Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  Q: What happened to her? Can you tell us?

  A: Daddy put her under the house.

  Q: And you didn’t like that?

  A: No. He says it makes no difference, but it does. Because they stop talking and playing. I don’t notice it so much with the cows or the pigs, but the people are different, because the change seems to take things away that I like. Jane doesn’t talk to me any more and I miss her.

  Q: You said that the flower you had with you was Jane.

  A: It’s Jane after she changed. After she stopped talking to me.

  Q: Can you describe Jane?

  A: She was like her. [Motions to Dr Daniels; this seems to indicate ‘grown-up’ rather than an exact physical description].

  Q: What did you talk about?

  A: We talked about … she told me it was okay. She used to say she would get out of there and make me safe. A lot of the time when I wasn’t under the house she screamed and cried, and it made the floor hum. But when I was down there she told me she loved me and that I should … I don’t know.

  Q: Do you think Jane was proud when you jumped off the tram?

  A: Yes. [Emphatic nod] I think she still is, even though she can’t say so any more. She’s still alive, but in a different form now. But I liked Jane better before.

  Q: Before?

  A: Before daddy turned her into a flower.

  ‘Here you go.’

  Hannah jumped as a file landed next to her with a whap on the desk.

  ‘What?’

  The desk sergeant was already walking away.

  ‘First one,’ he said. ‘Dennison.’

  Hannah glanced at the brown file and saw the name written down the side in black marker. DENNISON, CHARLES. But she was too distracted to give it her attention right now. She kept looking at the WEBB file instead. Staring down at it, staring through it. As though an explosion had gone off in a world skewed just centimetres from this one.

  She remembered her favourite story as a child. It was about a girl growing up on a terrible farm, treated as little more than a slave by her cruel father and brother. The farm was drab and colourless, and all the flowers that grew there were black. One day the starving girl stole an apple from the tree, and her father was so angry that he buried her alive in the woods and left her there. But a kind stranger found her. He saw black flowers growing in the shape of a little girl and rescued her from the grave, then took her away to a place where the flowers were all brightly coloured, and where she would always be safe.

  Not a coincidence.

  But – what was it then?

  Either this ‘Charlotte’ had read the same book and concocted a story based on it, or else …

  Or else it had never been a real book at all.

  Hannah closed her eyes and tried to picture it, the solid object in her hands – or even in her father’s, him reading it to her. Tried desperately. But she couldn’t. If somebody had asked her before now, she would have been adamant it was illustrated, because she had images in her head to go along with the words. Now she wondered. Were they images she’d seen on a page, or had she conjured them up in her mind, listening to the words?

  There was no way of knowing.

  Hannah leaned her elbows on the desk and rubbed her fingertips over her forehead, trying to clear her head, trying to think.

  What if there had never been a real book at all? It meant that Charlotte’s account was true, and the story had only ever been a creation of her father’s. It meant he’d taken the horrors of this interview, fashioned them into a comforting narrative and recounted it to his daughter, over and over again. Why would he have done that?

  Rather than rubbing, she realised the fingertips were now jabbing at her forehead: pecking like birds. She opened her eyes and made them stop.

  Then turned the folder back a few pages, to the two photographs of Charlotte: the fierce little girl and the one who was relaxing slightly. Looking down at them, Hannah felt something crawling inside her. An idea.

  If it was possible her father had taken the truth in this file and turned it into a story, one he’d repeated so many times she’d believed it was fiction … was it possible he’d also done the opposite? Taken a fiction and repeated it to her, made her repeat it to herself, so many times that she’d come to believe it was actually true?

  You are Hannah Price, daughter of DS Colin Price.

  That couldn’t be the case, though.

  It didn’t make sense.

  DENNISON, CHARLES.

  Hands trembling, Hannah slid the Webb documents to one side and opened the other file. The photograph of her was on top – Barnes really had done that, after all. She slipped it out and folded it into her pocket.

  The first bundle of sheets was a summary of the investigation into Charles Dennison’s disappearance: a list of people interviewed; statements gathered. Scanning down, Hannah saw her father’s name. Barnes’s too. They were both mentioned numerous times, and the next stapled section revealed why: complaints from Dennison himself, written in large and childish handwriting. Accusations of harassment against DS Colin Price. There were several, each with a report of action taken stapled to the back. Her father had been officially reprimanded. Christ. Reading through, it looked like he’d stalked the man incessantly, obsessively hounding him. Barnes had been right. If anyone read these, the connection would be obvious.

  What she still didn’t understand was how that could be stopped.

  She put those reports to one side, coming to the last main bundle in the file. This was much thicker than all the others combined, so she knew this must be it: the investigation in connection to the girl Dennison was suspected of murdering. In fact, the reference number was right there at the bottom of the page …

  Hannah stopped.

  It’s a story about a little girl, she remembered.

  This little girl told your father a man had been following her.

  She didn’t move at all. Just stared down at the sheet of paper in front of her.

  Your father was very busy, so he didn’t take what she said seriously.

  Inside her head, though, everything had begun whirling around – a storm of words and memories – as the explosion landed, finally, in this world now.

  I was supposed to be looking after everyone. I wasn’t paying close enough attention. We found her underwear dumped in that well. Not her body. It washed up on the beach the next evening.

  ‘Oh God,’ Hannah said. Except the words didn’t come out.

  Your father and I were friends back then. I was one of the first people to visit you all in hospital after the birth. Is it so hard to believe I did it for Colin?

  Is it so hard to believe?

  Hannah stared at the reference number.

  [PRI-1976a: homicide – Anna Price (aged 5)]

  Extract from The Black Flower by Robert Wiseman

  Up close, Whitkirk Abbey looks even more ancient and weathered than it does from the seafront. As Pearson drives up towards it, the bare arches form odd shapes and angles against each other. They have been blackened by time, so that the whole structure resembles the scorched ribcage of a giant, set on fire on top of the cliff.

  There is a car park just past the abbey. Pearson pulls in and parks up next to a battered old Ford. An elderly couple is standing over by the fence at the edge of the cliff, wrapped tightly in raincoats, watching the boats out at sea down below. The old man is mostly bald, with just a monk’s crest of white hair round the back of his head, and has his hands clasped at the base of his spine, holding a pair of binoculars, the cord dangling to the backs of his knees. His wife, beside him, is visibly pear-shaped even in the coat. Her hair is grey-white and tousled into a damp whirl by the rain and wind, like a storm on a weather map. Standing side by side, they seem content in their silence.

  The sight of them makes Pearson feel unbearably sad.

  He will never have that now. Gloria left yesterday. She told him he had changed; that he had become a stranger to he
r. The truth is that he was never a good enough husband, and they had been growing apart for a long time, but he knows she’s right, and that these last three months have been different.

  Ever since what happened to Poole.

  He thinks of it like that: what happened to Poole. As though it is something horrific that occurred by accident, which he was only a witness to. But even looking at it from such an oblique angle, the sight in his head is too much to cope with – yet he can’t look away. He thought it would be easy to kill a man. In every sense, it was not.

  These past weeks, he has become haunted. He is haunted by Poole’s cawing mouth, and the bloody face that was no longer a face any more. Most of all, though, it is the old man’s final gesture that bothers him: the fact that when he should have been dead he was not. Poole had no features left to speak of, but he still raised his arm in a futile gesture to protect the remains of his face. His body knew it was dead, but it continued to cling to life.

  Sometimes, Pearson imagines him down there at the bottom of the river, still moving inside his sack like a foetus. Alive in a different sense now; inert, perhaps, but not without influence. In Pearson’s nightmares, the old man poisons the water like a dead sheep in a mountain stream. Poole’s essence spills down the river into the sea, and washes back with the current, crashing onto the rocks directly below him now. At the viaduct, the trees and flowers all grow twisted, and the next generation of birds caw more obscenely than the last, their cries more and more like those of a dying man.

  It reminds him of Charlotte’s story, about the dead becoming flowers.

  The story that was not a story after all.

  Pearson has a hip flask of spirits in the compartment of the car door. He unscrews the tight silver cap and swigs from it. The taste is strong and hot, and amplifies what he has already consumed. The back of his throat is clogged with alcohol.

  He watches the ruins of the abbey through the rain pattering on the windscreen, gradually blurring the view. It isn’t tourist weather; the elderly couple are the only ones braving the clifftop today. He hopes they will leave soon, so he can be alone.

  Thoughts of Poole and the little girl lead inexorably to thoughts of Sullivan, who Pearson knows is far more haunted than he will ever be. Sullivan is different from him though, in that he seems to have an almost otherworldly ability to bear ghosts. Perhaps with the death of Anna Hanson on his conscience for over a year, he has simply had more practice at coping with guilt. But then Sullivan remains convinced Charlotte is still alive somewhere, and won’t allow himself to fall down until he has found her and made her safe again.

  Pearson believes she is dead. If she is alive, he imagines she is suffering so terribly it hardly bears thinking about. But he suspects she died not long after Poole, and is now having the same awful effect from her own shallow grave as his nightmares grant an old man in a river.

  Pearson takes another swig, then screws the top back on.

  The couple have finished staring out to sea. They turn and walk back across the car park, their boots crunching in the gravel, steps tentative with old age. The man gives Pearson a glance, but they are not unduly interested in him. The rain has picked up, and they are no doubt eager to leave.

  He stares ahead, but hears the car door slam, and then the engine choking into life. Stones scatter beneath the tyres as the old Ford pulls out and away. And then Pearson is alone, except for the tap and patter of the rain and the ghosts in his head.

  As he gets out of the car, the drizzle hits his face, and a cold wind blasts across his skin. The world is echoing slightly. Perhaps it’s the alcohol, but his pulse seems to be racing around his body: thumping in his throat, then his temples, then the centre of his chest. The remains of the abbey tower overhead. It looks unreal there, standing starkly against the ice-cold grey sky.

  He walks across to the barrier. The sea compresses and shrinks as it reaches the horizon in the distance. Directly below it is wild and ridged, throwing itself against the rocks and shattering into pieces, then trying again a moment later. It seems so far down that, like the horizon, his eyes can’t focus on it.

  Pearson takes a deep breath.

  Yes, he is very different from Sullivan. He can’t bear it any more. Killing a man really is something. It seems to him that the world knows everything that man would have done, had he lived, and mourns the spiderweb of cause and effect that has been yanked from it. And so the world takes some of you back to replace the parts it is missing.

  There is one similarity between him and Sullivan, though: they have both been under scrutiny since Poole’s disappearance. There are rumours and speculation. Naturally, given his obsessions with the man, Sullivan has borne the brunt of that.

  So at least one good thing may come of this.

  Pearson has written a note and left it folded neatly on the passenger seat of the car. It is a confession, but one that gives no clue as to where Poole’s body might be found, and makes it clear that he acted alone that night. Without mentioning him directly, it is the best Pearson can do to absolve Sullivan from blame.

  He leans on the barrier.

  It is cold and wet beneath his hands. Rain stings his eyes.

  So that is something, because he knows Sullivan will never give up looking for Charlotte if there is a chance she is still alive, and Pearson wishes him good luck with that. The least he can do is give his friend the time and space to be haunted.

  His foot slips on the barrier as he clambers over. It is all slightly less graceful than he would have liked. He has time to think that, and then to feel suddenly cold and see the clifftop silhouetted against the sky, receding upwards to a new horizon.

  He has time for it to feel like flying.

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was early evening, and the day was beginning to dim and die as I reached the hospital a few miles from Thornton.

  The car park at Accident and Emergency was constructed in a circle, the parking spaces surrounding a central flower bed, and stemming off from it like petals. I pulled my car into the first empty bay I saw, then ran across through the shock of the cold evening air, through the sliding doors into the hospital’s reception. The area had been transformed into a construction site: boxed off in the middle, with plastic chairs crammed in down the walls to either side. Vending machines were humming softly. The main reception desk was at the far end: a brightly lit cube of Perspex with a middle-aged woman reclining behind a desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Which way is Ward fifty-seven?’

  ‘That way.’ She leaned forward, pointing with a biro down a hallway to the right. ‘There’s a passenger lift a few doors along. It’s floor five, then follow the signs.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The lift was easy enough to find, but I kept pressing the button, over and over, as it seemed to take an age to arrive. Come on, come on. Eventually the doors opened. Inside, the lift was little more than a small, steel box. The doors clanked shut, and the whole thing rattled alarmingly as it clambered slowly up to the fifth floor.

  Don’t die, I thought.

  Don’t you dare fucking die.

  The lift doors opened and I stepped out. The ward was signposted to the left, and I found it a little way along, but had to ring the intercom and wait – again, for what felt like an age.

  Don’t die, you bastard.

  When I’d answered the call from Ally’s mobile, I’d found myself talking to a woman named Doctor Matheson. A few hours earlier, she explained, an ambulance had been called to attend to an old man on a bridge in the city centre of Thornton. Passers-by had seen him, obviously in severe distress, doubled over and clutching at his chest, and alerted emergency services. According to witnesses, the old man had been determinedly throwing things into the river below: fumbling in his pockets for wallets and keys. A couple of people intervened to stop him – to help him – and the old man had fought back, apparently confused, before finally collapsing and being rushed here.
A major heart attack, Matheson told me. He was still alive, but in a critical condition.

  They had no idea who he was. The one thing the old man hadn’t had time to get rid of was a mobile phone buried deep in one of his coat pockets. Doctor Matheson had turned it on, checked the last number, and redialed it in the hope of making contact with a relative.

  Got you, you fucker.

  The door to Ward 57 buzzed for a few seconds, and then the lock disengaged. I pulled it open and walked down a corridor, round into an area divided up by blue curtains. There was a new reception desk here, and the women behind it were deep in conversation.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry.’ One of them rotated on her chair. ‘Can I help you there?’

  ‘Doctor Matheson’s expecting me. I’m here to see a patient that’s been admitted.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a heart attack, but the patient had no ID. He was found on a bridge in Thornton centre.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  The nurse craned her neck – you’re in my way – and stared at the wall behind me. I glanced back to see a white board divided up in straight lines by permanent black marker pen. Names and notes were scrawled on the grid in green. Most of the cells were full, while the empty ones still had ghostly, half-wiped smears detailing the bed’s previous residents.

  ‘Room A3.’ She pointed back the way I’d come. ‘Round that corner there.’

  ‘What, I just go in?’

  ‘Yeah, it should be fine. Just be very quiet, as I think he’s sleeping. I’ll tell Doctor Matheson you’re here.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  You’ve got your own room then.

  I approached the door, feeling my pulse tapping in my temples. Was this really going to be him? Even after everything I’d read, everything I’d discovered, it was still hard to believe that such a person existed in real life.