would help me – help the police – find Ally and get her back safely.
And so whatever I did, I needed to follow my father’s trail.
Keep calm, Neil
.
Ridiculous, but I thought it anyway.
The first thing I did online was load up the wiki page Dad had printed. Robert Wiseman’s biography. The references for the numbers dotted through the text were at the bottom of the page. I clicked on them one by one, but each time I was met by an error message on the new window that opened. I checked the ‘History’ tab on Wikipedia and realised the article hadn’t been amended for years. The sources linked to it had probably been correct at the time of the article’s last edit, but they’d disappeared from the servers in the time since.
After that, I hit Google. I wanted more information about
The Black Flower
– ideally something else about the
real crimes
it was supposed to be based on. Barbara Phillips was my natural contact there, but I wasn’t sure about talking to her. Not yet. Because all I knew about her for sure was that she’d been in contact with both Wiseman and my father – and they’d both ended up dead. I would talk to her eventually, but I wanted something independent first. Something I’d be able to measure against whatever she told me.
The problem was I couldn’t find anything much at all.
The Black Flower
was supposed to have been a minor bestseller, but its success was all pre-Internet, and it didn’t appear to have been a book that had lasted. Most of the links I found in the search engine went to auction and marketplace sites, where paperback editions of the book were being sold for tiny amounts of money. There were no reviews or essays to speak of. Aside from occasional mentions, nobody was namechecking
The Black Flower
online; it didn’t feature in any genre retrospectives, and nobody was hailing it as an inspiration to their own careers. It wasn’t some kind of forgotten masterpiece. It was just forgotten.
Mostly
forgotten, anyway.
I did an image search next. Predictably, I got a long series of tiny book covers: screen after screen of small faces crying out in pain. I didn’t want to look at any of them; that image started the panic rising in me. But after clicking through a little way, I managed to find a couple of photographs of Robert Wiseman himself.
Obviously, both were old. The first and then most frequent was a mannered head and shoulders portrait. Black and white. I guessed it was the publicity still Wiseman had used on his book covers. His hair was coiffed, curled at the front like a breaking wave, and he was looking at the camera from a slightly sideways angle. A handsome man who knew it. A bit arrogant.
You get the feeling he would love to have said champagne instead
.
The second photograph I found was more interesting. It appeared on a much smaller number of websites, so I found the largest version and clicked through to that. This image was in colour, and it showed four men and a woman stationed around one side of a circular table. Wiseman was in the middle, his elbow on the table, his chin resting in the cup of his hand, looking at the camera with a roguish glint in his eye. There was a glass of wine on the table in front of him.
The woman was sitting beside him. She was much younger – perhaps twenty years old, at most – and pretty in an ethereal way, with dark hair that hugged the contours of her face. She was also staring at the camera, but with such an eerie intensity that her eyes had stolen Wiseman’s thunder and become the focus of the shot. Two other men were sat on the far side of him, turned towards each other, engaged in private debate. And at the other end of the shot, on the far side of the woman, was …
Dad
.
My throat tightened.
I hadn’t even recognised him at first glance. He was a young man here, younger than I ever remembered him. Boyish andbleary-eyed – there was wine on the table in front of him as well. This was the Christopher Dawson
And so whatever I did, I needed to follow my father’s trail.
Keep calm, Neil
.
Ridiculous, but I thought it anyway.
The first thing I did online was load up the wiki page Dad had printed. Robert Wiseman’s biography. The references for the numbers dotted through the text were at the bottom of the page. I clicked on them one by one, but each time I was met by an error message on the new window that opened. I checked the ‘History’ tab on Wikipedia and realised the article hadn’t been amended for years. The sources linked to it had probably been correct at the time of the article’s last edit, but they’d disappeared from the servers in the time since.
After that, I hit Google. I wanted more information about
The Black Flower
– ideally something else about the
real crimes
it was supposed to be based on. Barbara Phillips was my natural contact there, but I wasn’t sure about talking to her. Not yet. Because all I knew about her for sure was that she’d been in contact with both Wiseman and my father – and they’d both ended up dead. I would talk to her eventually, but I wanted something independent first. Something I’d be able to measure against whatever she told me.
The problem was I couldn’t find anything much at all.
The Black Flower
was supposed to have been a minor bestseller, but its success was all pre-Internet, and it didn’t appear to have been a book that had lasted. Most of the links I found in the search engine went to auction and marketplace sites, where paperback editions of the book were being sold for tiny amounts of money. There were no reviews or essays to speak of. Aside from occasional mentions, nobody was namechecking
The Black Flower
online; it didn’t feature in any genre retrospectives, and nobody was hailing it as an inspiration to their own careers. It wasn’t some kind of forgotten masterpiece. It was just forgotten.
Mostly
forgotten, anyway.
I did an image search next. Predictably, I got a long series of tiny book covers: screen after screen of small faces crying out in pain. I didn’t want to look at any of them; that image started the panic rising in me. But after clicking through a little way, I managed to find a couple of photographs of Robert Wiseman himself.
Obviously, both were old. The first and then most frequent was a mannered head and shoulders portrait. Black and white. I guessed it was the publicity still Wiseman had used on his book covers. His hair was coiffed, curled at the front like a breaking wave, and he was looking at the camera from a slightly sideways angle. A handsome man who knew it. A bit arrogant.
You get the feeling he would love to have said champagne instead
.
The second photograph I found was more interesting. It appeared on a much smaller number of websites, so I found the largest version and clicked through to that. This image was in colour, and it showed four men and a woman stationed around one side of a circular table. Wiseman was in the middle, his elbow on the table, his chin resting in the cup of his hand, looking at the camera with a roguish glint in his eye. There was a glass of wine on the table in front of him.
The woman was sitting beside him. She was much younger – perhaps twenty years old, at most – and pretty in an ethereal way, with dark hair that hugged the contours of her face. She was also staring at the camera, but with such an eerie intensity that her eyes had stolen Wiseman’s thunder and become the focus of the shot. Two other men were sat on the far side of him, turned towards each other, engaged in private debate. And at the other end of the shot, on the far side of the woman, was …
Dad
.
My throat tightened.
I hadn’t even recognised him at first glance. He was a young man here, younger than I ever remembered him. Boyish andbleary-eyed – there was wine on the table in front of him as well. This was the Christopher Dawson
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