Black Flowers (25 page)

‘To protect
yourself
this time,’ she said. ‘Not quite as fucking noble.’

‘I did it to protect Colin.’

‘Oh yeah, of course you did, Barnes.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Not because you didn’t want to go to fucking jail, or anything like that.’

‘I’ll never go to jail, Hannah.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. And abducting me hasn’t made that any less likely, has it?’

‘Oh, this?’ He looked at his hand, and seemed almost surprised to see the taser was still there. ‘I just needed to make sure you listened to me. I needed to explain so that you didn’t think badly of him. I know how much he meant to you, and he wouldn’t have wanted you to—’

‘Still protecting him, are you?’

‘Is it so hard to believe I did it for Colin? That’s why you’ve done what you have.’

‘For God’s sake, Barnes. It’s not the same thing.’

‘Isn’t it?’

Hannah didn’t reply. Anger was surging up inside her. Rather
than getting out, running away, she suddenly wanted to attack him: pummel him. The only reason she didn’t was because he already seemed so beaten, as though additional blows would just bounce off him, maybe even be welcomed.

‘What about Christopher Dawson?’ she said. ‘Did you kill him too?’

‘No.’ He gave another hollow laugh. ‘I have no idea what happened there.’

‘You don’t. Well, forgive me if I find that hard to believe.’

‘I forgive you, Hannah. For more than you know.’

‘Oh, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means it’s all going to come out now. The truth. All because of you.’

‘I burned the map,’ she reminded him. ‘I burned the hammer.’

‘That doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you see? Wiseman will be identified, and people will look into his life. They’ll read his book again, where two policemen dump the body of a paedophile over a viaduct in a place that’s obviously based on Whitkirk. They’ll read the file on Charles Dennison and make the connection.’ Barnes shook his head. ‘Wiseman was a bastard. Don’t you understand, Hannah? Even dead, he’s going to reveal everything.’

‘Shut up. Let me think.’

‘I’ve spent the last two days thinking. There’s no way to stop it. The entire file on Dennison is damning. He’d made complaints. Colin and I were actually questioned when he disappeared. It’s all there, and more. You don’t understand yet, but you will. Christ, I was even investigating officer for Wiseman’s suicide. I made sure I was.’

Hannah started to say something but stopped. Because he was right, wasn’t he? Certain things could possibly be made to disappear, but not identities, or published books, or entire files. And it was stupid to attempt it: the more you tried to cover up something that extensive, the more obvious it became.

I was even investigating officer for Wiseman’s suicide
.

The media would run with it, and everything would unfold. Hannah ran her fingers through her hair, her mind racing.

‘So what are we going to do then?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Barnes said. ‘And there is a way out of this. It won’t protect you from the truth, won’t protect me … but it might at least protect your father’s reputation. And that’s what we both want, isn’t it?’

Hannah frowned. ‘What do you mean? What do we need to do?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Your father was a good man, and he always kept you safe. Now it’s your turn to repay that – to help me repay it as well. You can keep his good name safe, but none of it is going to be easy for you.’

Hannah looked out through the windscreen. The elderly couple had turned around and were walking back towards their car.

‘How?’ she said.

Barnes nodded towards the old couple.

‘When they’re gone, you’re going to get out of the car and go to the department. To the archives. You’ll find the file for Charles Dennison.’ He thought about it. ‘And the file for a girl called “Charlotte Webb” as well. Those are the two you’ll need.’

Beside them, the doors of the estate slammed shut.

‘I can’t make those files disappear, Barnes.’

‘You’re not going to. You’re just going to read them.’

She shook her head. ‘How is that meant to help anything?’

‘You’ll see. If you want a more selfish motivation, then there’s always the fact that the photo I took of you last night is in Charles Dennison’s file.’

‘What?’

‘I put it there first thing this morning: a photo of you at the scene where Dennison was suspected of murdering a little girl. That’s going to be hard to explain, isn’t it? And Dennison is registered as a missing person, so I’m guessing that file will be making its way upstairs very soon.’

Hannah didn’t reply.
You bastard
.

Barnes smiled ruefully, reading the expression on her face.

Beside them, the engine of the estate rattled into life. There was a scratch of gravel as it pulled out.

‘I’m sorry.’ Barnes’s gaze tracked the vehicle as it passed in front of them. ‘I needed to make sure you did what I wanted you to. You’ll understand when you read the details. It’s not going to be easy though.’

‘Barnes—’

‘But you’ll face up to it.’ He stared at her. ‘You’ll do it for him, and you’ll do it for yourself.’

‘And what are
you
going to do?’

He took a deep breath. ‘There’s one last thing that needs to be taken care of. Now get out, Hannah.’

You bastard
, she thought again. Barnes had dropped her in the shit and was forcing her to make a decision. Attempt to take him in – turn him, her father and herself over to the law – or run. Try to get to that photograph before anyone saw it. Read the two files, whatever that was supposed to achieve. And whichever route she took, there would be no going back.

Barnes gestured with the taser.

‘Go on,’ he said gently. ‘You’d better be quick.’

And after a long moment of silence, in which they did nothing but stare at each other, Hannah made her decision, got out of the car, and began to run.

At least my father’s road map had turned out to be useful.

The small village of Fenton was almost indistinguishable from the other little hamlets dotted along the coast here: places so nondescript they barely warranted a name. Fenton had a neatly mown village green, with houses around three sides, and a few shops along the road by the cliff-edge. A series of stone steps wound down, presumably to the beach. Today, the whole place was almost deathly quiet and still. I parked up by one corner of the central square, outside an unassuming two-storey cottage, and then sat in the car for a few minutes.

What the hell was I going to say to this woman?

After leaving the café in Whitkirk, I hadn’t been sure what to do next, but Barbara Phillips’s words had stayed with me.
He stole a lot of real people and places. In some cases he barely made an effort to conceal them
. Of course, she thought that applied only to the strand of the story involving Charles Dennison, but I knew better. I’d got to thinking – might there be anything else there, hiding obviously between the lines?

So I’d gone back to the hotel and flicked through the book, looking at individual characters, and eventually something caught my eye in the chapter on the foster home run by Mrs Fitzgerald.

Out back, the garden ends where the cliff-edge allows it to. One day, erosion will take this house from her
.

I’d stared at those words for a while. That seemed a strange detail to include; it had no obvious bearing on the story. So I’d booted up my laptop and googled various combinations of ‘foster home’, ‘Whitkirk’ and ‘erosion’, wondering just how little effort Wiseman had really gone to, hoping it wasn’t much at all.

It turned out he’d barely even changed her name.

A children’s home had been run near Whitkirk by a lady called Denise Fitzwilliam in the seventies and eighties. It was long gone now: one of several properties lost from the clifftop as the sea knocked the legs out from below the land. When the home closed, Denise Fitzwilliam had been forced to rely mainly on savings and charity donations, and had moved here, to what, at the time, was a cheap house in a run-down village.

A sad story, especially for the caring and selfless woman presented in the book, but, as it turned out, the intervening years had been kind to her. Fenton had tidied itself up and grown at least slightly more desirable in the time since. These days, the little two-up two-down she owned was probably worth twice what she’d paid for it. It was almost as though, after a lifetime spent looking after others, someone had looked down and decided she probably deserved a little better than what she’d received.

And now I was here to confront her with the past.

Just play it by ear, Neil
.

See what happens
.

I got out of the car. In the small, flagged-over area at the front of her house, there was evidence of care still being taken. A row of small trees were growing in pots down one side, and there were two baskets of brightly coloured flowers hanging from struts in the wall. Flat on one window sill, a box was thick with herbs. The flagstones themselves were freshly swept, still bearing giant fingerprint swishes from the wooden broom leaning against the wall by the door.

I knocked and waited.

Silence.

Come on
, I thought.
Don’t be out
.

I was just about to knock again when I heard a shuffle of movement from inside. It sounded awkward, as though whoever was in there was having some trouble, but still determinedly making their way.

When the door opened, it was by a woman in her seventies, with a mass of grey, frizzy hair. She was overweight, her body packed tightly into a threadbare red jumper and old black tracksuit bottoms, and her cheeks were plump and red. Her eyes, almost lost above them, were milky. One hand clung to a rail that had been screwed onto the wall inside; the other clutched the top of a walking stick, enfolding the nub of it almost totally.

I’d never seen her before but I recognised her immediately.

Mrs Fitzgerald
.

It was the strangest sensation – a fiction come to life in front of me – and, for a moment, all I could do was stare at her. It didn’t help that the next thing she did was smile and nod to herself.

Because somehow, she had recognised me too. ‘Welcome home, my son,’ she said. ‘Welcome home.’

Mrs Fitzwilliam ushered me through into the lounge at the back of the house. It was a small room with exposed wooden beams across the ceiling and a cheap carpet on the floor, worn down to a meagre grey thatch along the obvious, shuffling routes she took. The bay window looked out onto a pleasant back garden, full of white afternoon light. There was an old two-seater settee in the alcove there. To the other side, an armchair and a wooden cabinet with glass doors, and …

‘Here we are,’ Mrs Fitzwilliam said.

But I stopped in the doorway for a second, staring around the room in disbelief. Almost every available surface was covered with photographs. The sheer number of them was almost
overwhelming. There were several crammed onto the mantelpiece above the electric fire, but it was the ones covering the walls that really caught my eye. Forty, fifty, too many to count at a glance.

From what I could see, they all showed Mrs Fitzwilliam with children. Sometimes in groups; sometimes just the two of them. Children she’d cared for, I guessed – her extended family. All gone now, like the original home, but in her retirement she had surrounded herself with their images and memories. The collection as a whole must have spanned decades.

‘You have that.’

She was motioning at the settee. I crossed the room and sat down there, then watched as she eased down carefully into the armchair opposite, chuckling to herself.

‘And now you’re going to have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘Who are you, dear?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Which one are you? You remember my eyes, don’t you – how bad they were. Don’t you worry, though. I’m still sharp. But it means you’ll have to remind me who you are.’

That was when it clicked.
Welcome home, my son
. She hadn’t recognised me at the front door at all. Between my reaction and her bad eyesight, she’d just made an assumption. She thought I was a boy she’d once cared for. A child who’d come home, not to the place where he’d grown up, but to the woman who helped raise him.

For a second, I wondered if that was that something I could play on. I needed her to trust me, after all, and given how accurate Wiseman’s description of her was, maybe I knew enough from
The Black Flower
to carry off the deception. Wiseman had threaded real details throughout his book. Perhaps it was possible to pull them out again.

Except … I wasn’t like him. Looking around the room now at all those photographs, I didn’t think I’d have the heart to carry it off, even if I did have the knowledge.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Fitzwilliam,’ I said. ‘We’ve never met.’

‘Oh.’

Her free hand clutched slightly at the arm of the chair, close to where she’d rested her cane.