Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  He would have tried though.

  ‘I’ll give you a couple of days.’ The old man laughed again. ‘After that, she’s mine for ever. This phone’s going in the water now. But you keep yours handy. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Let me speak to her.’

  ‘She’s in no state to talk right now.’

  I remembered the blood on the table leg, and panic twisted inside me.

  ‘She’s pregnant. For God’s sake—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do you know how babies are made?’

  I closed my eyes. No, no, no.

  He repeated it: ‘Do you know how babies are made?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘No, you don’t. They get half from their father, and half from their mother. You know that much. But I bet you didn’t know this. A woman’s born with all her eggs inside her already. She’s got them as a baby. Got them in the womb. Isn’t that amazing, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You know what that means? It means half your baby existed long before you came along. She was born with that half already inside her. And her mother was born with half of her, which makes a quarter of your child. And her grandmother. And so on. All the way back, for ever and ever.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Set in stone, long before you and I. That’s beautiful, when you think about it, isn’t it? A part of your child’s been there forever. Women birthing women is one of the world’s continuums. Most people don’t see that. Most people don’t want to.’

  I still didn’t say anything.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you don’t necessarily need to worry, is what I’m saying. If it turns out to be a girl, we’ll keep it.’

  And then the line went dead.

  Chapter Nine

  Hannah stood outside her father’s house.

  It was a large detached property a mile from the seafront, set back from the road behind railings and apart from its neighbours by a wall of trees. The downstairs windows were crisscrossed black; the ones upstairs were capped with wooden peaks. Dark paths ran down either side of the building, leading to the substantial garden behind. Her father had not been rich, but the house would probably be worth a great deal when she put it on the market.

  If she did that.

  Right now, Hannah lived in the centre of Whitkirk, in a small, run-down flat, and she knew a decision was required some point soon about what to do with this place. Move in and make it her own? Sell it and buy somewhere better? Both were huge acts, logistically and emotionally, and the last three months had seen her oscillating: putting the moment off.

  A big decision, she’d told herself. Don’t rush into it either way.

  Now, given what she’d found, it was good that she hadn’t.

  The gate scraped across the tarmac drive, and she felt a chill, even though the air was still. It was a balmy evening; there was no breeze. The shiver came from that unfocused feeling of dread, amplified by the house in front of her.

  This was the place Hannah should have felt safest in the world. Growing up, she certainly had, and she was painfully aware how precious that was. In all her years as police, she’d met countless children who should have felt safe in their homes but didn’t – kids with skinny shoulders, collarbones like skeletons, and hollow, wary eyes. But her father had loved her and taken care of her. Until recently, this house had reminded her of that, and, as an adult, there had always been that familiar feeling of warmth and security returning here. The gentle, rhythmic knocking of the grandfather clock in the hallway; the fabric of her father’s coat, rough against her knuckles as she hung her own on top; the sound of wood spitting and cracking behind the copper guard on the hearth, where he would have lit a log fire regardless of the season, because he understood that a warm hearth was not solely about heat.

  Walking into this house had always felt like folding herself into a comforting, familiar embrace. Somewhere she could allow herself to feel as small as she wanted and still be safe, because she could do anything.

  Not any more.

  She closed the gate behind her with a gentle clink, and it felt like a key turning: locking her inside a room with something that had once been good but was now soured and rotten, maybe even dangerous.

  Hannah opened the front door and sensed it, hard as a shove.

  Go away, the house was saying. You’re not welcome.

  She shrugged off her jacket, glancing through the open door to the living room. There was no fire burning in there this evening, of course; she’d never resurrected it. The ashes sitting in the grate were the ones from the evening she’d found him.

  A king, she reminded herself.

  Whatever happens, hold on to that.

  She went upstairs and opened the door to his study. It was a small room, but a grand one. There was an ornate desk in the centre with a reclining leather chair pushed underneath on the far side. Behind it, a window ran along most of the back wall, covered by red velvet curtains that were thick and lustrous enough for a child to stand in the creases, turn around three times and be hopelessly lost in. The other walls held bookcases, broken only by the doorway she was standing in, and the old chimneybreast that her father had often talked of opening up but never had.

  Hannah walked across to the desk and looked down, as she had so many times now, at what she’d found.

  The other thing.

  It had started a week and a half ago.

  For some reason Hannah couldn’t identify, she had started feeling that now familiar sense of dread. It was worse, though. She was actively scared: small and vulnerable and alone. At the time, this house had still felt like an embrace – albeit a sad one, like hugging someone goodbye – and so she’d returned here and done what seemed natural and harmless at the time. She’d come up to this room to feel closer to her father, to remember him, to try to regain a little of the reassurance and safety he’d always provided her with.

  You are Hannah Price, daughter of DS Colin Price.

  And that means you can do anything.

  After a while, she’d realised there was something she wanted. Maybe it was stupid and frivolous, but the idea became impossible to shake. She wanted a book: one in particular. A simple story from her childhood that she’d always enjoyed her father reading to her. It reminded her of his quiet voice, and the clean, sharp tang of his aftershave. And she wanted those memories again. There was no harm in that, was there? Of course not.

  Except she couldn’t find it.

  Which was wrong. All the others she remembered were on the shelf – even the ones that had never been favourites and which she’d barely read. There were books so old that their spines were bare and torn, like a child’s attempt to skin a branch with a penknife. But the book she was looking for was missing.

  It had been an idle search at first. And yet suddenly, from wanting to find and read it, it had become needing to.

  The attic, then.

  In contrast to the rest of the house, it was only a simple conversion: just boards laid down and a bare bulb installed, the cord wrapped in webs. The light was soft, the colour of butter, and the air smelled of sanded wood. At the back, she’d found cardboard boxes sealed with parcel tape, and cut them raggedly open with her keys.

  Inside, stored away at random, there were hundreds more books. Hannah had sat cross-legged on the dusty floor of the attic, feeling the height of the empty house stretching down a giddy and precarious distance below her, and she had gone through each box methodically, book by book.

  Her book had still not been there. That stopped mattering, though, because in the last box she had found the old carrier bag, and the things her father had hidden inside.

  That bag – empty now – was resting below the desk, but it was so old that it had kept its shape when she discarded it, like an enormous piece of crumpled paper. Every now and then, it rustled to itself, gradually relaxing. She could imagine it doing that when she wasn’t here,
the noise brief and crisp in the empty house: the gradual breaths of something emerging from hibernation.

  The two items she’d found inside were on the desk now.

  The first was a folded map of Huntington county, which she’d spread out. It had the opposite instincts to the carrier bag, and kept trying to close itself. Hannah leaned on either side of it, resting her palms on the edges to flatten it down. The age was apparent from the stars worn through at each junction of creases. The veins and capillaries of Huntington were faded in places, totally obscured in others. But the things her father had added to the map remained clear.

  Five tiny, red crosses.

  One was over the middle of a residential street. Mulberry Avenue. The second was over the side of Whitkirk Park. A third was by Blair Rocks, a small, bare picnic area ulcering the edge of the woods. The fourth was close to a derelict cottage a short distance from there – again, by the woods. But the largest, this one with a circle drawn around it, was some way deeper into those same woods. Directly over the viaduct.

  The map felt ominous enough by itself, but the second item made everything infinitely worse. Her father had given this second thing its own bag, as though he wanted to preserve whatever evidence was sealed away inside. She hadn’t opened it because she didn’t need to. Even through the opaque plastic it was wrapped in, it was easy to identify it by shape.

  A hammer.

  You have a real fucking problem here, Hannah.

  Yes. She certainly did. Because even without understanding the exact details, she had no doubt what she had found in her father’s attic was evidence of a crime. Perhaps a terrible one. One that, rather than being investigated by her father, had been covered up by him. Or possibly even worse.

  Maybe even perpetrated by him.

  Hannah ran her fingertip over the crosses, imagining she could feel the ink dyed into the paper.

  What she should have done – straightaway – was put the map and hammer back in the box in her father’s attic and forgotten about them. Maybe in time she’d even have forgotten them successfully enough to have the father she remembered back again: the loving, caring one; the strong, infallible man who’d made her feel safe.

  Instead, the day after the discovery, she had investigated. Visits to the first four sites revealed nothing, as far as she could tell. It was something to do, though: a cursory look to reassure herself. See – it was nothing. It meant nothing. But then, at the viaduct, she had spotted Christopher Dawson’s body. She hadn’t been able to ignore that.

  And now, after what she’d found on the CCTV footage this evening, hiding everything away again was no longer an option. She wasn’t a perfect person; she could, and would, continue to lie about the anonymous call; and, because the past was the past, she could fail to disclose what she’d found up in the attic to anyone else. But a woman had been in the car with Christopher Dawson – a car that had ended up abandoned at the viaduct with Dawson lying dead on the riverbank below – and that was another matter entirely. A human being couldn’t be boxed away and forgotten about. Hannah wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. Professionally as police, or personally.

  No, that woman urgently needed to be identified and accounted for.

  Hannah had already left a message on Neil Dawson’s home number, requesting him to phone her as soon as possible. Perhaps he would have an idea who she was. In a few minutes, she would leave her father’s house and head to the viaduct to coordinate with the head of the dive team she’d requested. Had the mystery woman ended up in the water with Dawson? They would need to check. Depending on what they found, forensic teams would be required on-site as well. They would search the entire area. If there was anything at the scene connected to her father, it was likely they were going to find it. Whatever he’d done was about to come fully into the light, where she would now have no choice but to face it. She was Hannah Price, of course, daughter of Colin Price, and that meant she could do it.

  That meant she could do anything.

  Hannah looked at the little red crosses marking the map, and then at the bag of grimy evidence she didn’t dare open.

  But what about you, Dad? she thought.

  What the hell did you do?

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  I headed to the university. I didn’t know where else to go.

  Late evening on a weekend, the campus was busy. In the distance, towards the Union, I could hear the steady thump of a club night, echoing in the flagstones. It was ominous now, as though there was something huge out of sight below me, banging to be released. I passed clusters of shadowy students moving in that direction, and their laughter jarred. It felt like I was half asleep, even though my nerves were on fire.

  What the fuck was I doing?

  You won’t go to the police, the old man had warned me.

  And I wasn’t going to the police – not yet. Because whoever the man really was, he was right that nobody would believe me. What could I possibly tell them? That twenty years ago, a man named Robert Wiseman wrote a novel that might have been based on a real-life serial killer? And that somehow, all this time later, the killer apparently remained active, still searching for his missing daughter? That he’d now kidnapped my pregnant girlfriend to blackmail me?

  Right now, I didn’t know how much of it I believed myself.

  I walked quickly through the cold night air. Even the phone call I’d received seemed unreal: a world away now. If it hadn’t been listed in the call log on my phone, I might have doubted it really happened. But it had. I’d tried Ally’s number again a few times since, and each time it had gone straight to automated voicemail. So either the man had turned it off, or done what he’d told me – thrown it in the water.

  Which meant that, even if the police did believe me, there was no obvious way of finding this man. They couldn’t trace the phone. Maybe the van had been caught on CCTV somewhere, but maybe not. If this whole thing was really true, the old man had been operating for decades without being caught. He’d be careful about things like that.

  You won’t tell anyone, he’d told me.

  You’ll just find her.

  Yeah, but then what? It was madness. I wasn’t going to trade anyone for Ally – or at least I fucking hoped I wasn’t. At the same time, the man’s final words kept coming back to me, the implications filling me with fresh horror each time.

  If it turns out to be a girl, we’ll keep it.

  I walked more quickly.

  Worst of all was the knowledge that I’d contributed to this. Irrational, maybe, but the guilt was eating the inside of my chest. If I hadn’t written that story, this wouldn’t be happening right now. That was what it came down to, wasn’t it? If not for me, this wouldn’t be happening to Ally …

  God, I thought. Ally.

  No. I couldn’t bear to imagine where she might be or what might be happening to her, or to deal with the idea that I’d caused it to happen. And that maybe she even knew I had.

  I didn’t wish you away, I thought. You or the baby.

  My toes half caught on the flagstones.

  It was only a story.

  The building was deserted. I used the main key to get in through the heavy red doors, making sure they cricked shut behind me.

  My footfalls echoed up the spiderweb of staircases that crisscrossed the centre of the building. I unlocked the door to our small common room, and there was something vaguely reassuring about hearing it shush closed behind me, then click tightly shut as well. It meant there were at least two locked doors between me and the outside world.

  The first thing I did was look around the common room. It was pitch-black and still, but I checked the other offices to make sure I was alone – just glancing at the underside of the doors, searching for any slivers of light there. It wasn’t unheard of for Ros to work this late, even on a weekend, but the rooms all looked dark and empty. That was good.

  There was a row of flat comfy chairs over by the noticeboard, which I coul
d sleep on if I needed to. As though there was the faintest fucking chance of me falling asleep.

  I went into my office. Half of it was in darkness, but one end was illuminated with amber from the floodlights a little way down the concourse. I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I just turned the lock behind me, then slid into my rattley old chair and booted up the PC.

  As the desktop loaded, I realised I didn’t feel safe at all. It wasn’t about doors. The old man wasn’t nearby. I almost wished he was: if he and his boy turned up here, at least I’d have something tangible to grab hold of – or try to. No, the worst thing was that they were probably miles away by now, completely out of reach, and that Ally was with them.

  It didn’t matter about me. She wasn’t safe.

  But I was going to find her.

  How, though?

  Same way your father did. If you want to see this one again, you’ll figure out how he did it.

  That was the key, I thought, whatever I decided to do afterwards. I had to get more information: try to understand a little better what was and wasn’t happening here. Before I went to the police, if that was what I was going to do, I needed something more concrete: something conclusive they’d have to take seriously. I had to try to discover if the woman really existed. And if she did, I had to try to find her. While I wasn’t going to trade anyone, she might at least be able to corroborate parts of my story. She might know something that would help me – help the police – find Ally and get her back safely.

  And so whatever I did, I needed to follow my father’s trail.

  Keep calm, Neil.

  Ridiculous, but I thought it anyway.

  The first thing I did online was load up the wiki page Dad had printed. Robert Wiseman’s biography. The references for the numbers dotted through the text were at the bottom of the page. I clicked on them one by one, but each time I was met by an error message on the new window that opened. I checked the ‘History’ tab on Wikipedia and realised the article hadn’t been amended for years. The sources linked to it had probably been correct at the time of the article’s last edit, but they’d disappeared from the servers in the time since.