Black Flowers (12 page)

Extract from
The Black Flower
by Robert Wiseman

 

‘Hello, Detective Sullivan,’ Mrs Fitzgerald says.

‘Hello again.’

He steps over the chipped wooden doorstop into her home. Mrs Fitzgerald is a foster carer: a plump, slightly stooped woman in her early forties, with hair so frizzy that it hangs around her head like rusty mist – or perhaps a halo. She lives slightly out of Faverton, further along the coast, in a property that backs onto the clifftop. The distance from town is the single concession to the little girl’s safety that Sullivan managed to wring from DCI Gray.

‘How are you this evening?’ he asks.

‘Oh, I’m fine. I’m always fine.’

Sullivan nods. Mrs Fitzgerald is always fine; it is a gift she has. He takes off his hat and stamps his feet on the wicker mat. A gloomy staircase extends up on the left. Ahead, at the end of a shabby downstairs hall, the worn carpet gives way to the old Formica floor tiles and cracked white porcelain of the kitchen. Out back, the garden ends where the cliff-edge allows it to.

The house is in disarray, and one day erosion will take even this from her. It hardly seems fair. Sometimes, when he visits, a clothes press is set up on top of the kitchen counter; Sullivan has seen Mrs Fitzgerald there, sleeves bunched up, feeding sopping wet clothes through the slick, pale-blue rollers, water dipping down into the sink. Her round cheeks will be red with the effort, the machine hot and grumbling, and Sullivan will wonder how she does all of this without a single complaint.

I’m always fine
.

‘Charlotte is in the front room,’ she tells him.

He pauses, just as he’s about to hang his coat by the door.

‘Charlotte?’

Mrs Fitzgerald leans in to talk quietly. ‘We talked about it last night after you left. We agreed that she needed a name. So I let her look at the bookcases until she found one that she liked.
Charlotte’s Web.’

‘Charlotte.’ Sullivan nods. It suits her. ‘Can she read well, then?’

‘Not as well as a girl her age should,’ Mrs Fitzgerald tuts, as though this means anything in the light of what she has gone through, ‘But certainly more than a little.’

Sullivan nods again, more thoughtfully this time. In his spare time, he has been reading about feral children, foundlings, children who have grown up in extreme deprivation or isolation from the outside world – sometimes even literally raised by animals, as part of a pack. One of the key features of the research is the impact of such an upbringing on learning. The consensus seems to be that if language is not learned soon enough, through companionship and interaction, it is not learned well, or even at all. Children who have been raised in such circumstances can often barely talk, never mind read or write.

But he has never read of anybody growing up like Charlotte has. According to her story, her father made an attempt to raise both her and her little brother – albeit in his own way and according to his own rules. And her mother had been present. Reading between the lines, it sounded as though the woman was very much a slave: a victimised subordinate. But she may well have taught the child to read.

‘How has she been today?’

‘She’s been quiet, but she’s eating better. And we had a little play earlier on.’ Mrs Fitzgerald raises her voice slightly. ‘Didn’t we, Charlotte?’

Sullivan turns to see her standing in the doorway to the lounge.

Over the past week and a half, there has been quite a transformation. Mrs Fitzgerald visits second-hand shops every weekend and buys what she can, and many people donate their cast-offs, so the doll’s dress has been replaced by blue jeans and a simple white T-shirt. Elsewhere, more personal wonders have been worked. The girl’s tatty hair is now combed out straight and full, falling halfway down her arms in a golden sheen. The bruises have faded from her face, and any dirt has long-since been washed away. In many ways, she looks like a normal little girl. Except in the eyes, which are beautifully blue but wary, and in the blankness of her expression, which remains much as it was the first time he saw her.

At least now, rather than the handbag, she is clutching something more appropriate. A battered, old teddy bear.

‘Hello, Charlotte,’ he says. ‘That’s a nice name, isn’t it?’

There is a familiar moment of coolness, of
not quite trusting
, but he has visited every night and she is more used to him now, so it only takes a moment for her to relax. Without saying anything, she reaches out a small hand. Sullivan walks across to take it and, while she is only capable of the gentlest of tugs, he relaxes his big frame and allows her to lead him into the lounge.

For half an hour, they sit in the front room playing.

Charlotte is cross-legged on the floor; Sullivan sits in an armchair, leaning forward and watching her, responding to her, talking as and when required.

Mostly, she wants to show him things. Mrs Fitzgerald keeps a long Tupperware box full of toys in the corner by the hearth, and Charlotte picks from it at random, scrutinising the toys one by one. Sometimes she cradles and talks to them; other times, she purses her lips, leans forward and gives them to him, then goes back to look for something new. She grows more and more bold, more playful, more
normal
. He accumulates the toys on the arms of the chair, or in his lap, or wedged next to the cushion, unsure on the surface what is required of him but understanding deep down that nothing is.

He wants to ask her about her father, but does not.

Instead, he quietly takes each toy she passes to him. Watching her increasing ease with a feeling akin to privilege. In some ways, by the time he leaves this house, Sullivan feels younger than she is: renewed in some way.
Charlotte
, he thinks.
You’re going to be okay
. But it is not entirely clear to whom he is directing the thought: to her, or to the memory of Anna Hanson, the little girl he failed to save. He recognises this mistake even as he’s making it but it is so easy to do, so very easy to do, and he lets himself do it night after night.

And so, every night, he arrives back home late.

His wife says little; they drift around each other in a carefully coordinated dance, subconsciously avoiding touching. They fail to find
anything that needs talking about, beyond the perfunctory and the practical. She is drinking, although neither of them ever mentions it. Often he is as well. Recently, it feels as though their lives have schismed: been split in two, like a trunk by an axe, and they are now beginning to grow irrevocably in different directions, sprouting fresh buds destined never to touch.

You would be better off spending your time at home
.

He tells himself there are two reasons he visits the girl.

The first is so he can make sure she is safe. Even though Mrs Fitzgerald has an enforced door and an unlisted address, he feels better seeing the girl for himself and making sure she is all right. He has promised to keep her safe, and he will.

The second reason comes on the journey itself, as he watches his rearview-mirror driving out to the foster home. Sullivan’s name is the official contact for anyone coming forward on behalf of this little girl, and, while he does not expect the girl’s father to contact him through official channels, he thinks it’s possible the man will try to discover his daughter’s whereabouts in more furtive ways. So he takes odd, winding roads, but so far he’s seen nothing unusual behind him. Nothing follows him, certainly no rusting red van. Not the vehicle he imagines smoking and rolling, silhouetted against a setting sun, as though emerging from Hell itself.

There has been no official progress either. The relatively small amount of press coverage has resulted in little more than the expected fake phone calls and time-wasting counter visits. The cranks; the attention seekers. People who clearly know nothing about the little girl, her handbag, the flower, and are just desperate for attention, even of this low kind. Steadily, they have been weeded. And as the days have passed, Sullivan has become more and more anxious, more certain than ever of the girl’s story.

Finally, other people feel it too. Gray’s prediction has quietly begun to haunt the department. Parents tend to want their children back – and yet a parent has not come forward. What does that mean? Why does nobody want this little girl?

Anna
, he thinks.

Except, of course, not Anna. Charlotte.

Lying awake in bed that night, he tells himself:
you’re becoming too involved
. And yet he observes this fact with the same detachment with which he stares at the bedroom ceiling. His own workings are all too clear to him, the problem apparent. But he can’t stop. Whenever he tries to remember Anna Hanson, it is harder and harder to conjure up her small face; but whenever he pictures Charlotte, it is Anna who appears instead. His heart throbs with alarm. He is afraid not just that something terrible is going to happen but that, when it does, it will somehow be his fault.

When he does sleep, he dreams of black flowers.

He is in the crawl space beneath a house. It is high enough for him to kneel up in. There is an awful, pale globe in the darkness before him: the slack features illuminated by cut diamonds of sunlight from the lattice surrounding them. The whole space feels strangely fertile. It smells of worms going about their business in the soil. It sounds like crickets, and the
click
of grass untangling from itself as it grows. The girl’s head rests in the slowly turning soil, buried up to the neck. Something on the scalp is squirming.

This is Jane after she stopped talking. When she could no longer play. All around her, night-black petals flick open and closed, audible as blinks in the darkness.

Audible as blinks in the darkness
.

It was one of Cartwright’s favourite lines from the book, because it showed that Robert Wiseman had really understood. Even though they’d never met in the flesh, they had been connected: two separate waves resonating on a similar frequency. Cartwright had felt a kinship with him ever since finding the book, which had happened quite by accident. He’d been searching for clothes in a charity shop, spotted an almost-new hardback on the shelves and been drawn to it by the title. After he read it, he’d realised that Wiseman had taken his life and turned it into a different form. When people read
The Black Flower
, Cartwright came alive in their minds.