Dead and Buried (27 page)

‘When’s your baby due?’ Rose said.

‘June. I finish work at the end of this term.’

Rose sat on the corner of one of the tables nearby.

‘It’s your first?’

Esther nodded, looking proudly down at her stomach.

‘Boy or girl?’

‘Girl. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but then I asked a couple of weeks ago.’

Somehow that seemed sad to Rose. Just now, when her sister’s body is discovered, she finds out the sex of her baby. Esther smiled at her, giving a shrug of her shoulders, as if she thought the same thing.

‘I didn’t know your family at all when I lived in Brewster Road,’ she said after a moment. ‘It was only when they went missing that I remembered that Sandy had babysat for some police officers. My family, Daisy, all of us had moved to Chingford in the summer – you probably know – so we were away from the street when the news of your parents’ disappearance hit the newspapers. I rang Sandy to see what had happened. She said you were really sweet kids. At the time I remembered feeling that we had a kind of link even though both cases were completely different. You lost your mother, I lost my sister. Of course your parents’ disappearance made the national newspapers. When Daisy left home she took a case of belongings with her. She had a history of storming off, staying at friends’ houses. She’d told friends that she was going to run away with her lover. Everyone, my parents, me, our family, we all expected her to turn up any day.’

Rose listened to Esther with a growing feeling of sadness. She had wanted to dash in and out of this school, to pick up some piece of information that would prove that Joshua had nothing whatsoever to do with Daisy’s death. But Daisy’s story had to be heard.

There was the sound of children from the playground. A name bring called over and over – ‘Gerry, Gerry, GERRY!’

‘Daisy’s disappearance was like a slow burn. For the first few days we expected her to turn up shamefaced, saying sorry. Then weeks went by. The police kept in touch but there was no search for her. Why would there be with bits and pieces of evidence that said she went of her own accord. You know she took her passport? And all her jewellery and her favourite clothes. She took
five
pairs of shoes. She
loved
shoes. She had tiny feet, size three, and she bought shoes in charity shops and sales. She loved heels.
What do you think of these
? she’d say. I laughed at her. It wasn’t even possible to walk in some of those shoes.’

‘I didn’t know her,’ Rose said, trying hard to pull together the one image she had of Daisy walking along Brewster Road. Possibly Rose had been getting out of her mother’s car and seen her with Sandy. ‘I only knew Sandy because she babysat for me.’

‘In the first couple of weeks after she left she used her cash card, or at least we thought she had.
Someone
used her cash card five times in places around London. That told my family that she was still alive. Then it stopped and there was nothing. After that we didn’t know what to think. We thought maybe she’d gone abroad. The police just shrugged their shoulders. People go missing, it’s a fact of life. They don’t like the life they’re leading, they find a different life. Teenagers especially. They told us to keep abreast of the Missing websites and organisations, and that maybe Daisy would try and contact us. I remember the last time I spoke to a detective. It was on the one-year anniversary of when she left home. After that nothing.’

Rose didn’t know what to say.

‘But this isn’t helping you to remember things from those days!’

Rose couldn’t go on pretending. ‘Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I
am
trying to remember that summer but the real reason I’m here is that the detective in charge of the case made it clear that she suspected that Brendan Johnson, my mother’s partner, was involved with Daisy. Now she’s questioning his son, Joshua. He was fourteen at the time and he admitted to me that he had a crush on Daisy but this police officer is actually questioning him about her murder.’

‘Oh.’

‘I know it doesn’t matter to you and the family who they question. You just want the guilty person put away. But Joshua, my stepbrother, is not guilty of anything other than having a crush on someone who was older than him and out of his reach.’

‘And his father?’

‘I can’t say. He was my mother’s partner and I cared for him a lot but whether I really knew him or not I don’t know.’

‘Well, you are being honest. What do you want to ask me?’

‘Sandy mentioned that Daisy said her boyfriend was older. Do you remember anything about him?’

‘I don’t know if it was this Brendan. I never met this mystery man. No one did. I wasn’t around much that summer. I’d just graduated and was on holiday some of the time and working the rest. I saw Daisy lots of course but it was unremarkable. Just sister stuff – chats, arguments, swapping clothes. She’d been out of college a year and was working in the newsagent’s.’

‘Near Roman Road.’

‘Just part-time at first. Early mornings, some half-days. Then it was full-time. She was a bright girl, Daisy, but she had no ambition. She could have done better. I spent a lot of time that year helping her to apply for jobs.’

‘Wendy Clarke, the detective, told me that you said she’d gone away for a weekend with him.’

‘No, I said she
told me
she was going to go away for a weekend and she wanted me to cover for her. Look, Rose, I’m not sure how this is helping you but Daisy could tell a few fibs and I never really knew if there was an older boyfriend or whether she was making it up. She’d come in and tell me stuff, like the plans for the weekend away. He’d got this cottage in Norfolk, she said. They were having sex, she said, and she’d had to go and get the morning after pill from the chemist once. She showed me the pendant she said he bought for her.’

‘I know about that.’

Rose pictured the pendant hanging round her mother’s neck.

‘It looked like something an older person would buy. Not something I would have worn. I was surprised she liked it. She did tell me he had a tattoo of a butterfly. I thought it was an odd thing for an older man to have.’

‘A butterfly?’

‘Yes. Weird.’

Rose hugged herself. She thought of Brendan with a cringing feeling. He had a butterfly tattooed on his ankle.

‘You know the worst thing about all this? At first I really thought she’d gone off with a boyfriend. I had a
to hell with her
kind of attitude. Then after a couple of weeks when we didn’t hear anything I began to get worried. She was too much of a show-off not to come round flaunting her independence or parading her holiday photos or whatever. After that first anniversary I got really depressed, couldn’t get up for work, that kind of thing. But because they never found a body I convinced myself that she must be alive, living somewhere else, that she’d just washed her hands of us and I got on with my life. Then a couple of weeks ago this policewoman came to my mother’s house. I was there at the time. She came in and said to my mother,
Don’t upset yourself, Mrs Lincoln, but we think we’ve found Daisy’s body.
’

Rose felt her phone vibrate. She ignored it.

‘Esther, thank you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your sister. I have to go now.’

Rose walked towards the door.

‘One thing,’ Esther said, just as she was leaving, ‘Daisy told me her boyfriend was a landlord, which made him sound about sixty years old.’

‘A property developer? That kind of thing?’ Rose said.

‘She just said
landlord
. That’s all.’

Rose felt her mouth go dry. A landlord.

Esther looked at her quizzically. ‘Are you all right?’

Hadn’t her mother told her that James Munroe had been
their
landlord. That he had owned 49 Brewster Road?

‘I’m sorry, Esther, I have to go,’ Rose said. ‘I hope your baby makes you very happy.’

She walked swiftly out of the building. Once outside she took her phone out. She had a message from Joshua. She read it in a distracted way.
Where R U? I’m out of the police station now. The lawyer was great. Thank your gran. Am back at the flat. Come round.

James Munroe had been their landlord. He had a key to their house. He knew when her mother and Brendan were away. Was he was Daisy’s older boyfriend, the man driving the green Saab?

Overwhelmed, she sat on the brick wall of a front garden. She stared at her mobile phone. Then she found her mother’s number and composed a text, her fingers jabbing at the letters, missing now and then so that she had to go back and correct it.
Mum, please just answer this question. Then I won’t contact you again today. It’s important. Did James Munroe ever own a Saab car?

She waited. Maybe her mother wouldn’t answer, would just dismiss her message without even opening it up. Possibly she would think that it was another appeal from Rose for her not to go ahead with the events that evening.

A beep sounded. It was a text from her. She opened it.
I asked you not to contact me!! But anyway, yes. James owned a green Saab car. No more messages. Not today.

Rose felt a heavy weight on her shoulders.

Whenever they started uncovering secrets James Munroe seemed to be at the heart of them. She stood and walked in the direction of the tube station.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Joshua was agitated. He kept walking up and down the kitchen of the Camden flat. He told her about the interview with DI Clarke at the police station and the intervention of the lawyer. ‘They were never going to charge me with anything,’ he said. ‘It was just a fishing trip. The lawyer knew it. DI Clarke knew it. That’s why they had to let me go.’

He seemed relieved to be home yet he couldn’t stay still.

Then she told him what she had found out about James Munroe.

He was surprised, shocked. She explained the things she’d heard from Daisy’s sister and what her mother had said about the car.

‘I just can’t get my head round it,’ he said, sitting down at the table, leaning back in the chair, using his hand to massage the back of his neck.

Rose sat opposite him. She could hardly believe it herself.

‘It makes sense. James Munroe was the older boyfriend. Daisy told her sister that he was a
landlord
. Well, in a way he was. He owned the house we lived in in Brewster Road.’

‘I never knew that,’ Joshua said.

‘Neither did I until yesterday. That’s why he came to my gran’s house after Daisy’s body was found. He said that he’d heard about it from the press but he must have been contacted by the police. He owned the house in 2007. They would have wanted to speak to him. That’s how he knew what had happened.’

‘You think
he
took Daisy there?’

‘He would have had access to it. Keys for the house. He also knew the times when Mum and Brendan weren’t going to be there. He knew that you and I would be staying over with friends. It was an empty house where he could take his young girlfriend.’

‘But he didn’t live round here. How did he meet her, hook up with her?

‘He was visiting Brendan and Mum? Maybe he just chatted to her out in the street. She might have been with Sandy and Sandy spoke to Brendan. Then he saw her in the newsagent’s or pulled up in his car and asked her the way. I don’t know.’

It was what Rose had been puzzling about all the way back from Walthamstow. How had Munroe met up with Daisy Lincoln? Munroe had still been a policeman then. Had she come into contact with him in that way?

‘But I never knew Munroe so he couldn’t have come to the house.’

Rose had never seen him either. Not before her parents went missing. She would have remembered a visit from him, she was sure. But then she had never seen Frank Richards either.

‘Maybe, once
The
Butterfly Project
started, they avoided going to each other’s houses.’

‘Except that Munroe used the house for somewhere to take his girlfriend.’

‘But wouldn’t someone have seen them going in?’

‘He used the back gate? Or waited until it was dark?’

‘And the cottage in Stiffkey.’

‘Daisy was eighteen. Why would she be interested in a man of his age?’

Joshua said it with distaste. Rose remembered his infatuation for her, the crush he had had.

‘How old is Munroe?’

‘In his forties? Forty-five?’

‘This was six years ago next August. Munroe would have been in his late thirties then. It’s not unheard of for a man of that age to get involved with a young woman,’ she said.

‘He was married.’

‘This could be why he and Margaret Spicer are splitting up.’

‘He killed her, Rosie. It wasn’t an accident.’

Rose was quiet. Joshua was right. It couldn’t have been an accident. Daisy had had her hands tied behind her back.

‘He used my dad’s tie to stop her struggling,’ Joshua said thoughtfully.