Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  ‘Get you anything?’

  ‘What?’ This time she did turn around, although she immediately wished she hadn’t. Ketterick was standing up, leaning back over his own belt as he stretched his spine.

  ‘Just running to the men’s room.’ He stopped stretching and thumbed at the door. ‘Passing the drinks machine on the way. Get you anything?’

  ‘No. Thanks. I’m good.’

  ‘Okay. Give me a shout if World War Three breaks out.’ He winked. ‘Somehow, I don’t think it will.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll hold the fort.’

  The door sealed shut as he closed it behind him. Hannah turned back to the screen, pissed off. She reached for the jog-shuttle, intending to rewind the footage, but then—

  Ah, there you are.

  She knocked the speed down to one and watched as Christopher Dawson emerged from the hotel. He was a tiny figure on the CCTV, but she could tell it was him. He was dressed in the clothes they’d found him in: the overcoat; the V-neck pullover with the shirt and tie beneath. All memorably old fashioned. He stopped at the bottom of the steps in front of the hotel. Hannah zoomed into the recorded image as far as possible, stopping when his body filled the frame, then watched as he turned this way, then the other.

  Looking for somebody?

  A thick black line curved around his shoulder. She waited as he looked around … waited … and there it was. A black bag on his back.

  The missing laptop? It seemed likely.

  So: this was probably close to the moment he set off on the journey to the viaduct. She felt a slight thrill – just as Dawson vanished from the frame.

  Shit.

  The scroll button on the console rattled round as she reversed the zoom, panning back as much as she could – and there he was again, crossing the street. He headed to the left of the screen, clearly with intent, and then disappeared off the edge.

  Hannah rolled the scroll button in frustration. It was a pointless gesture as this wasn’t live footage. History was set: the camera had pointed where it had, and there was no way of changing it now. She was about to try one of the other feeds when she remembered his car. She could have kicked herself: he had driven to the viaduct. And the entrance to the car park, just past the hotel, remained in the frame.

  She watched the random stick figures moving soundlessly about the frame and waited. A minute or so later, Christopher Dawson reappeared. He walked back across the street towards the hotel. But now, there was someone beside him.

  Hannah zoomed in.

  A woman.

  She was on the far side of Dawson, so it was impossible to see much detail: all Hannah could really make out was that she was wearing a puffy black coat and blue jeans. She had skinny legs, dark hair, and was a little taller than Dawson. It was hard to tell what age she was. One thing that was clear was that the pair of them were talking to each other: walking side by side, with their heads turning in conversation. Dawson had crossed the street to meet her and now they were heading back across.

  Hannah watched as they walked up the side of The Southerton, then disappeared. She sped up the film again. A moment later, Dawson’s battered old Escort nosed out of the car park, backed up slightly, then spun out and disappeared out of shot.

  This time, she was sure, Dawson wasn’t coming back.

  Chapter Seven

  Inside my father’s house, the familiar hallway was grey and dim.

  I stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, feeling the profound emptiness all around me. It was stronger than before. Nobody had been here since my last visit, and nobody would until my next, and my presence didn’t seem enough to leave a mark.

  I stared into the shadows at the end – listening to the silence that had scared me as a child, not so much now – and then went down to my father’s office, my childhood bedroom, and opened the curtains there. A spread of dismal late-afternoon light fell reluctantly into the room. Motes of dust turned lazily in the air. I sat down in the office chair with a thump that sent it rolling slightly, then rubbed my fingertip slowly across the surface of the desk, through the dust, and stopped in the clean centre.

  I tapped the desk once.

  Where was his laptop?

  At some point, I had to pick up his belongings from the police station in Whitkirk. But that was just his car, and the clothes he’d left in the hotel room. The laptop was missing. If I was to believe the police, it was lost for ever – either heavy enough to be lodged below the surface on that riverbed, or else swept away downstream into the sea, maybe smashed against the rocks – and, either way, nobody was going looking for it.

  Except I couldn’t imagine him clutching it as he jumped. Why would he do that? Despite the ways writing might have failed him, I still didn’t think he would have deliberately destroyed something he was working on …

  But you can’t imagine him jumping at all.

  No, I couldn’t. Which felt like a dangerous idea because there was such an obvious emotional convenience to it: if he hadn’t, I couldn’t be responsible for failing him; there wouldn’t be anything I should have done. So I kept rolling that thought around, making sure I was thinking it for the right reasons, and not just through guilt.

  It wasn’t just guilt.

  I glanced up at the calendar on the wall in front of me. Assuming the things he’d written there were names, my father had gone to see ‘Haggerty A’, and possibly ‘Ellis F’, before heading to The Southerton. And then whatever had happened in Whitkirk had happened. It was, very clearly, a schedule, and the question from last night came back to me now. Why make appointments to meet people if you were planning to kill yourself afterwards?

  Who were they, I wondered, and what had he been working on? Something to do with The Black Flower? Wiseman’s book was at the back of the desk where I’d left it. I rolled the chair slightly closer to reach for it – and, as I did, my knee hit the single drawer built in below the desk.

  I leaned to one side and stared at it, then reached down. It opened with a scrape. A smell of old wood emerged, like pencil shavings, revealing a single item inside: a black book. A diary,I thought but then realised it was too small. An address book.

  Almost as useful.

  The cover was rough leather, and a sheet of paper was feathering out at the back: folded up and tucked into a lip in the cover. I took that out and put it on the desk, then flicked through the pages of the address book itself. My father had clearly had it for a long time, as some of the contacts were faded away almost entirely. They’d been recorded with pens, pencils, felt tips in all different colours – clearly just whatever had been to hand as he scrawled the entries.

  I glanced at the calendar again, then checked through.

  Nothing for ‘Ellis F’ under either E or F. But ‘Andrew Haggerty’ was there, listed under H in bright black ink – a fairly recent entry, by the look of it. There was no phone number for him, just an address, but the postcode wasn’t far away – south of the city centre. Seeing it there almost gave me a small thrill. That was my father’s first contact located then. I might not know who Andrew Haggerty was or why Dad had been interested in him, but I did know where to find him. Which meant, if I followed this up, I could ask.

  What about the paper then?

  I picked it up and found there were actually two separate things: an A4 sheet, and a newspaper cutting that fell out as I unfolded it. I looked at the sheet first, which my father had printed from the Internet. The Wikipedia entry for Robert Wiseman.

  That pretty much confirmed he’d been working on something to do with that book.

  I read:

  Robert Nigel Wiseman (1947–1993) is the English writer of three detective novels. He is presumed deceased, having been missing since 1993.

  Early career

  Educated at St Bartholomew’s College, Chichester, Robert Wiseman expressed an intention to become a writer from an early age [1]. Following a number of short stories, his first novel, An Excellent Death, was published in 1986 at the
age of 39. Before then, he worked as an advertising executive, and continued to do so until the publication of his second novel, Dangerous Times, in 1988.

  The Black Flower

  The Black Flower was Robert Wiseman’s third novel. Published in October 1991, it immediately outsold his previous titles, and was eventually to become a bestseller, reaching number five on the UK sales charts, and selling well in Europe and the United States. Rights to film the story were sold, but never came to fruition.

  The plot concerns a little girl who appears as if from nowhere on a seaside promenade. When she tells the story of where she came from, it leads the police officer in charge of the investigation into danger. Critical opinion was mixed [2,3].

  Death of wife and subsequent breakdown

  Prior to the publication of The Black Flower, Wiseman had become estranged from his wife of eight years, Vanessa [3]. Some reports suggest a series of infidelities was responsible for the dissolution of the relationship, but the two remained in contact [3]. On 5 November 1992, the pair met in Whitkirk. Directly after this encounter Vanessa Wiseman was killed in a car accident. Following his wife’s death, Wiseman withdrew from public life and began drinking heavily, with many sources commenting on his increasingly fragmented mental state [4,5,6,7].

  Last known sighting

  Robert Wiseman’s withdrawal from public life culminated in his ultimate disappearance. He was last seen at approximately 7 p.m. on 6 September 1993 while leaving The Southerton Hotel. Wiseman had been resident in the hotel for four days and was rumoured to be working on a sequel to The Black Flower. On the morning of 7 September, Wiseman’s car was found parked on a cliff near Whitkirk Abbey, which was the last place he had seen his wife alive. Despite an extensive police investigation, Wiseman’s body has never been found, although he was pronounced legally dead as a result of presumed suicide in 1998 [8].

  After I’d read it through once, I did so again.

  Holy shit.

  And then a third time – so I was sure I wasn’t imagining it. But no, the connection was plain and obvious. Nearly twenty years ago, Robert Wiseman had booked into The Southerton, allegedly working on new material, and killed himself – apparently anyway. And that wasn’t the only similarity to my father either. Wiseman’s wife had died the year before too.

  I read the entry a fourth time, but it didn’t help. I was tingling inside, both excited and scared. This couldn’t be a coincidence, but what did it mean? Had my father been trying to emulate Wiseman for some bizarre reason? Or had he been investigating the man’s history and then something else had happened? I needed to get online and look the entry up – make sure the details were right – and then get in touch with the police. There was something going on here. Something that people weren’t seeing.

  The other piece of paper.

  I picked it up carefully; it was yellow and brittle, and felt dusty beneath my fingertips. A quarter-page clipping, torn from a newspaper: the Whitkirk and Huntington Express. The date in the top corner said 6 November 1992.

  VIOLENT CRIME WRITER

  TALKS VIOLENT CRIME

  BARBARA PHILLIPS

  Robert Wiseman has made a very successful career for himself by writing about murder. His latest novel, The Black Flower, has sold to 10 countries and spent 8 weeks on the bestseller lists earlier this year. Its graphic killings and grisly subject matter appear to have struck a chord with audiences, but how does the author himself feel about violence?

  Speaking to me in nearby Huntington, Mr Wiseman is unmoved.

  ‘You have to remember that we’re not talking about real people doing horrible things to other real people. They’re fictional characters. Nobody actually gets hurt.’

  Fictional or not, the subject matter of The Black Flower is dark indeed. When a little girl, eventually named Charlotte Webb, appears on a promenade, she brings death and destruction in her wake. The detective who finds Charlotte must protect her from her father, who is hunting her down, while at the same time dealing with his own demons. So far, you may be forgiven for thinking, so familiar.

  ‘No, the book is different from many other crime novels,’ Mr Wiseman asserts. ‘In most books, you have a murderer hunting and killing people. But The Black Flower isn’t like that. It does have a serial killer, and a particularly horrible one at that, but it’s more about the little girl who escapes. Who is she? Where did she come from? And I like that the act of her telling her story is what sets events in motion.’ He is unable to suppress a smile. ‘That idea was hard for a writer to resist. A man becoming haunted by a story that may or may not be true.’

  However, when asked about perceived similarities between his novel and real crimes that took place in the 1970s, Mr Wiseman is reluctant to comment directly.

  ‘Ideas are everywhere,’ he tells me. ‘I grew up on a farm. I have friends who are borderline alcoholics. I’m a writer, after all! No, it’s not where the ideas come from that matters – it’s what the writer does with them through his work. You need to put a lot of effort in to transform ideas and experiences into a story. Think of it like wine. Ideas are the grapes, while the book is the finished bottle.’

  His eyes glitter at that. You get the feeling he would love to have said champagne instead.

  The Black Flower is out in paperback this week.

  It was a strange little article, I thought – as though it wanted to be a hatchet job, but the journalist hadn’t quite had the heart to unload on him. Was that because of the date? If the wiki page was right, this article had been published the day after Vanessa Wiseman’s car crash. Maybe the writer had tempered it down slightly, out of respect.

  Barbara Phillips.

  The name rang a bell – and after a moment I remembered why. The message I’d heard on my father’s answerphone: a journalist called Barbara, asking about an interview. I’d assumed she wanted to interview him, but perhaps I’d got it the wrong way around. Given she’d written this article, then, if my father had been working on something connected to Wiseman, maybe it was him who’d asked to speak to her.

  You’ve got my number.

  I flicked through the address book to P, and yes, he did. So I could ask her too, or else the police could. I read through the article again, my attention catching on one line in particular.

  Real crimes that took place in the 1970s.

  What crimes?

  The book’s cover struck me again, out of the corner of my eye this time. The woman’s face, roughly transposed over the centre of the flower, screaming in pain as the thorns drew blood. What kind of real crimes could that be based on? I picked it up and allowed it to open where it wanted, on the page with the flower pressed inside it. It was my imagination, I was sure, but the petals seemed even more fragile than last time – flat and thin and weak – while the flower itself looked more obviously deformed. But it wasn’t my imagination that it bothered me a hell of a lot.

  I turned back, all the way to the beginning of the book. There was no prologue, no indication of chapter number. It just started.

  It does not happen like this.

  I read the first few pages of the book.

  And then I carried on.

  Extract from The Black Flower by Robert Wiseman

  As soon as Sullivan enters the office, before anything has even been said, he knows that DCI Peter Gray does not believe him. Or – more accurately – that Gray does not believe the little girl’s story but anticipates the fact that Sullivan will.

  The first is obvious from his superior’s body language. Gray is visibly tense, but nowhere near as tense as he would be if taking the girl’s story as truth. The second is clear in a different way. After what happened to Anna Hanson, everyone in the department knows that DS Michael Sullivan cares very deeply when it comes to children, that he will not let a cry for help pass him by again. He has acquired a professional blind spot, one that potentially occludes his judgement. Even Pearson, his partner, believes that. Gray thinks the same.

  The
plastic-glass door rattles in its frame.

  Gray motions to the chair.

  ‘Sit down, DS Sullivan.’

  He is all business: determined to get this out of the way as quickly and with as little discomfort as possible. Sullivan resists the urge to leap straight in and argue his case, and instead does as he is told, pulling the thin chair back with a scrape and sitting down across from Gray. From behind him, even with the door closed, he can hear the clatter of typewriters, the whirr and bing.

  For a moment, neither of them says anything.

  Sullivan glances around. Gray’s office has a truly appalling colour scheme. The walls are painted an unpleasant shade of pea-green, the carpet is beige, and his old desk is made from dark-brown wood, chipped and hinged, like something you’d see folded up beneath the window in a pensioner’s bedsit. With the rusted, screeching filing cabinet and the cobwebbed potted plant on the windowsill, the office has the feel of something assembled in desperation from the last vestiges of a jumble sale.

  The foam tiles in the ceiling were originally white, but over the years they have been stained with amber bruises from the cigarettes Gray constantly smokes. His sharp, smart cap rests on the desk beside a glass ashtray filled with orange tab ends and ash. Sullivan’s report lies between them.

  Gray lights his next cigarette, exhales a plume of smoke, then slides the file towards the middle of the desk.

  Take this back, he seems to be saying.

  Sullivan says, ‘I’ve checked out some of the details, sir.’

  Gray raises his eyebrows slightly. Of course you have. The gesture makes it clear Sullivan’s words bother Gray in a small way, but surprise him in no way at all.

  Already, Sullivan has no real hope – Gray’s demeanor makes that clear – but there is an urgent curl of anger in him, like the light you get in your vision after staring at a bare bulb. It had been there since the interview with the little girl.