by Steve Mosby
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ I said.
‘Me neither. Good thing you don’t have to worry about that.’
As I rubbed her arm, it occurred to me that she and my father had never met, and now never would. He hadn’t known he was going to become a grandfather.
Would it have made a difference if he had?
Would anything?
The handful of newspaper reports I’d seen on his death all mentioned Worry Dolls and my mother’s death, placing heavy emphasis on the latter. I still found it hard to believe, but the facts were the facts. He’d lost his wife and had a vague history of depression; his car had been found in an isolated spot by a bridge; his body was recovered from the riverbank seventy feet below; and police were not currently looking for anyone else as part of their enquiries. The word ‘suicide’ didn’t appear in the newspapers, but it emerged unspoken through the details, between the lines. I couldn’t avoid what he’d done even if, most of the time, I also couldn’t quite believe it.
A number of journalists had called or emailed, asking me to comment, but I didn’t acknowledge them. What was the point – what did they expect me to say? Maybe that I hadn’t cared enough to make sure he was okay? Or that I was having trouble accepting he’d killed himself – and that a part of me still didn’t, not really? There was nothing sensible for me to tell them. The result was that, in the reports, I was generally reduced to a footnote.
He is survived by his son, Neil, 25.
There was an enormous chatter of gunfire from below.
Ally sighed and moved away from me.
‘Excuse me for a moment, babe.’
‘No worries.’
This time, I heard her open the front door – and then several large bangs. A moment later, the noise from the television below fell silent. There were no raised voices. After a few more seconds, Ally came back up the stairs, my door slamming pointedly behind her, and the television downstairs did not resume.
‘That’s much better,’ she told herself. ‘I’m going for a shower.’
She whistled on her way down the corridor, and I managed a half-smile before turning back to the computer. There was a new email I needed to respond to.
The messages had all started on the day the obituaries began to appear in the media, and then increased in volume as the news of my father’s death spread across the blogosphere. I don’t know how they found me, but they did. My father’s friends, colleagues and fans, expressing their shock and sending their condolences. All contained variations on the same themes.
I had the pleasure of meeting Christopher once.
His work was an inspiration to me.
He was a wonderful writer, a wonderful person.
I’m so very sorry for your loss.
A few of them sent personal anecdotes – usually stories about their encounters with him at conventions or signings. That was the strangest part, actually: the tales of late-night drinking, draining hotel bars dry, falling over furniture at six in the morning; the adventures in foreign countries, winding streets, late-night taverns and hidden drinking dens. They made my father sound exotic and exciting, as though he’d lived the life of a spy, and I found it hard to square their version of Christopher Dawson with mine.
But as strange as the stories seemed, they helped. They were comforting. Reading them created an odd combination of sadness and happiness: they tightened knots in my heart and my throat. Every novelist wants to be read, of course – what’s the point of speaking if nobody listens? But, to my father, there had always been a difference between saying the thing you know people want to hear, the bestselling thing, and saying what you want to – what you have to – and then hoping someone likes it enough to listen. That was what Dad had done all his life. And it was clear from all these emails now that people had listened.
From the bathroom, I heard the hiss of the shower starting up, and then the whump of the boiler kicking in.
I hit the reply button and started typing.
Dear Mr Cartwright
Thank you for your email. My father’s funeral will be held at Longwood Crematorium at 1.00 p.m. on Friday 24 September. If you would like to attend, please do come. There will be a reception afterwards at The Regency. Directions to both are attached.
Donations, in lieu of flowers, should be made to Cancer Research UK.
Thank you, and I’m sorry for your loss too.
Neil
Flowers.
It reminded me briefly of the book I’d seen at my father’s house, the one with the pressed flower secreted inside its pages.
As I transferred the email from Joseph Cartwright to the folder I was keeping all the messages in, I scanned down the list of names there. No reason to expect it, of course, and it wasn’t there. None of the people who’d emailed me was Robert Wiseman.
*
I dreamed I was four years old again and scared of the dark.
My bedroom was halfway down that long corridor. Every night, after tucking me in, my parents would flick off the light switch and go back to the living room at one end, and close the door. I would lie there, the covers drawn up to my chin, hearing the dulled sound of the television and the throb of silence coming from the other direction. From the empty part of the house. Except, the more I listened, the less empty it seemed. It felt as though something was forming in the shadows down there, and then creeping closer along the hallway. I’d stare at the doorframe, the whole time waiting for fingers of some kind to wrap slowly around it. For a face to peer in at me. And when it did, I knew my parents would be too far away to reach me in time.
Other times, I’d manage to drop off to sleep, only for something to startle me awake again. This was one of those nights.
Something had woken me up.
Something had happened.
‘Dad!’ I shouted.
Then I listened intently, my tiny heart thudding. Normally, I would hear hushed conversation from the front room – was that Neil? – and eventually the door opening. But not tonight. Instead, I heard silence for a few moments, the sound of someone holding still, and then quiet footfalls as that person made their way to my bedroom. For some reason, one of my parents had already been in the corridor.
It was my father. He appeared in the doorway now, still carrying whatever book he was reading, and then walked over and switched on the feathered lamp. His voice was quiet, soft.
‘What’s wrong, Neil?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There was something.’
‘A noise?’
‘Maybe.’
He glanced back at the hallway.
‘Do you want me to go and check?’
I shook my head; I knew enough by that age that checking wouldn’t solve anything. Logic didn’t work. There might not be anything there now, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be something there after. Children’s logic, perhaps, but, deep down, my father understood this too. He certainly never got impatient or angry with me.
He sat down on the chair beside my bed.
‘Do you want me to read to you?’
I thought about it. ‘Yes please.’
‘Okay.’
He put his book down on the floor. The one he’d been reading to me recently – Archer’s Goon, by Diana Wynne Jones – was on the nightstand. It was resting face down, splayed open, creased. Despite being a writer, my father had always been careless with books. It’s the stories inside that matter, he would tell me. You can’t bend them back.
But he didn’t pick that one up. Often, instead of returning to a story we’d been reading, he’d make something up instead. When that happened, he always started slowly – tentatively – but, as he went on, the story would gather pace and flow more quickly. I would watch his eyes glint with excitement, and I’d believe, in my naïve, childish way, that the story he was telling was something magical: that it had been there all along, waiting to be discovered and claimed.
He rubbed his hands together slowly now,
as though washing the ordinary world from them.
And said, ‘This is not a story about a little girl who vanishes.’
And I woke up with a start.
The bedroom was dark; the main street outside was quiet and empty. It was still the dead of night. I turned my head and saw Ally asleep beside me. She was lying on her front, her naked back shifting slowly and gently as she breathed, her face peaceful and clear. As far as I could tell, after lying still for a few more moments, nothing was wrong or out of place. It was just the dream that had woken me. And yet my heart was punching as hard now as it had when I was a little boy, scared of darkness and silence.
This is not a story about a little girl who vanishes.
I remembered that from the back of The Black Flower, but everything else in the dream might as well have been pulled straight from my childhood. Had my father ever said that? It was impossible to know; I couldn’t remember what had happened in any of the stories he’d made up. The content was never really the point: it had always been more about filling the silence, warding off the darkness, for a while.
So why did Wiseman’s book keep cropping up in my mind?
I put my hand behind my head and stared at the blue-grey ceiling. Maybe it was natural to keep thinking about it: I’d looked at the book just before speaking to the police, after all, so it made sense that the two things were linked in my head. Not to mention that creepy fucking flower. But it felt like there was something more to it than that.
I lay there for a few minutes, half-heartedly trying to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t happening. For whatever stupid reason, I was wide awake.
Quietly, so as not to disturb Ally, I slipped out from under the covers and went through to the kitchen, my bare feet tacking on the plastic tiles. The timer on the oven read 4:58. Absurdly early, but I put the kettle on anyway, then sat down at the circular wooden table. Rested my elbows on it and rubbed my temples.
It was more than just the timing of finding the book and the flower inside. It was also the fact that it was right there on my father’s desk, as though he’d been looking at it, consulting it even, while he was working. It was also the thing I’d said to Marsha about my father’s writing. Regardless of my own naïvety, he had been distracted by a project of some kind – and there were things scheduled on his calendar, for Christ’s sake. Haggerty. Ellis. Did it make sense to arrange appointments, to go on what looked like a research trip, if he was planning to do what he had?
No. It didn’t really make sense to me.
And if he was going to kill himself, why go to Whitkirk to do it? Maybe it held some meaning or resonance for him, but I’d never heard of the place before. And while I could understand him not wanting me to be the one who found him – wanting to spare me that horror, if nothing else – it didn’t require driving across the fucking country.
Which meant he’d been there looking for something.
Why, Dad? I thought. What’s there?
What were you working on?
The kettle burbled louder and louder, until it seemed like it would boil over, the plastic rattling in its stand, and then it clicked off. I didn’t stand up yet though. I sat there, still thinking, still slowly rubbing my temples, as the kitchen fell silent.
Except …
Not quite silent.
There was some kind of noise from outside: a gentle puttering sound. The kitchen window looked out over the alley behind the building. I stood up, raised one of the slats in the blind and peered down.
There was a van there. The puttering sound was its engine idling.
It was an old one too. The metal looked rusted. I couldn’t quite make out the colour, but guessed it was red or brown. The lights were all off, but the engine was running. A streetlight from the end of the alleyway just reached it, so that a dagger of amber rested across the windscreen, revealing the driver was inside, but not much more. The figure was broad enough to guess it was male, and he had what looked like a large moon printed on the front of his chest: a pale, distorted circle.
The circle ducked suddenly backwards out of view.
Shit.
I let the slat go with a sharp click. That had been his face. He’d been leaning forward, staring right back up at me through the windscreen.
Outside, the tone of the engine changed. I looked out again, and only just caught the back end of the van as it rolled out of view, slow and steady. There was no chance to see the license plate from this angle, and a moment later I was left with the purr of the vehicle turning onto the main road and the roar as it accelerated away.
My heart had started up again.
That couldn’t have been his face.
Whatever – what the fuck was someone doing out back at this time of night? A burglar, scoping the place? Maybe. If so, then I’d seen them, they’d seen me, and now they’d gone and wouldn’t be back any time soon. Burglars were opportunists, after all – no point making life hard for themselves.
And no point me jumping at shadows.
But I kept looking out – and listening too. The back street remained empty; the world stayed silent. When that happens – when you’re an adult, anyway – it’s easy for your nerves to settle, and for you to start down-playing how odd something was. Growing up turns your fears inside out.
It took a while though. When I finally lowered the slat in the blind and went over to make myself that coffee, I touched the plastic on the side of the kettle and needed to put it on again.
Nothing to worry about, I was telling myself as it boiled.
Nothing at all.
That morning the weather was blustery and indecisive, the clouds vague white swirls on grey steel. Overcast and drab. Ally and I pottered around, drinking coffee and lazing in bed watching television – or trying to in my case, as my thoughts kept wandering. In the afternoon, we walked down the road to the supermarket in town, then trailed back up lugging plastic bags, with leaves skittering across the pavements and whirling through the air overhead like birds.
I’d almost forgotten about the van by then; the incident in the night, whatever else it was, felt a long time ago now, the way things do when you’ve not slept since they happened but probably should have. Regardless, Ally and I didn’t talk much. My mind kept returning to my father, and every time it did my chest grew tight. Inside, I could tell, I was building to a crescendo. My heart had already decided what I was going to do, and it was just a matter of my head catching up; the longer it took, the more impatient my subconscious was becoming. Eventually, after we’d unpacked the shopping, the emotions reached fever pitch, and I said:
‘I think I’m going to go out for a while, if that’s okay.’
‘Of course.’
Ally sounded like she’d expected it. She didn’t even ask where, and probably already knew, but I said it anyway, as much to myself as to her.
‘To my father’s house.’
Chapter Six
The CCTV monitoring suite for Whitkirk was based in a small room at the back of the station. The room itself was old and in need of refurbishment. There was paint flaking on one wall, and a number of the polystyrene tiles in the ceiling were cracked. One, in the corner, was missing entirely, revealing a network of pipes in the gloomy space under the floor above. When the radiators came on, they clanked and thunked, and the dusty grilles on top made the air smell of slowly simmering rust.
At least, the surveillance equipment was state of the art. A bank of monitors, six across, four down, was built into a wooden casing that curled slightly back against one wall and then out again as it reached the ceiling. Each screen showed a static image of a street or junction. On the desk in front, which was built into the wall unit, there were further screens where on-duty officers could bring an image down for sharper focus, manoeuvring the live camera itself with a joypad, zooming in and out.
Hannah was viewing a separate monitor, sitting at a desk on the other side of the room. Going through older footage. The archives.
‘
No joy so far?’
‘Nope.’
She didn’t turn around to look at Ketterick. He was the only officer on duty, a broad-backed Sergeant. Whitkirk was a tourist town, so most of its crime was shoplifting, bag-snatching, pick pocketing, and there wasn’t much of that to cope with. Later on, as the pubs got busy, another officer would probably come on to help. She hoped so, if she was still here then.
Ketterick chuckled.
‘Well, you’re determined. I’ll give you that.’
And that’s all you’ll give me. He’d already said it to her twice; she wished he’d just shut up and leave her alone. There was nothing worse than people talking for the sake of it. And, apart from anything else, the footage she was watching was running at one-oh-five speed, and turning round for small talk she didn’t want might cause her to miss something she did.
What might she miss exactly?
She still didn’t know.
Officially, it was the pretence of locating the anonymous caller that had got her in here, but obviously she had no interest in undertaking a futile search for herself. Unofficially, she was attempting to track the final movements of Christopher Dawson. Hannah knew why she’d gone to the viaduct. Now, she wanted to get a better idea of what Dawson had been doing here in Whitkirk, and why he had chosen to go there of all places to die. Was his choice of suicide spot just a coincidence, or did it have some connection to her father and his crosses?
It was harder than she’d anticipated.
She knew Dawson had been staying at The Southerton and that he’d ended up at the viaduct. But she didn’t know when he’d gone there, or where exactly he’d left from. Maybe he’d gone to other places first. Following him was tricky, as well: since the CCTV coverage was restricted to certain parts of the town centre, the bastard kept walking off the footage. Every time that happened, unless she caught a lucky glimpse, she had to return to the camera covering the hotel, hoping and waiting for him to reappear.
She’d zoomed into the image as much as possible without losing the detail. Right now, she could just about make out the faces of the people walking towards her outside The Southerton, the profiles of those entering and leaving. Last week, when this was live, Dawson had been inside.