It was a strange little article, I thought – as though it wanted to be a hatchet job, but the journalist hadn’t quite had the heart to unload on him. Was that because of the date? If the wiki page was right, this article had been published the day after Vanessa Wiseman’s car crash. Maybe the writer had tempered it down slightly, out of respect.
Barbara Phillips
.
The name rang a bell – and after a moment I remembered why.
The message I’d heard on my father’s answerphone: a journalist called Barbara, asking about an interview. I’d assumed she wanted to interview him, but perhaps I’d got it the wrong way around. Given she’d written this article, then, if my father had been working on something connected to Wiseman, maybe it was him who’d asked to speak to
her
.
You’ve got my number
.
I flicked through the address book to P, and yes, he did. So I could ask her too, or else the police could. I read through the article again, my attention catching on one line in particular.
Real crimes that took place in the 1970s
.
What crimes?
The book’s cover struck me again, out of the corner of my eye this time. The woman’s face, roughly transposed over the centre of the flower, screaming in pain as the thorns drew blood. What kind of real crimes could that be based on? I picked it up and allowed it to open where it wanted, on the page with the flower pressed inside it. It was my imagination, I was sure, but the petals seemed even more fragile than last time – flat and thin and weak – while the flower itself looked more obviously deformed. But it wasn’t my imagination that it bothered me a hell of a lot.
I turned back, all the way to the beginning of the book. There was no prologue, no indication of chapter number. It just started.
It does not happen like this
.
I read the first few pages of the book.
And then I carried on.
Extract from
The Black Flower
by Robert WisemanAs soon as Sullivan enters the office, before anything has even been said, he knows that DCI Peter Gray does not believe him. Or – more accurately – that Gray does not believe the little girl’s story but anticipates the fact that Sullivan will.
The first is obvious from his superior’s body language. Gray is visibly tense, but nowhere near as tense as he would be if taking the girl’s story as truth. The second is clear in a different way. After what happened to Anna Hanson, everyone in the department knows that DS Michael Sullivan cares very deeply when it comes to children, that he will not let a cry for help pass him by again. He has acquired a professional blind spot, one that potentially occludes his judgement. Even Pearson, his partner, believes that. Gray thinks the same.
The plastic-glass door rattles in its frame.
Gray motions to the chair.
‘Sit down, DS Sullivan.’
He is all business: determined to get this out of the way as quickly and with as little discomfort as possible. Sullivan resists the urge to leap straight in and argue his case, and instead does as he is told, pulling the thin chair back with a scrape and sitting down across from Gray. From behind him, even with the door closed, he can hear the clatter of typewriters, the whirr and bing.
For a moment, neither of them says anything.
Sullivan glances around. Gray’s office has a truly appalling colour scheme. The walls are painted an unpleasant shade of pea-green, the carpet is beige, and his old desk is made from dark-brown wood, chipped and hinged, like something you’d see folded up beneath the window in a pensioner’s bedsit. With the rusted, screeching filing cabinet and the cobwebbed potted plant on the windowsill, the office has the feel of something assembled in desperation from the last vestiges of a jumble sale.
The foam tiles in the ceiling were originally white, but over the years they have been stained with amber bruises from the cigarettes Gray
constantly smokes. His sharp, smart cap rests on the desk beside a glass ashtray filled with orange tab ends and ash. Sullivan’s report lies between them.Gray lights his next cigarette, exhales a plume of smoke, then slides the file towards the middle of the desk.
Take this back
, he seems to be saying.Sullivan says, ‘I’ve checked out some of the details, sir.’
Gray raises his eyebrows slightly.
Of course you have
. The gesture makes it clear Sullivan’s words bother Gray in a small way, but surprise him in no way at all.Already, Sullivan has no real hope – Gray’s demeanor makes that clear – but there is an urgent curl of anger in him, like the light you get in your vision after staring at a bare bulb. It had been there since the interview with the little girl.
‘Jane Taylor,’ he says. ‘She disappeared on the fifteenth of March last year from Brookland. She was last seen playing outside her house.’
He leans forward.
‘Now, there are conflicting witness reports, but two people saw a similar rusty red van to the one described in the file. And she was twelve years old, which is about the same age as the “Jane” our child describes playing with underneath her house.’
Our child
.Even as he says the words, he regrets them but it doesn’t matter. Gray is not really listening; he is simply following formal procedure and waiting for his chance to speak. At which point he intends to add a full stop to the conversation, whether Sullivan likes it or not.
‘What I’d like to do, sir,’ he says, ‘is present her with a photograph of Jane Taylor for verification. I have it in the file.’
Gray makes no move to check; of course, he has already seen it. Instead, he takes a drag on the cigarette. A second later, the air between them fills with derisory smoke.
‘Do you believe her story, Sullivan?’
Yes, he thinks.
I do
.‘It’s possible, sir. I think it would be—’
Gray holds a hand up.
‘
Possible
.’He says it as though musing, but Sullivan knows exactly what he is thinking. Everybody in the department believes that what they are dealing with here is a runaway child, scared to tell the truth and face the repercussions.
Everybody, that is, apart from Sullivan. But again, he knows what people think of him. After the death of Anna Hanson, he is too biased, too haunted, too primed to believe whatever comes his way. Of course, they all sympathise. A child’s death is supposed to affect you; there would be something wrong if it did not. At the same time, the unspoken rule is that you’re not supposed to dwell. A balance must be struck between empathy and strength; it must only affect you
so much
. A year on, Sullivan is now in breach of that unspoken rule. He has been since Clark Poole lodged his first complaint.‘Lots of things are
possible
, aren’t they?’ Gray says. ‘To me, this has the feeling of a child’s invention. Something she’s made up after watching an unfortunate movie.’Sullivan does not reply. Gray certainly has a point: the child’s story is the most horrific thing he has ever heard. But that does not, to his mind, mean she must have invented it.
Gray taps away some ash.
‘Have you found this farm?’
‘No, sir. There was no obvious way forward there.’
During the interview, the little girl told them that she had grown up at an isolated farmhouse. To her, of course, it was not isolated, because it was all she had ever known. She had a younger brother, a mother – and the father. The only time she ever encountered the outside world was on days like yesterday, when her father drove the family in his rusted old van to different places. Sometimes the journeys would take hours. And on many of those occasions, they returned with a new friend. Sometimes a child; sometimes an adult. Sometimes more than one.
But that, as awful as it sounded, was not as terrible as what happened to the victims once they arrived back.
‘It must be easy to find a farm,’ Gray insists.
‘Sir?’
‘If you look hard enough, I mean.’
Sullivan shakes his head, confused.
Gray spreads his hands. ‘If you look for a farm, you’ll find one. The same way that if you look for missing children called Jane, you will likely find several.’
‘I’m not following you, sir.’
‘What I’m saying, DS Sullivan, is that
our child
could have invented any name at all, and away you would have gone and found a missing child to match. They all have names, you know. Unfortunately, there are enough of them to cover all the names under the sun.’‘You think she invented it? Why would she?’
‘I don’t know. Why would I? The workings of young girls’ minds are a mystery to me – probably as much as they are to you. What about the handbag?’
‘We’ve identified the manufacturer. It’s a common brand.’
‘And it’s not a
little girl’s
handbag, DS. So she must have stolen or found it somewhere, yes? It certainly didn’t belong to this Jane Taylor, did it?’‘No, sir.’
But again, this is all in the file, which rests between them on the desk. The little girl never claimed the handbag belonged to her or to ‘Jane’. She said it belonged to one of the other women her father had brought to the farm, whose name she never learned. One of the many.
Gray taps the end of his cigarette over the chunky glass ashtray but then thinks better of it, and stubs it out altogether. Sullivan realises he has been allowed precisely the amount of time it took his superior to smoke it.
Gray says, ‘If you want to continue this foolishness in your spare time, that’s your own business, Sullivan. At least it will keep you away from certain people’s houses. But from what I hear, you would be better off spending your time at home.’
‘Pardon, sir?’
Sullivan leans forward. He’s not sure whether to be alarmed or
angry. What had his wife been saying? And to whom, in what circumstances? It is no secret between them that things have become complicated and difficult, but this is the first time he’s heard his personal problems referred to at work, even as obliquely as this.‘But that isn’t my concern,’ Gray says, ignoring the question. ‘And in the meantime, what we have, effectively, is a missing child, only in circumstances far more fortuitous than normal. Parents tend to want their children back. They are not usually difficult to find.’
Sullivan remembers the look of panic on the little girl’s face.
‘Sir—’
Gray holds up a hand.
‘Be quiet. We need an appeal, DS Sullivan, don’t we? Rather than further attempts at authenticating a fairy tale, we need a photograph for the newspapers. Rather than believing in horror stories, we need a press conference. We need information for the television. We need to get this girl’s image out there.’
Sullivan feels deflated. There is nothing he can say, and he knew this would happen as he walked in, but even so.
He also feels afraid.
Parents tend to want their children back
.That is the impression he got from the interview, and it is exactly what the little girl is afraid of. That her monstrous father is going to want her back very much. That he will not stop looking until he finds her and takes her home again.
‘Is there a problem, DS?’
‘No, sir.’ Sullivan stands up. ‘For the record, I think this is a mistake.’
‘That is
possible
, Sullivan. We shall see, won’t we?’Finally, now that the meeting is over, Gray picks up the file. He still doesn’t open it, but he stares down at the cover with a slight frown on his face, as though – beneath the bluster – he isn’t quite sure what to make of the details inside after all.
‘We shall see,’ he says again.
Sullivan walks back through the typing pool towards his desk, half imagining a slight pause in activity at each station he passes. But he does not care.
He is remembering Anna Hanson, and the one time they met. Last year, he and Pearson visited the primary school to talk to an audience of enraptured, cross–legged children; she pulled him aside timidly afterwards, and told him she was scared someone was watching her house. But Sullivan had not listened carefully enough and not believed sufficiently. Preoccupied with his marriage, he had heard only a child’s
inventions
. He had not even known her name. Weeks later, he had recognised her face in the missing persons report, and the next time he saw her had been on the beach, where she was tangled in strands of black seaweed, her small grey hand resting on the rocks.He thinks of the little girl on the promenade. How brave she has been; how much courage it must have taken for her first to run away, and then to trust them with her story. About her father, who will do anything to have her home again. Who will never stop.
Whatever anyone says, he
does
believe her and he
is
going to protect her. Because in a world that only takes, in a world filled with lost little girls who were not believed in time, someone has to.