Dead and Buried

by Anne Cassidy

  ‘Guys, can anyone lend me some money?’

  ‘What? Get lost!’

  ‘My bag’s been stolen, my phone, everything. I just need a tube ride home. I can write down my mobile number and tomorrow you can ring and I’ll give you double, treble what you give me.’

  ‘It’s a scam.’

  ‘I’m stuck up here otherwise. I’ve got no way of getting home.’

  ‘Go to the police,’ a boy said, looking at her in a puzzled way.

  ‘I don’t trust the police.’

  Several of them turned away but the boy continued to stare at her.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m desperate.’

  He put his hand in his pocket and came out with a pen. He held his arm out and pushed the sleeve of his jacket and jumper back.

  ‘Write your number there.’

  She wrote it, holding the pen softly so it didn’t dig into his skin. He looked at the number, then back at her. He put his hand in his trouser pocket and pulled out a five pound note and gave it to her. Some of the others saw it and started to laugh.

  ‘I always said Tony would have to pay for sex!’

  Rose took the money and mouthed the words, ‘Thank you.’

  She ran down the steps of the station and in minutes was on a Piccadilly Line train to Hyde Park Corner. Then she just had to find the Royal Swan Hotel. The journey was just two stops and she dashed off and up the escalator until she was outside the station and standing by a busy road. Across the road was Hyde Park, huge, dark and quiet. Behind her was a line of glass buildings, some apartment blocks and hotels. She ducked into the half-moon drive of a hotel. The concierge was standing on the front steps.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for the Royal Swan Hotel?’

  He sighed and looked away from her. ‘Four buildings along, madam.’

  She hurried away, quickly passing the other buildings. When she came up to the Royal Swan Hotel she saw that it was smaller and older than the others. It had a recess for coaches and cars to pull in. Then there was a garden area. Along the front of it was a line of trees and benches dividing the hotel off from the busy road. Rose looked round at the grass and shrubs that grew there. It was mostly dark but the lights from the traffic illuminated parts of it.

  She saw Joshua. He was sitting forward on one of the benches, his hands in his coat pockets. She was sure it was nine or thereabouts. She had no idea which direction Munroe would be coming from. He had said he had somewhere else to go before coming to the hotel. She walked over to the bench. Joshua saw her coming. He was surprised. He stood up.

  ‘Leave me alone, Rosie,’ he said, looking from side to side.

  ‘Don’t do this. It makes you just like him,’ she said, putting her arm through his.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ he said, shaking her off, stepping away from her. ‘It evens things out. It rids the world of a killer. Wasn’t that what The Butterfly Project was all about?’

  ‘It will taint you. It’ll change you.’

  ‘It’ll make me happier. I haven’t been happy since Christmas Eve. It’ll pay back for Skeggsie.’

  And Daisy? Rose thought.

  ‘You’ll get caught. This is a public place.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Joshua stiffened, looking over her shoulder. Rose turned round. Munroe was walking towards the hotel. He had on his Crombie overcoat. It wasn’t buttoned up, it was flying out behind him and he seemed to be moving quickly as if he was late. Joshua stepped past her but she grabbed on to his jacket.

  ‘Josh, don’t do this thing,’ she said, her voice cracking.

  But he shook her off. He walked forward to the edge of the garden. Munroe was coming up to the hotel, striding briskly along the pavement. He looked at his watch and seemed to be smiling at something. Rose stood transfixed as Joshua edged close to a tree, took the gun out of his pocket and raised his arm.

  ‘No,’ she said, her hand over her mouth.

  Seconds later a shot rang out, like a car backfiring. Everything seemed to stand utterly still as Munroe jolted and twisted as if he’d had some kind of electric shock. Then he fell to the ground. Rose ran up to Joshua.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  Joshua was shaking his head and Rose burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, what have you done?’ she cried.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing,’ he said.

  Munroe was lying on his back. He seemed to be twitching, his arm moving for a second then he stopped. People were walking towards him. A man at the front of the hotel was pointing towards the park.

  ‘We have to get away from here,’ Rose said through sobs.

  But the man wasn’t pointing in their direction. He was shouting and gesturing to a spot further along the garden. Rose spun round and looked.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Joshua said. ‘I didn’t have time to fire.’

  Margaret Spicer was standing by a tree. She stared at Rose. She dropped something from her hand. She took a pale raincoat off and let it fall to the ground. Underneath she was dressed in a black trouser suit. She walked towards them, peeling off some gloves and letting them drop on to the grass.

  ‘Margaret did it,’ Rose whispered.

  Rose stared horrified as Margaret Spicer walked up to them.

  ‘That was for Daisy,’ she said.

  Margaret walked away from the hotel. Rose saw her cross the traffic, her head high. Then she disappeared into the darkness of Hyde Park.

  ‘We have to get away from here,’ Rose said, taking the gun from Joshua and holding it under her coat. ‘Where’s the car?’

  Joshua mumbled something.

  ‘Where’s the car!’ she said, sharply pushing his arm.

  He walked off. She held her coat tight and stayed behind him. A siren sounded and she put her head down as they cut off into side streets and walked for a while until they came to the Mini parked half up on the pavement, a parking ticket wedged under one of the windscreen wipers. Joshua took it out silently. He tossed it into the back seat.

  ‘Let’s go back to Waterloo Bridge and finish what we started.’

  Waterloo Bridge was quieter. Rose had wiped the gun clean and replaced it in the canvas bag. Joshua pulled the car up in almost the same spot as he had an hour or so earlier. Before they got out he looked at the news on his phone. He read it out. ‘Man shot dead outside London hotel. ’

  There were only a few details. James Munroe was not named. Rose thought all of that would come later, perhaps in the late night news and the morning papers. Her mother and Brendan would be on a plane by then and so, most probably, would Margaret Spicer.

  She got out her phone and accessed her mother’s number. She wrote a text, short and to the point. Munroe dead. Then she pressed Send.

  They got out of the car and walked to the parapet. Further up on the South Bank Rose could see Tate Modern, its chimney lit up with purple neon. On the seventh floor a party was taking place for Macon Parker, the man who stole people’s organs. He would be wondering where his housekeepers were. He would never know how close he had been to death. His notebook, back at the Camden flat, would never be completed.

  The river was bright. Two riverboats were passing in opposite directions. They waited until both had gone by and then dropped the canvas bag. There was no sound for a few moments then a distant splash.

  ‘Will it wash up?’

  ‘Eventually but there won’t be any prints on it.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the flat.’

  Joshua took Rose’s hand and they walked back to the car.

  THIRTY

  Anna had allowed Rose and Joshua to light a bonfire at the bottom of the garden. It was in a space adjacent to her studio, the building that had once been an unused garage. They had cleared away the remains of old garden rubbish to make room for the blaze. Rose had told Anna that she was burning old papers of her mother’s and Anna had nodded supportively. ‘It’s best to move on with your life,’ she said.

  Joshua was trying to g
et the fire going using bunched up newspapers and scraps of wood that had been lying around.

  Rose looked up to the house and saw her grandmother at the window of the Blue Room. She was busy talking to the decorator. They had chosen furniture and rugs and blinds and Rose was to have a television and stereo. In the past week she’d spent a lot of time with Joshua at the Camden flat but that would end in the summer. Skeggsie’s dad was going to sell the flat and Joshua would have to find a room in a shared house. So maybe the Blue Room would be a good place for them to use.

  The fire was taking a while and Joshua was looking puzzled.

  ‘Maybe we should use some firelighters?’ Rose said.

  ‘It’ll catch,’ he said. ‘It’s not like we haven’t got enough flammable stuff to keep it going.’

  Joshua pointed to the carrier bags he’d brought in the car earlier. They were full of all the stuff they’d ever used or printed off to do with the notebooks and The Butterfly Project. In another bag were the notebooks themselves.

  The front door bell sounded; maybe it was the decorator’s mate, a lad in his twenties who wore headphones all the time and went pink whenever Rose came near. She looked back at the fire. Joshua’s face was rapt in concentration.

  ‘It’s coming,’ he said.

  He still had plasters over his ear but his face had healed and was looking normal again. Rose put her hand up to her cheek where her skin had been grazed and scratched. It too was getting better. A week had passed since Munroe’s death and she and Joshua were recovering.

  ‘Oh good,’ she said, seeing a flame lick around a piece of wood.

  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 a
fter 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