The Flower Girls

by Alice Clark-Platts

  Hazel’s shoulders are hunched inwards, as if she is trying to hide from the two people who sit like Sphinxes in front of her. Jonny looks washed out, freezing in his shirtsleeves. His normally confident face is moon-white, his usually neat hair dishevelled from his agitated raking of it. Evie’s expression alternates between scorn and anger; her chest rises and falls rapidly as if struggling to contain the violent tears which lurk beneath the checks of her lumberjack shirt.

  ‘Look,’ Jonny says at last, ‘the girl has been found. Thank God.’ He licks his lips, checking Hazel’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘Going home is the right move now. We can talk about things properly there, without the police looking on. Work out what to do.’ He flicks a look sideways at his daughter. ‘And sort things out with you, Evie. Most importantly.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ his daughter replies. ‘It would be nice to have some idea of what’s going on. Why Hazel’s hiding under a blanket, for instance?’ She studies her own reflection in the wing mirror. ‘Is it because of that woman who attacked her by any chance? The mum of the girl who went missing.’

  Jonny can’t speak for a moment, scanning the road ahead as he drives. He clears his throat and places one hand on his daughter’s knee. ‘Evie darling, yes, I’m afraid it was. And this is exactly what we need to talk about. It’s not only about the attack. It’s because . . . well, it’s because . . .’ He glances at Hazel in the mirror. What should they say?

  ‘Evie . . .’ Hazel begins. ‘A long time ago . . .’

  ‘In a land far, far away?’ Evie laughs. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know all about it. I know about you, Hazel. I know who you are.’ She lifts her head, staring out at the frigid fields, her jawline set. ‘I’m not an idiot, Dad. I know she’s one of the Flower Girls.’

  The car swerves across the white lines in the middle of the road. From the backseat, a despairing moan emerges from Hazel’s mouth as tears spring to her eyes.

  ‘How?’ Jonny exclaims. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Evie says, twirling a piece of her hair around her index finger, pushing out her bottom lip until she resembles a sulky toddler. ‘Everyone was talking about it in the hotel. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who they meant. Two clicks on Google and I brought up her school picture.’ Evie jerks her head backwards in Hazel’s direction. ‘It’s not like she’s had plastic surgery or anything, is it? Although she might need it now, with those scratches on her face.’

  Jonny’s words trip over themselves as he scrambles to recover his composure. ‘Oh, God . . . Evie. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I know we should have told you. But . . . we never thought . . .’ His voice tails off and he runs a hand through his hair again in frustration.

  ‘Never thought she’d be found out?’ Evie scoffs and raises an eyebrow at him.

  ‘No, not that. But it never seemed . . . I mean, well, obviously this is a shock.’ Jonny grips the wheel tight. ‘For all of us.’

  ‘Not for Hazel, though, is it?’ Evie puts in. ‘She knows exactly who she is. She’s known forever.’

  ‘Look, Evie,’ he says in a level voice, trying to recover some control. ‘The fact is we didn’t tell you, rightly or wrongly. And I’m sorry about that. I really am. We certainly would have told you – in the future – when the time was right. But now . . . obviously, all this has happened. And you mustn’t conflate the two things. It was simply a terrible coincidence. Georgie probably just slipped and fell down the cliffs. In which case, this will all blow over very soon and we can get on with our lives. But, right now . . . what’s important now . . . is that we need some calm. Some peace and quiet so we can gather ourselves and work out what to do. Don’t you think, Hazel?’

  She sways on the seat behind them, her gaze vacant. She stares through the back of Evie’s head as if the girl isn’t there.

  ‘And, of course,’ Jonny goes on, gathering confidence as he speaks, ‘we need to figure out whether we talk to this Max guy. I mean, personally, I think that could be a good thing, don’t you?’

  ‘What Max guy?’ Evie whips her head round to face him. ‘What else is going on, Dad? What else aren’t you telling me?’

  Jonny pats her thigh, staring at the road ahead. He seems lost in himself, dipping in and out of a dream. ‘It’ll be OK, Evie,’ he says. ‘I’ve always looked after you, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes . . . but, Dad?’ she says and, for a moment, she sounds like she did only a few years ago, before her hormones popped and fizzed inside of her and she stopped being his little girl. She remains entirely still until he removes his hand and something streams across her face, an alchemy of fear and confusion.

  ‘Now people know,’ Jonny says, ‘they’ll hound Hazel. They’ll come for all of us.’

  Neither Evie nor Hazel says a word.

  ‘Max Saunders is a journalist, an author,’ Jonny continues. ‘He thinks he can help us put Hazel’s side of the story across. Explain that she was only six years old when Kirstie Swann was killed, that she had nothing to do with the murder. He wants to write a book about her. Laurel Bowman – Hazel’s sister – she’s already had a chance to put her side of the story across in court. Why shouldn’t Hazel? he says. After all, she’s the innocent one.’

  Hazel takes a breath to speak, leans forward in her seat.

  Evie stiffens as if she can’t bear to hear the sound of Hazel’s voice. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, what?’ she snaps. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Hazel says. ‘Something I’ve not mentioned . . . I’ve had emails, Jonny. And cards. Just in the last few months. Things sent to me, threatening me.’

  ‘What do you mean? You never said.’ His voice is raw, his stare drilling into the tarmac ahead.

  ‘The emails . . . they’ve come from an account. A fake account. But the name of the sender is Primrose Bowman.’

  Jonny frowns. ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘Someone has been sending me emails telling me that they know I’m a Flower Girl. Pretending to be me. Pretending to be Primrose Bowman.’

  ‘But who knows? Who has known before me?’ Jonny sounds bitter.

  ‘I don’t know, Jonny. I got the first one a couple of months ago. And then I’ve had about one a week. I’ve had dead flowers sent to me too. At the flat. At work. And cards. The emails are always just a sentence or two. Nothing more. But frightening. Upsetting. They say they know who I am. That they’re going to . . . hurt me.’ Hazel is practically whispering.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me about this?’

  She twitches involuntarily. ‘I didn’t know what to say, I suppose. I was scared. I didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Evie blurts out, folding her arms. ‘Is it that much of a surprise? That someone is threatening you, wanting to punish you? It’s not exactly quantum physics to work out the reason why, is it? Given what you did.’

  ‘Watch the language, Evelyn,’ Jonny says.

  Evie tosses her hair. ‘Yeah, all right. But it’s true. And once more people find out, they’re going to go mad, aren’t they? Look at that little girl’s mum. She wanted to scratch your eyes out. And I can’t believe you’re not the same, Dad. In all honesty. That once you found out about Hazel, you would have . . .’ She pulls back, her lips pursed.

  ‘What?’ he asks tersely.

  ‘Nothing.’ Evie refuses to look at him. ‘Nothing!’

  He drives for a minute before speaking. ‘You’re just upset, sweetie,’ he says then, sounding as if his throat is constricted. ‘We need to work out a plan of action, that’s all. There’s a lot to think about. But attacking each other, saying things which could damage us all,’ he swallows and his voice eases, ‘isn’t going to help. And these emails,’ he says, flicking on the indicator to change lanes, ‘are plainly blackmail. We should tell that policewoman about it – Hillier. Definitely we should.’

  ‘It’s irrelevant now, though, isn’t it?’ Hazel’s tone is bitter. ‘It’s like
Max said. Now the Greenstreets know, the press will know.’ She puffs out air, the beginnings of an emotional storm creeping into her voice. ‘They’ll find out where I live. Where you live. Where Evie is with her mum.’ She shakes her head violently. ‘It’s no good, Jonny. I don’t want you or Evie involved with this. It’s not fair on you. Just take me back to the flat and leave me there. This is my problem and I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘I agree totally,’ Evie says drily. ‘Home is where the heart is.’

  ‘Evie, I mean it . . .’ Jonny warns.

  ‘No, she’s right,’ Hazel says, a strange smile on her face as she looks at the teenager’s blonde hair, twisted into its glossy ponytail. It occurs to her that both of them are Matryoshka dolls in their stealthy concealment. ‘We have to think of Evie. We have to protect her. The journalists will be brutal, like they were before.’ Her voice cracks. ‘Someone’s already bullying me with the emails and that’s only going to get worse. It’s not right that you’ll both be exposed to it as well. Why should you be?’

  ‘I knew about this,’ Jonny says. ‘About you and your sister. I knew about it before – it didn’t matter to me. I loved you anyway.’

  Evie wrinkles her nose, concentrates on pressing her fingernails deep into her palm.

  ‘I knew about it and I took it on. I won’t abandon you, Hazel.’

  Evie looks at him. His cheeks are flushed and he is turning to Hazel, not her, not to his daughter. Despite everything she’s done for him. As he speaks, drops of rain spatter against the windscreen and the sky darkens and Evie feels that pull of sadness that threatens to take her over all the time these days. That longing for it all to be over.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Can we just go home?’

  But Jonny and Hazel are silent, locked into their own thoughts as the rain begins in earnest. Neither of them seems to notice that she’s said anything at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Max is at the kitchen table back in Birmingham. The Buccaneer’s Daughter is nothing but a few thousand words saved on a memory card now, destined to be forgotten forever. He senses the looming headlines that, any day, will violently mushroom from the tabloids – a thrilling story in this slow news period – about a girl going missing and being found in the same hotel where Flower Girl Rosie Bowman was staying. But he ignores it and tries to breathe as his fingers fly across the keyboard, creating the thing of beauty that will be his book proposal. Ever since he recognised Hazel for who she actually is, he has had an electric current sparking through him and he shifts on his seat as he types, unable to sit still, wanting to burst through the door and run and run.

  Georgie has been found, he reminds himself whenever he feels a dash of guilt that he is manipulating this situation to his advantage. The child is safe in hospital and everything he has planned for Hazel is for her own good. Underneath all of the coal of Georgie’s disappearance is the diamond that is Rosie Bowman. And he, Max, has found her after scrabbling around in the dark for all these years: wrestling storylines from flickering images that scamper through his mind on train rides, the moments just before sleep, or those luxurious seconds just after an orgasm. It’s no way to conjure up stories or ideas.

  But now …

  Now he can forget The Buccaneer’s Daughter. Whatever the tabloids will claim to be the truth, he is the one who has a vulnerable and lost Rosie Bowman in his palm. Since he had his epiphany in the hotel lounge, Max is clear-headed about his purpose. What he wants will not harm Hazel. It will help her.

  As it will help him.

  It feels almost too easy. Like one of those mythical moments he has heard other writers describe. The magical muse that sits on your shoulder and dictates the best-selling book to you; those characters that appear fully formed. Not that Max has had any experience of this but he feels it now, reaching towards him over the deep and vast boundaries of the mind.

  The Flower Girls: Their True Story.

  It’s too good.

  Max likes Hazel, he tells himself. He feels protective towards her and, it is his view (he types), that this is the best solution for her, in order for her to move forward and go on with her life.

  The problem is – and here, he reluctantly takes his hands off the keyboard – that Hazel cannot remember what happened on that terrible afternoon when Kirstie Swann was murdered, and if she can’t recall the details, then there won’t be enough information to fill a serialised run of newspaper articles, let alone the eighty thousand words required for a book.

  And so – Max jerks his attention back to his proposal, mouth twisting with excitement – he has come up with the idea that the Flower Girls should be reunited.

  As the words appear on the screen, his heart begins to pound. Such an idea! One that came to him after he’d left Hazel and Jonny. He had halted midway up the stairs to his room, picturing the possibility of the two women meeting for the first time since one was ten and the other six.

  Max’s hands drift over his keyboard, thinking about Laurel, about what she must have experienced. Had she tried to contact her family? Had they contacted her? In his cursory research so far, he has discovered that Laurel’s lawyer was a Toby Bowman, her uncle and Gregor Bowman’s elder brother. Why had he stepped into the breach when the parents appeared to have wanted nothing more to do with her?

  All this was yet to be discovered.

  But it was clear to him that if he could arrange for Rosie and Laurel Bowman to be reunited, to nudge the memories in Rosie’s brain . . . it would be the story of the century. Myra Hindley meets Ian Brady. Maxine Carr goes to visit Ian Huntley.

  Max presses the save button, his pulse fizzing, pins and needles in his fingers. Alison will be back from her parents’ tonight with the girls and they can celebrate. He will go to the supermarket now to buy some well-deserved champagne.

  Hillier sits staring at the white vinyl floor in the hospital, imagining the millions of germs that are crawling over it unobserved. She is warmer now, at least on the outside. But despite the four plastic cups of sugared tea she has already been given, she feels as though, inside, she will never again be anything other than ice.

  She runs through it in her mind over and over again, like rain pouring off a drainpipe into a bucket. The heavy weight of the child, the pinch in her shoulders where Georgie’s fingers grasped like iron. The numbness in her toes, the shivering and trembling. And the terrible stillness in Georgie’s face while she lay rolled up in blankets, dying right before their eyes. The previous twenty-four hours have been so centred on the fixed point that is Georgie that it seems impossible she might soon no longer exist. She looms so large in Hillier’s head that even now the physicality of her remains. She had felt Georgie. She was alive in Hillier’s arms. She had a pulse, faint and tricksy under the fingertips, but it had been there.

  Hillier looks at her fingernails, at the dirt collected under them, the red of her knuckles, swollen with cold. She will never come to terms with this job if she’s honest. The swing and shift of it from a dark blanket of nothing for months and months only to be thrust into a tunnel of blazing adrenaline that, when you exit, disappears behind you as if it had never been there in the first place. They’ll be wanting her to go for counselling, she thinks with rueful resignation. Especially if the girl is dead.

  Dead.

  If a child dies, what’s the point? Hillier thinks. If she’s dead, what’s the point of the five years she lived? Because it’s not this. It’s not any lesson that they’ve learnt from this miserable episode. All today carries with it is sorrow: dragging, weighty sorrow. And Hillier doesn’t know if she can cope with that in the days to come. She can’t let herself think about Georgie’s parents. Her mother, who bore her from her own body. Who held her in her arms when she was born. Did she know then? Hillier wonders fleetingly before pushing the thought away. Did she know then that she would only have her daughter until she was five?

  Hillier feels faint, her legs weak, but she forces herself up from her chair, t
o walk along the hospital corridor, to breathe in the disinfectant, the smell of stew or whatever foodstuff it is they’re boiling the nutrients out of. She walks towards a door at the end of the corridor beyond which shapes converge and dissipate in patterns of urgency. Mr and Mrs Greenstreet are tucked away from her, in another room, cushioned by police officers who will catch them when they fall.

  From behind her comes Detective Sergeant Gordon’s voice.

  ‘She’s out of the woods.’

  Hillier whirls round. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘She’s going to be OK. They’ve stabilised her. Her temperature’s up. She might lose her right big toe and the tip of a finger, but she’s going to live.’

  Hillier drops, her knees buckling, her open mouth making no sound.

  ‘Here, here, I’ve got you,’ Gordon says, bending to grab her under the arms, hoisting her over to a chair. ‘Come on, put your head between your knees.’

  Hillier does as she is bidden, pushing her face down, watching the tears drip onto the floor.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Gordon says gruffly. ‘No one can see. Here you go,’ he says, handing her a tissue.

  Hillier sits up and blows her nose, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

  Gordon nods, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Ah,’ Hillier says, exhaling and leaning back. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘It was dodgy there for a while. Thank the coastguard for the chopper ride to the hospital.’

  ‘Was she in that cave? The one I could see?’

  ‘They don’t know for sure. It’s certainly possible. She must have sheltered somewhere. She would have died otherwise.’