Black Flowers (5 page)

‘Dawson,’ Barnes said now. ‘Dead.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Run me through it then. Ah – PowerPoint. Delightful.’

The briefing was set up to display on a pull-down screen at the side of the room, currently showing a black square with the case number in the corner. She forced herself to ignore Barnes’s sarcasm.

Just do this. Get it over with
.

Hannah stood up and went straight into it.

‘Yesterday morning, we received a call from an anonymous female, placed from a phone box on the seafront. She claimed to have been jogging in woodland between Whitkirk and Huntington and spotted what she believed to be a man’s body by the river.’

‘Name?’ Barnes said. ‘Address?’

‘The jogger?’ It was typical of Barnes to latch on to that. What part of anonymous didn’t he understand? ‘She left a message with the switchboard clerk, so we don’t have that information. The details were passed through and I visited the scene to investigate the report.’

Hannah clicked the button, and the screen changed to show a Google satellite map of the area. Three yellow circles had been drawn on it, linked by a snaking red line. The first, labelled (1), was on a main road; the others, (2) and (3), were close together in the middle of a dense green area.

‘I approached along this dirt track, which joins the Huntington Road at point (1) as indicated. It’s an old path, not signposted from the main road. At location (2), I encountered this vehicle.’

Another click. The screen displayed a photo of the car she’d found: an old blue Escort positioned against a dark background of trees and thick undergrowth. The driver had pulled in at a section where the track would be wide enough to turn round again.

‘The vehicle was unlocked. I performed a check on-site and learned the vehicle was registered to Christopher John Dawson. Subsequent enquiries have revealed Mr Dawson was staying at The Southerton Hotel here in Whitkirk.’

As always, she felt a strange disconnect to find herself talking about the man in such an impersonal way, especially after his son’s reaction. The physical mess of death didn’t bother her in the slightest, but she’d never achieved that casual, emotional distance cops were fabled for.
Dawson. Dead
.

She clicked the button.

This photo had been taken from the end of the path, facing out along the disused viaduct.

It was creepy in itself: an old, rusted bridge in the middle of nowhere, extending thirty metres out over space towards a line of trees at the far side. Every rivet was black with age, and the floor was coated with several autumns’ worth of leaves and
dry mud. What the photograph didn’t convey was quite how unworldly and forgotten the location had felt in real life: how lonely and humming with threat. The only real noise was the uncaring rush of the river, seventy feet below, but it had felt like that might be masking other sounds. Hannah was as rational as they came, but the place still seemed like some half-remembered childhood nightmare. The kind of dangerous fairy tale place you only found by taking the paths your parents warned you not to.

‘This is point (3) on the map, a short distance further on from the vehicle. The body was below the viaduct on the riverbank.’

Hannah stopped the commentary and clicked through a series of images that required no explanation.

The first showed the body in situ: taken from where she’d first seen it. The man was lying far below, in the centre of the image, his top half in the river, his legs spreadeagled pitifully on the muddy bank. He was fully dressed, although his clothes were wrenched oddly on his broken frame, as though someone had tried to reverse them without taking them off.

There were more photos from the riverbank below. Closer now, you could tell the man was lying on his back, his head turned sideways. His cheek was a flat, pale stone visible just below the surface of the water. One white forearm stuck up like a tree branch, and his abdomen appeared to have flopped back towards the shore, distended enough to stretch open the buttons of his shirt. Out of the water, one thigh was already bloated tight inside the suit trousers.

‘We don’t have an exact time of death yet,’ she said. ‘Most likely, he’d been dead between two and three days at time of finding.’

Click, click, click. Finally, a sad close-up of Dawson’s mottled face was replaced by an overhead shot from inside the mortuary that showed the clothing and possessions cut from his corpse.

‘Due to the deterioration of the body and the availability of other corroborating evidence, we decided not to obtain a formal identification from Christopher Dawson’s son. However, Neil
Dawson identified these items of clothing as belonging to his father. Also, the keys you’ll see in the bottom right-hand corner match the vehicle we found, and the wallet contains a credit card in his name.’

Barnes’s gaze hadn’t left the screen the whole time.

‘A positive ID, then.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘We’re still waiting for the coroner’s report, but it appears that Mr Dawson died as a result of a fall, presumably from the viaduct above. The injuries I observed on scene are consistent with that.’

‘A jumper.’ Barnes nodded. ‘That’s what we have.’

‘It looks that way,’ Hannah said.

Clearly, he’d already made up his mind about the case, which irritated her, even though he was right that all the evidence pointed directly to suicide. Neil Dawson had told her about his mother’s death the previous year, and Hannah had found prescription drugs for depression in Christopher Dawson’s hotel room. So it was what she would have concluded herself, if it wasn’t for …

The other thing
.

Barnes picked up on her indecision. ‘But?’

You should leave this
.

She said, ‘But I have some doubts.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, for one thing, there’s the car. Dawson parked it in a spot where he’d be able turn around, which
obviously
suggests he intended to drive away again.’

‘People are creatures of habit,’ Barnes said. ‘And suicide is an extreme course of action, isn’t it? Obviously he hadn’t fully committed at that point.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Again, she could leave it there. And yet she found herself plunging on anyway. ‘But there’s something else.
Christopher Dawson was a writer. His son believes he was working here in Whitkirk. And his laptop is missing.’

‘His laptop, DS Price?’

‘His computer.’

‘Yes,’ Barnes said slowly, ‘I know what a laptop is.’

She swallowed his sarcasm. ‘It’s not at his home address, sir. It wasn’t in the hotel and we didn’t find it in the car.’

‘So he took it with him when he jumped.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s what
has
to have happened. But we haven’t located it, when all of his other possessions have been accounted for.’

‘We wouldn’t. I’m familiar with that river, DS Price. It’s very deep and very fast, and it flows straight into the sea a little way down the coast. Do you know what that means? It means we’re lucky a small child didn’t trip over Christopher Dawson’s corpse on the beach.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He was right, and it had been stupid to press the point. As it happened, the laptop didn’t interest her in the slightest; it had just seemed like a convenient hinge on which to swing open an investigation.

One she wasn’t even sure that she wanted.

‘What about the woman?’ Barnes said.

Hannah shook her head. ‘Sir?’

‘The anonymous caller. This woman said she saw the body while jogging, but called from a phone box on the seafront. That’s strange, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it’s strange. For one thing, it means she was out in the middle of nowhere without a mobile phone. But then she came all the way to Whitkirk to use a payphone.’ He stared at Hannah. ‘So have we got an image of her? Is she on CCTV?’

‘I’ve not checked whether that phone’s covered, sir.’

‘Well do that, then. Let’s see how anonymous she stays.’

He headed for the door.

‘In the meantime, coroner’s report, as soon as it arrives. Then let’s draw a line under this.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All of this.’

The door rattled shut in the frame behind him.

Hannah sat down, frustrated. As irritating as Barnes could be, she was more annoyed with herself. What was she doing? Vaguely pushing to extend the investigation, when she should have been trying to forget all about it.

But the truth was that, however much she tried not to think of
the other thing
, she couldn’t do anything but. Five tiny crosses. They had knocked a hole in her life, and when something like that happens you can only tiptoe around the edges for so long before peering in.

She caught herself reaching for the drawer. Stopped.

It wouldn’t help; it wouldn’t solve anything. Looking through it was just storytelling, really – repeating a fiction in the hope it would become true – whereas what she’d found at her father’s house was reality, there whether she looked at it or not.

I’ve not checked whether that phone’s covered, sir
.

She had, of course. Hannah might have been terrified half the time and grieving the rest, but she wasn’t an idiot. No cameras. That was why she’d picked that particular payphone to place her anonymous call from in the first place: no cameras. Although she wasn’t going to tell Barnes that.
Obviously
.

She sighed to herself.

If her emotions hadn’t been so shot, though, she might have come up with a better cover story than pretending to be a jogger.

Hannah sighed to herself and tapped the mouse. The monitor had gone to screensaver, and it came alive again now, showing Christopher Dawson’s belongings.

Why there?
she asked the dead man.

Why did you have to choose
there
of all places?

Because anywhere else and she wouldn’t have this problem. What Hannah had found had led her to the viaduct – but if she
hadn’t spotted Christopher Dawson’s body lying on the riverbank below, she wouldn’t be faced with the predicament she was in now: wondering why Dawson had ended up there out of all the places he could have chosen to end his life, and whether his death was connected to what she’d discovered in her father’s attic.

Whether it was connected to his crosses.

Cartwright could feel himself dying.

In one sense, that was nothing new. Ever since he was a boy, he’d been aware the world was different from how ordinary people saw it. Normal people packaged life up with a beginning and an end. They used words like
birth
and
death
, as though a person’s life was linear and contained: something that started in one place and then stopped, later on, in another.

His father had taught him that was wrong, and helped him to see the truth: that life was not something that began and ended, but ever-present. It was the forms life took that rose and fell. But before Cartwright was born, he had existed as something else. His matter had been spread far and wide, and it was just happenstance that it had come together now in a form capable of understanding that. The atoms of his body were a crowd, summoned briefly into a room. After his death, that crowd would disperse to different places. That was all any form of life was. Just the universe at play, making shapes with its hands.

Of course, his current form was very old now. And while he had always been aware of the continuum, like a constant rush of wind in his mind, this sensation of dying, right here and now, was different. This was what ordinary people meant by the term.

He looked around the café.

It was even smaller inside than it had looked from the street:
barely the size of a living room, with seven tables cramped in so close together that the wicker chairs were pressed back to back. Oak beams were exposed across the ceiling, and dark wooden shelves lined the walls, covered with old tea tins and ancient toy cars.

Most of the clientele appeared to be elderly ladies in flowery blouses, their waists thick as barrels and their conversations either murmured or simply dispensed with altogether. There was a crutch leaning against one wall. The loudest sound was the
tink
of a teaspoon tapping round a china cup.

If he was dying, then, he had chosen the right place.

But it was other circumstances that had dictated his choice. Cartwright had managed to secure the window seat. To either side, the curtains were rolled open, as thick and soft as cushions. On the glass itself, the name ‘Flanagan’s’ curled in reverse. Across the road from the café, there was a row of exhaust-blackened cottages. They were nice, he thought. Homely. Each had its own individual character; each looked like it had a story to tell and wanted to do so. One had an old wooden cartwheel, painted a glossy black, bolted to its outside wall. That was the one he was watching.

‘Would you like a refill, sir?’

He looked up to see the owner had come from around the counter and was offering him a fresh pot of tea. Cartwright had not formed a very positive opinion of her. She was middle-aged and astonishingly happy with herself: as polite and insincere as he had been led to believe air hostesses were. In her conversations with the other patrons, he’d heard her employ the same sing-song voice each time, as though she was talking to children.