by Steve Mosby
Hannah frowned. ‘What do you mean? What do we need to do?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Your father was a good man, and he always kept you safe. Now it’s your turn to repay that – to help me repay it as well. You can keep his good name safe, but none of it is going to be easy for you.’
Hannah looked out through the windscreen. The elderly couple had turned around and were walking back towards their car.
‘How?’ she said.
Barnes nodded towards the old couple.
‘When they’re gone, you’re going to get out of the car and go to the department. To the archives. You’ll find the file for Charles Dennison.’ He thought about it. ‘And the file for a girl called “Charlotte Webb” as well. Those are the two you’ll need.’
Beside them, the doors of the estate slammed shut.
‘I can’t make those files disappear, Barnes.’
‘You’re not going to. You’re just going to read them.’
She shook her head. ‘How is that meant to help anything?’
‘You’ll see. If you want a more selfish motivation, then there’s always the fact that the photo I took of you last night is in Charles Dennison’s file.’
‘What?’
‘I put it there first thing this morning: a photo of you at the scene where Dennison was suspected of murdering a little girl. That’s going to be hard to explain, isn’t it? And Dennison is registered as a missing person, so I’m guessing that file will be making its way upstairs very soon.’
Hannah didn’t reply. You bastard.
Barnes smiled ruefully, reading the expression on her face.
Beside them, the engine of the estate rattled into life. There was a scratch of gravel as it pulled out.
‘I’m sorry.’ Barnes’s gaze tracked the vehicle as it passed in front of them. ‘I needed to make sure you did what I wanted you to. You’ll understand when you read the details. It’s not going to be easy though.’
‘Barnes—’
‘But you’ll face up to it.’ He stared at her. ‘You’ll do it for him, and you’ll do it for yourself.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
He took a deep breath. ‘There’s one last thing that needs to be taken care of. Now get out, Hannah.’
You bastard, she thought again. Barnes had dropped her in the shit and was forcing her to make a decision. Attempt to take him in – turn him, her father and herself over to the law – or run. Try to get to that photograph before anyone saw it. Read the two files, whatever that was supposed to achieve. And whichever route she took, there would be no going back.
Barnes gestured with the taser.
‘Go on,’ he said gently. ‘You’d better be quick.’
And after a long moment of silence, in which they did nothing but stare at each other, Hannah made her decision, got out of the car, and began to run.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At least my father’s road map had turned out to be useful.
The small village of Fenton was almost indistinguishable from the other little hamlets dotted along the coast here: places so nondescript they barely warranted a name. Fenton had a neatly mown village green, with houses around three sides, and a few shops along the road by the cliff-edge. A series of stone steps wound down, presumably to the beach. Today, the whole place was almost deathly quiet and still. I parked up by one corner of the central square, outside an unassuming two-storey cottage, and then sat in the car for a few minutes.
What the hell was I going to say to this woman?
After leaving the café in Whitkirk, I hadn’t been sure what to do next, but Barbara Phillips’s words had stayed with me. He stole a lot of real people and places. In some cases he barely made an effort to conceal them. Of course, she thought that applied only to the strand of the story involving Charles Dennison, but I knew better. I’d got to thinking – might there be anything else there, hiding obviously between the lines?
So I’d gone back to the hotel and flicked through the book, looking at individual characters, and eventually something caught my eye in the chapter on the foster home run by Mrs Fitzgerald.
Out back, the garden ends where the cliff-edge allows it to. One day, erosion will take this house from her.
I’d stared at those words for a while. That seemed a strange detail to include; it had no obvious bearing on the story. So I’d booted up my laptop and googled various combinations of ‘foster home’, ‘Whitkirk’ and ‘erosion’, wondering just how little effort Wiseman had really gone to, hoping it wasn’t much at all.
It turned out he’d barely even changed her name.
A children’s home had been run near Whitkirk by a lady called Denise Fitzwilliam in the seventies and eighties. It was long gone now: one of several properties lost from the clifftop as the sea knocked the legs out from below the land. When the home closed, Denise Fitzwilliam had been forced to rely mainly on savings and charity donations, and had moved here, to what, at the time, was a cheap house in a run-down village.
A sad story, especially for the caring and selfless woman presented in the book, but, as it turned out, the intervening years had been kind to her. Fenton had tidied itself up and grown at least slightly more desirable in the time since. These days, the little two-up two-down she owned was probably worth twice what she’d paid for it. It was almost as though, after a lifetime spent looking after others, someone had looked down and decided she probably deserved a little better than what she’d received.
And now I was here to confront her with the past.
Just play it by ear, Neil.
See what happens.
I got out of the car. In the small, flagged-over area at the front of her house, there was evidence of care still being taken. A row of small trees were growing in pots down one side, and there were two baskets of brightly coloured flowers hanging from struts in the wall. Flat on one window sill, a box was thick with herbs. The flagstones themselves were freshly swept, still bearing giant fingerprint swishes from the wooden broom leaning against the wall by the door.
I knocked and waited.
Silence.
Come on, I thought. Don’t be out.
I was just about to knock again when I heard a shuffle of movement from inside. It sounded awkward, as though whoever was in there was having some trouble, but still determinedly making their way.
When the door opened, it was by a woman in her seventies, with a mass of grey, frizzy hair. She was overweight, her body packed tightly into a threadbare red jumper and old black tracksuit bottoms, and her cheeks were plump and red. Her eyes, almost lost above them, were milky. One hand clung to a rail that had been screwed onto the wall inside; the other clutched the top of a walking stick, enfolding the nub of it almost totally.
I’d never seen her before but I recognised her immediately.
Mrs Fitzgerald.
It was the strangest sensation – a fiction come to life in front of me – and, for a moment, all I could do was stare at her. It didn’t help that the next thing she did was smile and nod to herself.
Because somehow, she had recognised me too. ‘Welcome home, my son,’ she said. ‘Welcome home.’
Mrs Fitzwilliam ushered me through into the lounge at the back of the house. It was a small room with exposed wooden beams across the ceiling and a cheap carpet on the floor, worn down to a meagre grey thatch along the obvious, shuffling routes she took. The bay window looked out onto a pleasant back garden, full of white afternoon light. There was an old two-seater settee in the alcove there. To the other side, an armchair and a wooden cabinet with glass doors, and …
‘Here we are,’ Mrs Fitzwilliam said.
But I stopped in the doorway for a second, staring around the room in disbelief. Almost every available surface was covered with photographs. The sheer number of them was almost overwhelming. There were several crammed onto the mantelpiece above the electric fire, but it was the ones covering the walls that really caught my eye. Forty, fifty, too
many to count at a glance.
From what I could see, they all showed Mrs Fitzwilliam with children. Sometimes in groups; sometimes just the two of them. Children she’d cared for, I guessed – her extended family. All gone now, like the original home, but in her retirement she had surrounded herself with their images and memories. The collection as a whole must have spanned decades.
‘You have that.’
She was motioning at the settee. I crossed the room and sat down there, then watched as she eased down carefully into the armchair opposite, chuckling to herself.
‘And now you’re going to have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘Who are you, dear?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Which one are you? You remember my eyes, don’t you – how bad they were. Don’t you worry, though. I’m still sharp. But it means you’ll have to remind me who you are.’
That was when it clicked. Welcome home, my son. She hadn’t recognised me at the front door at all. Between my reaction and her bad eyesight, she’d just made an assumption. She thought I was a boy she’d once cared for. A child who’d come home, not to the place where he’d grown up, but to the woman who helped raise him.
For a second, I wondered if that was that something I could play on. I needed her to trust me, after all, and given how accurate Wiseman’s description of her was, maybe I knew enough from The Black Flower to carry off the deception. Wiseman had threaded real details throughout his book. Perhaps it was possible to pull them out again.
Except … I wasn’t like him. Looking around the room now at all those photographs, I didn’t think I’d have the heart to carry it off, even if I did have the knowledge.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Fitzwilliam,’ I said. ‘We’ve never met.’
‘Oh.’
Her free hand clutched slightly at the arm of the chair, close to where she’d rested her cane.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
‘No, no. It’s my mistake. That just tends to be the only people who come to see me now. The boys and the girls. I just thought—’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to mislead you.’
‘No matter. Who are you then, and what can I do for you?’
‘My name’s Neil Dawson.’ I still hadn’t really decided what I was going to say, so I just took a deep breath and came out with it. ‘I wanted to ask you about a man called Robert Wiseman. Have you ever heard of him?’
She pursed her lips, considering it, and then shook her head.
‘I don’t remember if I have. When would this have been?’
‘He wouldn’t have been one of your children,’ I said. ‘Actually, he was a writer. A novelist. Years ago, he wrote a book called The Black Flower.’
I gave her a chance to recognise the title, but she just looked blank.
‘You’ve never heard of it?’
‘No, I don’t think so. What is it?’
‘A crime novel,’ I said. ‘Well, maybe more horror than crime.’
‘Oh no, no.’ The shake of the head was much more definite this time, the matter clearly settled by that detail alone. ‘Those aren’t the kind of books I read. There’s far too much horror in real life to waste time reading about it in stories as well.’
‘I know what you mean.’
And I believed her too. At the same time, though, Wiseman must have spoken to her at some point, because his description was simply too vivid to have come about any other way. Which meant that he hadn’t told her his name or his real intentions when they’d met.
‘What does it have to do with me?’ she said.
‘In one part of the book, he writes about a children’s home. It’s very specific. I think he based it on the one you used to run.’
‘I see. Well, that feels like a very long time ago now.’
‘Yes.’ I leaned forward. ‘It’s not really the home itself I’m interested in. It’s actually one of the children who stayed there. A girl you used to look after.’
Mrs Fitzwilliam didn’t reply, but I sensed the slightest of hardenings to her. After all this time, she was still protective of her charges.
Maybe I should have tried to bluff it after all.
‘It will have been about thirty years ago,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure exactly. This girl would have been five or six years old. She was found on the promenade in Whitkirk, and all she had with her was a grown-woman’s handbag, containing a flower.’
The more I spoke, the harder Mrs Fitzwilliam’s expression became. It wasn’t just protectiveness either.
You know, I thought.
You know who I’m talking about.
And so, despite the hardening, I felt a flash of hope. If she knew about this girl and what she’d gone through, she could corroborate her existence. Christ – maybe she even knew how to contact her.
I started to gabble.
‘The little girl, she told a story about escaping from a farm, but nobody believed it. I know she was telling the truth though. I think her father was exactly the type of man she said he was.’
‘I won’t talk about my children.’
‘I know you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘And I know you probably shouldn’t. But I really need to know about that girl.’
‘No.’ She shook her head firmly. ‘No, you have to leave.’
‘More than I can tell you.’
‘I’m going to call the police, Mr Dawson.’
I closed my eyes and pictured Ally. Forced myself to continue.
‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should. Because that man is still out there. And if someone doesn’t find him in time, he’s going to kill someone else.’
‘I’m telling you to—’
‘Not just a woman. A baby too.’
And at that, something inside me just crumpled. I was so tired, so scared for Ally. There was nothing left to say.
The silence that followed seemed to go on for a long time, and when I finally opened my eyes again Mrs Fitzwilliam was staring at me. Her face was grim. Her jaw working slightly. I couldn’t read what she was thinking.
I held my hands out, palms up.
‘Please help me. Please.’
After a moment longer, she sighed to herself. Then she eased out of her chair and began to follow one of the worn grey trails to the doorway.
‘Wait here,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘You were wrong before.’
Mrs Fitzwilliam walked back into the lounge, half bent over, pushing a small trolley. The cups on it rattled against the teapot, letting off small porcelain clinks. She had been in the kitchen for five minutes, and I was now back sitting where she’d left me. In her absence, I’d stood up and walked quietly around the room, checking the photographs. It hadn’t helped. There were so many children, and almost any of the girls might have grown into the woman photographed at the Carnegie Crime Festival.
‘Wrong about what?’ I asked.
‘You told me that nobody believed her.’ She began pouring my tea. ‘The truth is that not many people even got to hear her story. Certainly not the media.’
She passed me the cup.
‘Thank you.’ I thought about Wiseman again. If the full story had never been reported then he must have heard the details from someone else. ‘I’ve spoken to one journalist who had no idea she’d ever existed. Was it not in the press?’
‘There was an appeal, an attempt to trace the parents, but the exact details of what she told the police were never circulated.’ Mrs Fitzwilliam began pouring her own drink. ‘It wouldn’t have registered in the brains of most journalists. It’s even worse these days. They just want something horrible to sell their newspapers with, which means they’re only interested in children who are missing or worse.’ She gestured around the walls. ‘They’re never interested in the ones who are still here and need help.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’ Mrs Fitzwilliam was shuffling back across to her chair. ‘You believed the girl, though? What she said?’
‘Oh yes.’ She eased herself down, delicately balancing the cup and saucer in her hand. ‘It was a horrific story, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that she wasn’t lying. You develop a nose for these things over the years. However, that isn’t the point.’
‘The point?’
‘A girl of that age shouldn’t have such pictures in her head. A normal little girl from a good home wouldn’t be able to tell the story that she did. Even if she was making it up, I ask you: where did those ideas come from?’
‘A policeman believed her too.’
‘Yes.’
‘He came to see her?’
Mrs Fitzwilliam nodded. ‘I remember him vaguely. He was a good man, from what I can recall. He seemed to care very deeply about children.’
Yeah, I thought. Very deeply. So deeply that he’d murdered a child-killer and dumped his body in a river. Wiseman too. And God only knew what else.
‘I have no wish to know, by the way.’ Mrs Fitzwilliam sipped from her cup. ‘What you mentioned before. About her father and someone else being missing. I’ll tell you what I can, but I want no more involvement, and that’s final. It’s better that way.’
‘Better?’
‘Safer.’
That word kept coming up, didn’t it? Safer. There was something to it: the more I learned, the more this girl’s story did feel dangerous. Of all the people who had come into contact with it, so many had found themselves entangled in it. Threads of real life made into fiction. They seemed to reach back out again and wrap around you. Pull you into it.
Mrs Fitzwilliam balanced the cup and saucer on the arm of the chair, the saucer resting exactly in place.
She said, ‘And as much as I looked after her, the same as I would have done for anyone, I was glad when she finally left. It shames me to admit that, but it’s true.’
‘That’s not shameful,’ I said. ‘I can understand that, given the man who was out there looking for her.’
‘It wasn’t just about him. We were protected, after all. That old address was private, unlisted. There was no way he could find us, and the police made sure we were safe.’