Dead and Buried

by Anne Cassidy

  The sound of her ringtone interrupted her thoughts.

  She picked up her mobile and saw the word Josh on the screen. Her chest tightened.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just been speaking to a policeman who you know.’

  She was thrown by his abruptness. He didn’t say, Hi, or Hello, Rose, or Rosie. She didn’t know how to answer.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said he’d been to see you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s Henry. I know him from last autumn.’

  ‘How come you didn’t let me know?’

  ‘He said he was going straight to see you . . .’

  ‘Maybe we should meet up. That’s if you want to.’

  His voice was guarded, unfriendly. It made her feel bad.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Where?’

  She could have asked him round to the house. She could have put the radiator on in her studio and then got some food for both of them. She had some new CDs she could have played but his tone of voice made her feel that he wouldn’t be happy with that.

  ‘The Dark Brew?’ he said, mentioning a cafe that they had used in the past.

  ‘Fine. When?’

  ‘Can you make it this evening, about six?’

  ‘OK.’

  The call ended. Rose looked at the phone with consternation. It seemed impossible that she and Joshua should be distant and cool with each other. She sat back in her chair, pushing her laptop away and thought gloomily about the last time she’d seen Joshua and the row they’d had.

  She’d been to the flat a lot since their friend Skeggsie had been killed. This time it was full of cardboard boxes. His things had been packed away and were ready to be shipped back to Newcastle where his father lived. Rose edged by the boxes and followed Joshua to his study. Before, when Skeggsie had been there she’d felt awkward, out of place, even unwelcome sometimes. Now she was just plain upset by his absence.

  In the study her attention was taken by a huge Ordnance Survey map of East Essex that Joshua had placed on the wall behind his computers. Three towns were pinpointed with large labels beside them; Wickby, Southwood and Hensham. Between the three towns Joshua had fixed red tape with drawing pins. It made a red triangle. From somewhere within that triangle their parents had sent them a text message. It had happened just before the New Year and it was the only evidence they had of their recent whereabouts.

  The previous two weekends she and Joshua had driven out to two of the towns and wandered aimlessly around all day long. Joshua hadn’t seen it like that, though. From his point of view they had been familiarising themselves with the territory. It was as if they were hunters looking for prey. They’d walked up and down every street and small turning. Then they’d got in the car and driven around the country lanes and paused at gated properties while Rose marked them on one of several large scale maps that Joshua had brought along with them. The days had been long and Rose had developed a headache from the stop-starting of the car, her shoulders tightening with the tension of Joshua’s demands: Have you marked that one down? Write the name. Write the road, there, it’s on the map further along. Make sure you spell it right. By the time they were on their way home Rose’s neck was aching.

  Now Rose was staring at Joshua’s back as he typed on to a spreadsheet.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at about eight on Saturday,’ he said, without turning round. ‘We need to make an early start because Wickby is the biggest of the three towns and so there’s more ground to cover.’

  There was quiet. Rose took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m not coming on Saturday,’ she said.

  He stopped typing and let the chair swivel round so that he was facing her.

  ‘You got something on at college? We could go on Sunday?’

  ‘I’m not coming at all. I think it’s a waste of time.’

  ‘What?’

  Joshua blew through his teeth.

  ‘It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ she went on. ‘The area is too big. There are too many properties. We could go up to each town every weekend for a year and still not find them.’

  ‘They’re small towns, Rosie, not like London. When we’ve mapped it out then we’ll start going round, into shops, showing our pictures of them.’

  Rose looked back to the wall and saw, at the bottom left-hand corner of the map, two computer-generated images of her mother and Brendan. They were taken from old photographs that they had. They had been enhanced; Brendan had less hair and his face was thinner; her mother had heavy-framed glasses on that made her look stern and cold.

  ‘Someone will recognise them.’

  ‘They don’t want to be found, Josh. We both know that. In any case I don’t know if I want to find them any more.’

  ‘Because of the murders?’

  ‘What else?’

  Joshua stood up. ‘That’s what makes it so important to find them. To stop them . . .’

  ‘If this is what they’ve chosen to do why is it up to us to stop them? I’ve had enough. I’ve got no energy left. I want to move on with my life.’

  Joshua huffed. He spoke under his breath. Rose didn’t quite catch the words.

  ‘What?’ she said, becoming angry. ‘WHAT?’

  ‘You’ve never really wanted to look for them. You’ve always had to be dragged along. Every single thing we’ve achieved over the last few months has been in spite of you not because of you.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It is. You’ve always been half-hearted.’

  ‘Only because I thought we’d get hurt. I didn’t want to see me or you get hurt any more!’

  He mumbled again, his hand in front of his mouth. Rose couldn’t make out what he was saying. It made her angrier.

  ‘What?’ she said, her voice raised. ‘WHAT are you saying? Spit it out!’

  ‘You got over it, didn’t you? Before we met, last September, you’d done your grieving and you were moving on.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You’d forgotten about them.’

  ‘No!’ she said.

  It wasn’t true. She’d never forgotten. How could she? It was as if she’d lost a part of herself.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me . . . and Skeggsie . . . we wouldn’t have found anything out.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for this, all this,’ Rose said, pointing at the maps and photographs, ‘Skeggsie would still be alive!’

  Joshua flinched. He sat down.

  Rose was rigid, her shoulders straight as a rod.

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ he said.

  She softened. ‘I didn’t mean it in the way that it sounded,’ she said, her voice gentle.

  Joshua leant forward, his elbows on the desk, and stared at the keyboard. Rose faltered. She looked around the room. Her eye settled on a giant glass bottle that was in the corner, the type that was usually used for plants. This one was three-quarters full with asthma inhalers: orange, purple and blue. It was something Skeggsie had done. Josh had called it an installation. It was not packed up waiting to go back to Newcastle. The sight of it touched her and made her feel worse about what she’d said.

  ‘I know how close you and Skeggs were.’

  A part of her wished she could walk out, leave the whole mess behind. Instead she went across and put her hands on his shoulders. He was hot and dishevelled. His hair looked greasy and needed a trim. His nails were bitten down. She stood very still thinking of Skeggsie, whose absence was present in every room of the flat, in every meeting they had, in every drive that they went on.

  ‘Skeggsie would want me to go on,’ Joshua said, his voice hoarse.

  ‘I know.’

  He was right. Skeggsie wouldn’t have given up.

  Then she noticed a picture up on the far corner of Joshua’s noticeboard. It was a photograph of ex-Chief Inspector James Munroe. She felt herself harden at the sight of him; the man they knew was responsible for Skeggsie’s death. It wa
s a three-quarter view of Munroe walking along the street, other people in the background. He had on a suit and over the top the long dark Crombie overcoat coat he wore. He was carrying a briefcase and looked like a businessman on his way to an important meeting. She stared at it for a moment, her feelings stirred by his blank expression, his smart clothes and purposeful gait.

  Skeggsie’s life was over but James Munroe’s was continuing.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Munroe? I took it a week or so ago. I waited outside his offices in Chelsea. I was in a bus shelter and I was able to get a good view of him.’

  Rose let out a sigh. This mission was filling up every waking moment of Joshua’s life. If he had his way it would consume hers too.

  ‘Then I followed him. He’s got this flat in Docklands.’

  ‘You followed him? Why?’

  ‘I’m collecting information about him. I intend to find out everything I can about the guy. Then when the time comes . . .’

  ‘You know what Munroe said. He told us to keep out of it. He said that Mum and Brendan would finish what they were doing and in time we would all be back together again. Why don’t we just wait?’

  ‘You think I would take any notice of what he says? He killed my friend. He lied to us about Dad and Kathy’s death. He can’t be trusted!’

  ‘He could be dangerous.’

  ‘You know what, Rose. You drop it if you want. I’ll go on for as long as it takes. I have to prove that Skeggsie didn’t die for nothing.’

  Joshua left the sentence in the air. Rose was frustrated. Any argument she might make would just sound as if she didn’t care about Skeggsie.

  ‘I have to go home now,’ she said.

  Joshua turned away from her. She left him sitting at the computer and went downstairs and out of the flat. As she closed the street door she stood for a moment listening for the sound of the bolts shooting across. It was something that Skeggsie had done when she’d first known him. He kept the door locked at all times. He’d been fearful of his own shadow. He’d changed, though, over the months, becoming more confident, ready to stand up for himself.

  But on Christmas Eve he’d stood up to the wrong person.

  She walked sadly away from the flat along Camden High Street.

  When she got home she wrote an email to Joshua telling him that she needed some time on her own.

  She stared at her laptop, flat and closed on her bed. For two weeks they hadn’t been in touch. In the past they’d loved spending time together. Now it took a dead girl buried in their garden to make them get in contact with each other.

  At just after five thirty Rose picked up her bag and her coat and made her way downstairs.

  ‘Bye,’ she called and heard Anna reply from the kitchen.

  She left the house, feeling uneasy. What would Joshua say about this new development? As she walked along she pictured the garden at Brewster Road. There was a patio that they used to sit on. It had yellow paving stones and a small wall that divided it off from an area of scrubby grass that Brendan tried to cut occasionally. Sometimes Joshua set up goalposts there and he and Brendan would take turns trying to score. Beyond that there were dense shrubs and bushes. A path disappeared into the undergrowth and ended at a back gate.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  A voice interrupted her thoughts and she felt a hand on her arm. She stopped and looked round. A man in jeans and a parka jacket stood there. He took his hand off her arm and in his other hand he was holding something out to her. A card.

  ‘My name is Jimmy Dobbs and I’m a reporter for a Sunday newspaper.’

  She stared at him. He proffered the card.

  ‘I wondered if you had any comments to make on the body that was found in the garden of the house you lived in with your mother and her partner, Brendan Johnson?’

  Rose frowned. She turned abruptly and walked away. She heard him follow her.

  ‘My newspaper is very respectable. If you speak to me first the tabloids won’t come near you.’

  She felt his hand on her shoulder. She spun round.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she said.

  ‘Just take my card and I’ll go away.’

  She stared at him. He had a streak of grey hair at the front and was wearing a single earphone as though he was taking instructions from someone else, like a TV newsreader. She snatched the card from him and walked off. When she got to the corner of the High Street she turned round and saw that he had gone.

  She chucked the card into the first bin that she passed.

  THREE

  Joshua was already at a table when she arrived at the Dark Brew. He was drinking from a mug and nodded when he saw her. Even though the tiny cafe was almost empty he had his coat thrown over the chair opposite, saving it for her. She went straight to the counter and bought a peppermint tea. Sitting down, she started speaking quickly to get over the awkwardness.

  ‘I’ve been on the web,’ she said. ‘The papers are linking this girl’s body to Mum and Brendan.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I actually read about it this morning before the policeman came.’

  ‘Really? How come you didn’t call me?’

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted to be called.’

  ‘No, but with this development . . .’

  ‘That’s the only reason you’re here?’

  ‘Yes. No . . .’

  She focused on his hair then. He’d had it cut very short, cropped almost, so that he looked like a soldier. He was wearing a scruffy maroon V-neck jumper that she hadn’t seen before. The cuffs were turned back as if it was for someone bigger than him.

  ‘The policeman asked me if I knew the dead girl,’ he said, running his finger round the rim of his cup.

  ‘He told you who it was?’

  ‘The police think it might be Daisy Lincoln. She lived down the street from us.’

  Daisy Lincoln. Rose knew the name and had a vague picture in her head of a teenage girl with long black hair walking down the street arm in arm with Sandy, Rose and Joshua’s old babysitter.

  ‘Daisy and her family moved to Chingford in the July.’

  ‘That’s awful. I sort of remember her . . .’

  ‘I knew her a bit. She worked in a newsagent’s on the High Street and I used to chat to her. I had a bit of a crush on her. I was fourteen, she was eighteen. Nothing was ever going to happen but I thought about her a bit and I used to hang round the shop where she worked. Then when her family moved she stopped working there. Later, I heard through the grapevine that she wasn’t living at home any more. I guess I forgot about her. The policeman asked me if I was involved with her. I just laughed in his face.’

  Rose pictured Henry sitting across the table from Joshua in the narrow kitchen of the flat. No doubt Henry had said something like ‘Point taken!’ when Joshua laughed.

  ‘They can’t seriously be linking this to Mum and Brendan.’

  Joshua shook his head.

  ‘I know they probably don’t have the information that the Cold Case team have but even so this happened in August. They disappeared in November.’

  Joshua shrugged.

  ‘And,’ she continued, ‘this will probably be . . . well, a sex crime maybe . . . And Mum and Brendan were . . .’

  ‘You mean,’ Joshua said, lowering his voice, ‘they didn’t murder eighteen-year-old girls? Just gangsters and child killers?’

  Rose stiffened. She looked round, aware of the young man behind the counter staring at them. Had he heard what Joshua just said? His hair was gelled so that it stood bolt upright and he had a piercing in his lip. It made him look slightly sinister. Joshua was drinking his coffee, unperturbed. His hair was bristly; it looked sharp as if it might hurt her if she touched it. Inside she was all screwed up. There was so much she wanted to say to him and yet broaching it was like opening a door she did not want to go through.

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Have you . . . Did you
go to Wickby?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How did you manage? On your own?’

  ‘I wasn’t on my own. You remember that girl, Clara? From uni? She came with me.’

  Rose was instantly stung. She remembered Clara. The one time she’d seen her she’d been wearing a duffle coat and her long blonde hair had been loose over her shoulders. She had been looking adoringly at Joshua and it had plunged Rose into a fog of jealousy.

  ‘You didn’t tell her anything about Mum and Brendan and the notebooks?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘I told her I was researching something about population distribution in rural areas and that I was using that village as an exemplar.’

  Rose pictured them driving through country lanes, Clara with the maps on her lap, highlighting properties along the way, changing pens and writing down streets and lanes and approximate locations. Maybe Clara was all buzzed up about helping her boyfriend with his college course.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to know. I thought you were moving on in your life.’

  Moving on in your life. He said it with sarcasm as if she was doing something ridiculous.

  ‘Of course I would want to know – it’s just that I don’t think you’ll find anything.’

  ‘Why ask then?’

  ‘Why are you being so vile to me?’ she whispered. ‘All I did was back off. I wanted a break. After what I’ve . . . we’ve been through over these last months anyone would need a break.’

  ‘Then the trail goes cold.’

  ‘You’re talking like a hunter!’

  Rose remembered thinking that very thing earlier.

  ‘In a way I am. I’m going to find them. Everything I’ve done over the last few months has made me more determined, not less.’

  Rose drank her tea, using the long spoon to move the peppermint leaves around the glass. Why were they fighting? She had missed him. She had regretted her email saying that she wanted to back off. Why was she keeping it up now?

  ‘Are there any bridges in Wickby?’ she eventually said.

  He looked up quickly and his face broke into a smile.

  ‘Actually there is one. Constructed in 1829 and built of coursed squared granite. It has these two segmental arches which are brick. Very impressive. It’s only wide enough for one car to cross at a time. Perfect for 1829. A little outdated now but very pretty.’