Dead Time (7 page)

The Tuscan Moon was the restaurant her mum and Brendan went to on the night they disappeared.

‘Here you are!' Joshua handed her a mug of tea.

They were sitting at a small table in a long narrow kitchen.

‘What's with Skeggsie and the bolts?'

Joshua let out a sigh.

‘He's had some bad times. You remember I told you how we hooked up? Me and him? Well, he's the kind of kid who seems to attract – I don't know – nasty types.
His dad bought this flat. And during his first year at uni he had a couple of other students share it and they took advantage. He had trouble getting rid of them. During his second year he lived here alone. He was burgled, though, and he's sure,
positive
, that it was some of the kids who had lived here with him. A couple of weeks ago he was in the flat on his own and he was sure he heard someone open the front door. He called out thinking it was me but it wasn't. When he went downstairs the door was wide open. It freaked him out. Hence the bolts.'

‘Oh, not good.'

‘But it's more than bad luck and it's more than about security. He is a bit obsessive. You know I sometimes hear him have showers three, four times a day. And the bolts thing? He likes it locked every time we come in. When I go out I have to lock two separate Chubb locks. He's a little
insecure
.'

‘I didn't warm to him,' Rose said.

‘You would if you knew him. Actually, I've got something to show you. Skeggsie has this software he's developed. Well, it's hard to explain. Come and see. Bring your drink.'

She followed Joshua into one of the tidiest rooms she had ever seen. It was as big as the living room and seemed to be divided in half. On one side was a bed and wardrobe and chest of drawers. The bed was made, the doors and drawers were shut and apart from a couple
of photos in old-fashioned frames there was nothing on the surfaces. No books, magazines, no personal items, nothing. The other side of the room was full of computers. She gasped at the amount of equipment on view. A long table, like an old dining table, was flat against a wall. There were four monitors, one of them huge, like a widescreen television set. Under the table were four base units. The rest of the space was covered in electronic equipment, things she had never seen before. Amid it all were the spaghetti wires that ran in between the machinery.

‘Here, look,' Joshua said, holding up an A4-size photograph.

Rose took it.

‘Skeggsie's got this way of getting into programs? He calls it a Trojan Horse Incursion. This is the Network Rail CCTV system. Look, this is a photo of you. Last Tuesday night.'

Rose looked hard at the dark grainy picture. It showed a railway station platform. On it was a girl and a boy standing together. At the bottom was a date and a time. The date she saw was the previous Tuesday and the time was 19.46. With a shock she registered that it really was her and Ricky Harris. They were standing a metre or so apart and as she examined the picture she saw that in fact Ricky Harris was talking on a mobile phone.

It was the night he was stabbed.

‘I don't understand,' she said. ‘How could Skeggsie get this?'

‘He's spent the last three years working on software stuff. He's a genius when it comes to all this.'

‘And he hacked into CCTV cameras? When?'

‘Late last Tuesday. When I got back from seeing you at your gran's house I asked him if he could get an image.'

‘Isn't it illegal?'

‘It is but Skeggsie does it in such a way that it can't be traced. He lays all these false trails. He's the world's first true Cyber Escape Man.'

‘But why?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Why did you get him to do it?'

Joshua looked puzzled.

‘I thought it would be interesting.'

‘This boy got killed …'

His face fell.

‘It's bad taste, isn't it? I didn't think. I was just showing you how clever Skeggsie is. I'm sorry, Rosie. You know me. I sometimes jump in without thinking.'

‘That was a terrible night for me. Why would you think I wanted to be reminded of it?'

She was angry. She took a last look at the photograph and then tossed it aside.

‘I'm sorry,' Josh said.

It was only her second evening with Joshua. The first one had been messed up and now she was feeling annoyed.

‘I just thought you might want to look at this. It was stupid.'

She glanced round at the wall of computers and pictured Skeggsie sitting bolt upright in front of them, the screens reflected in the lenses of his big glasses.

‘He had no right to steal this image of me!' she said.

‘It was my fault. I asked him to. I've mucked up big time, haven't I?'

Joshua looked crestfallen.

‘No …' she said, feeling foolish. ‘No, 'course not …'

‘I have,' he said.

He reached out and took hold of her arm. She flinched, pain crossing her face.

‘What?' he said. ‘What have I done now?'

‘Nothing. Really.'

He took a step back from her. He was upset. The evening was going wrong. She spoke quickly, holding her arm out to him.

‘Look, I've got this tattoo.'

She pulled her sleeve back. The tattoo was still red and raised but the blue outline of the butterfly was clear.

‘When did you have that done?' he said, a curious smile on his face.

‘A week or so ago. It's still quite sore.'

‘A butterfly.'

‘A Blue Morpho.'

‘But why a butterfly?'

‘I like the look of them. I like the blueness of it.'

‘
Blueness?
'

‘Don't mock me,' she said, letting her sleeve drop.

‘I would never do that,' he said. ‘Actually, this is amazing. Come on, let's get out of Skeggsie's room. I've got something to show you.'

She followed him out and back to his tiny bedroom. Once inside he walked to the wall mirror. She stood by the door, slightly embarrassed.

‘Here,' he said. ‘Come closer.'

She stood by him. There was no space to move. He crossed his arms and pulled his T-shirt up over his chest and head and threw it behind him on the bed. She was startled but tried to keep a neutral expression on her face. Then he turned away from her and she saw it.

‘Oh!' she said.

On the side of his ribs was a butterfly tattoo, twice the size of the one she had, its blueness sharp and vibrant, its wings wrapping around him.

‘We're a team, you and me,' he said.

He was staring into the mirror, looking straight at her. She looked back at him, her eye dropping to the tattoo. After a second she reached across with her hand and touched his skin with her fingertips.

Her sleeve fell back to reveal the edge of a blue wing.

‘A team,' he whispered, grinning.

On Saturday morning Anna seemed to hang around Rose a lot of the time. She stood at the corner of her study door and watched as Rose sat at her desk working on her laptop. She asked her questions about the events at the station. The questions were separated by long gaps as if Anna was weighing up every word of her answer. Rose typed on and felt Anna's eyes on her back.

In the end she stopped working and turned to face her. Anna, seemingly disconcerted by Rose's scrutiny, picked up a cushion that had fallen off the big armchair and straightened it.

‘I was wondering whether it would be good to give violin a miss this week,' she said.

Rose remembered the violin lessons that were no more. After returning from boarding school she'd gone to a woman in Hampstead, Isabel Popper, to keep up her practice. Once a week she went for an hour playing her pieces, practising her chords, preparing for an
exam that she had never intended to take. After the summer, when school began, it was easy to say that she was transferring to another tutor nearer to home. She had continued to go out every Tuesday. A small victory against Anna. The money she was given she kept in a box in her room.

‘I don't want to miss my lesson,' Rose said.

Her grandmother nodded and paused for a second before walking out of the room. Behind her she left a heavy flowery scent.

When she was sure she had gone Rose opened up her blog, Morpho. She scrolled down some recent links and pictures and clips she'd uploaded and read over the most recent entry she'd made. It was a week or so before she was to meet Joshua. She smiled when she read the optimism there, the feeling that the evening ahead was a new beginning for her and Joshua. Her optimism had been well founded. She and Joshua had met up and were now a family of sorts again.

But in between she had witnessed a murder.
She made a new heading.

Be Careful What You Wish For.

What happens when someone from your school goes out of their way to pick on you and make you miserable?

She paused and thought inevitably of Rachel Bliss, her old best friend from boarding school. How could someone so close have made her so unhappy? Ricky Harris had been completely different. She had never been close to him. She had disliked him from the moment she set eyes on him until he said,
Here's your train, posh bird!
She continued writing her blog.

It happened to me. I hated this boy, Ricky Harris. I detested him. I avoided him but last week I bumped into him while waiting for a train. I had no choice but to listen to his taunts. Was there a moment when I might have unconsciously wished him dead? That I might have imagined him falling on to the tracks as a train thundered in? Maybe. I may well have wished this but never imagined what was going to happen later.
This boy got stabbed. He is dead. End of story.

It was a harsh but truthful post. Her blog wasn't a diary, just a jumble of her thoughts and feelings with pictures and links to other interesting sites and blogs. At the moment she was the only one who read it, but one day she might invite Joshua to look at it. She closed her laptop and stretched her arms up, flexing her fingers.

Later her grandmother joined her for lunch. They talked about Camden.

‘Is there a lot of violence there?' she said. ‘Day to day, I mean?'

‘No. 'Course not. In the time I've been there I've only seen a bit of horsing around,' she said, thinking ironically of Lewis Proctor pretending to stab himself with a plastic knife.

‘But you read such things in the newspaper about these institutions,' her grandmother said, biting daintily into a sandwich.

‘No,' Rose said. ‘It didn't happen in school. It happened outside, on the station platform. It wasn't to do with
school
. It could have happened anywhere.'

But that wasn't true. Rose thought of Little Radleigh, the station in Norfolk which was near to the Mary Linton School. She and some of the girls had used it to get to Norwich at weekends. It was tiny, with hanging baskets swaying in the breeze and the sound of cows mooing from nearby fields. The sky was vast and they could see the train from miles away. It seemed to take an age to get there and when it did it had a single carriage and looked as though it had been abandoned by a rushing locomotive. The girls from the school were metropolitan. They were used to big cities and expensive cars and air travel. Stepping on to the local Norwich train was quaint. Nothing bad could have happened on that platform, Rose was sure.

‘Camden really isn't such a bad place,' Rose said.

Her grandmother didn't answer.

Rose studied her. She was wearing a lemon-coloured jumper with cream trousers. Her hair, shoulder-length, was pulled back into a lemon tie at the back of her neck. She had neat gold studs on and the thick gold chain that she always wore round her neck. Rose looked down and saw brown leather high heels. She wouldn't have been surprised to see a matching handbag sitting on the floor beside her. Anna looked like she was going for a job interview even though it was Saturday and she was simply
at home
.

Rose, on the other hand, was in black jeans and a black and white T-shirt. On her feet were pink slipper socks, the kind with rubber patches that stopped her sliding across Anna's wooden floors. Indoors she
was
prepared to wear colour.

She spent the afternoon working on an essay.

A beep sounded. She had a new message. She expected it to be from Joshua. They had been emailing each other on and off since lunch. He had been telling her about a paper he had to give on Brunel and bridges and she had been telling him about the essay she was planning on Dickens'
Great Expectations
.

She looked at her in-box and was puzzled to see the name Emma Burke.
Emma Burke
? She opened the message.

Hi, Rose. Got your email address from school. I wanted to talk to you about something. Could we meet somewhere? Emma.

It was Ricky Harris's girlfriend.

Her first thought was to send a quick answer to say that she couldn't manage a meeting, that she was busy. Her fingers hung over the keys wondering how exactly to word it. She sat back. She had no wish to be in contact with Emma and her difficult stepsister, Sherry.

She decided not to answer the email. She deleted it from her in-box and sent a message to Joshua instead.
How's the computer whizz, Skeggsie? Does he have a life away from cyberspace?

She got an almost immediate answer.
Skeggsie is his computer. It does not exist without him. He does not exist without it.

She answered,
Half boy, half chip. Where does he insert his memory stick?

The answer came seconds later.
He is the human memory stick.

As she was trying to think of a reply a new message came. The name Emma Burke was in her in-box. She opened it.

Rose, I need a quick answer. This is important. It's about Lewis Proctor.

Rose hesitated before deleting the message.

Joshua sent another.
Fancy meeting up tomorrow afternoon? We could walk over the Millennium Bridge. Part of my research. 3 p.m. St Paul's underground.