Black Flowers (10 page)

I drove home too quickly.

There’s nothing to worry about
.

I kept telling myself that. It didn’t help; I’d told myself the exact same thing after Marsha’s phone call, after all, and been wrong then. There was no rational basis for how on edge I felt, how nervous, but that didn’t help either.

Robert Wiseman’s wife had died in an accident. A year afterwards, he checked into The Southerton, where he was rumoured to be working on a sequel to his most popular book, but instead of doing that he disappeared, and was presumed to have committed suicide. Twenty years later, my father had done the same: gone to the same place, possibly writing a book of his own, and now he was dead too.
Something
was happening. Something still only half visible between the lines.

As I drove, pushing as hard as I could through the traffic, connections and implications kept flickering in my head like ghosts, forming and dissolving, but it was one set in particular that was strongest. Wiseman had written:
Two people saw a similar rusty red van to the one described in the file …

And the journalist interviewing Wiseman had referred to the book being based on real crimes that took place in the 1970s.

That was a hell of a long time ago, so there was nothing to worry about. Certainly no reason to make any kind of connection with what I’d seen last night out of the kitchen window.

As irrational as it was, I couldn’t shake it.

I parked up in front of my building. It was after six now, and it was the weekend, so the pub across the street was busy. Groups of men were planted outside on the tarmac, leaning back over their heels. Some of them, drinking from their pint glasses, looked as though they were trying to get the whole rim between their teeth. As my car door slammed, laughter echoed across, more aggressive than it usually sounded. None of them were paying me any attention. From down the street, I could hear the rhythmic
thump thump
of music from a parked car.

I opened my front door.

The uneasy feeling didn’t go away as I stepped inside. The downstairs hallway was dark and empty – although at least I could hear the thuds and explosions echoing down from my neighbour’s flat. For once, that was weirdly reassuring. But there was something else that wasn’t. Something different. Standing there, it took me a moment to work out what.

A smell.

It was unpleasant. I breathed in, trying to identify it. Rubbish, maybe, or rotting vegetables. Only slight, but definitely there. Cool air too. A draft was delivering the smell here from …

I stared along the downstairs hallway.

At the far end, it doubled back and stairs led down to the cellar. I’d only been in there once, to check the meter when I first moved in; the rooms under the house were filled with broken furniture, mostly impassable. But I remembered an outline of daylight where a fractured door faced out up rubbish-strewn stone steps into the alley behind.

That was where the smell was coming from. A breeze was working its way from the alley, through the cellar, then coiling up the stairs and reaching me here, bringing that stench with it. Because …

Because someone had broken in.

Above me, the artificial bangs and booms continued.

Ally
. I took the stairs two at a time. When I reached the first
floor landing, my neighbour’s television was louder than ever. There were shrieks coming from inside. I turned the corner, up the stairs to my flat, and—

At the top, my front door was hanging open against the white, woodchip wall. Not broken, just open.

My heart was beating too fast.
There’s nothing to worry about
, I told myself, walking inside. Maybe she’d gone out. Not closed the door properly on her way.

‘Ally?’

I half stepped into the front room – but then held still in the doorway. It seemed even smaller and more crammed than ever, because my few items of furniture had been scattered around. The coffee table was over by the wall on its side, one leg buckled outwards. The TV was on its face. The wires, and the weight of it, had pulled the stand over too. The bed was angled to one side, the mattress half hanging off. Sheets of paper littered the carpet.

The floor below me was vibrating.

And at first, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It looked like a burglary, but none of the drawers were open, nothing obvious had been taken.

No. The thought came with a chill.
Not a burglary
.

My gaze caught the corner of the coffee table, where the leg was bent. There was blood there. A smudge of it across the wood.

For a second it was all I could see. I stared at it, and it suddenly felt like I was metres closer, like I was seeing it magnified right before my eyes.

It looks like a fight
.

‘Ally?’

I moved quickly down the hallway, checking the bathroom and the kitchen. She wasn’t here. Obviously she wasn’t here. And there were no other signs of disturbance. In the kitchen, I peered down into the alley. Empty.

This was madness. My heart was thumping in my chest.

There were a couple of seconds where I didn’t actually know what to do and just stood there uselessly, my fists clenched. Was I in shock? And then my phone began vibrating in my pocket. I scrabbled for it.

Ally Mobile

I answered it. ‘Ally?’

For a moment, there was no reply. All I could hear was a crackle on the line. It sounded like traffic. Maybe she was—

‘No.’

A man’s voice.

‘Who is this?’ I said.

‘You know who I am.’

I shook my head, said the first name that came to mind:

‘Wiseman …?’

‘No, not Wiseman.’ The man was old, I thought. His voice was rich and textured, full of throat. ‘But Wiseman knew me. He wrote about me. Wrote bits of me into being.’

Even though I didn’t understand, even though it was all too strange to make sense of, everything inside me still went cold. Wiseman had written about this man? Wiseman had written about a serial killer, who lived on a farm. His book was nearly twenty years old now. This couldn’t …

‘Who is this?’ I asked again.

‘I’m your Goblin King.’ The old man stopped, then let loose a great, hacking cough. ‘I gave you what you wanted, didn’t I.’

‘What?’

‘I liked your story.’

My story? I started to say that out loud but then realised: my father’s laptop was still missing. Dad had never been much of a techie. When he logged into his Yahoo account, he probably checked the ‘keep me logged in’ button on the screen. So there was only one obvious way this man could have read my story.

‘You’ve got his computer,’ I said.

‘My boy took it from the car after he made him fly.’

I hesitated. ‘Why did that … why did you kill him?’

‘Because he was in the way.’

The world was suddenly unsteady. I sat down at the kitchen table, my legs shaking.

‘Where is she?’ I said.

‘Here with us. And that’s where she’s staying.’ He said it decisively. ‘She’s part of my family now. We’ll take good care of her. You’ll forget her in time. Both of them.’

‘You can’t—’

‘You asked for it to happen!’ He snapped, suddenly angry. ‘You
wanted
it.’

All the man has to do is wish for it to happen
, I thought.

Eventually, selfishly, he does
.

But that was …

‘No, that was just a story.’

‘There’s no taking it back. She belongs to me now.’

I shook my head. What was happening was too surreal. I couldn’t fit this into the everyday world and make sense of it.

‘You can’t get away with this,’ I said. ‘Whoever you are. I’ll call the police, and they’ll find you. Whatever it is, what you’re really doing here, you need to stop it now.’

‘Do it. Call them. They haven’t found me yet, have they? Never have, never will. But let them try, if that’s what you want – see if they believe anything you have to say, or have the first idea where to look. And then you’ll never see this one again. Never get her back.’

‘Wait,’ I said.

‘There is one way though.’

For a moment, I didn’t reply.

‘One way,’ I said. ‘One way to get her back?’

‘That’s right. She’s mine now because you gave her to me. That means you need to give me something in exchange. You have to trade me. There has to be a
change
so we come out equal.’

‘
Trade
you?’

‘Fair’s fair, isn’t it? That’s the way it works.’

‘For what?’ I said. ‘Trade her for what?’

‘For my little girl.’

I started to reply again – to say something, anything – but stopped. In Wiseman’s book, the killer was determined to find his escaped daughter, whatever the cost. Barbara Phillips had implied the book was based on real crimes.
My little girl
. Was that what this old man was implying? That he wanted me to find a fictional character? Or rather, the real person a character might have been based on?

I repeated, ‘For your little girl?’

‘You know who I’m talking about?’

‘The girl from Wiseman’s book.’

‘That’s her.’

‘But she’s not real.’

The old man laughed to himself.

‘She’s as real as I am.’

‘How am I supposed to find her?’

‘I don’t know, do I? If I did, the trade wouldn’t be worth anything. Same way your father did. If you want to see this one again, you’ll figure out how he did it. And you won’t go to the police either. You won’t tell
anyone
about me. You’ll just find my little girl, and then maybe we’ll trade.’

Same way your father did
. I made the connection with what he’d said earlier: that my father had ‘got in the way’ at the viaduct. What had happened? Had he gone there with someone – with someone this man thought was his grown daughter – and then, when they were attacked, fought back long enough for her to get away? I remembered the pale, malformed face I’d seen peering up through the van windscreen: the bulk of the driver’s body. My father was a small man, not a fighter. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against most people, never mind someone as big as that.

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.

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 criss-crossed 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.