Free Black Flowers by Steve Mosby Page A

to speak to
her
.
    You’ve got my number
.
    I flicked through the address book to P, and yes, he did. So I could ask her too, or else the police could. I read through the article again, my attention catching on one line in particular.
    Real crimes that took place in the 1970s
.
    What crimes?
    The book’s cover struck me again, out of the corner of my eye this time. The woman’s face, roughly transposed over the centre of the flower, screaming in pain as the thorns drew blood. What kind of real crimes could that be based on? I picked it up and allowed it to open where it wanted, on the page with the flower pressed inside it. It was my imagination, I was sure, but the petals seemed even more fragile than last time – flat and thin and weak – while the flower itself looked more obviously deformed. But it wasn’t my imagination that it bothered me a hell of a lot.
    I turned back, all the way to the beginning of the book. There was no prologue, no indication of chapter number. It just started.
    It does not happen like this
.
    I read the first few pages of the book.
    And then I carried on.
     

Extract from
The Black Flower
by Robert Wiseman
     
    As soon as Sullivan enters the office, before anything has even been said, he knows that DCI Peter Gray does not believe him. Or – more accurately – that Gray does not believe the little girl’s story but anticipates the fact that Sullivan will.
    The first is obvious from his superior’s body language. Gray is visibly tense, but nowhere near as tense as he would be if taking the girl’s story as truth. The second is clear in a different way. After what happened to Anna Hanson, everyone in the department knows that DS Michael Sullivan cares very deeply when it comes to children, that he will not let a cry for help pass him by again. He has acquired a professional blind spot, one that potentially occludes his judgement. Even Pearson, his partner, believes that. Gray thinks the same.
    The plastic-glass door rattles in its frame.
    Gray motions to the chair.
    ‘Sit down, DS Sullivan.’
    He is all business: determined to get this out of the way as quickly and with as little discomfort as possible. Sullivan resists the urge to leap straight in and argue his case, and instead does as he is told, pulling the thin chair back with a scrape and sitting down across from Gray. From behind him, even with the door closed, he can hear the clatter of typewriters, the whirr and bing.
    For a moment, neither of them says anything.
    Sullivan glances around. Gray’s office has a truly appalling colour scheme. The walls are painted an unpleasant shade of pea-green, the carpet is beige, and his old desk is made from dark-brown wood, chipped and hinged, like something you’d see folded up beneath the window in a pensioner’s bedsit. With the rusted, screeching filing cabinet and the cobwebbed potted plant on the windowsill, the office has the feel of something assembled in desperation from the last vestiges of a jumble sale.
    The foam tiles in the ceiling were originally white, but over the years they have been stained with amber bruises from the cigarettes Grayconstantly smokes. His sharp, smart cap rests on the desk beside a glass ashtray filled with orange tab ends and ash. Sullivan’s report lies between them.
    Gray lights his next cigarette, exhales a plume of smoke, then slides the file towards the middle of the desk.
    Take this back
, he seems to be saying.
    Sullivan says, ‘I’ve checked out some of the details, sir.’
    Gray raises his eyebrows slightly.
Of course you have
. The gesture makes it clear Sullivan’s words bother Gray in a small way, but surprise him in no way at all.
    Already, Sullivan has no real hope – Gray’s demeanor makes that clear – but there is an urgent curl of anger in him, like the light you get in your vision after staring at a bare bulb. It had been there since the interview with the little girl.
    ‘Jane Taylor,’ he says. ‘She disappeared on the