Black Flowers (15 page)

Hannah was rubbing the backs of her fingers against her lips.
Victim
. She tried to put that word – and its necessary opposite:
murderer
– out of her mind, forcing herself to examine the remains instead.

Most people’s image of skeletons come from ghost stories and children’s cartoons: smooth, bright-white bones and pitch-black eye sockets; a grin that was almost friendly; a cackling pirate’s flag. The reality was a world away. The bones Dale was standing beside now looked organic, but barely human. The skull was recognisable, and yet even that reminded Hannah of old, brown pottery unearthed after years spent underground; it was difficult to imagine there had ever been a face stretched over it, or that thoughts and emotions had taken place inside.

The idea that the body became one with the earth after death was common and, of course, it was true. Flesh decays; cells break down; molecules scatter. Eventually, the body is recycled, the physical essence of a person absorbed by the world and transformed into something new. That was why some cultures had myths about trees growing in graveyards. But looking at the
remains before her now, Hannah thought the opposite was also true. As the body of Victim A had decayed, it appeared to have taken on characteristics from the landscape around it. Just as the river had absorbed this body, so, it seemed, the body had absorbed the river. The arm and leg bones were brown and weathered as twigs, while the hands and feet were mottled a mossy-green colour. The ribs were uneven – straggly and twisted, like the roots of a fallen tree. On the left-hand side, a number were broken, bent inwards as though clasping for the long-absent heart.

She said, ‘What do you mean, “broken into pieces”?’

Dale waved it away.

‘It’s the wrong word. The body has been in the water for quite some time. I’d say several years at least. Given the environment – the turbulence of the river – it’s not surprising to observe this level of detachment at the joints. I mean, we’ve both seen our fair share of floating feet over the years.’

‘But the body wasn’t dismembered?’

‘There are no tool marks on the bones.’

‘Okay.’ Maybe that was something. ‘So what can you tell me?’

Dale pulled a face. ‘Not much beyond the fact that Victim A is a fully grown adult male. I’m trying to get a forensic anthropologist in. He or she will have a better chance at estimating the victim’s age and how long he’s been in the water. But I can’t promise anything. On the plus side, there’s a good set of teeth available for identification. Unlike Victim B.’

Hannah couldn’t look at B for the moment. Fortunately, Dale nodded at a sodden pile of fabric on the station beside the first victim. ‘It might also be possible to identify some of A’s clothing, after we’ve finished unravelling it.’

‘Cause of death?’ Hannah asked.

‘Again, it’s impossible to say for certain. But there’s a clear injury to the skull, and I’d say that looks like a solid candidate.’

Hannah had already seen what Dale was referring to. A coin-sized
piece of bone was missing from the side of Victim A’s skull, with tiny fractures cracking out from it. Obvious blunt-object trauma: a lot of force onto a small area.

She gestured towards the broken ribs.

‘What about that injury?’

Dale peered at the corpse. ‘Impossible to say. Whether it’s pre- or post-mortem, I mean. My guess would be it was caused by the weight that was included in the sack with the body.’

Hannah shifted slightly – reluctantly – and turned her attention to the third table along. The bodies had been found in two separate hessian sacks, both resting five metres below the surface in the silt of the riverbed. Each bag had also been given its own dissection station. Both were vile, sodden slumps of material, which had originally been tied at the top with rope. Dale and his team had cut them open at the side to remove the bones, allowing the pans beneath the tables to catch any remnants of river water and decay that ran off the plastic sheets. Aside from the bones, the mulch, and whatever tatters of clothing had survived, each sack had also contained a large, heavy rock.

Dale rolled his hands around each other.

‘Tumble, tumble, tumble. Bang.’

She could easily picture what he was implying: the bag falling down through the air, then striking the water; the boulder breaking the dead man’s ribs as the sack smashed through the surface of the river. True to Hannah’s reputation, that picture didn’t trouble her. What she found much harder to imagine was the face of the man on the viaduct above: the one who’d tipped the body over the edge and watched it fall. For now, he was just a silhouette against the sky, leaning over, watching as his victim sank away out of sight. She didn’t want to give that man a face, but she couldn’t get away from the question:

Is this it, then, Dad?

Is that you?

‘And so to Victim B,’ Dale said. ‘What’s left of him, anyway.’

The second set of remains –
the second so far
, she reminded
herself – had clearly been in the water for much longer, and the bones had made an almost full transformation into something from a riverbed. It was much worse than the first. She found it hard to look.

‘Male,’ he said. ‘But, once again, I can’t tell you how old he was at the time of death or how long ago he died. Not yet.’

‘Do you think it’s the same killer?’

As soon as she said it, she regretted the question. For one thing, that was her job to figure out, not his. For another, the answer was obvious. Maybe she was just looking for even the smallest scrap of hope. There was none, of course. Her father had done this – killed not just one, but two people. She knew it deep down.

Dale glanced at her, a curious expression on his face.

‘It’s not my place to confirm or deny,’ he said. ‘But even without the method of disposal being identical – the sacks – I’d say you’re looking at the same perpetrator. Victim B shares a similar injury to A. Even if he’s been a bit more
aggressive
with this fellow.’

Dale made a knocking gesture with his fist.

‘As you can see, the front of the skull is entirely missing.’

Hannah nodded.

Yes, she could see that.

It was the obvious aggression she found hardest to deal with. The first body was bad enough; this second one was something else altogether. Even in death, you could see it: that someone had squatted over Victim B and repeatedly brought an object down onto the man’s face, literally caving in the front of the skull. And then they had folded him into a sack and dropped him into the river.

Someone
.

Hannah looked at the empty cup of B’s skull, then back to Victim A. At its missing coin of bone.

‘The weapon,’ she said.

‘Blunt object. Small diameter.’

‘Consistent with a hammer?’

Dale pursed his lips and nodded to himself.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘I think you’re right.’

Hannah was driving.

You’re going to get yourself in trouble
.

Maybe. Well, she was already in trouble of course. There was a potential murder weapon lying in her father’s house right now, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do about it that wouldn’t lead to even more trouble. Not just for her father, but now for her.

Call it in? That was the sensible thing to do – except, without the map, it was just a hammer. There was no reason to look at it twice. Obviously, with the
map
, it made sense. But if she reported that, she was opening herself up to scrutiny. Hannah had sat on what she knew, made that anonymous call, not told anyone her suspicions. She wasn’t confident enough she’d covered all the angles. There was no CCTV on that payphone, for example, but lots elsewhere. If she put herself in the crosshairs, someone would surely be able to find her nearby, close to the time the call had been made. Circumstantial at best but that was only off the top of her head, and who knew what else she might have missed? These little details added up. One thing police work taught you was that however careful someone thought they’d been, there was always something.

So she wasn’t going to call it in.

At least the fear – the dread – was diluted slightly now. She’d found out something close to the truth, and it was as bad as she could have expected. But now, she was annoyed as well as scared. With him. With herself.

Why had he done this to her?

Never mind that
, she thought.
Why are you doing it to yourself?

Hannah slowed, then indicated and turned into Mulberry
Avenue. The first cross on her father’s map – the furthest inland, at any rate – was over this road.

From what the dive team had found, it looked as though the viaduct had been a dump site for bodies. What about the other places he’d marked down? Were they the same, and, if not, what did those other crosses represent?

She’d driven down Mulberry Avenue a number of times before. As far as she’d been able to tell, it was just a quiet residential street, indistinguishable from many others on the outskirts of Huntington. She couldn’t see anything different now. It was a reasonably affluent neighbourhood, and the houses were spacious and detached, with neat, crew-cut grass verges outside, and neighbourhood-watch notices on the lamp posts.

No wasteground. No obvious disposal sites. Where the viaduct was secluded and disused, Mulberry Avenue was very conspicuously not a place you’d choose to hide something.

Unless there
used
to be something here
.

That idea occurred to her as she reached the end of the street and turned right. It was possible, wasn’t it? Her father’s map was an old one, after all, so back when he’d drawn those crosses perhaps some of the houses behind her hadn’t been there. Or maybe one of them had a poisoned secret or two of its own, throbbing beneath a cellar floor. She would need to check the records for that.

Well, you can do that
.

The thought followed quickly, hollow now:

After all, you can do anything
.

It took a twenty-minute drive to reach the place marked by the second cross. Whitkirk Park. The entrance was gated: great big iron railings. Across the road, there was an old block of flats, with an estate sprawling away behind. This was no good either; there were too many people around for too much of the time. During the day, the park was full of women strolling with prams, couples meandering, teenagers sitting around in circles
on the grass, playing guitar. At night, older kids got drunk here. Men cruised. There was nothing she could hope to find hidden here that someone else wouldn’t have uncovered long ago.

A short drive away, Blair Rocks was much the same. It was a small but well-known picnic area on the edge of Huntington Woods. Hannah turned into the car park. At the end, there were wooden benches, and beyond them a large field with a wall of trees on either side. Three other cars were parked up, and the field was speckled with families. Children’s laughter echoed across; two kids were chasing each other across the grass. A kite trailed in the sky.

The area took its name from the large boulders that scabbed the far end of the field. There was an embankment there, steep enough in a few places to be scaled by serious climbers, but most of the rocks were small and safe enough for children to play on. As a result, this place was reasonably well attended for most of the year.

Which meant there couldn’t be anything here either: once again, logic dictated this wasn’t a dump site, because anything disposed of quickly would have been found quickly. And anything hidden more carefully would have been hidden far more easily somewhere else.

What did these places mean to you, Dad?

The fourth cross.

Hannah reversed the car, and headed away.

A few minutes later, she was parking up on the old patch of scattered gravel that faced into the remains of Wetherby Cottage. It was halfway along one of the small roads linking Whitkirk to Huntington. Not a quiet road, perhaps – but not a busy one either. Like the Rocks, it also ran along the edge of Huntington Woods. In fact, it was only about a mile north of here that the river cut through below the viaduct, where her father had marked his fifth and final cross.

This place is more promising, isn’t it?

The front of the main structure appeared to be still standing:
a wide, low building that, in life, had probably been painted as white as the flesh of a fish. In death, it was grey: sodden and worn. The windows were just empty holes, with the undergrowth wrapping itself in and out of them. Around the corner, the side wall had collapsed inwards. The roof was clearly long gone.

Derelict for years. But …

What’s here?

Or what
was
here when you made that cross?

Hannah’s phone vibrated against her hip. She took it out.

Barnes.

Without even answering, she could play the call in her head. As much of an arsehole as he could be, once again he would be right in what he said.

Sorry, sir
, she thought.
I didn’t hear it ring
.

But even so, there were places she should be right now, and things she should be doing. Inconsequential things, maybe, in the face of what she’d uncovered, but not in terms of her everyday life, of what was expected of her. And that was the issue, wasn’t it: the question that had occurred to her on the way to Mulberry Avenue. Why was she doing this to herself – risking everything and getting herself deeper and deeper in trouble?