Butterfly Grave (Murder Notebooks) (24 page)

Was it Margaret Spicer of Beaufort Holdings?

She stared at the photograph. She couldn’t stop the thought that Skeggsie could have enlarged the picture. She opened up her email and clicked on Eddie’s address.

Eddie, are you online now? I need some help with one of Skeggsie’s programmes. If you ring me I’d be so grateful.

She added her mobile number and waited. She noticed that it was almost three o’clock and Joshua was still out. He’d been gone most of the day. What would he say if he came in and saw the table covered with all this stuff?

Her mobile rang. She answered it.

‘Hi, Rose. Eddie,’ he said in a clipped voice.

‘Eddie, thank you for calling me. I need a huge favour. It’s something that Skeggsie used to do.’

‘Yep. Fire away.’

‘You sure you’re not too busy? Or with family or something?’

‘Rose. Tell me. Get to the point!’

Rose flinched at his tone but kept going.

‘Skeggsie had a programme for enlarging photos, almost down to pixels. He said he used to use it for analysing brushstrokes in paintings.’

‘Yep. Know it.’

‘I have a small photograph of three women from a newspaper article. I’d like to enlarge one of the faces.’

‘Yep. Can do. Email the links to me and I’ll check it.’

‘Will you have to go to the flat? To Skeggsie’s computer?’

‘Rose. This is the age of the internet. Skeggsie passed the programme on to me. Send me the link and I’ll get back to you ASAP.’

The line went dead. Rose wrote the email and put the link to the newspaper article. She told Eddie she wanted the face on the right enlarged. She pressed
Send
. Then she pulled Skeggsie’s laptop over. Her body felt tight and stiff, her shoulders rounded in concentration.

What was she thinking? That Margaret Spicer of Beaufort Holdings had been a WPC at one time and that she had been on duty when the body of Judy Greaves was discovered by an estate agent? That she now ran a security company and owned the silver SUV that had been following them?

She thought back to the times she had seen the car. It had been parked in the street, the woman and her dog sitting in it. Three times she’d seen it and then she’d looked for the registration number in Joshua’s book. She found the number there, from the time when they stopped at the services. She’d also seen it in the car park of the Royal Hotel.

Something occurred to her. She had asked Skeggsie to find out who the car belonged to. Rose knew that whatever Skeggsie had done to find this out would be illegal – some kind of hacking programme that he had devised, probably into the database at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority.

She opened up the emails that Eddie had sent about the car registration number. He had had to use Skeggsie’s computer because Skeggsie had kept the programme he’d devised to himself. She opened Skeggsie’s email and clicked on Eddie’s file. She read the words in his email.

Once I’ve input the data I’ll leave it to search. I’ll take your word for it that it’s not traceable (at least not to me!). I trust you.

As soon as Rose asked Skeggsie to find out who owned the car she never saw it in the street again. Not once. Could it be that be the owners of the car somehow
knew
that someone was trying to find out about them? She shook her head. It wasn’t possible? Was it? Could it be that the hacking was traced? By the DVLA? Or in some other way?

Had someone monitored Skeggsie’s illegal search on his computer? Had someone known what Skeggsie was doing and how?

She sent another email to Eddie.

You’ll think this is a stupid question but is it possible for someone’s computer activity to be monitored? Like a phone tap but on a computer? How would it be done? Rose

A few moments later she got a reply.

Yep! Absolutely possible. It can be done by cloning. There’s software that means that someone can find passwords and replicate what’s happening on someone else’s computer. It’s illegal obviously :-( Will have your picture done in a few mins :-)

The silver SUV stopped watching them just after Skeggsie set up his computer to search for the car’s owner. Rose knew that the car was registered to Beaufort Holdings. Why would a company like that want to clone someone’s computer? How would they know about Skeggsie or what he was doing? Who would know that Skeggsie had such a lot of hardware? Someone who had been in the flat at some point?

The name James Munroe came into her head. He had been with Skeggsie at the flat in Camden weeks before, waiting for her and Joshua to return so that he could tell them an untrue story about what had happened to their parents.

James Munroe.

Her phone rang. It startled her.

‘It’s Eddie. I’ve enlarged your photo.’

‘Thanks!’

‘Any news on the funeral?’

‘Funeral?’

She understood immediately what he meant. Skeggsie’s funeral.

‘No, no news. We’ll let you know.’

He rang off and Rose sat very still for a second. Had she actually
forgotten
Skeggsie’s death amid her excitement and research? After a few moments she blew through her teeth and clicked on Eddie’s attachment. The face from the newspaper photograph was clearer if a little blurred.

Was this the woman with the white-blonde hair?

She couldn’t be sure.

And yet the face in the picture seemed
familiar
to her.

She’d seen it recently.

She’d been looking at photographs in the last couple of days and she was sure she had seen this woman. She stood up feeling excited. She went out of the kitchen and upstairs to the box room. On the floor beside her bed was the photo album that Anna had bought for her. She took it downstairs and placed it by her laptop. She looked at the photo on the screen and then she opened the photo album and turned to the pictures of her mother and her friends. Right at the end she found the photograph she wanted – her mother sitting round a restaurant table with four other women. To her right a dark-haired woman was smiling at the camera.

That woman was Margaret Spicer.

TWENTY-SIX

The front door opened and shut.

‘Rose!’ Joshua called out.

Rose was sitting in front of the mess of papers on the kitchen table. She was staring at Margaret Spicer’s face in the photo alongside her mother. Margaret had the faintest smile on her lips and was holding up a wine glass. The WPC who discovered Judy Greaves’s body was a friend of her mother’s.

Joshua came into the kitchen and looked quizzically at the things on the table. She closed the photo album and the laptop.

‘Sorry I’ve been out so long but there’ve been developments.’

He took his coat off and draped it over the back of the chair. She saw him focusing on his uncle’s papers and the steel box. She wondered how she was going to explain it all to him.

‘I would have rung,’ he said, ‘but everything was moving quickly. What’s going on here?’

‘Did you speak to the Polish man?’

‘Yeah, but that’s not where the developments have come from,’ he said, speaking excitedly. ‘Greg Tyler walked into the police station an hour ago and gave a new statement to say that he and my uncle
did
meet up on the cliff and had a tussle. He saw him go over the side and panicked and ran. Then it turns out that his wife, Susie, went there later just in case there were signs of life.’

‘Oh.’

Rose hadn’t expected them to go so soon.

‘Joe Warner said they’re contradicting each other’s stories slightly so there are further interviews to be had. What I can’t understand is why Stu hasn’t said anything? I can’t believe he doesn’t remember.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to get Susie into trouble. Maybe he’s still hoping she’ll come back to him.’

‘The woman who left him lying halfway down a cliff?’

Rose shrugged. Joshua continued talking rapidly.

‘And if that wasn’t enough, Sean Spenser’s alibi has collapsed. His mate’s mother was out at a club, seen by the barman. Someone did some really good police work there, I have to say. Even Bob was impressed. So the CID are going to talk to him again. I think this might really be it!’

He ran his fingers over the empty steel box.

‘What is all this? Why are you looking at it?’

‘I had time on my hands . . .’ she said, her confidence slipping away in the face of his news.

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m going to grab something to eat and I thought we could go over to Bob’s. He’s in touch with the detectives.’

Rose nodded lamely. The day had been too much for her. The story she had pieced together was overshadowed by Joshua’s buoyant mood.

‘What did the homeless guy say?’

‘Oh God!’ Joshua was taking cheese out of the fridge, and bread from the bread bin. ‘We had such a runaround at the hospital. It took an age to find out which ward he was in. Then when we got to it he’d been discharged to a hostel. We went there and he was out. We waited and when he came back he was just a little bit tipsy even though he’s not supposed to drink while he’s at the hostel. So we took him out to a cafe and bought him food and sat with him for about an hour, just chatting generally while he sobered up a bit. Then when I tried talking about Christmas Eve he got confused but eventually he did remember the night.
When it was snowing
, he said. He had the right night in his head.’

‘Did he see anyone?’

‘No. Well, apart from a woman walking her dog. That was it! We spent most of the day looking for this sad guy and all he could remember was a blonde woman walking her dog.’

A blonde woman walking her dog.

Rose clutched the edge of the table.

‘You want some cheese on toast?’ Joshua said.

‘No.’

‘You look upset.’

Rose nodded.

‘I’m rambling on here about my day and I keep forgetting that this is all hitting you as well. It’s just that this stuff with Sean Spenser is giving me a positive way of dealing with Skeggsie’s murder. Something to do instead of sitting around crying. Perhaps you should have come with me today?’

‘No, it’s not that. I mean I
am
upset about Skeggsie, that goes without saying . . .’

‘So what is it?’ he said.

‘I think I know why he was killed.’

‘How do you mean,
why
? I know why he was killed. Rory and Sean . . .’

‘No, no. It’s to do with this,’ she gestured to the things on the table. ‘All of this. The Butterfly Murder.’

Joshua gave a half-smile, a look of incredulity.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It is. I know it is.’

He put the bread knife down and pushed the bread board away from him. He stood with his back to the work surface and folded his arms across his chest. Rose stuttered the first few words out. It was not going to be easy to explain.

‘I think Skeggsie died because of us,’ she said. ‘You and me and all of this.’

It took a long time to explain. Eventually Joshua sat down, his upper body deflating, his chin resting on the back of his hands. She went through all the things on the table. She didn’t refer to the earlier part of her day when she’d talked to Rory and then Susie and Greg Tyler. She focused on Primrose Crescent. She told him about the park and the name of the house and then described her research. She tried to map out what she thought had happened.

‘I think that the silver SUV followed us up to Newcastle. You had the number in your book. I checked it. The woman watched us for a few days. Then I asked Skeggsie to find out who it belonged to. He had a way of hacking into databases but his laptop didn’t have enough memory so he asked Eddie to go to the flat and set up a search for the number. I think that that search alerted someone to what he was doing. In other words I think his computer has been cloned. Someone has been following what Skeggsie was doing on his computer and that someone is linked to Beaufort Holdings.’

‘But why?’

‘Because Beaufort Holdings is linked to the Butterfly Murder. The woman WPC who discovered the girl’s body is now a director of the company. The Butterfly Murder involves your uncle and Brendan. And maybe it’s the reason for everything that has happened since. Think about it. The significance of the butterfly, the tattoos.’

She rolled her sleeve up, holding her blue butterfly out as if it was evidence.

‘I had this done because my mum had one. The same for you with Brendan.’

‘And the guy we took the notebooks from had one,’ Joshua said.

‘If your uncle actually
killed
Simon Lister, as he said in his letter to his solicitor, might Brendan have been involved in some way? And my mum? Maybe on that weekend that they came up to see him in 2004?’

‘Wait,’ Joshua said. ‘Go back to the bit where you said that Skeggsie’s computer was cloned. By whom?’

‘Whoever did it had to have known that Skeggsie was into computers in a big way. They had to have seen Skeggsie’s hardware. They had to have been in the flat.’