Dead and Buried (31 page)

Authors: Anne Cassidy

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General

Just then she heard Anna call her name as Joshua fed some computer printouts on to the fire.

‘I’ll be back,’ she said.

Anna was in the kitchen. ‘There’s a policewoman to see you. She won’t come into the house. Nothing I should be worried about?’

‘No, definitely not. It’s probably someone bringing a message from Henry. He sent me a text asking me to help in his club.’

Her grandmother went back upstairs and Rose went to the front door. Wendy Clarke was standing in the street next to a parked police car. Rose picked up her key from the hall table and went out of the house to join her. There was a uniformed officer in the driving seat. Wendy was leaning back against the car, her unruly hair held back with a hairband. She was smoking a cigarette. It was not one of her roll-ups but a filter tip. Under her arm she was holding a padded envelope. Rose recognised it immediately.

‘Hello, Rose. How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Not got anything to tell me?’

‘About what?’

Wendy held out the cigarette and tapped it. The ash dropped off.

‘I received this yesterday.’

She showed the envelope. On the front of it was the address of Bethnal Green Police Station and it was made out for the attention of Wendy Clarke
.
Rose stared at it.

‘Imagine my surprise when I opened it and a small black recorder dropped out.’

‘A recorder?’

‘Yes, you know. You turn them on, they record what’s being said. You turn them off, they stop. Now I’d say that you and your stepbrother had something to do with this.’

Rose’s face was very still.

‘As well as the recorder there’s this piece of paper which has a name and address typed on it. This name turns out to be a Mr James Munroe – the same James Munroe who was a victim of a sensational shooting in central London a week ago. This is the man who was the owner of the property in Brewster Road at the time that Daisy Lincoln was murdered. During the recording this man, James Munroe, confesses to the killing of Daisy Lincoln. I say confess but there are several sections of the tape which have been wiped clean so it’s only half a conversation that I’m hearing.’

‘I knew James Munroe,’ Rose said.

‘Oh, I know that. This man was a colleague of your mother’s so I’m guessing you may have met him once or twice.’

Rose shook her head. ‘Only after my parents disappeared. I didn’t like him. Ever.’

‘So, we’ve gone to this Mr James Munroe’s London address and we found a letter from his wife, Mrs Margaret Spicer. This letter is a suicide note and gives, as a reason, her discovery of the affair that her husband had with Daisy Lincoln and her belief that it was he who killed the girl.’

‘Suicide?’ Rose said, alarmed.

‘It’s a suicide note. And yes, some items of clothing and a shoulder bag full of documents has been found on Beachy Head but no body as of yet. So it’s a very strange case. These two bits of evidence coming together so neatly.’

‘But you’ll be able to close the case. To tell the family what happened to Daisy.’

‘I will. What I won’t be able to tell them is how I found out.’

‘But at least justice is done.’

‘Someone shot James Munroe outside the Royal Swan Hotel. CCTV footage shows a woman walking away from the scene about that time. That woman could be Margaret Spicer, his wife. What’s your view, Rose?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know nothing.
Nada.
’

‘I don’t have a view.’

‘’Course the officers who looked through the CCTV footage may have missed something. They may have missed other interesting bystanders. What do you think?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Another one of your secrets. You lied to me, Rose. You told me your secret had nothing to do with Daisy Lincoln.’

‘My secret doesn’t. This,’ she said, gesturing towards the envelope, ‘was not my secret.’

Wendy Clarke looked at her without speaking. Then she opened the passenger door and got into the car. She let the window slide down.

‘Look after yourself, Rose. Keep out of my way.’

The car drove off. Rose watched it go down the street and then went back into the house. As she walked into the kitchen she could see smoke rising up from the garden. She stepped outside and headed for the fire. Joshua was standing next to it looking pleased with himself. There were several empty carrier bags weighed down by a stone on the ground. There was just one bag of papers left.

‘The notebooks,’ Joshua said. ‘I thought we’d do them together.’

He picked out the first one.

‘2005 George Usher.’

He let it drop into the flames. Rose picked up the next one.

‘2007 Michael McCall.’

‘2008 Ronnie Binyon.’

‘2010 James Barker.’

‘Oh,’ she said, remembering. ‘There’s one more thing I want to put on the fire. Keep it going for me.’

She went inside the house and up to her bedroom. From her desk drawer she picked out the envelope that had
Myers and Goodwood
written on it. She tipped out the red notebook that contained her statement. It would be the first time that Joshua had seen it. And the last. She took it downstairs and while Joshua was moving the wood around and adding more scraps she threw the notebook on top of the fire. She watched it join the remains of the four other notebooks. It sat at an angle. Its edges seemed to catch, first curling and turning brown, and then the fire seemed to eat it greedily until it was black ashes just like the others.

‘What was that?’

‘Just some notes I was making. Not important any more.’

Afterwards they sat side by side on the sofa in the studio.

‘What about your gran? Will you ever tell her?’

Rose had thought about this for some days.

‘I will. I will tell her that Kathy and Brendan were working undercover and have left the country. Now that Munroe is dead I can say that they were working for him hence the lies and cover-ups. She has a right to know that her daughter is alive.’

‘That’ll be an interesting conversation.’

‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.’

Rose had her laptop on her knees. She opened up her mail. There was the email she had received that morning after six days of silence.

Dear Rose and Joshua, We arrived safely in British Columbia via a direct flight to Seattle. We appreciated the text you sent on the night of our flight. It certainly makes our lives a lot easier having that information to hand. We are staying with friends outside a town called Kelowna. We will be involved in various conservation projects based around Shuswap Lake, north of where we are now. In the autumn we will look into renting a property on the outskirts of Calvary. We long to see you both. Maybe you could come in August? Then things can be explained at length and you can both get back to England in time to continue your studies. Jenny and Gareth Somers.

Rose had read this email many times. Jenny and Gareth Somers – she wondered who had thought that name up.

‘Do you think we’ll go, Rosie? To Canada? In the summer?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s too soon. Maybe we need time to let this all settle. To think it through. To work out what we really feel about what they did. Then we can go later. In a year or two.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he said, grabbing her hand, holding it tightly. ‘There’s lots for us to do in the next couple of years. Most of it we can do
together
.’

She stared at him and found herself smiling. His haircut didn’t look so severe and he seemed relaxed, his hard edges softened. For the first time in months he looked like the boy she had first met the previous September after a five-year break.

She leant forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.

‘The main thing is,’ he whispered, ‘that they’re safe and the killing is over.’

That was the main thing. The killing was over.

By Anne Cassidy

The Murder Notebooks series

in reading order:

Dead Time

Killing Rachel

Butterfly Grave

Dead and Buried