Black Flowers (23 page)

‘Ms Phillips?’ I said.

‘Barbara.’

I put the book on the table and stood up. If I’d been nervous about meeting her, then I needn’t have been: it was immediately obvious that she wasn’t going to be throwing me off anything in the near future – not without help, anyway. At the same time, she didn’t look quite as old as I’d been expecting. Her white hair was shot through with dark streaks, and she was wearing a neat black suit and scarf, and small circular glasses that made her eyes look tiny. Beneath the suit, she still looked slim and young. Something about her made me think of country houses, yoga and middle-class allotments. In fact, she reminded me more of an academic than whatever image I’d had of a journalist in a small seaside town.

She shook my hand, then nodded at
The Black Flower
.

‘I thought you’d have finished that by now?’

I sat back down. ‘I’ve been distracted.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She looped off the scarf. ‘My condolences.’

She slid a little awkwardly into the seat opposite me, her age more apparent now through the obvious flare in her joints. And
her hands, resting on the table, looked far older than the rest of her; the skin there was shrink-wrapped over the thin bones. I noticed the large wedding and engagement rings and remembered what she’d said on the phone last night.

‘I hope your husband is okay.’

‘Unfortunately not.’ She reached up and brushed her hair back behind her shoulder. ‘He has Alzheimer’s. Has had for a long time now. He’s not really very well at all, although it’s rare for him to know about it any more. That or anything else.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Thank you.’

There was a note of finality in her voice. It said,
I don’t want to talk about it
. I remembered not saying much the same thing myself a number of times while my mother was dying.

Barbara craned her neck and peered over my shoulder at the waitress. Her neck was as thin as a wrist.

‘Coffee, please.’ Then she looked back at me. ‘What are you doing here in Whitkirk, Neil? What do you hope to accomplish?’

How much was I going to tell her? I’d been wondering. Certainly not the truth about Ally; not yet, anyway. And so I started to give her the same answer I’d given Andrew Haggerty, but then the fresh pot of coffee arrived, fast as magic.

‘I’m psychic,’ the waitress said.

Barbara smiled, her eyes wrinkling at the corners.

When the waitress had retreated again, I said, ‘After my father died, I suppose I felt guilty.’

‘Everyone feels guilty when someone close to them dies.’

‘Probably. But it was true: I hadn’t seen enough of him over the past few weeks. At first, I wanted to know if there was something I could have done – something I’d missed. Given who he was, I thought the best way of doing that was to look at what he’d been working on. The whole time, I’d just been presuming he was writing about my mother’s death.’

Barbara poured herself a cup of coffee. ‘Maybe he was.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not
about
that specifically.’ She put the pot down, then gave the end of her thumb a delicate lick. ‘But you know, stories can be dangerous, can’t they? Telling them can have repercussions.’

I nodded.

‘And sometimes,’ she said, ‘stories are so dangerous that you have to
wait
to tell them – wait until you can’t hurt anyone else with them.’

‘What are you saying?’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps your mother’s death freed Christopher to pursue something that had been on his mind for a long time.’

‘Robert Wiseman?’ I said. ‘Or the book anyway.’

‘Or both.’ She tore open a sachet of sugar. It hissed as she poured it into her coffee. ‘Anyway, you learned what he was working on. And I presume you’re here, wanting to talk to me, because of the message I left on his answerphone?’

‘Yes. Because you wanted to meet him.’

She looked aghast. ‘God, no.
He
wanted to meet
me.’

‘All right. Did you meet him?’

‘No. There was nothing set in stone: we’d only exchanged a few emails and phone calls. I was
reluctant
to talk about the subject, shall we say, but eventually agreed to meet up with him in person. And then I never heard back from him. He seemed like a nice man, for what it’s worth. That was the impression I got from our brief correspondence. So if we had met I would have told him exactly the same thing I’ll tell you now.’

‘Which is?’

‘To leave this alone.’

I said nothing. It was easy for her to say that, and easy for her to talk of stories being dangerous. She didn’t have my current first-hand experience of just how fucking dangerous that was. She didn’t know about Ally, or that ‘leaving it’ wasn’t an option for me.

Barbara looked at me, her eyes like tiny beads behind her glasses, and emphasised the point.

‘Leave it alone, Neil. Let the past be the past.’

‘What if I can’t?’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Or both.’ I leaned back and folded my arms. ‘But to be honest, I think a part of you doesn’t want to leave it either. I mean, if you were so reluctant, you wouldn’t have chased up my father, would you. And why meet me? Why suggest here of all places? This
particular
café, I mean.’

Barbara sipped her coffee and smiled. It was a bittersweet expression, which, for some reason, made me remember what she’d said about her husband.
He has Alzheimer’s. He has had for a while now
. Yes, I thought. Sometimes stories are so dangerous that you need to wait to tell them until you can’t hurt anyone else.

‘Perhaps you have a point,’ she said. ‘And I suppose it’s true that what your father did changed things. I take it you’ve seen the news today?’

‘About the remains they’ve found.’

‘Yes. So on one level, it does seem that things are beginning to unravel. Maybe the truth is finally going to come out regardless. Because if the remains belong to who I think they do, I’m not sure it can be covered up much longer.’

I tapped the cover of
The Black Flower
.

‘The child-killer, I’m guessing? Clarke Poole.’

She nodded. ‘That would be my guess too.’

‘What was his name in real life?’

‘Charles Dennison. His identity hasn’t been confirmed yet, of course. But that’s only part of the story. My understanding from colleagues is that police divers have found remains from
two
victims.’

‘Two more?’

‘So far.’

‘And presumably the other one is Wiseman?’

‘Most likely. I don’t know for sure, but both are male, both appear to have been in the water for quite some time and both are suspicious deaths. Unlike your father, these two are certainly
not
suicides.’

I let the implication there go for the moment.

‘You think the police killed them both?’

‘Keep your voice down, Neil.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Years ago, when Charles Dennison vanished, there were a lot of rumours flying around about who might have been responsible. Unofficially, of course. Let’s just say that some of the explanations for his disappearance were very similar to what Robert Wiseman ended up writing in his novel.’

I shook my head, thinking of the photograph. I was sure Wiseman had got his information from the woman he and my father met.

‘How would he have known about that?’

‘Well, he was a writer, Neil. Writers do research. Nobody knew for certain what happened to Charles Dennison, and I don’t suppose there was any way Wiseman could have either. He just looked at various facts in the public domain, perhaps a few that weren’t, and fashioned what he thought was a good
story
. However.’ She gestured down at the book. ‘I think it’s possible that he hit on the truth – or landed close to it at any rate. Close enough to rattle the wrong people. And then—’

‘Disappeared.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘Until now at least.’

I looked down at the book.
Real crimes
. I’d been a fucking idiot. Ever since reading Barbara’s article at my father’s house, I’d assumed the reference was to the little girl – to the serial killer and his van. But it was nothing to do with ‘Charlotte’ and her family at all. She’d been implying that the ‘real crime from the 1970s’ was the murder of a paedophile; that, by connecting a few pieces of information, Wiseman had fictionalised a real-life killing by the police. As a result of that, she thought they’d silenced him.

‘But why would the police bother to kill Wiseman?’

‘I didn’t say they did.’ She tutted at me. ‘What did I tell you about being careful?’

I was too frustrated to care. I needed a different story from this one.

I said, ‘Wiseman’s book was already published. It was a bestseller. Why bother getting rid of him? What would that achieve, apart from risking even more attention?’

Barbara was unfazed. To her the answer was obvious.

‘Because of his wife.’

I blinked, then tried to remember the details. Vanessa Wiseman. She died in a car accident, just after meeting her estranged husband here in Whitkirk, a year or so after
The Black Flower
had been published. The day before Barbara Phillips’s interview with him had run.

I said, ‘You were the last person to interview him before her accident. Is that right?’

‘No. I was the last person to interview him
at all
.’

‘Due to his breakdown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which was caused by her accident.’

‘Which was
exacerbated
by it. He was already flaky when I met him. They’d been separated a few months by then. You’ve probably read that he was an incorrigible womaniser, which is true, but he loved her and needed her. He was like a lot of men in that regard: always seeking what they can’t have; never happy with what they do – until it’s gone, of course. Wiseman had been given the freedom he’d always hankered after. But it was obvious to me he’d lost something far more important deep down, and was in the middle of realising it.’

I thought about the cover shot for
The Black Flower:
Wiseman looking suave and smug – handsome and knowing it. In the picture with my father, he looked like the kind of man Barbara was describing: someone who enjoyed being caught out, so long as he wasn’t
really
caught.

‘Pitiful, to be honest,’ she said. ‘He touched my knee, you know? Even then – when it was quite apparent he was pining for his wife – he couldn’t help himself. Some men can’t. So sure of themselves on the surface. Needy, lost little children underneath.’

I picked up my coffee.

‘He met her afterwards, didn’t he? At the abbey.’

‘Yes. That afternoon. I think after our interview, he had some kind of crisis and phoned her. Clicked his fingers and she came running. And what happened afterwards … happened.’

‘An accident.’

‘Almost certainly.’

I put my cup back down again.

Barbara said, ‘You shouldn’t believe
anything
you read online, Neil. There
was
a car accident. But some details about it were strange.’

‘Strange, how?’

‘No body for a start.’

‘She disappeared as well?’ I stared at her. ‘A lot of people seem to disappear in Whitkirk.’

‘They do, don’t they? As it happens, I’m being slightly melodramatic. The accident was on the coastal road, close to the cliff edge. It was presumed that she wandered, dazed, from the scene and fell. Her body was never found, but there’s no reason to doubt the official story.’

‘So—’

‘No sensible reason anyway. But Wiseman swore blind that he saw a van of some sort, just after she’d driven away. Very much like the one he’d described in his book. The way he told it, it was as though his characters had come alive and were punishing him.’

She snorted. Except it didn’t sound funny or stupid to me, because I knew the truth: his characters hadn’t come to life; they’d
already
been alive. What exactly had happened though – why would the old man target Vanessa Wiseman? There was no
way of knowing for sure, not now, but maybe he suspected Wiseman had to have met his missing daughter at some point. If so, perhaps he’d started following Wiseman, seen him with his estranged wife on the clifftop, and jumped to a conclusion about who the woman really was.

‘Regardless of what he really saw,’ Barbara said, ‘it was obvious he blamed himself. Over the next year, he retreated entirely from the world. By the end, when he finally came to stay at The Southerton, he was very unbalanced. He wanted to interview me – much like your father did – but I refused.’

‘He was working on new material when he disappeared.’

‘More like obsessively throwing himself into old material. He only told me enough to know he was borderline insane. He was reworking
The Black Flower
, he said – a kind of sequel, but in an odd way. This new book was going to be about a novelist who wrote something that came true and who lost his wife because of it.’