Black Flowers (20 page)

‘I’ll call the man finding her,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him his time is up.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if he can’t find her … ’ Cartwright began. But the words afterwards failed him. His insides had come to life again. He thought of unpeopled jungles, sunlight streaming through the trees, stained green. He thought of leaves clicking open, undergrowth stretching, flicking quickly then slowly into slightly different shapes. All of that, taking place within the barrel of his torso. He was becoming overgrown, and his forehead was suddenly dappled damp with hot-house sweat.

‘If he fails,’ he said, ‘then she’ll be yours.’

His eldest glanced off towards the back of the farm. That promise was enough for him, as Cartwright had known it would be. Because yes, the world was numb, the farm was mostly silent, and even the chickens were quiet. But not the woman behind the house.

She was still screaming for help.

The next morning, I was far more hungry than I would have thought possible. It seemed such a mundane thing in the circumstances, but then, my body didn’t know anything was wrong, and I’d been running on vapours, most of them coffee, for longer than I could remember. I couldn’t run much longer without collapsing. So while I showered, I boiled the small, wobbling travel kettle in my room, consumed another dose of caffeine, and then took my key card and went down for something to eat.

The breakfast room was decked out entirely in white; the tables caught the early morning sunlight from the high windows. The crumbs, grease stains and leftover jam packets from earlier diners stood out against the cloth. I heaped a plate with everything hot from the buffet, then carried my tray over to the closest single table I could find. Fuel up, head out. That was my plan, as much as I had one.

The table happened to be next to the wall, which is the only reason I noticed the complementary newspapers. Even then, I didn’t think to check straightaway. But halfway through eating, I remembered what I’d seen from the taxi – the fact the police were still at the viaduct – and cursed myself. Maybe whatever was going on had made the news. I stood up, licking butter off my finger.

There was the usual selection of dailies in the rack, but I
scanned down and found a copy of the local paper, the Whitkirk and Huntington Times, then sat back at the table and held it awkwardly over the remains of my breakfast.

Shit. It was right there – front-page news.

Until I’d got to the bit about the remains being in the water for a long time, I’d gone cold inside, thinking it might be
her:
the woman I was supposed to be looking for. But it couldn’t be. So what the fuck was going on?

The telephone number listed looked like the same one Hannah Price had left on my father’s answerphone. For a moment, I half considered just fucking ringing it – demanding to know outright what was happening. I had a right to know, didn’t I? I might have to explain why I was here in Whitkirk, but I could probably come up with something, or just dodge the question. I’d pretty much run out of other options. What made
me hesitate now, though, was what Barbara Phillips had said on the phone last night.

Don’t talk to anyone else before we have a chance to speak
.

Especially the police
.

What was going on here?

I scanned the article again, trying to tease out additional detail. It was phrased carefully, leaving it unclear whether there was one body or more. Instead, it was just ‘further remains’. But how had they been found in the first place? Why were police divers dredging the river at all?
They appear to have been in the water for a long time
. And yet a person who had been in the water for a long time wouldn’t just lie there, would they – their body would have been swept downstream, the way my father’s laptop was supposed to have. Which meant the remains must have been weighted down somehow to keep them hidden. Not suicide, then.

Christ
, I thought.
Could it be Wiseman?

‘Are you finished with this?’

‘What? Oh yeah – sorry.’

I folded the newspaper out of the way, so the young waitress could clear the table. Then I moved the chair back.

‘Actually, I’m done,’ I said. ‘Let me get out of your way.’

It was too early to meet Barbara Phillips, so I walked for a while, trying to fight back the feeling that time was running out.

Many of the cobbled streets here were little more than alleyways and it was difficult to tell them apart. The pavements were blocked by racks of postcards, and wicker bins full of plastic, primary-coloured spades, and windmills on sticks that spun in the breeze, rattling like playing cards in bicycle wheels. The shops were mostly indistinguishable: every other one seemed to be a newsagent of some kind, their windows full of blown-glass miniatures of ducks and whales, or tiny porcelain ashtrays and ships. There were second-hand bookshops. There were God knew what shops, with smudged glass displays containing
curved lock-knives, pipes and lighters, and air guns resting in old, weathered card cases.

The whole time as I walked, I kept half-recognising things from
The Black Flower
. It wasn’t anything specific: more the atmosphere of the place. Maybe Wiseman had imagined he’d just been describing a generic seaside town, but it
felt
the same. It was obvious to me that Faverton was Whitkirk. Wiseman hadn’t just stolen real crimes for his novel, he’d stolen the entire setting.

Wiseman.

If it was his remains the police had found at the viaduct, how had they ended up there?

The man who’d taken Ally had heard of Wiseman.
He knew me
, he’d told me on the phone.
He wrote about me
. Presumably he’d read
The Black Flower
at some point and recognised himself in it. Would that have been reason enough to kill Wiseman? Maybe. With this man, there was no telling what he’d do. But then, why hide Wiseman’s body at the viaduct? And what had led my father there?

There was obviously some other significance to the place. One I didn’t understand yet.

I came back down to the promenade, then turned and made my way further along the front, past The Southerton. There were boats moored up beyond the stone sea wall, bobbing on the laps of the tide. I crossed over and looked out to sea for a bit. The wall itself was thick with moss, while the sea below was thick and rich, its surface covered with fractured thatches of leaves and twigs. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the abbey on the clifftop, poking up like a broken tooth. I looked up at it.

That was where Wiseman’s car had been found abandoned. The cliff fell down steeply. From this distance it was impossible to judge how high it was, but it was certainly high enough. At its base, the sea was nobbled with rocks, the sea frothing in tiny white curls amongst them. Anyone jumping would probably be
killed immediately by the fall; depending on the time of day, it was also possible the currents would take their bodies out into the sea. And not everyone washed out to sea is washed back again.

But that was only
if
someone jumped.

It was assumed Wiseman had thrown himself off the cliff solely because of his car being there. But maybe it hadn’t happened like that. Perhaps he’d left the vehicle there for some reason – met someone and then driven away in
their
car. Or else someone could have taken his car to the clifftop to make it look as though he’d killed himself when, in reality, something else had happened to him. All of this for some reason I couldn’t fathom right now.

I stared up at the abbey for a moment longer, then shook my head and started walking again. A little further ahead, past the boats, there was a break in the sea wall and a long stone slope, the water rolling lazily halfway up, green and meaty. To the right, on the far side of the road, was the café.

The Fisherman’s Catch
.

From the outside, it looked like most of the cafés I’d spotted already, albeit noticeably older – and also much emptier, as though there was something about the place that put people off. The sign above the glass front was faded and chipped. Inside, I could see one lone waitress. She was young, early twenties at the most, and she was leaning down and swabbing a table roughly and hurriedly, like a hospital cleaner in a room you weren’t intended to see.

The place didn’t look anything special, and I wondered what had made Barbara Phillips suggest it. Until, glancing a little further along the promenade, I got my answer. There was an open garage front, with the nose of a boat poking out onto the pavement. Traffic lights marked a section of street where it could be wheeled out, directly towards the stone slope, and then down into the sea.

Whitkirk Lifeboat Station.

For a moment, I was frozen on the spot, just looking at it.

And then I wasn’t quite sure where I was any more. It felt like a place that was a mixture not just of fact and fiction, but also of past and present, the boundaries between those things suddenly too blurry to see.

I heard children laughing – and there really
were
children here, a little way ahead of me along the promenade, but my mind linked the sound to a chain of imaginary boys and girls instead, coming in clusters down the other side of the street, on their trip to see the lifeboat, as a paedophile stood across the road, waving his fingers delicately at them. I could feel the pulse of
The Black Flower
, and of the past it had been drawn from. It was sealed away inside the surface of the world, but at this spot, at this moment, it was pressed so tightly against its skin I could sense the outlines.

I looked along the promenade again.

She wasn’t really there, of course, but in some strange way she was: the memory of a little girl, standing motionless amongst the couples and families trailing obliviously around her. This would be the place where Charlotte Webb had appeared. Where the police had held the stakeout.

In the book, and in reality. Because it was all real, I thought. Standing here now, I no longer believed Wiseman’s novel was fiction at all.

I waited for a break in the traffic and jogged across the street to The Fisherman’s Catch. A bell tinkled as I pushed the door open and walked inside. The waitress looked up.

‘Hi there,’ she said. ‘Be with you in a moment.’

‘No worries.’

As she finished mopping the table – so hard that it looked as though she was trying to push it through the floor – I glanced around. There were photographs hanging on the wall, most of them sepia prints of Whitkirk ‘back in the day’. Some captured fishermen standing by boats, their beards almost supernaturally bright against the beige backgrounds. Others showed the streets
themselves: the familiar cobbles, overhung here by antique signs like wooden shields. Distinguished couples stood proudly outside shops, faces serious, eyes staring into the camera. I glanced around the walls until I found one that interested me, then walked over to peer at it more closely.

It was a colour photograph of the seafront. A tram was parked up close to the camera. Beyond it, wires and poles extended down the road. It wasn’t as old as the other photographs, but time had drained it, giving it the look of a black and white picture that someone had daubed watery paint on.

‘Do you remember the trams?’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

The waitress had just blown a strand of hair out of her face and was standing facing me, hands on her hips.

I nodded at the print. ‘The tramline in the picture. I noticed it’s not there any more. Do you know when they got rid of it?’

‘Ummm.’ She thought about it. ‘Can’t tell you to be honest. Ten years ago? Maybe more. There was a big thing about it between the residents and the council. I can check if you want?’

‘No, it’s all right. It doesn’t really matter.’

‘What can I get you?’

‘Just a coffee for now.’

She gave a mock salute. ‘Coming up.’

I took a seat at the nearest table. It was superficially clean, but her efforts couldn’t hide the older stains, the ones dyed into the surface. There were salt and vinegar dispensers, a bottle of ketchup and a menu with large photos of battered fish on it. The place reminded me of a chip shop I’d gone to as a child: one my parents had taken me to. It was a memory of comfort rather than anything else: warmth and sizzle and smell.