Butterfly Grave (Murder Notebooks) (10 page)

Rose turned the page, not wanting to become emotional. Some work photos showed Kathy with colleagues. Rose’s eyes swept across them. She might have known some of them at the time. They might have been the people who rang up to speak to her mum or who came round for dinner parties clutching a bottle of wine. But it was so long ago that none of the faces rang any bells. She focused on one picture which she was sure must have been taken by Brendan although she couldn’t explain why. Her mum was wearing a dark suit and her hair was pulled back at the base of her neck. She had make-up on and her glasses were straight and neat. There was only a hint of a smile on her lips as if she were doing her best to look serious. She was a police officer. She worked on cold cases. She was important and professional.

She looked from one to another, her mother’s face smiling out from the past. For a few moments she felt all the pleasure of seeing her so close, like an unexpected meeting, a surprise reunion, and then there was the slow agonising awareness that this was just a mirage, that her mother was as far away from her as she had been for the last five years and more. The photos were just a cruel reminder of what she had once had.

Just then she heard the head teacher walking along the hallway downstairs. He was talking loudly like teachers do. Joshua’s voice was just a whisper underneath it. The front door opened and closed. Rose went downstairs and found Joshua sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

‘I don’t feel well,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a few hours?’

He nodded.

‘That’s Stu’s stuff from his locker at school,’ he said, pointing at the cardboard box which was now on the floor. ‘They’re having building work or something and lockers had to be cleared.’

‘I’ll put it away,’ Rose said.

Joshua went out of the room. After having some breakfast Rose carried the box up to Stuart’s room. She went quietly so as not to wake Joshua. The room was untidy and Rose remembered that Joshua had searched it the previous day. There were piles of papers on the floor around Stuart’s desk and the duvet was rumpled and crooked. She placed the box on top of the bed. She decided to unpack it. There were clothes and boots as well as books and files. She put them on the bed. She picked out two football team mugs and placed them on the bedside table. Underneath was a games console and a couple of chargers and some connection leads entangled. There were also a couple of clip frames with pictures of Joshua.

At the very bottom was a money box.

It felt like it was made from steel and was the size of a hardback book. She wondered if it was full of money, notes perhaps. It was locked but not heavy. She upended it and something moved inside. A single item slid from one end to the other. It didn’t sound like cash. She placed it on the bed.

Then she went out on to the landing. There was silence from Joshua’s room. She was feeling tired and a bit chilly. She picked up the single duvet from her bed and went down, to the living room. She put on the television and lay on the sofa, covering herself up with the duvet. She gazed at the programmes, not really paying much attention. Every now and again she glanced over at the window and saw the snow drifting lazily down.

She dozed off to sleep.

‘Rose, wake up, Rose!’

She jerked awake and saw Joshua standing in front of her holding something.

‘I found this! Look, I found this in Stu’s things.’

She sat up, her head ringing slightly. She glanced at the clock. It was almost midday. She’d slept for nearly two hours. Joshua was dressed and was holding the cash box she’d found earlier. It had its lid up.

‘Look,’ Joshua said, sitting down beside her. ‘There was a key in Stu’s desk that opened this.’

Inside the money box was a mobile phone. It was old-fashioned. It looked like pay as you go and Rose wondered what the fuss was about. Stu had an old mobile that he kept at school. So what?

‘The battery was dead. I found a charger in among the other things you’d unpacked. Once I plugged it in I was able to access the data!’

Joshua was excited, running at full speed, but Rose was still heavy with sleep and dazed by being woken up in the middle of it. She took the mobile and looked at the screen. It showed
Call History
. There was a list of phone numbers, a couple of them the same but mostly they were different. She scrolled down it and saw that it went back to the previous January.

‘Look at the dates!’

Each call was made on the same date. The twenty-fourth of every month – the same dates that were ringed in the diary that she had found. Except in December when there had been three extra calls.

‘This is a phone that Stu kept locked away at work. There was no way I could stumble on this. He kept this phone for a single call that he got every month.’

‘From different numbers.’

‘Mostly.’

‘Why don’t you ring the numbers?’

‘I was thinking that,’ Joshua said, reaching for the mobile.

‘Not on this phone. The number will show up.’

‘You’re right. I’ll get my mobile.’

He went off. She heard him run up the stairs. Fully awake now, she threw the duvet back and put the mobile on the coffee table. She stretched her arms up and moved her shoulders.

It was twelve o’clock.

Suddenly the mobile rang. It startled her. The ringtone was like an old-fashioned telephone. She watched it for a second and then snatched it up.

‘It’s ringing,’ she shouted.

There was no reply from upstairs and she let it ring another couple of times before pressing the receive button and putting the phone to her ear. She didn’t speak.

‘Stu, it’s me,’ a man’s voice said. ‘Stu, I’m sorry about the other night. I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.’

Rose felt her mouth go dry. She heard Joshua’s footsteps come down the stairs. The man’s voice continued.

‘Stu, don’t be pissed off. I’ll try and sort some money out. I told you I wouldn’t let you down.’

Joshua was in the room. He was looking at her quizzically.

‘I thought we weren’t going to make the calls on that phone?’ he said.

Rose tried to block out Joshua’s words. She turned away from him to concentrate on what was being said.

‘For God’s sake, Stu, grow up!’

‘Who is this?’ Rose said. ‘Who’s speaking?’

The phone went dead. She took it away from her ear.

‘What?’ Josh said.

But she couldn’t speak to him. She had to write down what had been said before it went out of her head.

‘I need a pen.’

In the kitchen she pulled the drawer open and scrabbled round to find a pen. Then she grabbed a junk mail envelope that was on the side. She started to write on it.

‘What’s going on, Rose?’

‘Don’t speak to me. Just for a minute. Don’t say a word!’

She wrote the lines as she remembered them. Four times he spoke with gaps in between. Four lines. It wasn’t verbatim but it was as clear as she could remember.

‘Rose, WHAT?’ Joshua said, looking angry.

‘The phone rang at twelve o’clock. It was Brendan speaking.’

‘Dad?’

‘I’d swear to it. It was his voice, Josh. I’m sure it was. This is what he said. He must have thought it was Stuart who answered. Here’s what he said. I wrote the words down as best I could.’

‘My dad, on the phone? My
dad
spoke on that phone?’

‘He did. He thought he was speaking to Stu.’

‘What’s the number? Read out the number to me. If I use a different phone he might answer.’

She read out the number on the screen.

Joshua punched it into his mobile and held it to his ear. His face was rapt, his shoulders tensed, rounded with anticipation. He was hoping to hear his dad’s voice. She held her breath while he had the phone clamped to his ear. Then he lowered it. He seemed to deflate.

‘No answer.’

‘It was Brendan’s voice. I know it was,’ she said.

‘I wish I could have heard it,’ he whispered.

ELEVEN

An hour later Skeggsie came round. Rose was watching for him out of the window. For once she’d been the one to summon him. He’d been going out somewhere with his dad, he’d said, and would come later but she’d insisted.
You have to come now! This is important!

She opened the door, relieved to see him. He had his hood up and shook off loose snow on to the doorstep before stepping into the hall.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.

Joshua was upstairs in his uncle’s study. They could hear drawers opening and shutting. Earlier she’d followed him up there and tried to talk to him but he seemed frenetic, determined to search again, to take the place apart. She’d put her hand on his arm and said that they should sit down, have a hot drink, something to eat, think it through. But he shrugged her off and continued, dumping stuff on the floor, making piles of paper from places he’d already looked through.

It made her unhappy to see him like that.

That’s why she had rung Skeggsie.

‘He’s been like this ever since I told him about the phone call.’

She followed Skeggsie into the kitchen. Looking around she noticed that the room was untidy, breakfast things not washed up. Skeggsie picked Stuart’s mobile off the kitchen table and turned it over as if the answer was there inside it. He looked at the safe and the keys.

‘How can you be so sure it was Brendan’s voice?’ he said.

‘I know his voice. He lived with me for three years. I just know it was him.’

‘And he rang at twelve, like a prearranged time.’

‘On the twenty-fourth of every month.’

‘Why circle the date in a diary? It’s easy to remember.’

‘Maybe he did that to identify which day of the week it fell on. Then he knew whether to have the phone here or at work.’

‘Maybe.’

Skeggsie was thoughtful.

‘This is weird. His uncle must know where Brendan is. Maybe Stu is a
part
of whatever it is.’

Whatever it is. The notebooks. Would they ever really know what it was?

Skeggsie walked up and down for a few moments. Rose saw he’d had his hair cut; razor cut, very short. It was just the way his new friend Eddie wore his hair. It made her feel funny for a second as if Skeggsie was edging away from them in some way. The sound of Joshua moving stuff around upstairs seemed louder and a little manic. It gave her a sense of growing unease. With Joshua like this, emotional and unstable, she needed Skeggsie around.

‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ she said pointlessly.

He gave a tiny shake of his head, dismissing the subject. He stopped moving around. He took his coat off and hung it round the back of the chair and rubbed his hands together in a businesslike way.

‘I know we said we would postpone all this stuff about the notebooks until we got back to London but we can’t now. Now that this has happened we have to face up to it. His Uncle Stuart is linked in some way.’

‘Maybe the phone calls were simply Brendan trying to check that Joshua was well?’

‘OK, but the fact is that Stuart knew that Brendan was alive and he kept it from Joshua. Why would he do that unless he knew why they’d disappeared? Unless he understood it all?’

‘Because his brother asked him to?’

‘But to lie to Josh? To pretend? There’s a bigger reason for all this and we just don’t know it yet. We have to tell Josh about the page I’ve decoded. And there’s the SUV. If someone’s following him it could mean danger of some sort. We can’t let that happen again.’

Rose nodded. She didn’t like to agree with Skeggsie but she knew he was right. She was concerned that these things were sending Joshua to the edge, maybe even out of control. They couldn’t leave all this until they returned to London. It had literally followed them here.

‘I’ll get him down here. We can tell him this other stuff together. Then we’ll have to make a plan.’

Skeggsie was bristling. He was always in his element when there were things to be done. It irked Rose and yet she had known he would be like this. She’d called him because he was utterly loyal and completely reliable. He was never happier than when he was doing something for Joshua. He went upstairs and she sat down and waited. After what seemed like a long time they came down talking quietly. When they got into the kitchen Joshua looked wrecked.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

Skeggsie showed him the page he’d decoded from the notebook. Rose read over Joshua’s shoulder.

Operation VB

Viktor Baranski at an event in his restaurant, Eastern Fare, July 15 at 17.30.

She looked up at Skeggsie. He was staring at Joshua fiddling with his collar as he usually did when he was nervous. She focused on the paper again, at the important section.

Once in custody Baranski should be passed on to B.

Change cars.