by Steve Mosby
‘Okay. Oh, there’s one other thing. I’ve had a message passed through from Neil Dawson.’
‘Finally. And?’
‘He’s on his way back to Whitkirk and wants you to call him. Says it’s urgent, apparently. About … Charles Dennison and Robert Wiseman? Those names mean anything to you?’
Hannah shook her head and didn’t reply. There it is. Barnes had claimed he’d no idea if Christopher Dawson and the mysterious woman were connected to the older case. Obviously, somehow they were, and Neil Dawson had independently discovered the identities of the bodies at the viaduct. So she wasn’t in the clear after all. So there it was: the unknown you didn’t expect and never saw coming; the thing that trips you up and sends you sprawling on the ground.
‘Boss?’
‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘I’ve heard of Wiseman. You don’t recognise the name?’
‘Nope.’
‘Never mind then.’
Hannah took a deep breath.
You can do this, she told herself. You’re going to have to do this.
‘Did Dawson leave his mobile number?’
Extract from The Black Flower by Robert Wiseman
There is the steady sound of a shovel crunching into the earth.
Sullivan is staring across a field of unkempt grass. There is a pale concrete bunker to the side on the right, while, ahead of him, he sees a row of apple trees at the edge of a wood. Before them, a fat, bald man is working at the ground. He is sunned-pink and sweating, cumbersome as a pig in his denim overalls, digging at the soil beneath the trees. He finishes and leans the spade against a tree. Sullivan watches as the man pitches something white and flopping into the hole at the roots, then begins to shovel dirt back on top.
He understands what he is seeing.
Beneath the house behind him, Jane Taylor was buried up to her neck and left to die. All around her in that dark crawl space were the black flowers that had grown there, feeding on her life as it ebbed into the soil. Now this man is seeding another victim, only this time in different soil. This body will be drawn up into the trees above it, recycled into bark and leaves and fruit.
When he is finished, the fat man reaches up and clips an apple from the lower branches. Then he bites into it, and the noise is like bone snapping.
Sullivan wakes up with a start.
His small bedroom has an atmosphere of shock in the air, as though someone has just cried out, startling it. But he is the only person here, and he doesn’t want to think of himself as the sort of man who screams in his sleep.
He lies there for a while, his body hot and slick with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest. You didn’t scream.
But he knows that he might have done.
It has been seven months since Charlotte disappeared. Four since Pearson’s suicide. And two months since he separated from his wife and moved into this small terraced house. On the outside, the red brick façade is dulled almost to black in places; the inside is even more dour. All the furniture came with the property, and he spends most of his evenings sitting on the dusty settee, drinking, and then most of his nights dreaming of awful things.
He is no longer a DS. He is no longer much of anything.
Except, in that time, he knows he has become exactly the sort of man who screams in his sleep. His behaviour has grown erratic and strange to the outside world. Hygiene tends to be an afterthought; he washes every three days at best, and never deliberately in time with his occasional trips from the house. When he goes out walking, he wanders aimlessly along country roads, or sometimes through the streets of Thornley. Trying to think. But his thoughts are so random and dislocated that making sense of them is like staring down at a milling crowd and willing it into a straight line.
Today, he showers – or as close as he can get to it in the house. There isn’t a shower: just a stethoscope of white plastic tubing, two ends of which go on the taps in the bath, the other a rudimentary sprinkler he holds overhead while sitting in the tub. The water is always too cold; bathing is a feat of endurance. As he sits there, head bowed and shoulder aching, shivering below an ice-cold trickle, he tells himself this is the reason he often doesn’t bother washing any more: too much effort; too much indignity. But the truth is that he doesn’t bother because he isn’t bothered.
Sullivan turns the taps off, one by one, and receives a burst of colder water on his toes. As he towels himself dry in front of the small cabinet mirror, he can see his body is deteriorating in tandem with his mind. The months seem more like years. He is gaunt and drinking too much. The effects are clearly reflected in the mirror. The alcohol is reducing him, so that he is almost painfully aware of his internal organs. It is as though his body is thinning out in preparation for a period of hibernation, or perhaps something worse. As though it is purifying itself in advance of an ordeal.
Downstairs in the front room, the carpet is gritty under his toes, and dust hangs in the air – the whole house is stagnant. Increasingly, he can imagine it eating itself: gnawing away at its insides, the way his own body is beginning to do. The walls seem to be closing in a little more every night, attempting to squeeze him out of existence without anybody noticing.
He makes himself a coffee, then sits at a table by the front-room window, peering cautiously out through the curtains. The gap is the smallest he can make without drawing attention from the street outside.
This is how he spends much of his time. He keeps an eye on the people out there, and watches the vehicles. He always expects to see a rusted red van parked outside, or drawing away slowly down the road, but it is never there. It is only never there because he doesn’t look out at the right moment to catch it.
Sullivan thinks constantly of Charlotte.
He remembers how frightened she was when he found her that day on the promenade, and how he tried to show her kindness in the days afterwards and promised to look after her and keep her safe. How he gave her a glimmer of hope and then failed her utterly. She should never have trusted him. Some things, perhaps, it is better not to have had.
And there is something worse even than that. The foster home of Mrs Fitzgerald was never officially listed, and so there is only one possible way Charlotte’s family can have located it. However careful he thought he was being, they must have followed him on one of his evening visits. He led them to her. And while he was otherwise occupied, they had taken her away.
That is all he can think of. The only saving grace is the corresponding knowledge that if they were following him back then, perhaps they are still following him now. Perhaps they are a little like Clark Poole in that way. Which is why he keeps looking.
Which is why he opens the curtains a fraction wider now.
The van is not there.
Later, he drives to Thornley.
It is a smaller town than Faverton, and further away, but Sullivan prefers to do his shopping here. There are no familiar faces, and less chance of an awkward encounter with someone he no longer has any interest in talking to. Nobody knows him here. On the ladder of social respectability, nobody he encounters is ever surprised to find him so low down.
It is an ordinary day with no hint of magic to it. Rain speckles the tarmac and the air smells of the sea. He loads heaving bags of groceries and bottles into the boot of his car; the weight makes the handles twist awkwardly, cutting off the circulation in his fingers. Behind him, he hears the rattle and clatter of trolleys being rolled across the stone ground. Sullivan looks around. The car park serves the whole of Thornley’s shopping area. There is the small supermarket, a garage, a DIY store.
Sullivan pauses, one bag half supported by the boot, half supported by his hand.
The van is old, rusted and crimson: the colour and texture of dried blood. It is parked with its nose up to the DIY store, practically pushing into the shelves and buckets lined up outside. From here, he can just make out that the cabin is empty.
Without taking his eyes off the van, Sullivan finishes lowering the bag. It res
ts down awkwardly, the contents slumping. Red vans are commonplace, he thinks; it means nothing. And yet, after he’s finished loading his shopping, he sits in his car and continues to watch the vehicle.
Rain builds up on the windscreen.
A few minutes later, the door to the DIY store opens and a man emerges. Almost unconsciously, Sullivan leans forward on the steering wheel. The man is weathered and rough-looking, as though he spends much of his time outdoors. He has no coat, and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, his forearms like thick lengths of rope. His hair is dark but greying, medium length and ruffled immediately by the wind. The face it frames is tanned and impassive. He is carrying a large, brown paper bag; Sullivan can’t see what’s inside.
Behind him, a little boy trails out of the store.
Sullivan watches, heart alive.
But a moment later, the shop door closes. It is only the two of them: father and son. As they get into the van, Sullivan leans back again. He wants to tell himself it is nothing; he does tell himself that. The man he’s just seen is very different from the pig-man of his nightmares.
But then, why wouldn’t he be?
As the van reverses out of its parking spot and swings around towards the exit, Sullivan makes a decision. What is worse? Following for the sake of it and wasting his time? Ultimately, that is no different from how he’s lived these last few months.
He starts the engine and the wipers squeak the rain from the glass.
No, what would be worse is not knowing. Sitting at his table, peering through his curtains at an empty street and thinking, endlessly, what if?
He follows the van cautiously, maintaining the kind of careful distance that, if this is the man, he himself must have kept seven months ago while following Sullivan. They pass through a small, rural village: little more than a row of old, conjoined cottages, a post office, pub and grocery shop. The road curls through the middle. He drives past an old black church sitting in a yard dotted with gravestones, then he is out the other side.
As the vehicle rumbles ahead of him down the endless country lanes, Sullivan feels a thrill inside him. A glimmer of hope. It does not occur to him that the world does not work this way – that it never gives, only takes – or that he no longer has any real idea where he is.
He allows himself to believe that he is following rather than being led.
He has forgotten that it does not happen like this.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I drove along the road my father had marked on the map.
Fields stretched out to the left: grey and gloomy in the dying light. To the right, there was a wood of sorts, where the trees were tall and bare and the ground below was carpeted black with broken twigs and branches. Glancing down at the map on the passenger seat, the cross was about halfway along this stretch of road. Not far now.
Now it was just a matter of keeping an eye out.
And keeping calm, I told myself.
Not getting your hopes up.
The excitement I’d felt back at the hospital had faded slightly now. My father had drawn a cross on a map, but that didn’t mean there was anything conclusive there in real life, regardless of whether it turned out to be a farm. He’d been researching a book, after all, not setting out to solve a crime. And, more than anything else, my father had been a careful, sensible man. If he knew the farm in The Black Flower really existed, and if he’d somehow discovered its location, he’d have gone straight to the police and done his best to make them believe in it too. He certainly wouldn’t have just pencilled a trip there into his itinerary as though it was no big deal.
So it couldn’t be that. It had to be something else entirely.
And yet … from the calendar, he had probably come here before going to Whitkirk, where he’d found Charlotte on the promenade and gone to the viaduct with her. The old man at the hospital had never figured out how to find her for himself, but he’d killed my father in the woods. How had he ended up there? All I could think was that he must have been following Dad, so he had to have started following him for a reason – their paths needed to have crossed. My father must have turned up at the wrong place and attracted the old bastard’s attention somehow.
Why here, Dad?
What brought you here?
The question was preoccupying me so much that I drove straight past the entrance. Without warning, the trees to the right were suddenly replaced by a drystone wall and open fields. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I could see a gap between the woods and the wall. I slowed down. The road behind was empty. The car whined angrily back up the road until I drew level with the end of the trees.
It was an entrance, all right, an opening onto a dirt track, only just wide enough for a vehicle to fit through. The track cut down the edge of the field, holding tight to the treeline. A constant tread of tyres had worn the grass away, leaving two strips of bare land separated by a raised, tatty ridge of turf.
An old sign was nailed on a post behind the wall. Red letters, painted on white.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO ACCESS
No other indication of what was down there.
On the right side of the track, pressing against it, the stripped-down woodland was dark and forbidding. The field on the open side seemed unkempt and unused. About fifty metres further along the road, it was separated from the next field along by another drystone wall running parallel to the track, and there was nothing to see beyond that except a pylon, standing on splayed metal legs a few hundred metres away.
I turned off the engine and was met by the heavy silence of the countryside. A moment later, I began to notice little clicks and rustles of undergrowth, the sigh of the breeze.
I checked the map again. This seemed approximately right, and there was nothing obvious further down the road. So this had to be place, didn’t it? I stared down the track. It was difficult to imagine there was anything bad down there – it wasn’t even gated off. There was just that sign.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
I listened to that heavy silence – the quiet that wasn’t quiet.
Was Ally down there?
Staring down the path, I thought it out to her: Are you there?
I felt a tingle of connection that was surely just fear. But there was no way I could leave without finding out, so I started the engine again and drove a little further on, to where the road widened, and parked up.
Call the police again, Neil.
I knew that I should. Even if I couldn’t get hold of Hannah Price, I should at least let someone know where I was. My phone was in my jeans pocket; I got it out now. The conversation wasn’t exactly going to be an easy one. Where to start?
But then it started ringing.
Christ. It nearly gave me heart failure.
Unknown number
I answered it. ‘Hello?’
‘Neil Dawson?’
‘Yes. Who is this please?’
‘This is Hannah Price – DS Hannah Price. You left a message for me.’
I recognised the voice, but she sounded different from when we’d talked before. At the mortuary, as I identified my father’s belongings, she’d been kind, warm and sympathetic, as though she really felt for my loss. Now, though, she sounded … blank. Far more controlled and professional, anyway.
‘Thanks for calling me back.’
She said, ‘How did you know about Charles Dennison and Robert Wiseman, Neil? That information’s not been confirmed for certain here yet, never mind released to the public. It bothers me how you know that.’
‘Well—’
‘Especially given that your father died in the same location.’
‘I think I can explain all of it.’
‘Can you.’ She was silent for a moment. Then: ‘Where are you? You said you were on your way back to Whitkirk?’
‘Change of plan.’
‘Then I think you need to change it back again.’
‘This might be more important.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m at
a farm.’
Hannah Price started to say something but then stopped. Again, silence panned out on the line, but there was something different about it this time. The mention of the farm had done it. She knew about it. She knew something anyway.
‘Where?’ she said.
‘Just outside a little village called Ellis. You know it?’
‘Yes.’
I started talking then. It all came out in a stream and didn’t make much sense even to me as I was saying it. But I told her that Wiseman had based one of his books on a real little girl, on a real family who had wanted her back, and that my father had known about them too. I told her they’d killed him and taken Ally.
‘And I think she’s here.’ I was babbling. ‘Or she might be. She’s pregnant, and I wished it away – that’s partly why they took her – and, oh God, I’ve got to find her. You have to believe me.’
‘Neil,’ Hannah said. ‘Neil.’
‘Yes.’
‘Calm down.’
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Listen to me. This is really important, all right? Don’t do anything.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t do anything. Sit in your car and wait for me. I’m on my way; I’m walking out of the door right now. Wait where you are. Okay?’
‘Yes.’
I glanced back at the break in the dry stone wall, feeling that tingle of connection again.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait right here.’
Outside the car, it seemed even quieter than before. As I walked down the dirt track, though, I began to hear a different sound from the undergrowth and the breeze. It was the hum of the pylon in the distance: an electrical noise, almost a vibration in the air. The kind of sound I imagined you’d feel in your teeth as you entered an empty place where there’d been a radiation spill.
High above me, the cables stretched over the trees. In the other direction, they spread into the distance, finding a brother, and then a second, all the way to the horizon. It only served to emphasise the vast, empty span of the land here. I felt small and isolated: out of sight of the real world, and far away from its safety.