Dead and Buried (8 page)

Out of the blue she noticed Joshua’s hand on hers. He stroked her skin for a few moments then pulled his hand back to the steering wheel. She glanced at him but he seemed engrossed in the driving. Her hand was very still and she was sure she could feel the sensation of his touch from seconds before. It gave her a powerful memory, a physical flashback to the way things were between them after Skeggsie died. They had reached out for each other. They had held on to each other and she had kissed him until her lips were swollen. Then they had become more than friends but not quite lovers. Had talking about Skeggsie brought some of those feelings back for Joshua as well?

There were things she wanted to say but now was not the time to say them. It didn’t seem right to talk about their relationship while this search for their parents was going on. She laced her fingers through each other and sat quietly. One day she would hold him still, make him look at her and tell him that she loved him.

They drove on.

‘Why don’t you come in for a while,’ she said, when they eventually pulled up outside the house in Belsize Park. ‘Anna wants me to bring friends home. She’s redecorating a whole room so that I have somewhere to take them.’

‘OK,’ Joshua said.

He looked tired. He left his jacket in the back of the car. She took his hand, lightly, as she would if he were a small child, and pulled him up the path. The front door opened before she had a chance to put her key in. Her grandmother stood there.

‘Rose, that policeman’s here to see you again. Oh, hello, Joshua.’

Anna looked a little pained. She was still in her ‘Clearing Out the Blue Room’ clothes
.

‘What does he want?’

‘I don’t know. He said he tried to ring you.’

Rose tutted. Her phone had been on silent.

‘He’s in the kitchen. I gave him a drink. I’ll be upstairs. I’ll leave you to talk to him.’

Rose walked towards the kitchen. Joshua was behind her.

‘Shall I go off home? This might be personal.’

‘It’s probably to do with the house in Brewster Road. Come on. It’ll include you as well.’

Henry was in off-duty clothes: a checked jacket and brown trousers. He looked as though he’d dressed up to go to church. Rose wondered if he had, if he believed in God. He stood up as they came in.

‘You’re both together. That’s good. I just called at your flat, Joshua. When you weren’t there I took a chance and came here. I’ve got some information for you. Why don’t you sit down.’

He was acting as though it was his house, not the place where Rose lived.

Joshua pulled out a chair and sat on it, slouched. Henry’s face was drawn and Rose felt a pang of fear. She sat down on the edge of the chair. The thought came into her head that he had come because something had
really
happened to her mum or Brendan. They’d seen a Skype recording of them after Christmas and had a text message from them days later. They had been alive then. Could it be that something had happened to them since?

‘The detectives in East London have asked me to liaise with both of you regarding the situation at Brewster Road. I hope that’s agreeable. It saves them coming across to see you and as I know you, Rose, I thought you wouldn’t mind.’

Rose felt a shiver of relief. It was to do with Daisy Lincoln, unconnected to their parents. She sat back, an image in her head of Daisy running across to the road to the car in which the
love of her life
was sitting. This picture of a girl she hardly knew seemed to have taken root in her thoughts.

‘The cause of Daisy Lincoln’s death is not clear. It’s hard after so much time to ascertain exactly how a person died. There was no bullet found near the body and the skeleton has no signs of violence, no broken skull or cracked bones,’ Henry said.

‘So we’ll never know?’

‘Strangulation, asphyxiation, poison. Until the crime is solved, the perpetrator found, it will be hard to identify the cause.’

Henry was pulling something out of a bag on the floor that Rose hadn’t noticed. It was a black leather briefcase. He opened a file and took out a colour photograph and placed it on the table so that they both could see. Rose leant towards it. It was a picture of a man’s tie. It was mauve with blue stripes and there was a crest of some sort in the middle.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘It’s a West Ham tie,’ Joshua said.

It looked scruffy, the edges of it dirty and frayed.

‘Do you recognise it?’ Henry said.

Rose shook her head. ‘What’s this got to do with Brewster Road?’

‘If you could just have a good look at it. See if it rings any bells for either of you.’

Rose looked closer. The tie had been laid on a white background, a table of some sort. It had been stretched out but still it seemed wrinkled in some places. It reminded her of the girls’ ties that hung in Lost Property in her old school; they looked as though they’d been through a mangle. She had no memory of this tie – why should she?

Joshua started to speak.

‘I bought a tie like this for my dad one Christmas. He wasn’t really a West Ham fan. He supported Newcastle but he never went to their matches. He never went to
any
matches but he always watched
Match of the Day
on television and he said that West Ham were his second team so I bought it for him. He wore it a couple of times, I think.’

‘Like this tie.’

‘Yeah, exactly like it.’

Henry put the photocopy back into the folder.

‘I’m sorry to tell you this but we believe that this
is
your father’s tie. We think this because DNA was extracted. It’s the DNA of Brendan Johnson.’

There was a puzzled silence in the kitchen.

‘DNA?’

‘Yes, saliva, hairs, something of that sort.’

‘OK. So?’ Joshua said, a sudden surliness in his voice.

‘When the body of Daisy Lincoln was found some items of clothing had survived. A lot of natural materials, cotton, silk and so on would decay over time. This tie, made of synthetic fibres, did not. There were a couple of other items as well . . .’

‘What was Daisy Lincoln doing with my dad’s tie?’

‘Ah.’

Rose stared at Henry. She was feeling irritated. Why couldn’t he just blurt it out, whatever it was?

‘We think that before Daisy was killed she had her hands tied behind her back. They were bound up with Brendan Johnson’s tie.’

Joshua sat up, his forehead wrinkled, his shoulders straight.

‘Naturally this puts a different slant on things. It opens up the case to other interpretations. I felt it was only right that I should tell Joshua as soon as possible and you too, Rose. There may well be a completely innocent explanation about this and if there is the police will find it . . .’

Henry’s voice seemed to dwindle and he stood up, grabbing his briefcase.

‘I gave you my number, Joshua, and Rose has it too. Get in touch with me if there’s anything you need to talk about.’

Joshua was still silent, his eyes staring hard at the table. Rose followed Henry out of the room and into the hallway.

‘It’ll take a while for this to sink in, Rose. You know where I am.’

Rose closed the front door. When she went back to the kitchen Joshua was standing up and looked as if he too was about to leave.

‘Josh, I . . .’

He shook her arm off. ‘This is rubbish. It’s crap.’

‘I agree but . . .’

‘But nothing, Rose. My dad is not a murderer!’

Rose stared at Joshua. His eyes looked dark and cold. The words he had just spoken hung limply in the air. There were things she wanted to say but didn’t. The truth hung around them like a bad smell.

‘My dad did not kill Daisy Lincoln. It’s because of murders like this that my dad . . . took the path he did. Decided to right wrongs, to get justice for the innocent.’

‘You’re making him sound like a superhero! He has
killed
people!’

‘Yes. Baranski. Someone who didn’t deserve to live!’

She stepped back, startled.

‘But not Daisy Lincoln,’ he said, a crack in his voice. ‘Never some eighteen-year-old innocent girl. Never.’

He walked away from her and she stood there and let him go. He opened the front door and closed behind him. From upstairs she could hear Anna humming. She thought of Brendan’s tie knotted around the wrists of Daisy Lincoln. She thought of Brendan, when they lived together, smiling at her.
All right, Petal?
He often picked up a packet of her favourite sweets when he bought a newspaper.

She knew Brendan wasn’t capable of such a thing.

He had killed Viktor Baranski and maybe others.

But an eighteen-year-old girl?

Brendan couldn’t do that.

EIGHT

In the corner of Rose’s study were her mother’s things which had been cleared out of the Blue Room. It had made the area temporarily untidy. Anna said that Rose should look through the paperwork and keep anything that she wanted. Rose had a feeling that she would keep it all, every sheet of paper, whatever it was.

On Rose’s pinboard was a photo of her mother that she had recently put there.

It was a head and shoulders close-up and for once she didn’t have her glasses on. Her hair hung round her face and she was wearing a black dress which was low at the front. Rose thought she must have been going somewhere formal. Around her neck was a pendant on a chain. The pendant was silver, quite heavy, in the shape of a heart. At the centre of it was a red gemstone. Rose remembered that this pendant had been a gift from Brendan but that her mother hadn’t liked it much. She’d worn it now and then but had told Rose
It’s not really my kind of thing. Don’t tell Brendan.

Her mother’s jewellery box was on her desk. Rose had looked in it over the years when it sat in the Blue Room. Most of her mother’s jewellery was not valuable but it was still precious to her. It held an eclectic mix of rings, necklaces, bracelets and earrings. Rose had looked at these from time to time, hoping for some connection to them, some stories to emerge from them but nothing much resonated. They were just items that she had bought or other people had bought for her. She looked at the photo again, at the pendant on her mother’s neck. The gemstone looked dark, the colour of a bead of blood. Rose had looked for this pendant over the years but hadn’t been able to find it. She wondered if, perhaps, her mother had secretly got rid of it.

Rose closed up the jewellery box and tucked it away by the rest of her mother’s things. Then she stood up and walked across to the window and looked out into the street.

Half an hour before Joshua had got into the Mini and driven away in anger. Now he would be at the flat in Camden, upset, disbelieving.

Everything seemed to have come to a standstill.

Over the last few months it seemed as though they were always moving towards something: some revelation or a reunion with their parents or simply the absolute truth about what had happened. But now everything was muddled. They seemed to be wandering alone, in circles. Now Joshua had another reason to be angry with her; she had failed to rise to Brendan’s defence.

She bent down to her desk drawer and pulled out the brown envelope that held her statement. She slipped the red notebook out and opened it to a clean page. She moved her keyboard to the side of her desk to give herself space and she put a date as she had with the other entries. Then she began to write.

For a while I’ve wondered exactly how much my mother is involved in the notebooks and the murders. I’ve had a feeling for some time, much stronger recently, that she was a reluctant participant. That she went along with it because she loved Brendan.

Rose thought back to the Skype recording they’d seen around Christmas. Her mother and Brendan had been speaking directly to them. It was the first sight of them they’d had for over five years. The quality of the film hadn’t been good but still Rose had hung on to every moment, her eyes searching the screen for facial expression, eye contact, hand movements. Brendan had done most of the talking. He’d explained the life they’d taken on before and since disappearing; her mother behind his shoulder, in his shadow, had said very little. She’d looked strained and grim. Brendan had talked earnestly about their choice, about the things they had done, but her mother had just looked burdened by it all.

Right from the beginning
, Rose wrote,
on the night they disappeared my mother left her glasses case behind in the restaurant. In it there’d been a card for a Bed and Breakfast place in Twickenham. It had seemed like a clue left on purpose. Then, the false surname they had used in the B and B had been Brewster, the name of the road we had lived in. On top of this my mother had not tried to disguise her handwriting when she’d signed the guest book, her ornate lettering giving away her true identity.

It seemed as if she was leaving a trail for me to find.