by Steve Mosby
‘Strange, how?’
‘No body for a start.’
‘She disappeared as well?’ I stared at her. ‘A lot of people seem to disappear in Whitkirk.’
‘They do, don’t they? As it happens, I’m being slightly melodramatic. The accident was on the coastal road, close to the cliff edge. It was presumed that she wandered, dazed, from the scene and fell. Her body was never found, but there’s no reason to doubt the official story.’
‘So—’
‘No sensible reason anyway. But Wiseman swore blind that he saw a van of some sort, just after she’d driven away. Very much like the one he’d described in his book. The way he told it, it was as though his characters had come alive and were punishing him.’
She snorted. Except it didn’t sound funny or stupid to me, because I knew the truth: his characters hadn’t come to life; they’d already been alive. What exactly had happened though – why would the old man target Vanessa Wiseman? There was no way of knowing for sure, not now, but maybe he suspected Wiseman had to have met his missing daughter at some point. If so, perhaps he’d started following Wiseman, seen him with his estranged wife on the clifftop, and jumped to a conclusion about who the woman really was.
‘Regardless of what he really saw,’ Barbara said, ‘it was obvious he blamed himself. Over the next year, he retreated entirely from the world. By the end, when he finally came to stay at The Southerton, he was very unbalanced. He wanted to interview me – much like your father did – but I refused.’
‘He was working on new material when he disappeared.’
‘More like obsessively throwing himself into old material. He only told me enough to know he was borderline insane. He was reworking The Black Flower, he said – a kind of sequel, but in an odd way. This new book was going to be about a novelist who wrote something that came true and who lost his wife because of it.’
I felt sick. ‘An autobiography?’
‘His version of one.’ Barbara leaned forward. ‘You asked me why the police would have bothered getting rid of him, Neil. It’s a sensible question. If certain people had read The Black Flower, it would have upset them. Worried them even. But you’re right – the book was published by then. Nothing could be done. And despite its success, any connection to real events seemed to have passed under the radar. So far anyway …’
She left that thought hanging. I finished it for her.
‘But with Wiseman unhinged, asking people questions, drawing attention to himself …’
‘Yes, exactly. Attention that might lead to them. Who knew what he might say, or who he might say it to?’
I rubbed my forehead. I could see how it made sense. It was perfectly possible everything Barbara had just said was true. The problem was that she didn’t know as much as I did. She only had half the story, and it wasn’t the half I needed.
‘What about the little girl?’ I said.
She looked blank. ‘Sorry?’
‘In the book. Charlotte.’ I could tell from her expression what the answer was going to be, but I asked it anyway. ‘Is she true, as well?’
‘Oh God, no. Of course not.’
No, I thought, of course not. Barbara didn’t know that the family were as real as the murder of Charles Dennison, and she wasn’t going to be able to help me find Ally, or the real Charlotte, or even back me up if I went to the police. Given what she’d told me, I doubted she’d even speak to the police. It was another dead end. The panic was rising.
What the fuck are you going to do now, Neil?
After what she’d just told me, was it even possible to go to the police? Who could I talk to? It wasn’t just getting them to believe me any more; it was about who was safe to tell any of this to.
Barbara was frowning. ‘Why do you ask about the little girl?’
‘I thought … maybe that part was true as well.’
‘A serial killer kidnapping people to take back to his farm?’
I forced myself to smile. ‘It’s just that so much of the book seems to be based on reality. I was starting to wonder if Wiseman made any of it up at all.’
‘He stole a lot of real people and places,’ Barbara said. ‘In some cases he barely made an effort to conceal them. But as far as I know, nothing like that ever happened.’
My coffee was nearly finished. I needed to get out of here. I wasn’t going to get anything else that was useful out of Barbara Phillips, and felt an urgency to get moving, do something. I didn’t know what though, and that made me feel even more sick.
‘Where have you got to by the way?’ Barbara said. ‘In the book?’
She reached out for it but I picked it up before she could. I didn’t want her seeing the flower. I just wanted to leave.
‘I’ve got to the attack on the foster home,’ I said.
‘Ah yes. I know that section. That’s where the tone of the story changes, if I remember rightly. Let me set your mind at rest, Neil, and save you some reading time. Whatever the truth about Dennison, everything from that point in the book is totally made up. It didn’t happen.’
‘Right,’ I said. As far as you know.
She continued, ‘The foster home was never attacked. The little girl, if she ever existed, wasn’t abducted. And the policeman didn’t end up being tortured to death on a farm. That whole storyline was just Wiseman’s invention.’
I did my best to smile again as I stood up.
‘You’ve just spoiled the ending for me.’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I really haven’t.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Up close, Whitkirk Abbey looked even more ancient and weathered than it did from the seafront. As Barnes drove them towards it, Hannah watched the bare arches forming odd shapes and angles against each other. They had been blackened by time, so that the whole structure resembled the scorched ribcage of a giant, set on fire on top of the cliff.
‘Where are we going?’ she said.
‘Here.’
It was the first thing he’d said since they left her father’s house. In the confined space of the car, the smell of alcohol was much stronger. He was, she had realised, very drunk. For the whole journey, he’d concentrated hard on the road, but kept the taser in his hand, balanced against the steering wheel. She hadn’t wanted to risk a move. If she’d succeeded in grabbing it, the car could still have ended up anywhere. People might have been hurt. Regardless, what on earth would she be able to say in the aftermath?
Barnes pulled into the car park just past the abbey.
‘Why here?’
He didn’t reply. The tyres crackled over the gravel as he parked up next to an old yellow estate. It was the only other car here. Hannah saw an elderly couple, standing over by the fence at the edge of the cliff, wrapped tightly in raincoats, despite the relative warmth of the day. She presumed they were watching the boats out at sea down below. Other than them, the place was deserted.
Signal to them?
No. Barnes still had the taser. As far as she could tell, it was his only weapon, and it would be safer to tackle him now they were no longer moving. However, there was still no guarantee that would end well. And despite the implicit violence of her abduction, he hadn’t actually hurt her yet. She’d been prepared to be driven to far more anonymous locations than this, but it seemed he had something on his mind other than harming her.
For a few moments, though, he said and did nothing. Hannah glanced around. The land on the far side of the road was rough – scruffy and unkempt. Huntington Moor. Technically, this was Whitkirk, but the moor curled around, eventually growing into the woodland nearer the larger town. Here, it was just an expanse of rock and heath. You half expected to see goats and sheep scraping their teeth against the dirt, trying to eke out a shivering life, but it was flat and empty, and the only movement came when the wind blasted across, sending quivers rippling through the grass.
Hannah turned back to the windscreen. The remains of the abbey towered overhead, unreal, standing out starkly agai
nst the ice-cold white sky.
‘Sir?’
The continued formality was absurd now, but it came anyway, out of habit. Beside her, Barnes’s expression was dark and troubled. He was staring at the couple by the fence as though he resented their presence for some reason, as though it bothered him.
Eventually, he said, ‘I knew your father would have kept those things. The map, especially. That was just him. He found what we did even harder to cope with than I did. It was an awful, awful thing. You really can’t imagine.’
Paying penance.
‘What did you do?’ she said.
Barnes thought about it.
‘Can I tell you a story?’
She nodded.
‘It’s a story about a little girl,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter what her name is any more. What matters is that, a long time ago, when your father and I were much younger, this little girl came to your father and told him a man had been following her. But your father didn’t believe her.’
Hannah started to interrupt. Barnes shook his head. Don’t.
‘Colin had his reasons. This little girl was quite well known at that point for making up stories to get attention, and your father was very busy, so he didn’t take what she said seriously. He should have done, but he … well, he wasn’t to know.’
Oh God. Hannah could see where this was going.
‘At the time, this little girl was friends with my own daughter. There was a birthday party, and I was supposed to be looking after everyone. We went out for a picnic at Blair Rocks, my ex-wife and I, along with eight children. And the thing is, Hannah, I wasn’t paying close enough attention. You’ve seen the area.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I know you’ve seen the area. It touches the woods.’
‘Yes.’
‘At one point, I looked up and realised she’d disappeared.’
Hannah didn’t reply, just watched him. His hands were trembling slightly. You could take the taser away from him now and he’d hardly even notice.
But she didn’t move.
‘Of course, we combed the woods and we managed to find a few traces of her, but not the good kind. We found her underwear dumped in that well behind the old cottage. A little way north from there, we found more traces of her blood on a bridge over the river. Not her body, though. He’d thrown that over the viaduct into the water. It washed up on the beach the next evening.’
I’m familiar with that river, DS Price, she remembered.
It’s very deep and very fast, and it flows straight into the sea a little way down the coast.
‘The map,’ she realised.
‘I was there when Colin made those crosses.’ Barnes nodded. ‘We were plotting various movements on that day. Trying to work out the killer’s route. Which way he went. Which way he took her.’
‘Looking for patterns.’
‘Yes. Although we knew who it was.’
‘You knew?’
‘Oh yes. Charles Dennison. The block of flats by the park was where he lived. He never made any real secret of what he’d done, but he was very careful and very clever. There was never any proof, but we knew. Dennison had previous experience with children, and he enjoyed taunting your father afterwards. Knowing Colin hadn’t stopped him only made him enjoy the whole thing more.’
‘Christ,’ she said.
‘Dennison was the man we killed and dumped in the river. You will have been about five years old when all this happened.’ Barnes looked at her. His eyes were bloodshot. ‘You couldn’t possibly have known how much it affected your father, but it really did. Very much. He felt he had betrayed the little girl, and I blamed myself for letting her down. For letting him down too, I suppose. For failing.’
Hannah tried to reconcile what Barnes was telling her with the memories she had of her father. In some ways, really, what she was hearing was much better than it could have been. Maybe it was as good as she could have hoped for.
‘So you both … killed this man for revenge.’
‘No.’ Barnes said it firmly, shook his head. ‘For protection.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘The year after she was killed, Dennison set his sights on another little girl. In her own way, she also came to your father for help. But this time we were ready. There was no way either of us would let Dennison hurt anyone else. That’s why we did it.’
‘To protect this little girl?’
Barnes nodded, and putting it like that, he made it sound almost noble. But it wasn’t the whole story, was it? There was more than one body in that river. Before she could remind Barnes of that inconvenient fact, he carried on.
‘It haunts me, Hannah. You have no idea what it was like. And I know it haunted Colin too. Ultimately, it ended both our marriages. It’s why your mother left. But despite everything, I’ve never regretted it. In fact, I only wish we’d done it a year earlier instead.’
Hannah’s question fell away for a moment.
It’s why your mother left.
Some way before the halfway point of the photograph album, her mother did indeed vanish from the pictures, just as she had from their lives. Hannah had only a bare handful of memories of the woman herself, and those were all of disapproval: blank stares and thin, difficult smiles. Eventually, she had moved away and started again with a new man, and Hannah had worked hard over the years to forgive the woman for leaving. She’d succeeded, but never felt any kind of need to seek her out and see what type of new life she’d formed. The base thought was always my mother just didn’t love me enough. Maybe it had even caused her to cling to her father harder.
Now Barnes was implying there was a different explanation: that her mother simply hadn’t been able to live with the ghosts her father carried. The ghost of a dead little girl. The ghost of a man he’d murdered.
‘What about the second body?’
Barnes laughed, but it was an empty noise.
‘Robert Wiseman.’
‘What?’ She knew the name, of course. Wiseman wasn’t exactly famous in Whitkirk, but most people had heard of his suicide. ‘What did he have to do with any of this?’
‘You’ve not read his book?’
She shook her head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘of course you haven’t. Well, this was years later. Wiseman found out what we’d done – or at least I thought he had at the time. That was what his book was about. It was painfully close to the truth. And he started talking about it. Investigating it more. He was putting all of us at risk.’
‘Jesus Christ, Barnes.’
‘I know.’ He looked at her suddenly. ‘It had nothing to do with Colin. It’s important you know that, Hannah. He refused to get involved. He told me that if the truth came out, so be it. I did it. All by myself.’
She wanted to believe him. Looking at him, she thought it might be true. But even so. It didn’t change what he, at least, had done. It didn’t change the overall fucking mess they were in.
‘To protect yourself this time,’ she said. ‘Not quite as fucking noble.’
‘I did it to protect Colin.’
‘Oh yeah, of course you did, Barnes.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Not because you didn’t want to go to fucking jail, or anything like that.’
‘I’ll never go to jail, Hannah.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. And abducting me hasn’t made that any less likely, has it?’
‘Oh, this?’ He looked at his hand, and seemed almost surprised to see the taser was still there. ‘I just needed to make sure you listened to me. I needed to explain so that you didn’t think badly of him. I know how much he meant to you, and he wouldn’t have wanted you to—’
‘Still protecting him, are you?’
‘Is it so hard to believe I did it for Colin? That’s why you’ve done what you have.’
‘For God’s sake, Barnes. It’s not the same thing.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Hannah didn’t reply. Anger was surging up inside her. Rather than
getting out, running away, she suddenly wanted to attack him: pummel him. The only reason she didn’t was because he already seemed so beaten, as though additional blows would just bounce off him, maybe even be welcomed.
‘What about Christopher Dawson?’ she said. ‘Did you kill him too?’
‘No.’ He gave another hollow laugh. ‘I have no idea what happened there.’
‘You don’t. Well, forgive me if I find that hard to believe.’
‘I forgive you, Hannah. For more than you know.’
‘Oh, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means it’s all going to come out now. The truth. All because of you.’
‘I burned the map,’ she reminded him. ‘I burned the hammer.’
‘That doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you see? Wiseman will be identified, and people will look into his life. They’ll read his book again, where two policemen dump the body of a paedophile over a viaduct in a place that’s obviously based on Whitkirk. They’ll read the file on Charles Dennison and make the connection.’ Barnes shook his head. ‘Wiseman was a bastard. Don’t you understand, Hannah? Even dead, he’s going to reveal everything.’
‘Shut up. Let me think.’
‘I’ve spent the last two days thinking. There’s no way to stop it. The entire file on Dennison is damning. He’d made complaints. Colin and I were actually questioned when he disappeared. It’s all there, and more. You don’t understand yet, but you will. Christ, I was even investigating officer for Wiseman’s suicide. I made sure I was.’
Hannah started to say something but stopped. Because he was right, wasn’t he? Certain things could possibly be made to disappear, but not identities, or published books, or entire files. And it was stupid to attempt it: the more you tried to cover up something that extensive, the more obvious it became.
I was even investigating officer for Wiseman’s suicide.
The media would run with it, and everything would unfold. Hannah ran her fingers through her hair, her mind racing.
‘So what are we going to do then?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Barnes said. ‘And there is a way out of this. It won’t protect you from the truth, won’t protect me … but it might at least protect your father’s reputation. And that’s what we both want, isn’t it?’