Black Flowers (14 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was about Lorri and Kent. The family I used to have.’

Ten years ago, Andrew Haggerty had been a successful estate agent in a town called Thornton, which was a little further inland from Huntington and Whitkirk, but still close enough to be on the same page of the map. Andrew’s wife Lorraine was a stay-at-home mum; their son, Kent, was four years old. They were a happy, ordinary loving family, until one Tuesday, after working late, Andrew returned home to find his wife and child weren’t there any more.

The car was gone too – which was something – but there was no reason for them to be out so late, and Lorraine hadn’t left him a note to say where she’d gone, which was very much unlike her. Andrew laboriously called round the various friends and family members who he thought might know where she was, but none of them did.

Finally, he called the police.

‘They didn’t take me seriously at first,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’

I could believe it all too easily. And it was a lesson, wasn’t it? The police hadn’t believed Haggerty’s wife and child were
missing even without him telling them the wild story I would have to.

Again, I fought down my emotions and tried to sound calm, natural. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Because the car was gone too, you see? So I suppose it makes sense. They thought we’d had an argument and she’d gone off. That she’d come back home when she was ready.’

Haggerty shook his head.

‘It turned out she’d gone to the supermarket. Not at that time, obviously, at some point in the afternoon. That was where they found the car though. It was the only one left in the car park overnight.’

I nodded.

Security footage from inside the store had captured the last known images of Lorraine and Kent Haggerty alive, and stills from that footage had appeared alongside a number of the articles I’d found online. They showed a woman and a small boy, dark and blurred and indistinct. They didn’t look real. It was like they’d been scribbled on the film: shaded in with the side of a pencil.

There were no cameras in the car park itself, but, over the days that followed, a few reports and witness statements were gathered. A handful of people remembered separate small parts of an overall picture: an old van parked nearby, browny-red, the colour of rust; a woman complaining about something to an old man; hearing a little boy crying; a larger man with wild hair. They were all just impressions, of course, and none of them had been conclusive enough in itself to cause concern to the witnesses at the time. Put together, though, they were sufficient for the police to launch a major enquiry.

Which went nowhere.

I remembered what the old man had told me on the phone.

They haven’t found me yet. Never have. Never will
.

In terms of the known facts, that was where Andrew Haggerty’s story ended. Despite the efforts of everyone involved, a
single car in an otherwise empty car park was the last trace of Lorraine and Kent Haggerty that was ever found.

I had no idea whether that would have made it easier for him or not. On the one hand, he never had to face the horror of the bodies themselves but, however painful that would have been in the short-term, at least then there would have been a sense of closure for him. Even now, ten years on, when he must have known in his heart that Lorraine and Kent were dead, I could feel that absence of resolution. It wasn’t just his appearance; it was obvious from his behaviour. He had agreed to speak to my father, and he was speaking to me now. The experience had never finished for him. A line had never been drawn.

It made me feel cold inside. Was this how I was going to end up? If Ally remained missing then the police would take it seriously eventually but they’d believed Haggerty too, thrown their weight behind the case, and his wife and son had never been seen again.

You’ll never see this one again
.

Never get her back
.

That was not going to happen to her. To them. My fist was clenched on my thigh. I relaxed it.

‘Did my father say why he was interested in your case?’

‘Not exactly. I got the impression he’d read about it at the time, and it had stayed with him. He did mention you and your mother – that he couldn’t bear to think of losing you both. I think that’s what made it stick in his mind.’

I nodded. Maybe that had been part of it, but there was more. Other connections. Obviously, the location wasn’t far away from Whitkirk. There was the old man arguing with Lorraine Haggerty, and a larger, younger man. A rust-coloured van. My father would have recognised many of those things from Wiseman’s novel. Perhaps even from whatever
real crimes
lay behind it.

Something else occurred to me.

‘Did he ever … contact you? The man responsible?’

For a long moment, Haggerty said nothing.

‘That was the other thing your father wanted to talk about. I don’t know how he knew about it. It was never made public, so I presume he had some inside information from the police.’

I stopped rubbing my hands together.

‘About what?’ I said.

‘About the flower. There were lots of them, of course. We held a service for Lorri and Kent a while afterwards – I can’t remember how long – and there were a lot of flowers then. But even before that: flowers and cards and notes from strangers. It surprised me, to be honest. How kind people can be.’

A flower. I felt sick.

‘This was different though?’

‘Yes.’ He frowned. ‘It was the strangest thing. As far as I know, nobody ever established it was even connected, but there was obviously something odd about it. I called the police as soon as it arrived. They took it away.’

‘What was it?’

‘A black flower. It arrived a year or so afterwards. Just in an envelope, no stamp or anything. Just posted through the door.’

‘You said the police took it?’

‘Yes. Your father said he wasn’t sure what it meant, but that was part of what he was looking into. Do you have any idea if it’s connected?’

Yes
, I thought. I didn’t know how but yes, it certainly was connected. The little girl in the book had a black flower in an adult woman’s handbag. My father had one too – tucked away in his copy of the book.

But I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

Haggerty didn’t need to hear any of what I knew. I wasn’t in a position to offer him closure right now, or much of anything at all. The only thing I could have told him was that his wife and child were surely dead, and he must have told himself that a hundred times already without it making an impact.

What did the flowers mean? And where had my father’s come from?

I was lost in thought, and almost jumped when Haggerty spoke again.

‘Do you know what the worst thing is?’

‘The worst thing?’ I said. ‘No. What is it?’

‘It’s not knowing
why
.’

I looked at him, and Haggerty stared back, right into my eyes.

‘Not knowing why it happened,’ he said. ‘Why
them
.’

I didn’t really know what to say.

‘Maybe there is no reason. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that’s all there is to it.’

‘No. They were targeted. I’m sure of it.’

There was no way he could know that, and I didn’t reply.

He said, ‘You only remember the things you did wrong. I told Lorri I loved her a million times over the years. I know that happened, but I don’t really remember it. What I remember is resenting them both, especially when work got tough. Thinking how complicated they made everything for me. Being angry when Kent cried in the night and I had to get up early. Those sorts of things. I probably only thought them once or twice, but that’s what I remember.’

He shook his head and looked away.

I stood up. Maybe a little too suddenly.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Haggerty.’

‘Andrew.’ He held his hand out and I shook it; his grip was almost lifeless. ‘If you find anything out, anything at all …’

‘I promise.’

I walked away, as quickly as I could manage without looking as though I was running. When I reached the corner, I glanced behind me and saw that Andrew Haggerty had remained sitting on the bench, almost as still as the bronze figures in the middle of the square.

For him, his past would always remain his present. His entire life, defined now by a handful of guilty thoughts. The kind of
thing you shouldn’t think but do, and then, when the worst happens, can never forgive yourself for.

That would not be me.

It wouldn’t.

Surely, you’re entitled to make that kind of mistake. You should be entitled to think something awful so long as you’re prepared to edit it afterwards. Because you can’t help your thoughts, can you? They’re all first draft. It’s not fair to be condemned by them for ever.

I thought:
No. I’m going to find you, Ally
.

I was determined to.

Even if it requires a descent into Hell
.

The first dead body Hannah encountered, it was generally agreed, had been a tester.

An obese old lady had lain dead in her detached house one summer for over a fortnight before being found. Hannah’s partner at the time, a far more seasoned officer, had gone pale at the sight of her: would probably have crossed himself if he’d had a religion. The elderly woman had died on the settee, but a great deal of her had collapsed onto the carpet by the time they arrived, and decay was misty in the air like pollen. And yet Hannah hadn’t blinked as she snapped on the gloves at the doorway. She had felt sad for the dead woman, of course, but nobody had seen that, and it wouldn’t have impressed them if they had. What they noticed was the way the young constable moved around the room with such quiet authority, apparently no more disturbed by the dead than she was by the living.

So word got round quickly. Hannah Price had a stomach of cast iron. And of course, there had been much worse scenes over the years. Traffic accidents where people were spread over the tarmac in streaks; a motorcycle helmet, apparently discarded, except for the almost comically screwed-shut eyes visible through its open visor. Four homicides, all women, all DV. One woman beaten to death with a kettle; a second stabbed; two more with necks covered in bruised, fluttering fingerprints. A man who hanged himself from a doorknob, his eyes and tongue
bulging out of a plum-coloured face. None of these sights had fazed her in the slightest. Viscera, at least of the physical kind, just didn’t bother her.

In theory, then, the bodies found this morning should have been easy.

The autopsy suite was in the basement of Whitkirk’s mortuary, situated almost directly below the place where Hannah had stood with Neil Dawson while he identified his dead father’s clothes. That room upstairs was designed to be sombre and respectful, with everything cushioned and curtained, so there were no visual or emotional sharp edges for the bereaved to cut themselves on. Down here, it was very different, albeit similarly fit for purpose.

The suite housed six aluminium tables, each of them separated from the next by weighing scales, sink units and hoses, all of it illuminated by artificial lights that angled out of the walls on adjustable metal hinges. Swabbed down, sterilised and polished, the fixtures gleamed, bringing out every detail in the bodies that lay here.

The dead always seemed unworldly, unreal to Hannah, and seeing them down here amplified that. The complex shapes, colours and textures were a stark contrast to the bright surfaces and clean angles. Usually, that made things even easier. Today, staring down at the remains that had been pulled from the river below the viaduct, it didn’t help at all. These bodies, as old and fragmented as they were, were as real as a clench in her chest.

Or a mark on a map. Right, Dad?

‘We have the remains of two victims.’

The pathologist, Owen Dale, was walking back and forth between the metal dissection stations in the autopsy suite. His boots squeaked slightly on the white tiles. They were fresh and new, but of the same generic type as the ones he’d been wearing at the riverbank when she’d arrived back there again this morning, after the phone call from the dive team co-ordinator. As dawn broke, Dale had been half waded in, directing both the
divers and his assistants, laying out plastic sheeting, supervising the awkward retrieval of two bodies from the water.

Hannah had watched from the bank, staring blankly.

Trying to hold herself together.

The search team was looking for the woman seen with Dawson, in case she had also ended up in the water. But neither of these two bodies belonged to her. They might, she thought, have some relation to a cross drawn on an old map.

Now, she was just trying to hold herself together. Beneath the disinfectant and chemicals, the air in here still stank of that river. It made her think of weeds and mud, and stagnant pools deep in forests.

‘This is the first set.’ Dale stopped by the nearest table. ‘I’ll call this Victim A for the time being, as it was the first to be retrieved from the river. It appears to be a complete skeleton, albeit broken into a number of pieces.’