
down there – it wasn’t even gated off. There was just that sign.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
I listened to that heavy silence – the quiet that wasn’t quiet.
Was Ally down there?
Staring down the path, I thought it out to her:
Are you there?
I felt a tingle of connection that was surely just fear. But there was no way I could leave without finding out, so I started the engine again and drove a little further on, to where the road widened, and parked up.
Call the police again, Neil
.
I knew that I should. Even if I couldn’t get hold of Hannah Price, I should at least let
someone
know where I was. My phone was in my jeans pocket; I got it out now. The conversation wasn’t exactly going to be an easy one. Where to start?
But then it started ringing.
Christ
. It nearly gave me heart failure.
Unknown number
I answered it. ‘Hello?’
‘Neil Dawson?’
‘Yes. Who is this please?’
‘This is Hannah Price – DS Hannah Price. You left a message for me.’
I recognised the voice, but she sounded different from when we’d talked before. At the mortuary, as I identified my father’s belongings, she’d been kind, warm and sympathetic, as though she really felt for my loss. Now, though, she sounded … blank. Far more controlled and professional, anyway.
‘Thanks for calling me back.’
She said, ‘How did you know about Charles Dennison and Robert Wiseman, Neil? That information’s not been confirmed for certain here yet, never mind released to the public. It bothers me how you know that.’
‘Well—’
‘Especially given that your father died in the same location.’
‘I think I can explain all of it.’
‘Can you.’ She was silent for a moment. Then: ‘Where are you? You said you were on your way back to Whitkirk?’
‘Change of plan.’
‘Then I think you need to change it back again.’
‘This might be more important.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m at a farm.’
Hannah Price started to say something but then stopped. Again, silence panned out on the line, but there was something different about it this time. The mention of the farm had done it. She knew about it. She knew something anyway.
‘Where?’ she said.
‘Just outside a little village called Ellis. You know it?’
‘Yes.’
I started talking then. It all came out in a stream and didn’t make much sense even to me as I was saying it. But I told her that Wiseman had based one of his books on a real little girl, on a real family who had wanted her back, and that my father had known about them too. I told her they’d killed him and taken Ally.
‘And I think she’s here.’ I was babbling. ‘Or she might be. She’s pregnant, and I wished it away – that’s partly why they took her – and, oh God, I’ve got to find her. You have to believe me.’
‘Neil,’ Hannah said.
‘Neil.’
‘Yes.’
‘Calm down.’
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Listen to me. This is really important, all right? Don’t do anything.’
‘But—’
‘
Don’t do anything
. Sit in your car and wait for me. I’m on my way; I’m walking out of the door right now. Wait where you are. Okay?’
‘Yes.’
I glanced back at the break in the dry stone wall, feeling that tingle of connection again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait right here.’
Outside the car, it seemed even quieter than before. As I walked down the dirt track, though, I began to hear a different sound from the undergrowth and the breeze. It was the hum of the pylon in the distance: an electrical noise, almost a vibration in the air. The kind of sound I imagined you’d feel in your teeth as you entered an empty place where there’d been a radiation spill.
High above me, the cables stretched over the trees. In the other direction, they spread into the distance, finding a brother, and then a second, all the way to the horizon. It only served to emphasise the vast, empty span of the land here. I felt small and isolated: out of sight of the real world, and far away from its safety.
Which you are
.
Maybe. But I couldn’t wait for Hannah Price. Not when Ally might be down here right now. Not when anything could be happening to her, and when that ‘anything’ would be my fault.
I kept close to the treeline as I walked. After I left the pylon behind, the only real sound was the occasional snap of a twig breaking under my shoes. The trees to the right were tall and straight. Despite the sheer number, they had a dead feeling to them. There were no leaves that I could see, and the few branches were fragile and skeletal, as though someone had come through here, stripping them methodically for firewood, only to abandon it all on the ground. Even in the early evening darkness, I could tell the undergrowth between the tree trunks was thick with them.
Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I kept imagining I saw movement, as though someone was keeping pace with me in there. But whenever I stopped and looked, there was nothing.
Just shadows making me nervous.
Up ahead, the track rode over a hump in the land. When I reached it, I glanced behind me. I could see the wall in the distance, but it seemed a hell of a long way back now. The sprawl of field was shivering in the evening breeze, grey and drained of colour. Everywhere I looked, the night seemed to be seeping upwards from the ground, staining the world darker and darker, like black ink creeping slowly up a sheet of tissue paper.
I started walking again, over the rise and then straight on. Ahead, it was just more of the same, and it felt like there was nobody alive for miles in any direction. But that wasn’t true; there had to be. This road had to go somewhere.
A little further on, I found out where.
The first thing I noticed was the corner of the fence. In fact, with the darkness settling in now, I almost walked straight into it: a rusted metal pole, about twelve-feet high, poking up from the ground on the edge of the treeline. Chicken wire extended out from it, stretching away down the side of the dirt track, but also at a right angle, straight into the woods.
Someone had cordoned off a section of the trees.
I stepped closer to the corner of the fence, wanting a better look, and something crunched beneath my foot. But this was a different sound and sensation from the branches underfoot. I stepped back again and looked down.
Then stood very still.
A dead bird. Or the remains of one anyway: just a few dirty tufts of feather still clinging to the fractured bones.
Glancing around, I spotted another.
And then a third.
And also something else. At the base of the fence, there was a thin strip of wire running parallel to the ground, a couple of
inches up. Carefully, I moved closer. The wire was clamped to the mesh by large metal crocodile clips, placed along it at metre-wide intervals.
An electrified fence.
Why would someone have an electrified fence? I looked around at the birds again. Was it to keep animals out, or maybe to discourage trespassers?
Or was it, just possibly, to keep something inside?
I listened carefully.
From somewhere in the thick of the woods, on the far side of the fence, I could hear a different noise now. It was far away, only just detectable. A gentle
putt-putt
noise. The sound of machinery left idling out by itself. A generator, I guessed.
I scanned the field, more nervous now, but the night was emerging so quickly that it was hard to see anything. But there was no obvious movement out there. No sound beyond the generator and the vacant hush of the breeze.
I walked a little further down the track.
What is this place?
I didn’t have to go far to find out. A short distance down, the trees thinned out and I came to a wide break in the fence. The trail of tyre marks veered out here before heading inside, as though whatever vehicle used it was large enough to need a turning circle. Beyond it, there was a wide corridor of dusty, light-brown ground. A sort of half-completed, makeshift driveway.
There were more dead animals at the side of the open gate, but they were rabbits this time, and these hadn’t wandered into the fence and been electrocuted. Instead, they were laid out in a neat row. Someone had caught them, or killed them somehow, then brought them here and left their tiny bodies in a line. The one nearest to me looked like a cat stretching. Except its tongue was poking from its mouth, and one black eye was staring everywhere at once. Flies darted around it. A moment later, I realised I could smell them.
It wasn’t odd to go hunting, especially out here in the countryside. But still. Something was very wrong here.
I looked at the gate.
Why had it been left open though? If this was the real farm from
The Black Flower
then that didn’t make sense. I kept coming back to the other question too. How could my father possibly have known about this?
And yet the air felt electric.
I stepped through the gate into the compound.
A little distance ahead, the driveway looked to open up into a slightly wider area. I could see a building of some kind, obscured by the hang of the trees to the side. I forced myself to walk forward, still keeping close to the trees. The further I walked, the louder the
putt-putt
of the generator became. It was the only sound I could hear now. Even the breeze seemed to have died.