The Flower Girls

by Alice Clark-Platts

  They were silent for a moment and for once London was quiet. The cars and the cabs and the buses seemed a universe away from them. The sounds they made were oddly distant, on another planet. There were just the two of them, looking at each other, wondering what the truth of all this was.

  ‘I need you to say it because it does matter,’ he said. ‘In so many ways, it matters.’

  Hazel had nodded in a long moment of realisation and relief. It felt like the buzz of drinking chilled wine on a summer’s evening. She smiled at Jonny and held out her hands. ‘If you can believe me,’ she had said, ‘then I can tell you, right here and now, that I didn’t do it.’

  He looked at her, his pupils filled with what seemed to be a kind of longing.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Hazel went on. ‘I was a child. I followed my big sister and I was led by her. When things turned out . . . the way they did, I didn’t know what was going on. I was so affected by it that I blocked it out. I still don’t remember anything about that afternoon. But I do know this.’ And here she grabbed his hands tight, pulling him to her. ‘I know,’ she said with perfect conviction, as if delivering a speech, ‘I know that I did not hurt that baby. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I would not have been able to sleep since then if I had done such a thing. Of course, the public believe differently and that’s why I’ve lived the life I have, why I’ve got a different name. And no one knows about this. Apart from you.’ She stared up at him. ‘Nobody. I haven’t told anyone else this, ever. But when you said what you did tonight, it was amazing.’ Hazel’s eyes shone. ‘And I feel the same way, Jonny. So I thought it was right that you should know.’

  She stopped talking then, searching his face for some kind of sign that he was hearing her, that he understood.

  ‘But I’ll understand – really I will – if you want to end it.’ She had waited, every muscle taut, breathless.

  And then a cab pulled up, its yellow light shining in the gloom.

  ‘Take the cab,’ she’d said, absorbing the hit. That’s it. He’s gone, she thought again. He can’t be with me after this. What she had always expected had come to pass. She would be left alone. Maybe that was OK. She would go home on her own in another cab. Listen to music. Drink some more wine. And tomorrow she’d wake up, free from hope at least. Because to hope is to expect. And she couldn’t live like that any more.

  And that was when he took her hand. They climbed into the back of the cab together and Jonny put his arm around her, and Hazel had never felt so safe and loved as she did at that moment.

  ‘Shall we get him then?’ asks Max in the hotel room, where they remain on opposite sides of it. ‘Your husband Jonny?’

  ‘He’s not my husband,’ Hazel answers. ‘He was at breakfast with Evie. I don’t know where he is now.’ She closes her eyes and runs her hand through her hair. ‘This is a nightmare.’

  ‘Let’s go downstairs and find him,’ Max says, moving towards the door where Hazel is standing. ‘It’s not a nightmare.’ He stops in front of her. ‘We just need to sort it out.’

  ‘But what about the emails?’ she asks, stepping sideways to allow him to approach the door. ‘You’ve seen them now. Emails from someone – maybe more than one person? – pretending to be Rosie Bowman. They’ve sent me dead flowers. Unsigned cards. They know where I live. I don’t know who is watching me, following me, or what they want. It’s terrifying.’

  ‘Well . . .’ He stops with one hand on the door handle. ‘I don’t know about that. My feeling is that it’s separate from what’s going on here. But I think if we just sit down with the police, and tell them who you are, you’ll be much more at ease. It all needs to come out in the open. Listen, Hazel.’ Max reaches out for her and she shrinks back. ‘Sorry – I’m sorry. But hiding yourself away like this isn’t going to help. Anonymous people emailing you from an account called Primrose Bowman is horrific. It needs to stop. We need to bring in the authorities. I really mean it. Then you might get some peace.’

  He’s looking at her so earnestly that she can’t help herself. She feels a spasm of optimism that, somehow, everything might still be all right.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ she asks.

  ‘I do,’ he says, and turns the handle, opening the door onto the bright lights of the corridor, trying to ignore the hammering in his head, the adrenaline coursing through him, the terrible, delicious thought that has only just occurred to him.

  That now he is going to be famous.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hillier and Marek stand in the doorway and look at the empty box in the pantry. She has forbidden them to enter, not wanting to disturb any forensic evidence that may be present. Nevertheless, they can see the entirety of the space. The walls are stacked with packets and cans; long rows of silver canisters are labelled things like Molasses, Mustard Powder and Bicarbonate of Soda. The smell is pungent, a mix of spices and dust and paper gone soft and curled with age. Level with Hillier’s shoulder, a weevil moves lethargically along a metal shelf. Underlying the converging aromas is the distinctive reek of urine.

  ‘They must have escaped.’ Marek gestures to where the door is propped open and the kitchen beyond. ‘Run out of here, gone outside somewhere.’

  ‘It certainly seems that way,’ Hillier says, folding her arms. She’s known the kittens aren’t here since the search of the hotel last night. But she’d wanted to study Kaczka’s reaction to what could, in all probability, be the scene of a murder. She is already envisaging the forensics team, who will be here soon, swabbing for DNA, using their ultra-violet lights to detect blood spatter. Now she shifts her gaze from the abandoned box to the narrow corridor that runs between the counters and work surfaces in the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s the door to the outside?’ she asks.

  Marek backs out from the doorway immediately, relieved to escape the sight and aroma of the cramped pantry, the proximity to Hillier. ‘There.’ He points away from the cupboard, to the other end of the gleaming stainless-steel range of kitchen equipment, to a door with an exit sign displayed on it. Above it is a large clock with Roman numerals. Hiller looks at the time and then down at her own wristwatch, noticing that the kitchen clock is slow by about half an hour.

  ‘And the only other way out is . . . ?’ she goes on without mentioning the clock.

  ‘Through into the restaurant,’ he answers, gesturing behind her to the pass, a brightly lit counter, beyond which she can see the white tablecloths of the hotel dining room.

  ‘When Georgie left the pantry, she would have had either to walk through the kitchen – where presumably there were a lot of you preparing for dinner – or, more likely, leave by this route,’ Hillier points to the pass, ‘and then out through the restaurant.’

  She walks that way herself, her lips moving as she does, as if she’s describing the movements of the five year old. She leaves the kitchen for the cool empty space of the dining room, recently vacated after breakfast. There are two doors here: one into the hotel’s interior; the other leading outside, where diners not resident in the hotel have to access the restaurant.

  Marek shuffles nervously beside her, reflexively lifting his index and middle fingers to his lips in a way that makes Hillier understand he is in need of a cigarette. She can smell his body odour, the bitter aroma of adrenaline. Outside, there is the distinctive buzz of a helicopter moving above them as the search for Georgie continues along the coast. Hillier’s phone pings loudly and she frowns at the message.

  ‘Can I go now, please?’ Marek says, his face sulky like a child’s. ‘I’m dying for a fag.’

  As Hillier considers this, there is a knock at the restaurant doorway, a timid sliding of knuckles on wood. She looks up sharply to see Max Saunders – the writer, as she remembers it – and Hazel Archer standing in the gloom.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Max says. ‘We don’t want to disturb —’

  ‘Yes?’ Hillier replies as Marek edges away from her, back towards the kitchen.

  ‘We wondered if
we could have a quick word?’ Max asks. He is dressed comfortably, in cords and a fawn-coloured woollen jumper. Hazel’s face is drawn, very tight and still, Hillier observes. Her hair is brushed neatly away from her face. She wears no make-up and her dark eyes are wary, unable to meet Hillier’s for long. She reminds the policewoman of a woodland animal, seconds away from darting into the trees. And still that strange sense of familiarity niggles at Hillier.

  What are they doing together? she wonders. What am I about to hear?

  ‘Off you go then, Mr Kaczka,’ she says to the already disappearing Marek. ‘Don’t go anywhere too hard to find.’ She looks back at the odd couple in the doorway and beckons them in, turning to sit at one of the tables in the middle of the dining room. The room feels cold, the whiteness of the tables emphasising the lack of heat in the dark inglenook fireplace. Thin glass vases on the tables are empty and the impression is one of vacancy, of absence.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Hillier says, her voice cutting through the blankness as she moves the silver cutlery away from under her elbows. ‘What can I do for you?’

  They approach quietly and Max pulls a chair out for Hazel before sitting down himself. He looks across at her but she says nothing, staring down into her lap. ‘Hazel?’ he says at last. ‘Tell DC Hillier what you told me.’ He speaks as if to a child, his tone kind but firm.

  Hillier feels her heart begin to thump in her chest. She places her fingertips carefully on the linen tablecloth. She looks at Hazel, who still is unable to meet her gaze. ‘What is it?’ Hillier asks softly. ‘What is it you want to say?’

  Hazel’s hands are tangled together in front of her on the table. She lifts her eyes. And then she begins to speak.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘It isn’t me,’ Hazel blurts, her cheeks flaming under Hillier’s gaze. ‘I don’t know what happened to the little girl but it wasn’t anything to do with me, I swear it. You have to believe me.’

  Max is nodding next to her, his breathing calm and unhurried. Unconsciously, Hillier adopts the same rhythm for her own breath – in and out – keeping it steady, keeping everything wrapped up tightly, under control. A helicopter still cleaves through the sky above them, its juddering sound weaving around the room, growing louder, then quieter, as it pitches nearer then heads out again to sea. In the back of her mind, Hillier hopes that, as agreed, Ellis is down on the beach liaising with the coastguard. She knows that uniformed police are standing outside the hotel, forming a barrier against the few cars that have managed to get themselves up the snow-covered roads, cars packed with the sharp eyes and eager cameras of local and tabloid journalists.

  She can sense Hazel’s fear. Her checks on the woman’s name on the Police National Computer this morning yielded no results, but still, thoughts of Hazel and Marek circle inside her head like basking sharks. She is certain that one or other of them is connected in some way with the missing girl’s disappearance.

  ‘Hazel,’ she says smoothly. ‘Why are you telling me that you have nothing to do with what has happened to Georgie? Why would you think that you are suspected of being involved?’

  Hazel hesitates as the chasm of the words she is about to speak yawns before her feet. She swallows and steps over the edge. ‘My name is Hazel Archer,’ she says. ‘But when I was a child . . . when I was six years old . . .’ She pauses and briefly closes her eyes. ‘My name was Primrose Bowman. Rosie Bowman.’ She opens her eyes and finally meets Hillier’s stare.

  Hillier can’t help herself. She recoils.

  Primrose Bowman. The Flower Girls.

  Looking at Hazel is like staring into the eyes of a person you have thought and talked about for months of your life, without ever really knowing them. But she feels now as if she does, considers that she understands everything about her. For so long she has debated this woman with her colleagues on the force, with her family; analysed the case on criminology courses she’s taken. She shed tears for Kirstie Swann when her body was discovered, eventually scooped up from the damp ground, abused beyond anything that any living person would ever want to imagine happening to such a small and innocent being.

  Primrose and Laurel. Laurel and Primrose.

  Those names. So beautiful and yet so vile. So steeped in the evil that had made them who they were. They looked so normal. They had come from such a nice family, their parents as shocked as the rest of the world at the depravity bubbling up from their gene pool.

  Evil.

  Hillier had used that word only once or twice in her career. Of Hindley and Brady perhaps. Levi Bellfield. And the Flower Girls. Laurel and Rosie Bowman. She had used the word evil about them, and she had meant it.

  Hillier rouses herself, conscious that she has said nothing since Hazel’s admission, aware that her mouth is open a little, her lips dry with disbelief.

  But there it is.

  This is why Hazel’s face provoked a sense of déjà vu. Because she has seen her before. The photographs of the Flower Girls were pasted all over newspapers both national and international when the body of Kirstie Swann was found. They were the most famous faces in Britain, and across the world. Laurel, with her direct stare into the camera, forthright, unashamed, defiant. And Rosie, her eyes dipped downwards, her lips pursed, her brown hair capped tight around her face. Both of them looked tiny, so incongruously small and vulnerable in the midst of such horror. Those faces, put in the mix with words like murder and abuse and torture. Hillier remembers feeling it at the time; the very core of it all was so wrong, it didn’t make any sense.

  ‘I see,’ she says eventually. She looks down briefly at her hands on the tablecloth, at her mother’s antique ring on her engagement finger. She clears her throat, her mind buzzing. Wonders how on earth to play this, because nothing in her experience has given her any clue as to how to handle such a situation. She looks over at Max, reaching out for something to prop her up for a moment. ‘And you, sir. Mr Saunders, is it?’

  Max nods again, his presence oddly reassuring in this cold room. His bulk seems warm, his pallor pink and comforting next to Hazel’s icy sheen.

  ‘Do you know Ms Archer?’

  ‘Well, I knew I recognised her from somewhere. She’s older, though. Obviously. And unless you have the association in your mind, it doesn’t immediately ring a bell . . . But then, it came to me suddenly, after breakfast. I found the old photographs online, looked at all the articles again. And, of course, there’s also been all that fuss recently in the papers about Laurel Bowman’s upcoming parole application. Faces change but . . .’ He gestures towards Hazel. ‘Once you realise, you can see.’

  Hillier glances again at Hazel and knows he is right. The image of that six-year-old girl morphs over Hazel’s face and Hillier sees her as the child she was. There had only ever been one photograph of Rosie Bowman and then, because of her age and the fact that she would not be standing trial, the courts had banned any further identification of her. All the world really knew of the two sisters were the court sketches of Laurel, along with her mug shot, and the one photograph of Rosie they’d been given of her in school uniform.

  ‘I went to find her,’ Max continues, ‘and she was terribly upset. Worried, as I’m sure you can imagine, DC Hillier, that she will be considered the prime suspect in the situation we find ourselves in here.’ Max’s voice is rich with rationale, with logic and compassion.

  Hillier puts her head on one side, considering this. ‘You have proof of your real identity, I suppose?’ she asks Hazel, the thought coming to her that she’d better check she’s not just dealing with an utter loon, an attention-seeking crazy.

  ‘Yes,’ Hazel answers, her tone meek. ‘And Jonny . . .’ She stares around the room as if she can magic him here. ‘My partner. I don’t know where he is. But you can ask him. He knows.’ A tear rolls slowly down her left cheek. ‘He’s the only one who does. Apart from my father.’ She lifts her head at that, an appalled expression on her face. ‘We won’t have to involve him, will we? Please, no. He’s old n
ow. He’s been through so much. I don’t want him to know about any of this . . .’

  Hillier rubs her nose with her hand. ‘Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?’ She glances over at the window, at the clear white light outside where a cloud of steam is escaping from pipes snaking out from the kitchen. ‘So, from what you said yesterday, you were with your partner all evening, at the time Georgie went missing. With the girl – Evie? She’s your . . . partner’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes. We all went down to the beach in the afternoon. Jonny used to come here as a kid for his summer holidays. He wanted to show me the coast. Then we hiked back up to the hotel and Evie went to her room while we had tea in the bar. It was cold, we were wet through from the rain. Afterwards we went upstairs to change for dinner. It was my birthday yesterday.’ She bites her lip. ‘It was supposed to be a celebration.’

  Hazel looks over at Max as she speaks and Hillier is suddenly reminded that he is still in the room.

  ‘Mr Saunders, thank you so much for instigating this meeting,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘But perhaps you could leave us to it now?’

  Max reluctantly rises, desperate to hear more but realising that his time on the frontline, at least for the moment, is up. He leaves after touching Hazel gently on the shoulder and giving her a weak smile, which she barely returns.

  ‘It’s just not fair. Any of this,’ Hazel says bitterly after he has left the room. ‘I’m not that child any more, if I ever was. I’m an adult. I’ve lived a life since then. I’m not my sister, Detective. I’m not her.’

  Hillier trains her mind back to 1997, when the Flower Girls were arrested. Laurel, certainly, was charged and tried. But why wasn’t Rosie? She frowns, trying to remember. Something about her age. That the younger sister couldn’t legally be held responsible. She studies Hazel who has sunk into her seat, concave with despair. A seagull squawks outside one of the restaurant windows and it brings Hillier back to the present.