by Steve Mosby
On the right, where my bed had been, the wall was now entirely covered with shelves. The bottom one contained reference materials and box files; the rest, all the way up to the ceiling, were filled with what looked like hundreds of copies of my father’s own books.
I stared at those for a moment. There were all the English editions, and it was easy enough to pick out the hardbacks and paperbacks of each, with updated editions studiously slotted into place. The foreign copies were harder to decipher, but they seemed to have been grouped together by title as well. Had he kept one of everything? I glanced here and there in wonder. The books, along with various anthologies, appeared to be arranged chronologically – autobiographically, I thought – so that Worry Dolls was at one end of the top shelf, clean and fresh and new.
What must it be like to have your life’s work on display like this? The number of spines visible was impressive enough, never mind all the pages and words contained inside. You could practically hear the pages whispering.
I turned around and walked over to the desk. When it was my room, there had been an enormous wardrobe here, and a standing lamp with an old feathered shade. My father’s desk looked even older than the wardrobe had been; it was made of pitted wood, the texture of a desk in a school science lab. The lamp had been replaced by an angled metal contraption. The only other things on the desk were a battered old paperback and dust. But there was a clean, laptop-shaped space in the middle. So, wherever he’d gone, it looked like he’d taken his computer with him.
I looked up. There was a calendar on the wall, with photos of sports cars; this month’s page had caught a blurred red Ferrari in the act of cornering on a racetrack. Below the picture, various days in September were blocked out. Last Friday, he’d written Haggerty A. Saturday was marked Ellis F ??
And then, underneath that, Southerton Hotel, Whitkirk, with an arrow running across all the days until tomorrow.
So that was that. He’d gone away after all.
It pissed me off a bit that he hadn’t let me know but then, he was his own man, and it wasn’t like I’d been in touch myself. If it was work-related, it was possible he’d been so distracted that it just hadn’t occurred to him to tell anyone.
What was he working on?
I looked again at the book. It wasn’t like my father to sit and read in here; he was a front-room, armchair reader. I picked it up. A novel, and an old one at that. It looked like it had been left out in the rain, or found in a field – or maybe just thumbed through so many times that it had begun to fall apart, like some ancient map.
The title at the bottom was embossed, and had once been gold, but most of the colour had flecked away over the years.
THE BLACK FLOWER
And in smaller letters underneath:
ROBERT WISEMAN
The cover image above was strikingly horrible. It resembled a rose, except the petals were black, and the centre had been twisted to form a woman’s face contorted in agony. Sharp thorns curled upwards from the stem, drawing beads of crimson blood from the petals.
I flipped it over and read the sparse description on the back:
This is not the story of a little girl who vanishes. This is the story of a little girl who comes back …
A little girl who appears on a promenade, clutching a bag. Inside, there is only a mysterious black flower. She has no name, no identity, and nobody knows where she came from. What she does have is a terrifying and disturbing story to tell.
The policeman who finds her is determined to discover the truth. Because the girl’s tale is surely too horrific to be real. But if it is true, then her life is in danger. And she is not alone.
I started to flick through it without thinking. The book immediately fell open in the middle. Where, pressed inside the pages, there was a flower.
The remains of one anyway. It looked half fossilised. The stem was reed-thin and crisp; the petals, dried and flat, their colour paled almost to grey, with tiny black veins visible in the surfaces. It reminded me of the skin of a very old lady.
A black flower.
I wondered if maybe it was some kind of promotional thing but that couldn’t be right. Because the more I looked at it, the more I felt there was something wrong with the flower. It was ugly. And certainly not something you’d normally choose to keep. I closed the book and slid it back across the desk, deciding I’d ask my father about it when I saw him.
Walking back through the house, clicking the lights off, I finished in the living room. In one corner, by the television, a small red light was pulsing on the answer machine. Messages. I walked across to see a red ‘7’ on the display. Were they all from Marsha? I pressed play and listened.
The first two were, indeed, from Marsha, recorded three days apart and still – at this point – relatively calm.
The third was someone I didn’t recognise.
‘Hello, this is Barbara calling, with a message for Christopher Dawson. About the interview? Give me a ring back if you’re still interested. You’ve got my number.’
Beep. A journalist then. My father would be thrilled.
The next three messages were all from Marsha, growing increasingly anxious in tone. The last of them, left this afternoon, told him she was going to try getting in touch with me to make sure he was all right.
Again – he would be thrilled.
The final message on the machine had been left an hour ago. Another woman’s voice that I didn’t recognise.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m trying to reach the family of Christopher John Dawson. My name is DS Hannah Price of the Whitkirk constabulary. If anyone picks up this message could they please phone me back on oh one—’
I scrabbled for a pen, then played mental catch-up with the number.
‘It’s very important,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I’ll be trying to reach you by other means. Thank you.’
Beep.
I stared at the machine for a moment. Why were the police calling my father? Whitkirk. That was the address of the hotel he’d listed on the calendar. The Southerton.
Something began crawling in my chest.
I’m trying to reach the family of Christopher John Dawson.
His family. Not him.
So why ring here?
I picked up the phone, then slowly tapped in the number she’d given in the message. As it rang, the crawling sensation became worse. The dark house behind me seemed to throb harder and harder with emptiness.
And a minute later, I learned that my father was dead.
Chapter Three
Five tiny crosses, the colour of blood.
Which you will not think about.
Instead, DS Hannah Price opened the drawer below her office desk and took out the photograph album. She was waiting for Barnes to arrive for the briefing on Christopher Dawson’s death, and there were a hundred things she could be doing in the meantime – a pile of reports on other cases to be written and filed, contacts to be chased – but she’d been finding it difficult to concentrate on work recently. Or, in fact, to do much of anything at all. Even sleep. When she’d looked in the mirror that morning and been faced with a pale, hollow-eyed junkie, she’d thought: you look like you should be haunting someone. But then, maybe she was. If it was possible to reverse the usual order of things, and for the living to haunt the dead.
Hannah glanced up at the door.
Outside, she could hear the clitter of typing from the secretarial support workers. Above the door, the wall clock ticked away the passing time. For some reason, the sound unnerved her.
Her emotions were all over the place recently, but the thing she felt most was this displaced sense of fear. Dread, almost, as though something terrible was going to happen to her. Ever since her father’s death, she’d alternated between that and sadness. Sadness was natural enough, of course, but even that emotion seemed heightened, far too intense. Just a few hours earlier, Neil Dawson had identified his own dead father’s belongings, and while he’d been doing
his best to stay in control, she’d still practically caught the anguish and grief from him. It had taken her back three months, and there had been an ache of connection, like the answering call of a ship on a dead sea. Oh God, yes, I know what you’re feeling. Hannah had almost broken down herself.
She opened the album.
There was some kind of comfort here at least; the book told a familiar story, one which steadied her. It contained photos that charted her life from birth to … twenty-two? She couldn’t remember when she’d joined the police. Her father had pasted the photos two to a page. The first showed her as a baby in her mother’s arms. Her mother looked weary and beaten but also proud: both of the baby she was holding and herself for what she’d been through.
How things changed.
The bottom photograph was her favourite. It showed her cradled in her father’s arms, in the same hospital setting as the one above. Where her mother had been facing the camera, though, her father was looking down at the baby he held. This was his first and only child – and Hannah was so fragile here, so tiny, red and bruised from birth – and yet Colin Price looked totally at home in his new role as a father. This photo reassured her about two things. The first was how capable and confident he had been, the strong, reliable type of man who could do most things he turned his hand to on the first attempt, and the second was that he had loved and protected her from the very beginning.
Which was something to cling to, wasn’t it?
Or at least it should have been.
Hannah worked her way through the album. In another of her favourites, several pages on, her father was wearing his dark blue, starch-straight uniform, bent over at the back of the shot, a delighted smile on his face. The focus of the shot was on Hannah, who had an equally delighted smile on hers. She was riding her bike without stabilisers for the first time, still convinced her dad was helping her keep upright when, in reality, she was now doing it all by herself.
You are Hannah Price. Daughter of DS Colin Price.
And that means you can do anything.
That mantra was the oldest memory she had of him. Not only had he always made her feel safe, he’d also encouraged her – and convinced her that she could achieve whatever she set her mind to, that there was nothing to be afraid of. Often when she’d felt nervous or scared as an adult, she’d repeated it to herself. That feeling of security was partly what she was trying to recapture by looking through the album now.
With each turn of the page, the spine creaked.
The final photograph had been taken on her first day in a constable’s uniform. Seventeen years ago now? God. She hadn’t changed much physically – still tall and slim; same ratty-blonde hair she mostly kept tied back – but something in the face was certainly different. She remembered how proud her father had been that day. He was often proud of her, but on that day in particular there was also this: his daughter had been able to do anything in the world, and what she had chosen to do was be like him.
DS Hannah Price, daughter of DS Colin Price.
Her eyes threatened to blur, but she shook the emotion away.
Must not cry. Not here. Especially not in front of Barnes.
Although it was the last photograph in the album, the images she had of him continued in her head. The older man, his skin slacker. Salt-and-pepper stubble. Lines kissing the corners of his eyes. Quicker to laugh but slower to stand.
And last of all, a king.
Three months ago, Hannah had arrived at his house, letting herself in as usual, and then walked into the front room to find former DS Colin Price in his comfortable chair, slumped, head bowed, with vomit staining the front of his shirt. His hands were clutching the nubs of the chair’s arms, so that her first thought was of a sleeping king, refusing to leave his throne.
She’d felt an initial whump of panic, as though the air had been sucked from the house by an explosion in a world skewed centimetres from this one. But she’d been very calm as she approached him, probably because, at that point, she’d presumed he was dead, and that kind of knowledge always takes time to settle. It wasn’t until she caught the desperate flutter of his pulse that the panic had flared – the explosion arriving in this world now, blasting her into action – and she’d gone scrabbling for the phone.
A king.
There were later images, of course, but none she wanted. He’d suffered a massive stroke, the doctors said, and there was nothing she could have done. But she was there during his days of dying in the hospital, as his body yellowed and shrank down, in search of its final colour, its final shape, pulling the bed covers closer as it went. She was there until the doctors asked her a question for what felt like the hundredth time, when she closed her eyes, considered it for an infinite moment, and said yes, turn the machine off now please.
She tried not to think about that, because in those final days he’d seemed to lack the nobility of every other image she had of him. She wanted to remember her father as DS Colin Price, strong and decent.
That was also why she wouldn’t think about the other thing.
Five tiny crosses, the colour of blood …
The thing she’d discovered a few days ago, in his attic, which threatened to undermine everything she knew about him. About herself too. That was the problem, wasn’t it? In relying on other people and using them as a foundation for your life?
When the floor breaks, you fall.
*
‘Are you all right, Price?’
DCI Graham Barnes closed the door to the office behind him.
‘Sir?’
‘You look like you’ve been crying.’
Damn it. Hannah had snapped her make-up mirror away in time; she’d thought she looked okay.
‘No, sir. I’m fine.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
Barnes was a small, pointy man: with the exception of his little round glasses, everything about him was angular and waspish; even his grey hair had receded up his forehead in sharp-edged triangles. He was nearing retirement age now, and was probably the only officer in Whitkirk who’d worked with her father during his time here. Colin Price had transferred to the department at Huntington, a few miles away, years before Hannah joined the police – a move for which she was eternally grateful. She imagined anyone who’d known him would either have been too easy on her as a result or else far, far too hard – Barnes was the latter – and she had been glad to have had the chance to prove herself on her own terms.
‘Dawson,’ Barnes said now. ‘Dead.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Run me through it then. Ah – PowerPoint. Delightful.’
The briefing was set up to display on a pull-down screen at the side of the room, currently showing a black square with the case number in the corner. She forced herself to ignore Barnes’s sarcasm.
Just do this. Get it over with.
Hannah stood up and went straight into it.
‘Yesterday morning, we received a call from an anonymous female, placed from a phone box on the seafront. She claimed to have been jogging in woodland between Whitkirk and Huntington and spotted what she believed to be a man’s body by the river.’
‘Name?’ Barnes said. ‘Address?’
‘The jogger?’ It was typical of Barnes to latch on to that. What part of anonymous didn’t he understand? ‘She left a message with the switchboard clerk, so we don’t have that information. The details were passed through and I visited the scene to investigate the report.’
Hannah clicked the button, and the screen changed to show a Google satellite map of the area. Three yellow circles had been drawn on it, linked by a snaking red line. The first, labelled (1), was on a main road; the others, (2) and (3), were close together in the middle of a dense green area.
‘I approached along this dirt track, which joins the Huntington Road at point (1) as indicated. It’s an old path, not signposted from the main road. At location (2), I encountered this vehicle.’
Another click. The screen displaye
d a photo of the car she’d found: an old blue Escort positioned against a dark background of trees and thick undergrowth. The driver had pulled in at a section where the track would be wide enough to turn round again.
‘The vehicle was unlocked. I performed a check on-site and learned the vehicle was registered to Christopher John Dawson. Subsequent enquiries have revealed Mr Dawson was staying at The Southerton Hotel here in Whitkirk.’
As always, she felt a strange disconnect to find herself talking about the man in such an impersonal way, especially after his son’s reaction. The physical mess of death didn’t bother her in the slightest, but she’d never achieved that casual, emotional distance cops were fabled for. Dawson. Dead.
She clicked the button.
This photo had been taken from the end of the path, facing out along the disused viaduct.
It was creepy in itself: an old, rusted bridge in the middle of nowhere, extending thirty metres out over space towards a line of trees at the far side. Every rivet was black with age, and the floor was coated with several autumns’ worth of leaves and dry mud. What the photograph didn’t convey was quite how unworldly and forgotten the location had felt in real life: how lonely and humming with threat. The only real noise was the uncaring rush of the river, seventy feet below, but it had felt like that might be masking other sounds. Hannah was as rational as they came, but the place still seemed like some half-remembered childhood nightmare. The kind of dangerous fairy tale place you only found by taking the paths your parents warned you not to.
‘This is point (3) on the map, a short distance further on from the vehicle. The body was below the viaduct on the riverbank.’
Hannah stopped the commentary and clicked through a series of images that required no explanation.
The first showed the body in situ: taken from where she’d first seen it. The man was lying far below, in the centre of the image, his top half in the river, his legs spreadeagled pitifully on the muddy bank. He was fully dressed, although his clothes were wrenched oddly on his broken frame, as though someone had tried to reverse them without taking them off.