Killing Rachel (30 page)

Joshua sat in the armchair. He looked around the room admiringly.

‘I should have told Anna the truth. She’s going through this and it’s a charade.’

‘Remember what we said. We have to make Munroe think that we believe every word he said. He is the key to this.’

‘But Anna is mourning my mother . . .’

‘Rosie, we have to keep our heads here. We stumbled on something really important to Munroe, something to do with our parents and Viktor Baranski and the British police. We found the cottage, the boat, we got Lev Baranski involved. Frank Richards was looking after you, he said, and he gave you the phone number and you used it and it shook everything up. The
Classified
file? It’s a work of fiction. But at least now we know. This is not to do with the secret Service or national security. This is to do with the police. If you tell your gran then she will make a fuss and Munroe will know. He’ll go to ground and we’ll never find out another thing about what happened to them.’

They were holding it all by a slender thread. A book of butterflies that held the key to the notebooks they had taken from Frank Richards. Each notebook concerned a murder; a teenage boy called Ricky Harris and a Russian businessman, Viktor Baranski.

‘We have to hold our nerve here, Rosie.’

Rose nodded. It was the right thing to do but it felt wrong.

There were a dozen or so of Anna’s friends in the tiny church. Rose and Joshua sat a couple of rows back. Up at the front was a photo of her mother that she hadn’t seen before. It was when she was a teenager, not much older than Rose. Anna had had it blown up. It was Katherine, the teenage girl Rose had never known. Her hair was full and styled and she had lipstick on and looked a little like Anna herself. Rose wondered if she was wearing clothes from Bond Street. Soon after that photograph Katherine left her mother and became Kathy Smith.

The church door opened and Rose and Joshua looked round. It was James Munroe, wearing his Crombie, carrying a small bunch of flowers. Rose felt Joshua stiffen beside her. Munroe walked up the aisle and nodded to them. Then he went into a pew on the other side.

The service was short with a mix of prayers and readings from the Bible and Shakespeare. At times Rose felt her eyes prickle as though she was on the brink of crying. Then she made herself stare at her mother’s photo on the altar rail. Katherine Christie was someone she never knew. In her purse Rose had a square photograph cut from a larger one. Her mother, Kathy Smith, staring out to sea on a beach in Cromer five months before. Alive.

As the service wound up she noticed Munroe edging along the pew and making his way down the other side of the church. Watching him steal away, she felt Joshua’s hand grab hold of hers. He squeezed it tightly, leant down to her ear and whispered to her.

‘We’ll find them.’

She turned to him nodding, the beginnings of a sob coming out of her mouth. She threw her arm around his neck and hugged him tightly. He was right. They would keep looking until they found them.

ONE

Rose looked at the blood on her arm. She held it under her bedside light and saw pinpricks of red across her skin. She blotted them with a tissue, then watched as a shape emerged; tiny ruby bubbles that looked like jewels and formed a raw outline of gossamer wings. Rose carefully unrolled the sleeve of her shirt and covered the wound, letting the cuff hang. She hoped the blood would dry soon. Tonight, of all nights, she didn’t want any trouble with her grandmother.

Her arm was still painful, though.

Think about something else, she told herself sternly, think about meeting Joshua, about getting out of the house without her grandmother knowing where she was really going. Think about keeping her butterfly private, covered up with a sleeve. The man in the tattoo parlour had told her to leave the dressing on for five days but she hadn’t been able to wait. She’d wanted to take it off in time to see Joshua. And now she’d made it bleed.

Rose, Rose
, she said to herself,
don’t be so impatient all the time.

She could hear Anna, her grandmother, downstairs. She looked at her watch. It was almost seven and she needed to leave soon. She picked up her violin case, took out her violin and placed it on the bed. Then she packed her stuff in; her make-up, a top, a notepad, her laptop and a book. She closed the case, making sure it was fastened tightly. She shook her arm, aware of the sleeve irritating and sticking to the raw skin. She looked at her white shirt. The red was seeping through. It would stop soon, she knew that. It would scab over. Then, in days, she would see it come to life on her arm. A Blue Morpho. Her favourite butterfly.

Her violin was still lying on her bed.

She stepped across to the chest of drawers, opened the bottom drawer and made a space. She carefully placed the violin inside, arranging some clothes on top of it so that it was hidden.

Now she was ready. She had half an hour to get to the Dark Brew, the coffee shop she used in Camden. Just thirty minutes and then she would meet Joshua again for the first time in five years.

She was excited.

She didn’t mind the blood on her arm any more.

A little bit of bleeding didn’t do anyone any harm.

Now all she had to do was to get past Anna.

‘You’re wearing black and white again?’ her grandmother said.

She was standing by the front door, like a sentry, her eyes travelling up and down Rose, looking closely at her.

‘Are you telling me that I can’t wear black and white?’ Rose said stiffly.

‘A little colour wouldn’t hurt sometimes,’ her grandmother sighed.

‘I’m not keen on colours.’

‘You look like an old photograph.’

‘Is this a new rule? Am I no longer allowed to pick my own clothes?’

‘Of course you are. Don’t be dramatic. I was just suggesting a bit of colour.’

When Rose didn’t answer, her grandmother shrugged, as if in defeat, then opened a large purse and pulled out two twenty-pound notes. Rose couldn’t help but stare at her fingernails. Each one carefully manicured and decorated with a line of glitter in the shape of a half-moon.

‘How are the violin lessons going?’

‘Fine. They’re going well,’ Rose said, looking down at her boots.

‘Because I don’t hear much practising.’

‘Do you want me to give it up?’ Rose shrugged.

‘Then what would you do with yourself?’

‘There are plenty of things I can do. I could go out with friends.’

‘Those awful types from that college? Oh no, dear. I didn’t pay for you to go to boarding school for five years so that you could start loitering around with those types of people.’

‘I should be off,’ Rose said, her fingers tapping impatiently on her violin case. She would not be drawn into another row over Anna’s snobbish attitudes.

‘At least you’ve stopped wearing that black make-up on your eyes.’

‘You know me,’ Rose said, sidestepping Anna and reaching for the front door. ‘I always do what you say.’

Rose looked in the mirror of the public toilets. Her eyelids were dark grey and her lashes were thick black. She took a minute to apply some amber lipstick, using a pencil to outline the shape of her lips. When it was done she nodded to herself. She didn’t look like Rose Smith any more. Not the Rose Smith that Anna knew.

She left the toilets and headed for Parkway East station. The ticket office was closed and she passed it and walked over the bridge and down the staircase to the platform. She smacked her lips together, tasting the sweetness of the lipstick. She ran her finger along her hardened eyelashes. She was no longer wearing her white shirt. She’d changed it for a black silky top that she had bought online. It was the first time she had worn it.

What would Joshua think of the girl he hadn’t seen for five years? What would she think of him? For a second she faltered, pausing on the steps. Was she really doing this? Meeting Joshua against Anna’s express instructions? She carried on down, putting a spring in her step. But to see him again, after so long! What could be better? What did it have to do with Anna anyway? She was weary of her organising her life, telling her what to do. In two years’ time she would be at university and then she would get a flat on her own. She wouldn’t have to live with Anna any more. At twenty-one she would have her mother’s money, then she would be truly independent.

The platform was almost empty. Further along was a single figure, a young man. She glanced at him and then looked away. The electronic board showed that she’d just missed a train and it was eleven minutes until the next one was due. She should have been quicker in the toilets.

She could have taken the bus, it was only half a dozen stops, but she liked the train. She liked the way it cut through the landscape, the neat, clean track that sliced its way through the urban brickwork from one place to another. The bus, by contrast, stopped and started and wove in and out of the chaotically untidy roads. This she didn’t like. It irritated her. Clean straight lines made her feel calm.

She was aware that the young man further along the platform was moving in her direction. She frowned. She realised then that she knew him. Her shoulders tensed and her fingers tightened on the violin case. It was Ricky Harris, a student from her college. She didn’t like him. He was in her form group and seemed to pick on her constantly.

‘Hi, posh bird,’ he said.

She gave a stiff smile. It was always better to rise above this kind of stupid talk.

‘What you up to, posh bird?’

She held up her violin case.

‘What you got in that? A machine gun?’ he said, laughing out loud at his own joke. ‘You look different,’ he said. ‘You don’t look half bad.’

He was standing very close to her, in her personal space. His eyes dropped down to her sparkly top and he stared at her chest. She stepped away from him but he moved with her as though drawn by a magnet. She looked past him at the electronic board and saw that her train had been delayed by three minutes.

‘Can’t you shove off?’ she said. ‘I prefer to be on my own.’

‘That’s not very polite.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t talk to me.’

‘
I’d rather you didn’t talk to me!
’ he mimicked her voice in a silly way.

‘Push off,’ she said, stepping sideways.

‘Stuck-up cow,’ he said, following her, grabbing hold of the sleeve of her jacket just above her raw tattoo. ‘Just because you went to a private school you think that you’re better than everyone else.’

‘I don’t!’ she said, pulling her arm away.

He’d said this sort of stuff to her in college. There she was able to ignore him, to sink back into the crowd, to watch him get swallowed up by other people and other conversations. Here, on the platform, there was no way to avoid him. She stared across the tracks, letting her eyes blur. She would just blank him, not respond to a single thing he said. Then maybe he would get tired and go away. A beep sounded, distracting him. He pulled his phone out of a pocket and studied it. She strode away to the furthest point of the platform, clutching her violin case as if she was afraid of him taking it. She stopped when she got to the barrier and felt herself calm down. The track stretched off into the silent darkness. On one side were houses and on the other was the local cemetery.

This was how she liked it. On her own.

Away from people like Ricky Harris.

She didn’t socialise much in college. There were a couple of girls she liked in her English group, Sara and Maggie. Sara and Maggie had been best friends since nursery but they seemed happy for Rose to tag along for a sandwich with them at lunchtime. Mostly, though, Rose preferred to be alone. The students in her college had come through
normal
schools and she was the only one who had come from a boarding school. She sounded different to them, she acted differently to them. In the few weeks that she’d been in college she’d learned to keep herself to herself.

‘Hey!’

Ricky Harris called out to her.

‘I heard a story about you the other day.’