Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  ‘Hello, Hannah.’

  She faltered in the kitchen doorway. DCI Graham Barnes was standing on the patio, just outside the back door. For a moment, she was almost relieved to see it was him, but then the incongruity hit her. Barnes himself was not a shock. But Barnes standing here: something about that was not right.

  ‘Sir,’ she said.

  ‘May I come in?’

  That was wrong, as well: too mannered and polite. And he looked so prim and proper standing there, dressed in his neat, dark-blue uniform. It was an old-fashioned copper suit: fabric ironed tight and straight; buttons and boots polished. Just like her father in the album. And while Barnes’s face remained as pointed and hawkish as ever, there was something else she wasn’t used to seeing there now. Deference, almost. He looked humble, like an officer who’d come to deliver bad news to an unsuspecting family.

  ‘Hannah?’ he said.

  ‘Sir – yes. Of course.’

  Barnes nodded a gracious thank you, then took one careful step over the threshold. She forced herself not to take a corresponding step backwards. He was still far enough away. And Barnes was not, in himself, a threatening man. He was much smaller than she was, and much older. Physically, she should be able to overpower him if it came to it, even without the baton, which Barnes had either not noticed or chosen to ignore.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  As he spoke, the smell wafted across, rich and strong. Whiskey. So he’d been drinking this morning – another piece of information to add to the list. The DCI had turned up at her father’s house, acting strangely, and most likely drunk.

  Hannah leaned her hip against the counter.

  Barnes had lost interest in her for the moment. He had seen the photo album, still open on the counter where she had left it last night. He rested his hands on either side of it and peered down intently.

  ‘Lovely.’

  He was looking at the picture of her father holding her in the hospital.

  She said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was there you know.’

  ‘You were—?’

  ‘Well, not there. But your father and I were friends back then. I was one of the first people to visit you all in hospital after the birth. He and I went out afterwards. We had cigars and champagne. You could smoke inside back then.’

  He smiled sadly to himself.

  ‘Yes, I remember that day very well indeed. Waiting for the phone call. Colin was so very proud. May I?’ He glanced up suddenly. ‘Look through?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thank you.’

  And Barnes began thumbing through the pages of the album, one by one. There was a reverence to his touch.

  ‘It must be nice to have this to look back on,’ he said. ‘To have everything laid out like this, I mean. The story of your life.’

  She felt herself tensing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Colin was thoughtful that way. He was a very clever man.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was.’

  Barnes had reached the photograph where she was on the bicycle without stabilisers, her father grinning in the background.

  ‘This is probably it,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘This is about the time it happened.’

  ‘Sir, are you … are you all right?’

  It was a ridiculous question given the circumstances, but what else was there? This man in front of her – even though she knew him, he might as well have been a stranger. She needed to pull the situation back towards some kind of normality, or else press the strangeness right out into the open where it could be dealt with.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Barnes, still looking down at the album, gave that sad smile again. ‘You were outside my house again yesterday.’

  ‘Outside your house?’

  ‘On Mulberry Avenue.’

  Just a quiet residential street, she thought. Nothing out of the ordinary to see; reasonably affluent; no waste ground. Anyone might live there.

  He said, ‘And I saw you at the old farmhouse last night.’

  Hannah realised she was holding her breath. She forced herself to let it go, and said:

  ‘That was you then, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘I might ask you the same question, Hannah. The same as I might ask why you called the Dawson crime scene in anonymously. Or what you were doing out at the viaduct in the first place.’

  She started to deny all knowledge of that, but Barnes read it in her face and shook his head. There are only two of us here, the gesture seemed to say, and we both know that’s not true.

  For a long moment, she just looked at him.

  ‘I wanted to know the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Ah – the truth.’ He nodded. ‘I understand that; it’s a good answer. Some things are more important than the law, aren’t they? The truth is one of them.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No, I know you, Hannah. You found Colin’s map, didn’t you? I know what you must have been thinking. You loved your father very much; he meant everything to you. So you wanted to find out what he’d done. You needed to. And the law didn’t come into it.’

  It bothered her how right he was.

  ‘Why were you there, sir?’

  ‘I was paying penance.’ He said it simply, decisively. ‘Visiting a ghost, I suppose. That place is haunted, isn’t it? I don’t normally believe in spirits, or things of that nature, but you can certainly feel one there.’

  ‘Paying penance?’

  ‘You found your father’s map.’

  Again, there didn’t seem any point in denying it. ‘Yes. And a hammer, as well. Paying penance for what?’

  At the mention of the hammer, Barnes closed his eyes. He seemed to be swaying slightly – from the drink, she guessed – and his face was suddenly pained, as though he was remembering something he could hardly bear to think about.

  ‘I burned them,’ she added quickly. ‘The map and the hammer. Nobody ever needs—’

  ‘Too late.’

  Hannah extended the baton down by her side. Click.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think you should stay where you are.’

  Barnes opened his eyes.

  ‘I should have had this with me last night,’ he said. ‘I just wasn’t sure.’

  She looked down, noticed the gun-shaped object in his hand and blinked. It took a second – an unbelievable second – for her to realise what she was seeing. He was holding a taser. Her mind started to object. The devices were recorded, traceable. If he fired it in here, the kitchen would be filled with punches of paper that would lead back to him. He couldn’t expect … This was madness.

  ‘Sir—’

  Barnes gave her that sad smile again. ‘It’s much too late, I’m afraid.’

  And she could tell that he meant it.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Neil.’

  I looked up to see a woman turning away from me, closing the door to the café. I’d been so lost in Wiseman’s book that I hadn’t heard the bell tinkle.

  ‘Ms Phillips?’ I said.

  ‘Barbara.’

  I put the book on the table and stood up. If I’d been nervous about meeting her, then I needn’t have been: it was immediately obvious that she wasn’t going to be throwing me off anything in the near future – not without help, anyway. At the same time, she didn’t look quite as old as I’d been expecting. Her white hair was shot through with dark streaks, and she was wearing a neat black suit and scarf, and small circular glasses that made her eyes look tiny. Beneath the suit, she still looked slim and young. Something about her made me think of country houses, yoga and middle-class allotments. In fact, she reminded me more of an academic than whatever image I’d had of a journalist in a small seaside town.

  She shook my hand, then nodded at The Black Flower.

  ‘I thought you’d have finished that by now?’

  I sat back down. ‘I’ve been dist
racted.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She looped off the scarf. ‘My condolences.’

  She slid a little awkwardly into the seat opposite me, her age more apparent now through the obvious flare in her joints. And her hands, resting on the table, looked far older than the rest of her; the skin there was shrink-wrapped over the thin bones. I noticed the large wedding and engagement rings and remembered what she’d said on the phone last night.

  ‘I hope your husband is okay.’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’ She reached up and brushed her hair back behind her shoulder. ‘He has Alzheimer’s. Has had for a long time now. He’s not really very well at all, although it’s rare for him to know about it any more. That or anything else.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was a note of finality in her voice. It said, I don’t want to talk about it. I remembered not saying much the same thing myself a number of times while my mother was dying.

  Barbara craned her neck and peered over my shoulder at the waitress. Her neck was as thin as a wrist.

  ‘Coffee, please.’ Then she looked back at me. ‘What are you doing here in Whitkirk, Neil? What do you hope to accomplish?’

  How much was I going to tell her? I’d been wondering. Certainly not the truth about Ally; not yet, anyway. And so I started to give her the same answer I’d given Andrew Haggerty, but then the fresh pot of coffee arrived, fast as magic.

  ‘I’m psychic,’ the waitress said.

  Barbara smiled, her eyes wrinkling at the corners.

  When the waitress had retreated again, I said, ‘After my father died, I suppose I felt guilty.’

  ‘Everyone feels guilty when someone close to them dies.’

  ‘Probably. But it was true: I hadn’t seen enough of him over the past few weeks. At first, I wanted to know if there was something I could have done – something I’d missed. Given who he was, I thought the best way of doing that was to look at what he’d been working on. The whole time, I’d just been presuming he was writing about my mother’s death.’

  Barbara poured herself a cup of coffee. ‘Maybe he was.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Not about that specifically.’ She put the pot down, then gave the end of her thumb a delicate lick. ‘But you know, stories can be dangerous, can’t they? Telling them can have repercussions.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And sometimes,’ she said, ‘stories are so dangerous that you have to wait to tell them – wait until you can’t hurt anyone else with them.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  She shrugged. ‘Perhaps your mother’s death freed Christopher to pursue something that had been on his mind for a long time.’

  ‘Robert Wiseman?’ I said. ‘Or the book anyway.’

  ‘Or both.’ She tore open a sachet of sugar. It hissed as she poured it into her coffee. ‘Anyway, you learned what he was working on. And I presume you’re here, wanting to talk to me, because of the message I left on his answerphone?’

  ‘Yes. Because you wanted to meet him.’

  She looked aghast. ‘God, no. He wanted to meet me.’

  ‘All right. Did you meet him?’

  ‘No. There was nothing set in stone: we’d only exchanged a few emails and phone calls. I was reluctant to talk about the subject, shall we say, but eventually agreed to meet up with him in person. And then I never heard back from him. He seemed like a nice man, for what it’s worth. That was the impression I got from our brief correspondence. So if we had met I would have told him exactly the same thing I’ll tell you now.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To leave this alone.’

  I said nothing. It was easy for her to say that, and easy for her to talk of stories being dangerous. She didn’t have my current first-hand experience of just how fucking dangerous that was. She didn’t know about Ally, or that ‘leaving it’ wasn’t an option for me.

  Barbara looked at me, her eyes like tiny beads behind her glasses, and emphasised the point.

  ‘Leave it alone, Neil. Let the past be the past.’

  ‘What if I can’t?’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘Or both.’ I leaned back and folded my arms. ‘But to be honest, I think a part of you doesn’t want to leave it either. I mean, if you were so reluctant, you wouldn’t have chased up my father, would you. And why meet me? Why suggest here of all places? This particular café, I mean.’

  Barbara sipped her coffee and smiled. It was a bittersweet expression, which, for some reason, made me remember what she’d said about her husband. He has Alzheimer’s. He has had for a while now. Yes, I thought. Sometimes stories are so dangerous that you need to wait to tell them until you can’t hurt anyone else.

  ‘Perhaps you have a point,’ she said. ‘And I suppose it’s true that what your father did changed things. I take it you’ve seen the news today?’

  ‘About the remains they’ve found.’

  ‘Yes. So on one level, it does seem that things are beginning to unravel. Maybe the truth is finally going to come out regardless. Because if the remains belong to who I think they do, I’m not sure it can be covered up much longer.’

  I tapped the cover of The Black Flower.

  ‘The child-killer, I’m guessing? Clarke Poole.’

  She nodded. ‘That would be my guess too.’

  ‘What was his name in real life?’

  ‘Charles Dennison. His identity hasn’t been confirmed yet, of course. But that’s only part of the story. My understanding from colleagues is that police divers have found remains from two victims.’

  ‘Two more?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘And presumably the other one is Wiseman?’

  ‘Most likely. I don’t know for sure, but both are male, both appear to have been in the water for quite some time and both are suspicious deaths. Unlike your father, these two are certainly not suicides.’

  I let the implication there go for the moment.

  ‘You think the police killed them both?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Neil.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Years ago, when Charles Dennison vanished, there were a lot of rumours flying around about who might have been responsible. Unofficially, of course. Let’s just say that some of the explanations for his disappearance were very similar to what Robert Wiseman ended up writing in his novel.’

  I shook my head, thinking of the photograph. I was sure Wiseman had got his information from the woman he and my father met.

  ‘How would he have known about that?’

  ‘Well, he was a writer, Neil. Writers do research. Nobody knew for certain what happened to Charles Dennison, and I don’t suppose there was any way Wiseman could have either. He just looked at various facts in the public domain, perhaps a few that weren’t, and fashioned what he thought was a good story. However.’ She gestured down at the book. ‘I think it’s possible that he hit on the truth – or landed close to it at any rate. Close enough to rattle the wrong people. And then—’

  ‘Disappeared.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘Until now at least.’

  I looked down at the book. Real crimes. I’d been a fucking idiot. Ever since reading Barbara’s article at my father’s house, I’d assumed the reference was to the little girl – to the serial killer and his van. But it was nothing to do with ‘Charlotte’ and her family at all. She’d been implying that the ‘real crime from the 1970s’ was the murder of a paedophile; that, by connecting a few pieces of information, Wiseman had fictionalised a real-life killing by the police. As a result of that, she thought they’d silenced him.

  ‘But why would the police bother to kill Wiseman?’

  ‘I didn’t say they did.’ She tutted at me. ‘What did I tell you about being careful?’

  I was too frustrated to care. I needed a different story from this one.

  I said, ‘Wiseman’s book was already published. It was a bestseller. Why bother getting rid
of him? What would that achieve, apart from risking even more attention?’

  Barbara was unfazed. To her the answer was obvious.

  ‘Because of his wife.’

  I blinked, then tried to remember the details. Vanessa Wiseman. She died in a car accident, just after meeting her estranged husband here in Whitkirk, a year or so after The Black Flower had been published. The day before Barbara Phillips’s interview with him had run.

  I said, ‘You were the last person to interview him before her accident. Is that right?’

  ‘No. I was the last person to interview him at all.’

  ‘Due to his breakdown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which was caused by her accident.’

  ‘Which was exacerbated by it. He was already flaky when I met him. They’d been separated a few months by then. You’ve probably read that he was an incorrigible womaniser, which is true, but he loved her and needed her. He was like a lot of men in that regard: always seeking what they can’t have; never happy with what they do – until it’s gone, of course. Wiseman had been given the freedom he’d always hankered after. But it was obvious to me he’d lost something far more important deep down, and was in the middle of realising it.’

  I thought about the cover shot for The Black Flower: Wiseman looking suave and smug – handsome and knowing it. In the picture with my father, he looked like the kind of man Barbara was describing: someone who enjoyed being caught out, so long as he wasn’t really caught.

  ‘Pitiful, to be honest,’ she said. ‘He touched my knee, you know? Even then – when it was quite apparent he was pining for his wife – he couldn’t help himself. Some men can’t. So sure of themselves on the surface. Needy, lost little children underneath.’

  I picked up my coffee.

  ‘He met her afterwards, didn’t he? At the abbey.’

  ‘Yes. That afternoon. I think after our interview, he had some kind of crisis and phoned her. Clicked his fingers and she came running. And what happened afterwards … happened.’

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  I put my cup back down again.

  Barbara said, ‘You shouldn’t believe anything you read online, Neil. There was a car accident. But some details about it were strange.’