Dead and Buried (5 page)

We think that they may have come back to England and spent some time in a cottage at Stiffkey in North Norfolk.

The next sighting of them was in a photograph on Cromer Beach. This photograph was taken in June 2012.

Our most recent sighting of them was in a Skype recording. This recording was made in December 2012.

On 29 December they sent us a text from a place in Essex. Somewhere in the area between the following three villages: Wickby, Southwood and Hensham.

Up to that time we know that they were alive.

The word
alive
gave her a jolt. How important that had been when she and Joshua first found out that they were not dead. They had Frank Richards to thank for that. Rose flicked to the end of the pages she had written and found the section where she had described the meeting with Frank Richards. She’d given it a heading –
The Notebooks.

Frank Richards was a friend of Brendan Johnson’s, a policeman who had been dismissed from the service. Joshua knew him by sight but I did not. In October 2012 we found him in a flat in Twickenham. He told us that my mother and Brendan were alive and he also said that my mother had asked him to look after me while she was away. He claimed he had done this over the five years that I’d lived with my grandmother, keeping an eye on what I was doing, checking that I wasn’t being followed. When we found him he was packing to leave England. He had a pile of notebooks and Joshua stole two of them. When we looked at them we found the strangest thing. Each had a photograph of someone and then the rest of the book was full of coded handwriting. These notebooks were ordinary exercise books and were both in the same handwriting. We believe the code was taken from an old hardback book called
The Butterfly Project
. We had a copy of this for a while but were unable to decode the books, just scraps of pages here and there. We think that each of these two notebooks outlined the killing of a person. We believe, from things we heard afterwards, that one of the notebooks belonged to a series (the remainder held by Frank Richards) which documented the killing of criminals.

Rose had stopped writing there because she hadn’t been able to find the words to go on. There was more to tell but she couldn’t really state the blunt awful truth about what her mother and Brendan had become without explaining the rest. The whole story of The Butterfly Murder
had to be told. Other people involved had to be described. The story of Viktor Baranski and his son, Lev. There was much more to say.

She looked down at the notebook in her hand. She could have written her statement on sheets of paper but somehow she had decided that a notebook was the right thing to have. In the shop it had taken her a while to make up her mind. There had been other colours but she had chosen red. The colour of blood. Was she being too dramatic? She closed it, flattening it with the palm of her hand. She had no stomach to write anything in it now. She slipped it into the envelope and then into the file and placed it back in the drawer.

Later she went to bed.

She was restless, turning her bedside light on and off, reading for a while, then listening to the radio. In the end she stopped trying to go to sleep. She heard Anna’s footsteps on the stairs and then the sound of her door opening and shutting. There was no knock on Rose’s door, no call of
Goodnight!
– just Anna, going about her day-to-day business as if she was living alone. Rose was used to it now but in the early days when she’d first been sent to live there after her mother and Brendan had gone missing it had been hard.

How long ago it seemed. Five years and four months.

She was twelve years old and felt wounded by the disappearance of her mother as if actual blood had been drawn from her. She spent a long time on her own in the rooms that Anna had set aside. Her frosty grandmother left her to her own devices and so she watched television and read and stared out of her bedroom window into the smart back garden. Each week that passed took her further from her old life. Joshua was in Newcastle, living with his uncle. There were some phone calls between them but they were always awkward. The easy intimacy they’d shared in the house on Brewster Road had disappeared and after she had asked him how school was she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Those first weeks it seemed as though
she
was the one who had vanished. It was as if she’d been out walking and suddenly spirited away into this other life. Now she was in a strange room, in a large house where the sound of her own footsteps echoed up and down the stairs and along the hallways. She was living with her grandmother, Anna, a woman who hardly ever spoke to her, whose eyes seemed to follow her round the room. She had a sense sometimes that her old life in Brewster Road was going on without her. That all the stuff about her mother and Brendan going missing had been some bad dream. It was she who had been taken, not them.

Now Rose sat up in bed. It was 1.03 a.m. She absolutely couldn’t sleep. She put her dressing gown on and went through her study and into the hallway. She intended to go downstairs and make a hot drink but was distracted by a glow further along the corridor. It was coming from the Blue Room. The door was slightly open and there was light spilling out. She walked quietly towards it and heard an odd sound. She waited outside. It was Anna. She was sniffing and blowing her nose. And then she recognised the sound. Her grandmother was crying.

Rose stepped inside.

Anna was holding a child’s nightdress. It was pink with drawings of rabbits all over it. It looked old-fashioned and had lace around the neck and sleeves; real lace that someone had crocheted. Anna looked up.

‘Are you all right?’ Rose said, walking across.

On the ground, in front of her grandmother, was an open wooden chest. Inside it were toys and clothes and books.

‘Katherine’s childhood things,’ Anna said. ‘I collected them together. One day I thought I might show them to her, give them to her. But she left when she was eighteen and I never saw her again . . .’

Anna stopped and hugged the nightdress fiercely.

‘I never got the chance to tell her . . . anything.’

Rose put her hand out and laid it on Anna’s shoulder.

‘You could give them to me,’ she said.

Anna turned and stared at Rose. In an instant she seemed to pull herself together. ‘You’re a sweet girl, Rose. I haven’t always been able to say how nice it has been . . .’ She stood up, wiping her face with a hanky. ‘I’m so sorry, did I wake you?’

Rose shook her head. ‘I thought I might make a hot drink. Do you fancy a coffee?’

‘That would be good. A latte, I think.’

Rose let Anna walk out of the room first. Then she glanced back at the wooden box, its contents unpacked, the nightie left lying over the side. Her mother’s childhood possessions, left behind, just like all the stuff at Brewster Road.

FIVE

Henry Thompson made the arrangements for Rose and Joshua to go to the house in Brewster Road. Joshua drove there in the Mini and parked the car at the other end of the road away from the crime scene tape and the police cars and vans.

They sat for a few minutes while Rose told Joshua about Munroe’s visit to her grandmother’s. It had been four days since it happened and she’d considered telling him by text or email but both seemed too inflammatory. She was afraid that he might go back to Munroe’s offices in Chelsea and have a row with him. So she waited to tell him in person. His eyes closed with annoyance as she described the things that Munroe had said to her. She left out the part where he’d hurt her hand. This, she thought, might enrage Joshua. She wanted as little to do with Munroe as possible.

‘Just more proof of his guilt,’ Joshua said. ‘He’s worried about what we might do. He’s keeping his eye on us. One day he’ll trip up and then we’ll have him.’

Rose didn’t answer. It was fantasy. Munroe had them where he wanted them. There was nothing they could do to him.

They got out of the car and headed towards the crowds. They walked along, weaving in and out of people who seemed to be simply milling round, pointing and looking in the direction of the house. They went up to a uniformed officer at the edge of an area that was cordoned off.

‘Excuse me, we are due to meet Inspector Wendy Clarke. She made an arrangement with us for ten o’clock,’ Rose said.

Before the officer could speak a woman who was nearby turned round and marched towards them. She was small, wearing dark trousers and a Puffa jacket. She had jaw-length ginger hair. She smiled and thrust out her hand to Rose.

‘Rose Smith and Joshua Johnson?’

She shook their hands warmly, as though she was an old friend.

‘Hi,’ Rose said.

‘I’m Wendy Clarke. Thank you so much for coming. If you don’t mind waiting for a few moments while I make arrangements for you to go into the house . . .’

‘Sure,’ Rose said.

Wendy Clarke walked off in the direction of 49 Brewster Road. Rose watched her go and shifted her position to see if she could glimpse around the cars and people to the front of her old house. She could not. In any case the road looked completely different because of the commotion. It didn’t look at all like the place she remembered living in. She was disappointed. She’d expected the trip to be an emotional one. She’d actually looked forward to seeing the houses and gardens and feeling the familiarity of her childhood surroundings. But standing here just felt strange as if it were any old place.

Joshua was quiet. Rose wondered if he was worrying about James Munroe. In daylight his hair was shorter than she’d thought, his skull showing through, his ears looking bare and cold. He was wearing a corduroy jacket that was lined with fake fur. He’d bought it in a charity shop in Camden. It replaced an overcoat he’d bought in the market just before Christmas. He’d got rid of it because it had been stained with Skeggsie’s blood.

‘Right.’ Wendy Clarke was standing next to them again. ‘I’ll take you into the house. The family who live there now are in hotel accommodation for the rest of this week but I would ask you to respect their home and their privacy. Follow me.’

Joshua went first and Rose followed. They made their way through officers and people in plain clothes. When they got to the front of the house Rose felt a shock of recognition. Beside the front door was the metal number plate that her mum had found at a car boot sale.
What’s the chance of that?
she’d heard her say.
A number plate for sale and it’s the number of our house! Karma. I have to buy it!

‘This way,’ Wendy Clarke said.

They followed her into the hallway. Rose noticed immediately that it had been carpeted and the walls painted a dark colour. The place looked considerably smaller or maybe she’d just got bigger. They walked past the front room door into the kitchen-diner. This room had also undergone extensive change. Where it had been wood everywhere it was now a white shiny kitchen with a black tiled floor. Rose felt like a stranger.

‘We’ll go out into the garden in a moment. We won’t be going down to the crime scene but you’ll glimpse it from a distance. I should say one or two things to you before we go. Firstly,’ Wendy Clarke rubbed her eyelids with the tips of her fingers, ‘I’m aware of your history and the tragedy of your parents’ disappearance. I’m also aware that the press have tried to link the two cases. While we’re not ruling anything out the information we have been given by the team who originally investigated your mother and your father’s disappearance seems to suggest that there is no link.’

Rose nodded.

‘The second thing I wanted to say was this; you two lived in this house when Daisy was buried here. You may have been out or away on holiday but still, when you came back, this young girl was in her grave not more than thirty metres away from you. If that makes you feel awful, then I’m sorry but the truth is it’s not your feelings I’m interested in. I want to find out who did this to Daisy. I will find out and I’m hoping you will help me. I want to know anything you remember about that summer, no matter how small it is. I don’t expect you to tell me anything today, just think on it.’

Wendy Clarke opened the back door. The first thing that Rose saw was a tent that had been erected down the back of the garden. It was white and went from fence to fence. It looked like a marquee; as if there were preparations for a party going on.

The three of them walked out on to the yellow paving stones, still there, a little brighter as if they’d been cleaned up. There was a smart garden table and chairs as well as a patio heater, standing like a standard lamp above it all. The garden itself had been worked on, the lawn flat and even, the shrubs neat, the earth around them dark and soft.

‘The owners planned to build an outbuilding at the rear of the garden, a kind of office, I think. The builders were digging foundations when they found Daisy. She was well hidden. It was a properly dug grave, not something someone could just stumble on. Plus there was an old rockery nearby and a lot of the stones had been used to cover up the space.’

Rose frowned. She had no memory of a rock garden. She rarely went down to the overgrown end of the garden. She hadn’t liked the buzzing insects and the foliage and the grass was always too long and seemed damp and mulchy. She preferred to stay up on the patio.