Black Flowers by Steve Mosby

one. One that, rather than being investigated by her father, had been covered up by him. Or possibly even worse.
    Maybe even perpetrated by him.
    Hannah ran her fingertip over the crosses, imagining she could feel the ink dyed into the paper.
    What she should have done – straightaway – was put the map and hammer back in the box in her father’s attic and forgotten about them. Maybe in time she’d even have forgotten them successfully enough to have the father she remembered back again: the loving, caring one; the strong, infallible man who’d made her feel safe.
    Instead, the day after the discovery, she had investigated. Visits to the first four sites revealed nothing, as far as she could tell. It was something to do, though: a cursory look to reassure herself.
See – it was nothing. It meant nothing
. But then, at the viaduct, she had spotted Christopher Dawson’s body. She hadn’t been able to ignore that.
    And now, after what she’d found on the CCTV footage this evening, hiding everything away again was no longer an option. She wasn’t a perfect person; she could, and would, continue to lie about the anonymous call; and, because the past was the past, she could fail to disclose what she’d found up in the attic to anyone else. But a woman had been in the car with Christopher Dawson – a car that had ended up abandoned at the viaduct with Dawson lying dead on the riverbank below – and that was another matter entirely. A human being couldn’t be boxed away and forgotten about. Hannah wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. Professionally as police, or personally.
    No, that woman urgently needed to be identified and accounted for.
    Hannah had already left a message on Neil Dawson’s home number, requesting him to phone her as soon as possible. Perhaps he would have an idea who she was. In a few minutes, she would leave her father’s house and head to the viaduct to co-ordinate with the head of the dive team she’d requested. Had the mystery woman ended up in the water with Dawson? They would need to check. Depending on what they found, forensic teams would be required on-site as well. They would search the entire area. If there was anything at the scene connected to her father, it was likely they were going to find it. Whatever he’d done was about to come fully into the light, where she would now have no choice but to face it. She was Hannah Price, of course, daughter of Colin Price, and that meant she could do it.
    That meant she could do anything.
    Hannah looked at the little red crosses marking the map, and then at the bag of grimy evidence she didn’t dare open.
    But what about you, Dad?
she thought.
    What the hell did you do?

Chapter Ten
     
    I headed to the university. I didn’t know where else to go.
    Late evening on a weekend, the campus was busy. In the distance, towards the Union, I could hear the steady
thump
of a club night, echoing in the flagstones. It was ominous now, as though there was something huge out of sight below me, banging to be released. I passed clusters of shadowy students moving in that direction, and their laughter jarred. It felt like I was half asleep, even though my nerves were on fire.
    What the fuck was I doing?
    You won’t go to the police
, the old man had warned me.
    And I wasn’t going to the police – not yet. Because whoever the man really was, he was right that nobody would believe me. What could I possibly tell them? That twenty years ago, a man named Robert Wiseman wrote a novel that
might
have been based on a real-life serial killer? And that somehow, all this time later, the killer apparently remained active, still searching for his missing daughter? That he’d now kidnapped my pregnant girlfriend to blackmail me?
    Right now, I didn’t know how much of it I believed myself.
    I walked quickly through the cold night air. Even the phone call I’d received seemed unreal: a world away now. If it hadn’t been listed in the call log on my phone, I