Killing Rachel (29 page)

Now they did and it gave little comfort.

Forensics could not give an exact amount of time that the silver Audi had been in the water. The best estimate was four to five years. The investigation was still open-ended but it was James Munroe’s view that Kathy and Brendan had been taken from the cottage at Stiffkey and murdered soon after.

The file contained the detailed notes, yet it sat on the table untouched. Joshua who had been the prime mover of the search for their parents didn’t reach for it, hadn’t opened it, wasn’t interested. Skeggsie looked as though he would have liked to open it but held back. It was Rose who had to reach for the file. Rose, who had been reluctant to get involved in the search for their parents, who had dealt with her grief and wanted to let the dead lie in peace. But she’d been seduced by Joshua’s fervour. She’d been pulled along in spite of her reluctance only to find that she had to go through the grieving process all over again. She opened the flap of the file and pulled out a wad of papers. On top was a photograph of the car. Her breath skipped in her throat as she saw it. It had been taken at the place where they’d stood hours earlier, Childerley Waters.

The shot had been taken from a distance. The silver car was being pulled out of the water. She thought of Rachel Bliss being lifted out of the lake by the gardener and the groundsman. The photo in her hand showed a big tow truck. There were pulleys attached to the back of the Audi and it was being dragged up from where it had sat in the depths for so long. There were people round, a frogman, a police officer, the man who was working the machinery.

She placed the photograph on the table in plain view but Joshua did not reach for it.

‘Will there be a funeral?’ she said suddenly.

No one answered.

She wanted to go back to Anna’s. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

‘I’ll go out and get some food,’ Skeggsie said, standing up. ‘We might as well eat.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

Joshua got up and walked out of the kitchen. She heard his bedroom door close. She frowned and was about to follow him when Skeggsie touched her arm.

‘Leave him to deal with it on his own.’

They shopped, walking round the streets of Camden. They bought bread and salad and a cooked chicken. Skeggsie picked up some fruit and some crisps and a bag of doughnuts.

‘Comfort food,’ he said.

‘Do you really not believe the policeman’s story?’ Rose said as they were carrying the stuff back.

‘I don’t know,’ Skeggsie said. ‘I just know from what my dad said that there’s a lot that goes on that the public know nothing about. This James Munroe, why isn’t he a policeman any more? How come he didn’t come to Joshua and you with this information until you both went to the cottage? There are a lot of unanswered questions.’

‘But they are dead? My mum and Brendan. You do think that now?’

‘Maybe. It doesn’t answer any of the big questions, though.’

‘I’m not interested in any of the big questions. The only thing I’m interested in is whether my mum is alive. And Brendan.’

‘What about Frank Richards and the notebooks? You know I found one of the codes. It’s a page number, line number, letter number. So if the code is 892 it’s page 8, line 9, letter 2. So maybe that letter is ‘A’. Trouble is the next time there is an ‘A’ it will be a different number. Do you see? I’ve got the computer doing it but every few words it turns into gobbledygook so that means the order has changed. So 892 becomes page 2, line 9, letter 8 which turns out to be a ‘P’ or something. So far I’ve deciphered about half a page and it’s all about Stiffkey and tides, blah, blah . . .’

They were walking back to the flat and Rose blew through her teeth. Did Skeggsie really believe that she wanted to hear this stuff now? Did he have any sensitivity to what she or Joshua was feeling? The trouble was his involvement with the notebooks had always been academic, never emotional. He looked at the whole thing as a kind of mathematical puzzle. That surprised her in a way because he was an art student. She’d have thought that he might have been
affected
more. Joshua was his closest friend and yet he did seem to experience things in a dispassionate way. Skeggsie’s art was a bit like that. There were no paintings or sculptures around. Skeggsie’s art was on his computer; animation, films, photography, installations.

They passed the Mini where they’d parked earlier.

‘I do care, you know,’ Skeggsie said, as if reading her mind.

She shrugged. Skeggsie stopped at the car.

‘What’s that?’ he said, taking the keys out, opening the Mini’s door with a pop.

He leant into the back of the car and pulled out the padded envelope that Rose had left there the day before. Rose tutted at the sight of it. She’d forgotten it again. She took it from Skeggsie, folded it in half, and pushed it into one of the carrier bags.

They returned to the flat. The kitchen was still empty. Rose walked up to Joshua’s bedroom door and opened it a crack. He was lying on his side on the bed. His eyes were closed.

‘Let’s get the lunch. He’ll wake up soon,’ Skeggsie said from down the hall.

They moved round the kitchen quietly. Skeggsie put the chicken on a baking tray and covered it with tin foil and put it into the oven. Rose sorted out the salad and cut some bread. She opened the crisps and put them in a bowl in the middle of the table and laid some plates out. The activity made her feel better. When she heard movement from the other room she cheered up a bit. Once Joshua was up they could eat. Maybe they could start afresh and leave this awful thing behind them. Move on with their lives. Of course, Rose wished her mother was alive but if she truly wasn’t then she had to go forward, had to walk away from this heavy sorrow that she’d carried all these years. The blip of hope they had had now looked like some bad joke. Frank Richards had been a siren pulling them on to the rocks.

She picked up the
Classified
file and took it into Skeggsie’s room. She placed it on the table where they usually kept the notebooks stuff, although it was now clear, the notebooks and printouts hidden away by Skeggsie after James Munroe arrived.

She went back into the kitchen and picked up the envelope from Rachel Bliss. She didn’t want to open it but she knew she would. If she’d taken the other letters seriously then she might have been able to help Rachel. Instead her hatred of the girl had meant she’d ignored her calls. If she was truly going to move on from what had happened these last few months she needed to see what Rachel’s message was. She pulled at the opening and the flap came away from the envelope. She put her hand in and pulled out some photographs. There was a note as well and she flicked her eyes over it.

Dear Rose, I took these today to prove to you that I was telling the truth. Rachel
.

It was brief, for Rachel, none of the histrionics she had got used to. She looked at the photographs. At first glance they seemed to be of someone holding a newspaper. Three A4 size photographs of the top or corner of a newspaper with people in the background.

What was it?

‘This is weird,’ she said out loud.

Then she looked at the note again and saw a date at the top of it. 10th June.

‘This was written to me on 10th June. Five months ago. What is it? I don’t get it.’

Joshua had come into the kitchen. He was stretching his arms up in the air. His hair was sticking out at the side. He looked a little better,
softer
for the sleep he’d had.

‘Rachel Bliss wanted to send this to me seven months ago but she never posted it. It’s some odd photographs of people at the seaside and there’s this newspaper at the bottom of every one as though she hasn’t framed the shot properly.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Skeggsie said.

Skeggsie took the photos. Rose looked at the brief letter again.
I took these today to prove to you that I was telling the truth.
10th June. Just after the exams, a couple of days before she left Mary Linton for good. Rose thought back to the day when Rachel came and sat beside her in the quad and told her that she’d seen her mother and stepfather on the pier at Cromer. It had just been another of Rachel’s lies and Rose had given her short shrift.

‘It might be that the newspaper’s been deliberately put in the photo to give the date. You know like they do in ransom videos. To prove the kidnapped person is still alive on a certain date. Proof of life?’ Skeggsie said.

‘Ransom videos. You’ve been watching too many movies lately,’ Joshua said grimly.

Rose snatched the photos back from Skeggsie. She put them all flat on the kitchen table. She pushed the plates and the salad and the crisps out of the way.

‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’ she said.

Skeggsie nodded.

‘Can I have it?’ she said shrilly.

‘A
please
would be nice,’ Skeggsie mumbled.

She looked hard at the first photograph. Then the others. Her breath stopped in her throat as she saw them. They were on deckchairs, by the steps that went up from the beach to the promenade. The man was sitting reading a newspaper. He had dark glasses on and a sun hat but still Rose knew him.

‘Give me the magnifying glass, quick.’

‘What you doing, Rosie?’ Joshua said.

She held it over the man’s face and let out a gasp of recognition.

The woman’s face was clearer. In the first photograph she was pulling her hair back into a tie. In the second she was standing up, brushing sand from her front. In the third she was staring out to sea, her face pensive. Rose didn’t need the magnifying glass to know who it was but she used it, anyway. Her mother’s face seemed to rise out of the picture towards her. Her mother, sitting with Brendan on Cromer beach five months before.

‘Rosie, are you crying? What is it?’ Joshua said, sounding concerned.

She stood back and handed the magnifying glass to Joshua. Her tears were mingling with the widest smile she could manage.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look for yourself!’

Skeggsie looked puzzled. Joshua took the magnifying glass. After a few moments he seemed to speak directly to the photographs, his fingers running over the images as if he could actually touch the people in them.

‘Dad,’ he said.

After all the lies Rachel had told she had finally come up with the truth. Rose closed her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

THIRTY

There was no funeral, just a memorial service.

It was in a small church in Hampstead. Anna arranged it and Rose had to attend. It was to be a small affair – just a few close friends and a chance for Anna to say goodbye formally to her daughter Katherine. Anna tentatively asked Rose if it would be all right if she had a photograph and flowers dedicated to
Katherine Christie
as that was the name that Anna had known her daughter by. Rose did not object. Rose was supportive. Joshua had argued that it was the right thing to do in the present circumstances. James Munroe had helped Anna with the arrangements. He had told her that it should be low-key as investigations were still going on. He had explained the bodies could not be released as they were still part of the investigation.

Anna had seemed buoyed up by the event and had talked to Rose a few times about her daughter. In the past she’d said hurtful things about how Katherine had left home, changed her name, became a career woman and had a baby. How she’d rejected Anna’s way of life and did what she wanted to do. Anna had seen this as a betrayal and had seemed more upset about that than the fact that Katherine had gone missing five years before.

She’d even blamed Brendan Johnson, suggesting that he had murdered Katherine and then gone into hiding himself. Rose had never told Joshua this so it was a shock when Anna came down the garden to Rose’s studio and knocked on the door when Joshua was there with her, a few days after the visit to Childerley Waters.

She’d shaken Joshua’s hand and said,
I’m sorry for your loss
.

She also told Rose to invite him up to the house at any time.

Anna’s acceptance of Munroe’s story about Kathy and Brendan’s death meant that Joshua was no longer the son of a murderer.

But it was all lies. The story about the car and the people in it was untrue. Rose had struggled with it in the days after they’d seen Rachel Bliss’s photographs. She had a hard time believing that ex-Chief Inspector James Munroe had actually lied to them.

‘Could it have been a mistake?’

‘DNA,’ Skeggsie answered curtly.

No mistakes had been made, no errors. It was a made-up story. Rose and Joshua knew it because they had seen three photographs of their parents on Cromer beach five months before, four and a half years after they were supposed to have drowned in a car in Childerley Waters. Munroe was a liar.

On the morning of the memorial service Joshua came to the front of Anna’s house and Rose let him in, leading him up to her study.

‘I just don’t think I should have let this go ahead,’ Rose said.