by Anne Cassidy
‘Want me to pack up your college stuff?’ she called.
Joshua said something but he was in the next room and she couldn’t quite hear him. She went after him.
‘I said do you want me to pack . . .’
On the bed was a holdall that he’d been throwing things into.
‘No college stuff. College is on the back burner for the moment. I’ve got other things to think about.’
He had a large brown padded envelope in his hands. On the outside was written Private and Confidential. Joshua Johnson. It was the envelope that held the remainder of Frank Richards’ notebooks. It was the last thing they’d talked about before he sent her the email to say that he wanted a break from her.
He saw her looking at it.
‘Rosie, I need to tell you a few things. Maybe explain why I think Baranski came round to see me when he did. There’s some stuff I didn’t tell you about.’
Rose sat on the very corner of Joshua’s bed. Her legs were tightly together and she crossed her arms.
‘I know where Dad and Kathy are.’
She didn’t respond. The words seemed to fall around her. The same old story – we know where they are, no we don’t, yes we do.
‘I’ve been researching Macon Parker. He was the name on the empty notebook?’
‘I know. You told me before that he was a doctor and lived in Essex near Wickby.’
‘Macon Parker is forty-eight, born in Denver, came to this country in 2001 to work in University College Hospital in London. Worked on the Renal Unit and then worked for a while as part of a kidney transplant team. He did various placements and ended up at St Thomas’s in Westminster in 2006. He got a job there as a senior registrar and then a year or so later he went into private practice. Now he’s a businessman with interests in private health companies. He has a house in the US and France and he also owns a house in a small village called Two Oaks.’
Joshua paused but Rose didn’t say anything.
‘He has a company website, Quality Lifestyles. It’s an umbrella heading for a whole range of small companies to do with health. Anyway, that’s where his legal income comes from. But I also found this article. It’s from a Sunday newspaper supplement, just over three years ago. It’s about the harvesting of organs.’
‘What?’
‘It says that there is a flourishing trade in organs. People from Third World countries travel to Britain on some kind of student visa and while they’re here they sell an organ. They’ve been promised twenty thousand pounds for a kidney. Twenty thousand pounds is a fortune for these people – it’s like winning the lottery. They come here, undergo an operation and then they get a few hundred pounds for their trouble. The rest of the money goes towards their travel, visa arrangements, medical care and so on. They go home with a few hundred pounds and only one kidney. And that’s not the worst.’
‘What?’
Joshua shrugged. ‘Some of them don’t go back at all because they don’t just donate one kidney, they donate both, plus liver, plus anything else that’s needed. Look at this.’
He handed her a printout. It was a section from the Sunday supplement article. It showed what looked like a family photo of a teenage girl. She was standing beside someone but that person’s face was pixelated. The article was adjacent to the picture.
Polina Bokun, nineteen years old, from Belarus. The hairdressing student came to London on a student visa in 2002. She disappeared from her lodgings four weeks after her arrival. Months later her body was found in the Thames Estuary near Shoeburyness. A post-mortem showed that both kidneys and liver had been removed.
‘This is horrible.’
‘The article mentions Macon Parker by name. It says that one of his companies was involved in the visa scams and in organising travel and accommodation for these people. It hints that the British police were looking into his affairs.’
‘Why wasn’t he arrested?’
‘I guess because there was no hard evidence. I found some later media references to him because he sued this newspaper for libel. The matter was settled out of court and a retraction was printed.’
‘Is this why his name was on the notebook?’
‘I would think so. A couple of days ago I drove to his house in Essex. It’s like a mansion.’
Rose exhaled. ‘Where does this leave us?’
She realised that she’d used the word us. Was it us again? The two of them together?
‘It leaves us with a problem. I told you that Lev Baranski took me to Hampstead Heath? Well, he didn’t beat me up straight away. He and Mikey questioned me and asked me why I kept driving out to Essex. They said that they knew that that was where my father was.’
‘They’re following you?’
‘I think they must have. Maybe they’ve been watching me for a while. They know I drive a Mini. Mikey actually mentioned Two Oaks so they must have tailed me last week. Maybe that was what brought about the attack. The thing is they can’t know about Macon Parker’s house because I parked the car and walked to it. No one was following me then. This makes it absolutely imperative that we find Dad and Kathy.’
Rose didn’t argue. It explained why Joshua hadn’t wanted to drive Skeggsie’s car. She sensed what was coming next.
‘If we don’t find them, Rose, Baranski will. It’s a small village. If they are there, living in some cottage, biding their time until they can execute Macon Parker then Baranski will find them.’
‘What do you think he’ll do?’
‘He thinks my dad killed his father. We know that’s true. If he finds them he’ll kill my dad.’
What about my mum? she wanted to say. But she didn’t need to. Lev Baranski would realise that she was part of it and he would kill her as well.
‘I tried to find them, Rose, because I wanted to stop them living this life that they’re living. I wanted to stop them killing any more. And all I’ve done is bring Baranski to them.’
He looked pained. He shook his head and rubbed at his short hair. She couldn’t say anything to make him feel better. She knew it was true.
FOURTEEN
They packed Joshua’s things and tidied up the kitchen, throwing unused food into a black rubbish bag. Rose was about to call for a cab when the doorbell rang. It was almost nine o’clock. Joshua looked edgy and told Rose to stay where she was and he went downstairs. She saw him put the chain on and open the door slowly. He had an exchange with someone then he took the chain off and pulled the door back. Rose saw the detective from Brewster Road, Wendy Clarke, standing at the bottom of the stairs. She was pointing to Joshua’s bandaged ear and asking him what had happened. Rose had recognised her at once even though she looked very different to when she’d seen her more than a week before. Her ginger hair was loose and looked frizzy and she had a long raincoat on over a suit that made her look like a businesswoman. She came up the stairs talking all the time about local gangs and the dangers of being a young man on the streets of London at night. She puffed when she got to the top, out of breath.
‘Rose here as well,’ she said. ‘That’s a stroke of luck. I wanted to see you both and I was passing by so I thought I’d have a word with Joshua and here you are too. Are you going somewhere?’
She was looking at Joshua’s holdall and other bags that were lined up on the landing.
‘He’s staying at my grandmother’s for a while. Just until he’s recovered.’
‘That’s good of you. Have you made a complaint against these boys who attacked you?’
‘I didn’t get a good look at them.’
‘That’s a shame.’
They stood awkwardly on the landing.
‘Well, could I just have a few minutes of your time? Before you go off?’
‘Sure,’ Joshua said, pushing open the kitchen door, turning the light back on.
Wendy Clarke walked ahead of them. She took a BlackBerry and a tin out of her pocket and laid them on the table. Then she slipped her raincoat off and placed it across the
back of a chair. She sat down, making herself comfortable. Rose kept her coat on and sat on a chair with her hands in her pockets. Joshua was beside her.
‘I half expected to hear from you – either of you – after your visit to Brewster Road.’
There was quiet and she seemed to look penetratingly at each of them. Rose began to feel uneasy. So far Wendy Clarke had been friendly and polite but Rose sensed something else coming.
‘I did give you my card.’
‘I thought you only wanted us to ring you if we remembered something,’ Joshua said.
‘And you didn’t remember anything. Not one single thing.’
‘I was eleven going on twelve,’ Rose said.
‘I . . . We did remember some things. ’Course we did but nothing that we thought was relevant to . . .’
‘What things did you remember?’
Wendy Clarke was smiling but Rose saw something rock hard behind her expression. She’d not come here just for a little chat.
‘What is it you want us to say?’ Rose said. ‘I remember my mum shopping with me for my school uniform. Is that relevant to your investigation?’
‘You mean the dead girl under the garden. You mean Daisy Lincoln who was tied up, killed and then buried under the ground. That investigation?’
‘Why are you saying it like that? We’ve not done anything.’
Wendy Clarke took a deep breath. She picked up her BlackBerry and looked at it. Then she put it down again and opened the tin.
‘You can’t smoke in here,’ Joshua said immediately.
‘Just making a couple of roll-ups. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
Joshua didn’t answer and Wendy took out a small green packet and pulled out three papers which she laid flat on the table. She used the tips of her fingers to smooth them out.
‘I have a bit of a problem where you two are concerned. When I didn’t get a call from either of you I was surprised. I thought you might come up with a load of irrelevancies – barbecues in the garden, Mum digging up plants, Dad painting the shed, noises in the night and so on. This is the stuff we get and sometimes, in the middle of all those memories, is an interesting nugget, something that might help the investigation. But what did I get from you two? Nada. Nothing at all. Just silence.’
She stared at them again. Then she pinched out some tobacco from a packet and laid it carefully on one of the papers. She carried on and did the same with the other two. She was concentrating, pulling the tobacco so that it fitted the papers. Rose felt she ought to say something to fill the uncomfortable silence but she didn’t.
‘So I had a quick look at your history. You both have this awful tragedy in your life. You lost your parents in November 2007. You were split up and you grew up in different cities. Then last September you, Joshua, came to London to study at Queen Mary College and you met up again. That’s how I understand it. Am I right?’
Rose nodded, glancing sideways at Joshua.
‘And since then your life reads a bit like a soap opera plot. I don’t mean to be rude . . .’
Wendy Clarke pulled a pad out of her jacket pocket and flicked through the pages.
‘Last autumn, Rose, you witnessed the murder of two teenagers from your college?’
Rose nodded.
‘Then a friend of yours was killed. A girl from your old boarding school . . . I’ve got the name here . . .’
‘Rachel Bliss,’ Rose said.
‘That’s right. Then, Joshua, before Christmas, your uncle had an accident in Newcastle and then your friend, Darren Skeggs, was stabbed to death in an alley.’
Joshua’s face was completely still, showing no expression.
‘This is extraordinary. Two young people skirting on the edge of something dark. If I were a betting person I’d lay money on the fact that,’ she said, pointing to Joshua’s bandaged ear, ‘that is something to do with all these other things.’
‘We’ve just been unlucky,’ Rose said.
‘Please. Most people go through their lives without touching on death at all. You two, between you, have made a pastime of turning up at murders.’
‘I didn’t turn up at my friend’s murder. I was trying to find him. And I object to the tone in which you are talking about this. My friend’s life was snatched from him by some thug in an alley. This is no soap opera and no joke.’
‘And neither is a girl buried in the back garden of the house you once lived in. I took time and effort to get you two over to that house to jog your memory and you didn’t even have the courtesy to call me.’
‘We should have, you’re right,’ Rose said, realising that they’d just put the visit out of their minds.
‘But why should we? This is nothing to do with us,’ Joshua said.
‘It was in your garden and this poor girl’s hands were tied together with your father’s tie. It is linked to your family whether you like it or not.’
‘But not us!’ Joshua said, shoving his chair back so that it scraped along the floor.
Wendy Clarke used her index fingers and thumbs to pick up one of the cigarette papers and raised it to her lips. Keeping her eyes on them she licked the edge of the paper and began to roll it gently in her fingers. Pinching the loose tobacco from the end she added it to the next cigarette and picked that up and went through the same procedure.
Rose was agitated. She wanted to explain.
‘I’m not trying to make excuses but that time, that summer, just blurs for me. Maybe for Josh too. I spent so long thinking about those days before my mum and Brendan went missing, that November, trying to recreate that time to see if I could find a clue to where they were . . .’
Rose stumbled on her words. Now she knew where they were it didn’t alter the fact that she had once thought like this.
‘So my memories of them are always about those days in November. The previous summer just merges into lots of summers.’
She was lying. Since reading Brendan’s letters she had more information about that summer but she wasn’t going to talk about it now.
‘OK. Well, here’s a new question for both of you. Did your parents ever take you to a cottage in Norfolk?’
They both stared at her.
‘No,’ Rose said.
‘No,’ Joshua said.
‘Did they ever talk about a cottage in Norfolk they might have rented?’
‘No, they never talked about Norfolk.’
‘Or any cottage anywhere. Why?’ Rose said.
‘I’ve been talking to Daisy’s sister, Esther. She’s a teacher, lives in Walthamstow. She said that they regularly spoke on the phone and she remembers her sister boasting about going away with her new boyfriend to Norfolk. She joked with her sister about this implying that he was older than a boyfriend. An older man.’
Rose couldn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say. She kept eye contact with Wendy Clarke until the policewoman looked down and began to pack away her finished roll-ups in the tin.
‘We don’t know,’ Joshua said. ‘We don’t remember.’
‘You’re speaking for both of you now?’
‘I don’t remember either,’ Rose said.
‘You know what? There’s something funny going on here. I’d say that you two know an awful lot more than you’re letting on. And if I find that you – either of you – knew something that could have helped my investigation then I will have you up for perverting the course of justice. That’s a prison sentence if you’re asking.’
‘We know nothing about the murder of Daisy Lincoln. Nothing.’
Wendy Clarke looked from Rose to Joshua. Her fingers were tapping on the tin.
‘But there’s something you do know, right? Something you’re not telling. I can see it in your eyes. I interview hundreds of people and I know when they are holding something back. You two know something. You’re sharing a secret that you think I don’t need to know about. I hope for your sakes that you’re right about that.’
No one spoke. Wendy Clarke stood u
p and took her raincoat from the back of the chair. She put her BlackBerry and pad in one pocket and the tin of roll-ups in the other.
‘OK. We need to make this more formal. I want to see you, Joshua, Monday morning at ten, Bethnal Green Police Station. It’s just off the Roman Road – look it up on the internet. Likewise, Monday at twelve for you, Rose. I want you there promptly and I want you ready to start opening up to me or else I could become quite a big problem in both your lives. Am I making myself clear?’
Neither of them moved or spoke.
‘I’ll let myself out,’ she said.
They both listened to her going down the stairs, one heavy footstep after another. Then the front door opened and shut.
‘The cottage in Stiffkey,’ Joshua said in a low voice.
‘How could Daisy know about that?’
‘Unless it’s a coincidence.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘All the more reason to find them. Then we can ask them what they know about Daisy. We can demand to know.’
‘You think that it might be part of . . .’
‘No, no. No. Whatever they’ve done it was for a reason. It was for justice. I don’t agree with it and neither do you but there was – is – a logic. This thing with Daisy, it’s just murder.’
Rose looked at Joshua.
‘And what they did to Lev Baranski’s father? Tying his hands up and throwing him into the North Sea. That wasn’t murder?’
‘Baranski had done terrible things. What about the girls in the container?’
‘But where does it stop, Josh? He kills the girls. Brendan kills him. Lev Baranski wants to kill Brendan. Then what? Then you go and kill him? How many people have to die?’
‘This is not a discussion we can have without knowing all the facts and we can’t know those until we find them. That’s what we have to do. Tomorrow. We have to go to Two Oaks and we have to find out if they are there.’
He was leaning his elbow on the table, his hand cupping his bandaged ear. His face flinched as though it was hurting him. Rose reached forward and touched his face.
