Black Flowers (37 page)

‘It can be. You wanted it and I don’t. It’s yours now.’

Hannah pressed a piece of paper into Doherty’s hand; it had her phone number written on it.

‘If you don’t want it either, maybe at some point I can help.’

And then, before the woman could reply, she walked quickly away, back down the promenade. If Doherty wanted to continue her charade then so be it. It didn’t mean anything any more. The story was past tense now. You don’t have to read anything you don’t want to, and if Doherty got in touch then she would try her best to explain why and how.

The end.

When Hannah reached The Southerton, she thought about glancing behind her – but didn’t. She had no wish to see Suzanne Doherty standing where she had left her, her dyed-black hair whirling in the wind like tattered petals. She had her own flowers now, growing in the back garden of her father’s house. She’d planted them that summer, and they were very beautiful indeed. Reds and blues and yellows, just like she remembered. What she wanted to do now was light a fire and sit inside, and maybe go through to the kitchen occasionally, glance outside, and remind herself they were there.

And she could do that.

Extract from unfinished document by Christopher Dawson,
retrieved from his laptop

 

It’s one night, early September, 1993.

He is sitting at home with his wife and they are watching the television – or Laura is. The programme is a documentary about cancer. Years later, this is the disease that will claim her life, although neither of them knows that yet. Watching the programme, Laura keeps expressing small noises of sadness at the accounts of suffering and courage that flicker on the screen.
It’s impossible to imagine
, he can hear her thinking,
it’s so horrible for the people involved – thank God we aren’t going through something like that ourselves
. In the future, when they do, Laura will display levels of resolve and strength equal to anyone in the programme tonight, and he will save his own expressions of sadness and grief for times and places when she can’t hear them.

For now, though, he is just sitting beside her, reading. The front room is threadbare (they can’t afford better tailoring than this) but at least it’s warm and gently lit. The volume on the television is turned down: a low murmur, as quiet as a parent whispering to a sleeping child. Without taking his eyes off the book, he reaches down and runs his little finger over the back of her hand. A gentle tickle, just to remind her he is there and thinking of her.

And that is when someone knocks at the door.

It’s three hard
raps
from downstairs, harsh and aggressive. If the noise hadn’t stopped, he might have thought someone was trying to break in.

He turns to face the door to the hall. His first thought, of course, is of Neil, who is a light sleeper at the best of times and hard to settle. The noise might disturb him.

The second thought is the hour.

‘Late for visitors,’ Laura says.

‘I’ll go.’

He stands up and heads as quietly as possible into the hallway, to
the top of the stairs. For a moment, he listens for signs that Neil has been disturbed, but that end of the house remains silent, so he heads down the stairs carefully but quickly, anxious to avoid more noise. There is a square panel of bobbled glass above the old front door, black with night. It makes him uneasy. Laura was right – it is late. And it takes effort to get to their house, the long driveway and steps discouraging casual visitors. As he reaches the front door, he wishes there was a chain he could put on. He has never got round to installing one.

As he opens the door, he hears the burst of cold night air rattle the windows upstairs. Instinctively, he recognises the man in the black suit, standing on his doorstep.

‘Robert,’ he says.

It is him, and yet he’s still taken aback by how much Wiseman has changed since they last met. In his mind, Robert is slick and professional, a cool handler of crowds, very self-assured – everything, in fact, that he himself will never be. The man on his doorstep now might almost have been a different person altogether. His suit is shabby and tatty, far too big for him, and he has lost so much weight that his skull gleams through his skin. His hair is also much longer than he ever wore it in the past: unbrushed and greasy-looking, so the length feels more due to lack of care or interest than to any kind of design.

Of course, he knows from casual conversations that Robert has dropped off the radar since Vanessa’s disappearance. The rumours were that he was unreliable, his behaviour increasingly erratic. Professionally, he is damaged goods. Looking at him now, pale and gaunt and sickly, it is obvious that he is personally damaged too. His hollow eyes have a glint of insanity to them.

Robert nods at him and then stands expectantly, hands clasped before him. It looks like one hand is trying to pull off the fingers of the other.

Of course
, he thinks.

He wants to come in
.

The night breeze rustles the leaves over by the stone steps, and the sound makes him even more uneasy than this skeleton of a man on his
doorstep. He feels the presence of ghosts. Thinking of the warm, softly lit life he has upstairs behind him, he realises he does not want this man in his home. That in fact he will do anything to keep him out.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

The bluntness of the response brings a pained expression to Robert’s face. ‘I understand.’

‘I’m sorry, Robert. About everything that happened.’

‘Thank you. You were right, though, all along. Everything that happened is my own fault. I understand that now, and I’m going to try to make amends for it.’

‘You don’t look well.’

Robert nods, as though it’s of absolutely no consequence, then stares down at the ground for a moment. There is a carrier bag at his feet. Then he looks up again.

‘Vanessa came back.’

‘Oh?’

That surprises him; he would have expected to have heard.

‘She came back as a flower.’

The words settle. For a moment, he has no idea what to say.

‘Have you told the police?’

Robert smiles sadly. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Perhaps you should.’

‘Perhaps.’ The smile slips away. ‘But you could have done, as well, couldn’t you? When you heard what happened to Vanessa. Although … you probably didn’t know everything. And it’s not your responsibility, is it? Not your story. I understand that.’

He shifts slightly. It isn’t an accusation, but it feels like one. Because, yes, he had thought of telling the police what he knows. The reason he has not done … well, he thinks again of his wife and child upstairs. Regardless of whether it is
his
story or not, it is a dangerous one. He has distanced himself from Robert out of cowardice, perhaps, but not entirely for his own benefit. One can be cowardly on behalf of others.
And from the very beginning, he’s felt an instinctive desire to keep this story at arm’s length to protect those he loves.

Robert says, ‘If I did go to the police, would they believe me?’

‘I don’t know. They might.’

‘Maybe if I had somebody to corroborate meeting her?’

In the cold night air, he convinces himself to stand firm. He puts images of Laura and Neil at the forefront of his mind. And eventually, Robert looks away.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I’m going to write about it. I’ve got an idea for a new book. A sequel, I suppose. It’s about a man who writes a story. Part of it’s already real, and the part that isn’t comes true. I’m going to call it
Black Flowers
and I’m going to research it properly too. I’ve figured out how to find Charlotte again. I think she goes home on her birthday every year. I’m going to find out.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘It’s an idea, isn’t it? That’s all we have.’ Robert smiles to himself, then picks up the carrier bag. ‘Before I go, I’ve got something for you. I want you to take it. In case anything happens to me.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Please. For old times.’

There is something in his face then: that same expression of sadness, but stretched longer, back through time. And, for a moment, he sees his old friend there. The guilt threatens to bloom, turning his life inside out. He wants to help him. He knows he probably should. He presses it all down again, but something still makes him take the carrier bag from someone who had once been his best friend in the world.

‘Thank you.’

Robert steps back onto the flagstone path. It takes him outside the stretch of light from the door, leaving merely the pale impression of a skull in the night. He says:

‘In another life, Christopher.’

And before he can reply, his old friend is gone.

After he has closed and locked the door, he looks inside the carrier bag. There is only one item in there: a copy of
The Black
Flower. It is a paperback: well thumbed, spine bent, a handful of pages turned over
at the corners. As he begins to flick through, the book falls open very naturally near the centre, where he finds a black flower pressed carefully between the pages.

He stares at it for a while. The emotions he feels are impossible to describe, because he knows exactly what he is looking at.
She came back as a flower
. What he wants to do most of all is throw the book away, but he knows that he won’t do that – that what his old friend has just given him amounts to a sacred pact. He is its caretaker now, this dangerous story. So instead, he closes the book gently and looks at the front door with its glass square of black night above.

A chain.

He will get around to installing a chain.

At the top of the stairs, he pauses before entering the living room. What should he say to Laura? Instinctively, he wants to keep this from her. Although he will have to tell her it was Robert at the door, he doesn’t want to involve her any more than he has to. The book and the flower make that difficult.

‘Dad?’

Neil – calling from the darkness down the corridor. He hesitates for a moment, and then turns from the living room and walks down that way instead.

In Neil’s bedroom, he doesn’t turn on the main light, but walks across and flicks on the more gentle feathered lamp. It reveals his son, sitting upright in bed, looking frightened. He feels the familiar burst of love for the boy, and knows that, whatever guilt he feels over abandoning his old friend, it is worth it to keep his family safe.

‘Hey there,’ he says softly. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I heard a noise.’

‘It was nothing, I promise.’

‘I’m scared.’

He can see that. Neil often is scared at night, when the house is dark and the silence is heavy. Perhaps he should be growing out of it by now – but then again, does anyone ever grow out of that?

He sits down on the chair beside the bed.

‘You’re safe,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Mum and I would never let anything happen to you.’

Neil doesn’t look convinced by that. Although still afraid of the dark, he is already smart enough to have begun doubting that kind of reassurance. He amends it in his head now, purely for his own benefit.
I will do everything I can to keep you safe. Whatever it takes
.

‘Would you like me to read to you for a bit?’ he says.

Neil nods.

‘Well, okay then.’

He slips the carrier bag underneath his son’s bed, almost without thinking about it. He will figure out what to do with it later. For now, he crosses one leg over the other, and leans back in the chair, considering. They have a book on the go, but he doesn’t feel like picking it up.

It is hard to think of anything except Robert. His old friend has filtered down into his subconscious, and he knows that, whatever happens, he will write about him someday. It is inevitable. He will write about the real life story his friend stole, the piece of fiction he made from it, and the effect that had on everyone. Not yet, but someday. When it feels safe to.

And in the meantime … well.

There are only the two of them here.

Christopher leans in closer, almost conspiratorially.

‘This is not the story of a little girl who vanishes,’ he begins. ‘This is the story of a little girl
who comes back.’