Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  And yet, if you stare down at the face of a flower, you realise how cleverly its structure has been refined over millennia. Imagine that as the flower pushes its way out of the ground, it begins turning slowly. Whenever it has completed exactly 138 degrees, a new bud will sprout. It is a perfect angle, a golden ratio found throughout nature, which guarantees that each leaf gains the maximum exposure to the sky, the minimum shade from its older brothers and sisters above.

  It could not be designed to be more efficient – although, of course, it is only the illusion of design. In reality, the trial and error of natural selection has withered millions of badly angled leaves, prevented the genetic pollen of those designs being spread. Flowers are the way they are because they have to be. Because their other possible structures have been tried and have failed.

  It is nearly midnight, and Sullivan thinks about all of this as he waits in his car. The engine is silent; the interior is dark. The road before him curls quietly into the distance. On the left-hand side, is the litter-strewn sprawl of Faverton Park. On the right, a little further up from where he has pulled in, is the grey face of a block of flats.

  It is as wide as it is tall – five properties over five stories – and like a flower, this place has also been built for efficiency, but of a different kind, and certainly not to maximise the occupants’ exposure to sunlight. When it was modernised, ten years ago, the architect, faced with an old monstrosity of partially conjoined council flats, had simply crammed as many separate properties in with the minimum of renovation. And so the eight houses in this soulless block are a maze of random shapes and sizes, built simply where damage to the earlier block allowed. One person’s living room might rest above another resident’s kitchen, but below the bedroom or bathroom of a third. There is no guarantee, heading upwards, to which corner of the building each door will take you. Many of the windows on its front lead not into rooms, but into small, bricked-up spaces.

  Clark Poole’s home is directly in the centre and, by accident rather than design, it takes the form of a flower. The stem is a concrete staircase running up the middle, with three basic rooms twisting off it at angles as it goes. The bathroom is at the bottom. Lost inside the block, it has no window. Poole’s bedroom is on the second floor; it provides a sideways glance onto the flat expanse of the estate behind. Finally, the kitchen is one turn away again, on the third floor, with a window that overlooks the street and the park.

  Sullivan has been inside before, when Anna Hanson was murdered. He has watched officers strip every surface, lift every carpet, crack away the skirting boards, all to no avail. Because Clark Poole is too careful: he always has been and he always will be. And he has made his intentions known. If he can take another little girl, this time a Charlotte, then he will.

  Sullivan watches now, as the pale-yellow square of Poole’s kitchen light goes off, as he prepares for his evening walk.

  As he starts the engine, he thinks again about flowers. How they have become what they are not through any design or desire of their own, but because of that one simple truth. That all other possibilities have been tried, and all other possibilities have failed.

  As Poole emerges into the cold night air, he glances left and right along the street. There is nothing there – no cars parked up. After his recent activities, he had been expecting to see the policeman, stationed once again at his laughable vigil. Over the past year, his presence has been intermittent. Surely tonight?

  And yet, not.

  Poole is disappointed. He has even come out without his cane, especially for the occasion. Such a waste.

  It is his only joy, really – or his principal one, these days – to torment DS Michael Sullivan. Poole is not as young as he used to be, and he has to be far more careful. Chances, real ones, are scarce. After the business in his hometown and his subsequent incarceration, he was relocated here to his small hovel of twirling squalor, a place in which he feels both constantly observed and yet somehow small and dismissed. To the authorities, he is an aberration; they have pressed him into the most convenient hole, and patted down on his life. And so, with real pleasures restricted, he has mostly had to occupy himself in different ways. Tormenting the policeman has become his favourite.

  He crosses the street slowly, a little awkwardly.

  He thinks about the little girl he saw on the promenade, and how helpless and lost she looked. The truth is that he saw her first, before any of them, because, while his activities might have been dulled, his instincts have remained sharp. Still possessing the insights and experiences of a predator, Clark Poole was quick to recognise a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. In a sane world, they would simply have given her to him. He would have taken good care of her, just as he took good care of Anna Hanson.

  In this one, however, he was forced to watch as she was taken away.

  Poole is forced in so many ways. Taunting the policeman, forcing him back, is almost enough to satisfy the dark emotions inside him – but he has physical needs. Unable to express himself as he would like, he is forced, on lonely nights such as this one, to take what comfort he can from wherever he can find it.

  As he reaches the far side of the road, Poole glances around again. It is very still. The only sound is the cold hush of the night air. For a moment, the streetlight above creates a swirling yellow sheen over his partially hunched back, like a moon reflected in shimmering water, and then he passes through the old gates of the park and disappears into its green-black depths.

  Faverton Park is quiet and small, and it causes the police a correspondingly quiet and small amount of trouble. There is a bandstand in the centre, where teenagers congregate to drink. On a night, they are all but invisible – just black shapes in the shadows – but you can often hear their voices, and the sound of breaking bottles, echoing quietly across the park. You will not hear the sounds of the other shadowy figures, though: the men, sometimes with dogs, sometimes alone, who follow the tarmac path around the edge, skirting the area of trees, bushes and undergrowth that covers one corner of the park, like a patch of rust encroaching onto a metal panel.

  Neither group causes serious problems, especially at this time of night, close only to the run-down estate, so the police only make occasional sweeps through the park. They respond to public concerns that things are getting out of hand, or, more rarely, following a spate of attacks. Otherwise, they leave the area be. Everyone knows there are far more important crimes to deal with.

  Sullivan organised the team that swept the park an hour earlier: gently but firmly moving the men and the teenagers on. A police van has remained pulled up in the car park at the far end to dissuade others entering from that side. This time, however, the sweep was done for reasons of public service. It was arranged so that now, as Clark Poole begins his walk along the path at the edge of the park, the entire area is as close to empty as it can be.

  Dressed in black, Sullivan follows Poole from a distance, keeping far enough behind and holding close enough to the treeline that he won’t be spotted. Occasionally, the old man pauses and turns, scanning the open grass to the left, curiously silent tonight, and then glances behind him. Sullivan holds very still and waits.

  Poole soon begins walking again.

  Gradually, Sullivan closes the gap between them.

  You’re doing this for her, he thinks.

  But he’s not sure who that refers to any more. Is he doing it for Charlotte, whom he has now failed to visit for the first evening in a fortnight, or is it really for Anna, who is long past being protected? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. In his head, there is little difference between the two any more, beyond the fact that one of them is in a position to be saved and the other should have been.

  He draws closer.

  They are about halfway across the park now. Here, the path curves to the left, as the wooded area begins to spread further in from the boundary wall. The trees and bushes to that side form a pitch-black maze: easy to lose yourself in, or to hide and wait for compan
y. If they are going to be observed, if anyone has been missed, it will be here.

  Poole stops again, peering between the trees.

  Sullivan is metres away now. With a burst of fear in his chest, he understands that this is going to happen. It is actually going to happen. His heart is beating very quickly.

  Then Poole puts his hand to one side of his mouth.

  He whispers, ‘Hey?’

  And a man steps forward out of the treeline.

  Sullivan holds still.

  The man is dressed entirely in black, and is much younger than Poole. Not tall, but good-looking. From here, Sullivan can only see the side of Poole’s face, but he sees the old man smile. It makes him shiver, because it isn’t entirely from lust; it is an oddly human expression, childlike and awkward, almost shy. And Sullivan realises that, as well as being evil and wicked and all the other things he is, Clark Poole is also a profoundly sad and lonely man.

  The man from the wood swings what looks like a handkerchief into the side of Poole’s head. Immediately, the old man falls sideways and rolls onto his back.

  ‘Nnng.’

  Poole falls silent for a moment – but then begins cawing like a bird. It is a hideous sound, and it echoes across the empty park. Pearson stands over him, hesitating. Sullivan’s hands flutter by his sides, and his partner looks over at him, slightly helplessly. Now that it has come to it, neither of them know quite what to do.

  In his hands, Pearson is holding a hammer wrapped in a white plastic bag. He clenches his jaw, then steps astride Poole and hits him four times square in the face. Thud thud thud thud. The bag whips through the air, making a noise like an angel’s wings flapping.

  Poole is silent.

  Sullivan moves closer. As he reaches them, Poole’s arm lifts up and falls lazily across the remains of his face.

  ‘Oh God,’ Pearson says. He wipes his nose with the back of his coat sleeve. ‘Oh God. Oh, all right then.’

  He uses the hammer to move Poole’s arm out of the way. It is a tentative, arms-length gesture: the way someone might use a stick to uncover a wasps’ nest. Sullivan sees that Poole has no nose or teeth any more.

  ‘All right then, you old cunt.’

  Pearson grits his teeth and hits him solidly three more times on the side of the head. And then again, harder. Even before the last, Sullivan can tell Poole is gone: the old man is suddenly as limp and loose as rags. But Pearson hits him again just to make sure, or perhaps out of some odd kind of fear.

  He will never hurt anyone again, Sullivan thinks.

  But the violence is settling in the air, and a part of him understands the world doesn’t work like that. He knows only too well that the dead can hurt people just as sharply and for just as long as the living. In the sudden stillness of the park, Sullivan senses something. It is a little like seeds. Seeds that have been knocked furiously into the air and which are now billowing away on the slight breeze. Who knows, really, what structures they will form when they take root and grow?

  And yet he tells himself this anyway, because he has to.

  He will never hurt anyone again.

  It is the early hours of the morning as they turn right, and start driving down the long, bumpy, dirt track that leads to the viaduct. The forest around them is black. To Sullivan, it feels haunted. Sometimes he is prepared to believe in the supernatural, and, if ghosts exist, then this is surely a place they might congregate.

  It is, most likely, the spot where Anna Hanson’s poor body was thrown over the side and lost in the frothing storm of the river below. From this spot up ahead, she was washed out to sea, before being pummelled backwards by the currents and coming to rest on the hard rocks at one end of Faverton beach.

  The van judders and rolls with the undulations of the land. The tyres, tracking through the sticky mud, make a sound like tape coming slowly, slowly unstuck from a parcel.

  Unlike the little girl he murdered last year, Clark Poole, wrapped in his weighted sack, will not escape into the ocean; he will neither be washed back to shore nor lost at sea. Instead, he will sink to the bottom of the river and rest there until it washes his bones as clean and smooth as the rocks of its bed. That feels appropriate to Sullivan. It is a kind of cleansing. A sacrifice to this slighted land.

  They are nearly there. Sullivan imagines that he can hear the water raging up ahead, although, in reality, he knows it is just the blood rushing in his head. Beside him, Pearson is gaunt and determined. His face is set; his hand grips the steering wheel.

  This is when the police radio crackles into life.

  Sullivan picks up the handset, stretching out the spiralling black cord that attaches it to the console.

  ‘Sullivan.’

  ‘We’ve got an oh-eight-two,’ the dispatcher says. ‘At one-eighteen Bracken Road. That’s a safe house. Got your name tagged on it, guys.’

  A panic button.

  The address is Mrs Fitzgerald’s.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Thanks,’ Hannah said. ‘I’ll be in as soon as I can. In the meantime, call down and have them start getting the files together.’

  She hung up.

  Shit.

  Hannah stepped out through the back door of her father’s kitchen onto the small flagstone patio. From somewhere beyond the trees, she could hear the sound of a neighbour strimming. Overhead, the sky was clear and bright.

  She took a deep breath.

  Well, it had been stupid to think the whole thing could be put off. After arriving back in the early hours, she’d ended up calling in sick this morning, not from physical tiredness, so much as mental and emotional. She decided she’d be in no state to deal with the intricacies of the case. But one of her sergeants had just phoned her mobile anyway. She was going to have to go in.

  They now had a list of missing persons in the Huntington area since 1950, filtered for adult males. There were over five hundred names on the list. While they were still awaiting a dental exam on Victim A, they had managed to salvage some of his clothing, which was a start. Officers could now begin cross-checking those against the missing person reports in the hope of finding a match. Victim B was harder, but he would be there too. The pathology reports on both bodies were due in later that day and, hopefully, the forensic anthropologist had been able to narrow down the age ranges they needed to look at. All of which meant that, before long, they were going to have at least one name, and possibly both.

  And then?

  That was the question – or rather, the last hurdle. Until they had the IDs, she wouldn’t know for sure what the implications were. It might turn out that neither of them had any obvious connection to her father at all. She didn’t think that was entirely wishful thinking, either, because what could there be? Especially now the evidence he’d kept here was gone. In a worst-case scenario, one she couldn’t picture right now, she’d just have to play it by ear. Given she was in charge of the investigation, perhaps certain details could be made to disappear. But she couldn’t plan for any of that until the names came in and she had a handle on what they were dealing with.

  Either way, it was nearly over.

  Apart from the stranger at Wetherby Cottage, last night.

  In the cold light of day, it was easier to believe that it could have been anyone, and there were any number of reasons for them being out there like that. None of them were good reasons, exactly, but at least they were reasons that weren’t connected to her. It was harder to believe the flash had come from a torch, rather than a camera, but she kept telling herself she was just imagining the worst. Even so, she was still kicking herself for being so stupid.

  You shouldn’t have gone.

  You should have left it alone.

  Hannah shook those thoughts away, and looked at the garden that lay in front of her. The grass itself was in dire need of cutting. Her father had always been scrupulous in his care for it, but in his absence it had been allowed to grow wild. Around the edges, it was lined by a privacy wall of conifers. In one
corner, there was the ramshackle shed where he’d kept logs for the fireplace; in the other, a patch of earth that was more bare. That was what caught her eye. It was his flowerbed – or had been once. As a little girl, Hannah had always loved it. She remembered the intense reds and blues and yellows; the flowers nodding, bright and pretty, in the summer sun. None there now, of course, and the weeds were already creeping in.

  She wanted them back.

  She wanted those memories back so badly.

  Hannah stepped into the kitchen. But just as she was about to close the back door, a ringing noise filled the air.

  The doorbell at the front of the house.

  It cut off after a second, and in the silence that followed, the house felt like it was slowly untensing. Hannah stood very still, holding her breath. Someone at the door. Her thoughts turned back to the man in the woods last night. But he had run away. And besides, how would he know where to find her? In fact, nobody had any reason to come looking for her here. Nobody had any reason to come here at all.

  But the doorbell rang again.

  A cold caller, maybe. She hesitated for a moment, then made her way quietly into the hall. The baton was on the end of the kitchen counter; she picked it up as she went. In the hall, the grandfather clock’s tocking was heavy and insistent. It took her a few seconds to fumble with the chain she’d attached to the front door, and then she opened it.

  Nobody there.

  Hannah stepped outside, holding the baton out of sight behind her leg. The spread of tarmac in front of the house was dappled with sunlight, and, at the far end, the gate was closed. Nobody in sight. But surely nobody could have got off the property that quickly either? She remembered the scrape the gate made. No, she’d have heard that. Which meant they must have gone round the back of the house.

  Where she’d left the door open.

  Hannah stepped back in and closed the door, but left the chain off this time, wanting an easy escape route if it came to it. Then she edged down the hall towards the kitchen. Nervous, even though there was no reason to think—