Black Flowers (22 page)

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.

‘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—

‘Hello, Hannah.’

She faltered in the kitchen doorway. DCI Graham Barnes was standing on the patio, just outside the back door. For a moment, she was almost relieved to see it was him, but then the incongruity hit her. Barnes himself was not a shock. But Barnes standing here: something about that was not right.

‘Sir,’ she said.

‘May I come in?’

That was wrong, as well: too mannered and polite. And he looked so prim and proper standing there, dressed in his neat, dark-blue uniform. It was an old-fashioned copper suit: fabric ironed tight and straight; buttons and boots polished. Just like her father in the album. And while Barnes’s face remained as pointed and hawkish as ever, there was something else she wasn’t used to seeing there now. Deference, almost. He looked humble, like an officer who’d come to deliver bad news to an unsuspecting family.

‘Hannah?’ he said.

‘Sir – yes. Of course.’

Barnes nodded a gracious thank you, then took one careful step over the threshold. She forced herself not to take a corresponding step backwards. He was still far enough away. And Barnes was not, in himself, a threatening man. He was much smaller than she was, and much older. Physically, she should be able to overpower him if it came to it, even without the baton, which Barnes had either not noticed or chosen to ignore.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

As he spoke, the smell wafted across, rich and strong. Whiskey. So he’d been drinking this morning – another piece of information to add to the list. The DCI had turned up at her father’s house, acting strangely, and most likely drunk.

Hannah leaned her hip against the counter.

Barnes had lost interest in her for the moment. He had seen
the photo album, still open on the counter where she had left it last night. He rested his hands on either side of it and peered down intently.

‘Lovely.’

He was looking at the picture of her father holding her in the hospital.

She said, ‘Yes.’

‘I was there you know.’

‘You were—?’

‘Well, not
there
. But your father and I were friends back then. I was one of the first people to visit you all in hospital after the birth. He and I went out afterwards. We had cigars and champagne. You could smoke inside back then.’

He smiled sadly to himself.

‘Yes, I remember that day very well indeed. Waiting for the phone call. Colin was so very proud. May I?’ He glanced up suddenly. ‘Look through?’

She nodded.

‘Thank you.’

And Barnes began thumbing through the pages of the album, one by one. There was a reverence to his touch.

‘It must be nice to have this to look back on,’ he said. ‘To have everything laid out like this, I mean. The story of your life.’

She felt herself tensing.

‘Yes.’

‘Colin was thoughtful that way. He was a very clever man.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was.’

Barnes had reached the photograph where she was on the bicycle without stabilisers, her father grinning in the background.

‘This is probably it,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘This is about the time it happened.’

‘Sir, are you … are you all right?’

It was a ridiculous question given the circumstances, but what else was there? This man in front of her – even though she knew him, he might as well have been a stranger. She needed to pull the situation back towards some kind of normality, or else press the strangeness right out into the open where it could be dealt with.

‘I’m afraid not.’ Barnes, still looking down at the album, gave that sad smile again. ‘You were outside my house again yesterday.’

‘Outside your house?’

‘On Mulberry Avenue.’

Just a quiet residential street, she thought. Nothing out of the ordinary to see; reasonably affluent; no waste ground. Anyone might live there.

He said, ‘And I saw you at the old farmhouse last night.’

Hannah realised she was holding her breath. She forced herself to let it go, and said:

‘That was you then, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘I might ask you the same question, Hannah. The same as I might ask why you called the Dawson crime scene in anonymously. Or what you were doing out at the viaduct in the first place.’

She started to deny all knowledge of that, but Barnes read it in her face and shook his head.
There are only two of us here
, the gesture seemed to say,
and we both know that’s not true
.

For a long moment, she just looked at him.

‘I wanted to know the truth,’ she said.

‘Ah – the truth.’ He nodded. ‘I understand that; it’s a good answer. Some things are more important than the law, aren’t they? The truth is one of them.’

‘Maybe.’

‘No, I know you, Hannah. You found Colin’s map, didn’t
you? I know what you must have been thinking. You loved your father very much; he meant everything to you. So you wanted to find out what he’d done. You
needed
to. And the law didn’t come into it.’

It bothered her how right he was.

‘Why were you there, sir?’

‘I was paying penance.’ He said it simply, decisively. ‘Visiting a ghost, I suppose. That place is haunted, isn’t it? I don’t normally believe in spirits, or things of that nature, but you can certainly feel one there.’

‘Paying penance?’

‘You found your father’s map.’

Again, there didn’t seem any point in denying it. ‘Yes. And a hammer, as well. Paying penance for what?’

At the mention of the hammer, Barnes closed his eyes. He seemed to be swaying slightly – from the drink, she guessed – and his face was suddenly pained, as though he was remembering something he could hardly bear to think about.

‘I burned them,’ she added quickly. ‘The map and the hammer. Nobody ever needs—’

‘Too late.’

Hannah extended the baton down by her side.
Click
.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think you should stay where you are.’

Barnes opened his eyes.

‘I should have had this with me last night,’ he said. ‘I just wasn’t sure.’

She looked down, noticed the gun-shaped object in his hand and blinked. It took a second – an unbelievable second – for her to realise what she was seeing. He was holding a taser. Her mind started to object. The devices were recorded, traceable. If he fired it in here, the kitchen would be filled with punches of paper that would lead back to him. He couldn’t expect … This was madness.

‘Sir—’

Barnes gave her that sad smile again. ‘It’s much too late, I’m afraid.’

And she could tell that he meant it.

‘Neil.’

I looked up to see a woman turning away from me, closing the door to the café. I’d been so lost in Wiseman’s book that I hadn’t heard the bell tinkle.