Black Flowers
Page 14
That was the justification. In reality, she knew she was still searching desperately for that old feeling of safety and reassurance. Trying to reclaim the father she remembered, and wanted to remember, and herself along with him. Oddly, now that she’d discovered at least some of the truth, it was more comforting to look through the album than it had been over the last few days. Because in a way it helped to know. However monstrous something is, it always feels worse when it’s lurking out of sight behind you.
Hannah cupped the remains of the coffee in her hands.
One thing hadn’t changed: out of all the photographs, it was still the second that she kept returning to, the one that showed her cradled in her father’s arms just after she’d been born. The place and time it had been taken were lost in the past; it recorded a moment in which she had been present but could never remember. And yet the fact remained that an invisible line cut jaggedly across the world and the years, connecting the baby in the photo to all the other Hannahs in the album, and finally to her, standing here right now.
That was something, she thought. That line is important. There is comfort in being able to follow your life backwards like a rope, hand over hand, and know there’s some coherence to who you are.
More than that, the photo before her now was clear evidence of how much she had meant to her father. A few pages further on in the album, he would let go of her bicycle so she could pedal herself alone. It was those things she had to remember: that he had always loved her enough to push her out into the world, to tell her not to be afraid, to tell her that she could do anything. Which meant he had been a good man, whatever else he’d done – whatever the bodies in the water meant, and whatever she found out tonight or afterwards – and that knowledge was tight like a fist. Mentally, she clasped it fiercely against her now.
You were a good man.
The cup in her hands was only lukewarm. She half considered making a fresh one, but it was nearly midnight, and another would just be putting this off out of fear. You wouldn’t approve of that, would you Dad? So she splashed the dregs into the sink, set the cup on the side, and made her way through to the lounge.
It was warm in here tonight. Earlier on, she’d brought logs in from the storehouse in the back garden, brushing away the spiders that tickled across, then laid them carefully on top of the old ashes in the grate. Now, the fire burned brightly behind the grille, flicking and cracking, casting checked light across the hearth and shadows on her father’s empty chair. Standing in front of the fireplace, the heat was a gentle, comforting pressure on her face.
Deep in the grate, the map had already burned away to nothing. When it caught, the evidence bag around the hammer had puffed briefly with green flame then melted, folding into itself. The hammer inside was now scorched down to bare, blackened metal. Whatever evidence might have been clinging to it had fizzed and curled and vanished.
There you go, Dad.
He had almost certainly done something criminal – maybe even something genuinely evil – but after deliberating all afternoon, she had decided there was no reason anyone else needed to know that. Not unless they absolutely had to. If the official investigation into the two bodies turned up a connection to Colin Price, she would deal with it as it happened, but she wasn’t going to volunteer that connection. As of now, there was nothing physical that linked him to the viaduct, and, beyond some ashes in a grate, the world was no different from how it was before, back when it had felt safe and secure, and she’d known who she was.
Nothing physical – but of course, she still knew. The question now was whether she would be able to live with that knowledge, given time, or whether the memories she cherished of her father were ruined forever. She could tell herself over and over he was a good man, but would she ever really believe it again? It was a question that couldn’t be answered until she found out the full truth of what he’d done.
Hannah warmed her hands against the fire and looked down at the items she’d assembled. It was impossible to know for sure what she was going to need, because she had no idea what she was going to find, or what she was willing to do in search of it. So she’d prepared for insanity. In addition to the rubber bulk of her father’s heavy-duty torch, she’d scoured the garden, garage and pantry, coming out with a large bucket, lengths of tow rope, rubbish bags. Several coat hangers, simply for their strong, metal hooks.
The spade was already in the back seat of her car. In addition to the black jeans and sweatshirt she was already wearing, there were dark gloves and a pair of wellington boots waiting to be put on when she’d reached her destination.
An extendable baton hanging from her belt.
Anything else?
There was nothing she could think of. But still, she stared down at the flames. In the furnace of the hearth, a log split, and a dusting of fire ribboned up into the chimney breast.
Now or never.
One by one, Hannah began piling things into the bucket.
Half an hour later, she reversed into the gravel passing place opposite the derelict Wetherby Cottage.
Behind her, an expanse of night-black fields crisscrossed their way to the horizon. The stars prickling the sky above were blurred in the rearview mirror. In front, half revealed by the headlights, the ruin of the old cottage was visible between the trees. In the surrounding darkness, the walls seemed more brightly fish-white than before. Looking at it, the car engine still idling, Hannah could feel the atmosphere of the place. It reminded her of the house at the end of that Blair Witch film: the broken down, abandoned one, deep in the woods. She thought of motes of dust illuminated by torchlight and cracked-plaster walls covered with children’s handprints.
She killed the engine. The world fell silent and the remains of the structure blinked out of view.
Hannah got out of the car, went round to the boot, and removed what she needed. Just the torch and the gloves. She didn’t bother with the boots, tools or rope for the moment, partly because she didn’t know what she might be faced with, but also because she’d convinced herself she would be faced with nothing at all. Just another variation on the park or Mulberry Avenue, where the mark would remain a mystery.
She clicked the torch on. The beam was anaemic after the headlights, as though half the light was missing, but it would be good enough.
A few insects drifted lazily through.
Let’s see what’s here then.
There would be nothing.
Hannah began tramping through the overgrown grass and brambles in front of the farmhouse. She approached the ruined building at an angle, and the black windows seemed to follow her, the vines and grass wrapped over the broken sills like streaming tears. Aside from the soft cracking beneath her shoes, it was profoundly quiet, and yet she could still feel a presence. The air felt tinged with sadness and regret, as though something awful had happened here and the place could never forget it.
Just your imagination, she told herself.
Nothing happened here.
She peered through the nearest window, shining the torch around slowly. The internal walls were all gone, but she could tell where they’d been: jawbones of stone half buried in the forest floor. Everything else had been taken. The back of the farmhouse had tumbled down entirely. Beyond a mosaic of tiles and timber in the undergrowth, there was little behind the front wall. No inside left. It was a face without a skull.
Hannah shone the torch as far as she could, moving the beam slowly, searching. What she was looking for, she had no idea.
The cool breeze kissed the side of her neck, blew softly into her ear. She remained intent.
Nothing obvious.
But there wouldn’t be, would there? It wasn’t enough. So she made her way down what remained of the side wall, turning the torch on the undergrowth instead. It was so thick here, so tangled, that she had to lift her knees high in order to traipse through it; every step felt like putting her foot down through coils of barbed wire onto nests of twigs. Click. Crack.
That was when she saw it.
A moment later, her ears began ringing gently.
Behind the building, the brambles thinned out. The torch’s beam was hazy, making the world appear full of pale mist, but it revealed a clearing of sorts before the woods began: a wall of trees and shadows that defeated the light. And just before they started, in the corner of the clearing, there was a well.
The silence continued to ring.
Then broke softly as Hannah began walking slowly through the long grass. Leaving the missing skull of the farmhouse behind. Moving closer towards the edge of the forest.
The well was at least as old as the building, and it was almost lost now: a cylinder of brick wrapped in the grass. The remains of three wooden struts poked up from the undergrowth around its circumference, the wood broken off at knee height. The lip of the well itself had crumbled away in places and, if there had ever been a cover, it had eroded long ago. The whole thing was only a metre across.
Hannah leaned carefully on the edge, pointed the torch in and peered down its mossy throat. Far below, a semicircle of water reflected the torchlight back at her: a shimmering moon, as small and distant as the one in the sky above. She moved the beam a little and found a thatch of something. She couldn’t tell what. It was like the flotsam that collected on the sea by the wharf: a dirty froth of splinters.
She knocked a stone loose. It rattled and ticked off the inside of the well, then hit the water with a sound that made her think of tumbling coins. The moon down there shimmered and swam, settling gradually.
Okay.
Now what?
She leaned back. It might be possible to do something with the bucket, she thought – attach a rope to the handle and lower it down, see what, if anything, she could scoop out. That didn’t seem like the most efficient method of accomplishing anything, but what else was there? Tie the rope round her waist and belay down?
Whoever’s daughter you are, you’re not doing that.
She wasn’t really considering it as a viable option, but still, she turned the torch in the direction of the wood anyway, wondering if there was anything to secure the rope to. The beam passed across the man standing beside her.
There was a sudden flash of light. Hannah stumbled backwards in shock, the beam zagging down over the man’s legs but then the back of her calf got tangled in the grass, and she felt herself falling. It happened almost in slow motion; she couldn’t stop it. Fuck. She landed on her elbow. The grass cushioned her from any real injury, but the impact jolted her heart.
Baton baton baton baton.
She fumbled at the clasp on her belt, at the same time angling the torch back towards the wood, sweeping the beam from tree to tree. Nothing.
Gone.
Immediately, she stopped moving. Listened. Inbetween the quick, heavy thuds of her heartbeats, she heard it: a distant cracking and trampling sound. Someone moving quickly away through the forest.
Well. Don’t just fucking lie there, DS Price.
She heaved herself forward, up onto her feet. The baton extended with a click. And then she went straight between the trees after him, slashing the torch sideways, back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse. She caught flashes of the trees, snatches of undergrowth. Shadows that hung like bats, unfolding their wings as the light moved away.
A moment later, she stopped and listened.
This time, there was no sound at all.
Okay.
Let’s not be stupid.
She took a quick glance around, judging the terrain as best she could, then thumbed the button on the torch. Everything went dark – almost pitch-black – but Hannah moved quietly to one side. Just a short distance from where she’d been, but enough so that if he’d been watching the light he wouldn’t know where she was now. Then she crouched right down, opened her mouth slightly, and listened again.
Again, nothing.
Not human noises, anyway. But beyond the galloping thud of her heart, she became aware of the sound of the forest. The little cricks and buzzes; the whisper of the breeze in the branches high above.
But he was here somewhere. He had to be.
So Hannah remained crouching, as still as her thigh muscles would allow, and tried to remember exactly what she’d seen. There hadn’t been time to take in much: she’d seen black jeans and boots, a dark jacket. It wasn’t a rough-sleeper. No, it was someone who was out here for a particular reason. Maybe even the same reason as her. He’d caught the torchlight and the sound of her trampling down the side of the farmhouse, and just taken a step back between the trees. To watch her. Or else …
Or maybe the activity drew him out from the woods.
Hannah shivered at the idea and took a better grip on the baton. The woman who’d gone to the viaduct with Dawson was still missing. So was she sure the person she’d just seen was a man? Hannah thought so. She scanned the night-black woodland for any sign of movement and couldn’t see a thing. Whoever it was, they had to have a torch, didn’t they? You couldn’t move in this mess without one. But there was no light. And the forest remained quiet, sounding only of itself.
She considered her options. Even with the baton and the torch, she didn’t fancy going much further forward in the dark. The alternative was to wait it out: see which of them had the most patience. Or she could get the hell out of here instead, but she wasn’t going to do that.
So you go forward.
All right, then. She stood up, intending to do just that, when red lights flickered between the trees a short distance ahead of her. And then she heard the noise. A car engine.
A crackling of pebbles.
Shit. She flicked the torch on and moved quickly through the undergrowth, not frightened any more. Determined now. But it was no good. She stepped out onto a wide dirt trail cutting through the forest. Dark and empty in both directions now, although the smell of petrol still hung in the air.
The flash, she thought.
When she’d first seen him, there had been a flash of light. Had that come from a torch he was holding? Her imagination?
Or had it been something else?
Hannah stood there for a few moments, her heart thudding, as an awful possibility occurred to her.
Had that flash come from a camera?
Chapter Seventeen
For the first time ever, Cartwright was woken up by the pain.
He had been dreaming about a tree. It was old and gnarled, growing twisted out of the ground like a thick length of silver rope. His father had planted it, or his grandfather, or possibly even his grandfather’s grandfather. The tree was thick and strong at the base, so that you could imagine its roots spreading away metres underground, tonguing through the soil and hooking the tree solidly into the earth. Further up, though, it dwindled, the trunk thinning as it rose. The branches stretched out without buds. Leaves flickered here and there, but the bunches were tiny and weak. At the top, where the main trunk resembled a broken bone, a few hopeless branches reached higher, tapering to vicious points.
In the dream, Cartwright looked at the tree and thought it resembled a malformed skeleton, stretching up to the gods for acknowledgement that had never arrived. It stood motionless, backdropped by a blue sky filled with swift, stop-motion white clouds.
He was woken, abruptly, by the fresh life the tree lacked.
The main tumour was pulsing against his ribs, so hard it threatened to slip between them and sprout suddenly, pushed out through his side like a fanned deck of cards.
This pain was too much to ignore. He sat up, and clutched at his chest and then his abdomen. Clawing like he couldn’t find the source. But at least he managed not to cry out, not to disturb the room full of silently slumbering bodies. As he fought for his breath, he breathed in the stink of disease. It filled the room. He was sweating it out. The rank, old duvet below him on the floor was wet with his d
ew.
He was dissolving.
Cartwright waited for the pain to subside. It took a lot longer than it normally did. By the time he finally turned his body, his heels knocking, stuttering, on the bare floorboards, dawn was lightening the shuttered window on the face of the house. He heaved himself upright. His limbs felt heavy, even though he was little more than skin and bones now. He rubbed the greasy sweat from his face, and then his body trembled as he stepped falteringly over the sleeping forms of his family, and out into the corridor.
Downstairs, moving more easily now, he opened the front door and stepped out into the misty darkness on the porch, then stood listening for a moment. The world was numb, and the farm was mostly silent. Even the chickens were quiet. But shortly, ahead of him, a shadow loomed amongst the shadows.
His eldest was stalking through the treeline, returning to the house with a log over his shoulder. He often patrolled the compound at night. Sometimes he went out into the fields to hunt. But never far, not by himself. For the most part, his entire existence was circumscribed by the fence around the farm, while the outside world was hazy and difficult: a place to hunt different prey, and to be hunted in return.
What will become of him? All of them?
When Cartwright pictured the future, he felt an ache of a different kind in his body. He saw this place sealed tight, surrounded by armed police. He saw his family hunted down from a wide circle to a tiny dot: one that, finally, blinked out of existence altogether. In teaching his family about the reality of the world, he had failed to prepare them for the illusion everyone else believed. Those that believed it would discover this place when he was gone, and they would overcome it.
His eldest approached him across the dusty front yard, and grunted as he dropped the log at Cartwright’s feet in the dust.
‘For the fire,’ he said.
Cartwright nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Now that he was near the end, the other thing he couldn’t stop thinking about was his daughter. It was a question of the past, rather than the future. What has become of you? he wondered. At least he had an image of her now – her startled face at the viaduct, before she had turned and ran, leaving Dawson to stand in their way – but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know more. Did she have children of her own? Had a seed from this life blown away on the wind and started a patch of its own elsewhere?