by Anne Cassidy
‘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.
B will take him to Stiffkey.
B will hand him over to F.
B will wait until operation is complete.
B will help dispose of evidence.
‘I don’t get it,’ Joshua said.
‘It seems to imply that Brendan was involved with the abduction of Viktor Baranski,’ Skeggsie said bluntly.
Thank goodness Skeggsie didn’t add his other concern – that Brendan had been somehow involved with the Russian secret service in the killing of Viktor Baranski. Rose knew that Joshua couldn’t take that on top of everything else.
‘And,’ Skeggsie went on, ‘Rose noticed that a car has been following us. It was at the services on the way up here and it was in the street outside for a couple of days. It’s a silver SUV, registration number GT50 DNT. There was a woman sitting in it each time you saw it, isn’t that right, Rose?’
‘And a dog.’
Joshua looked at Rose.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you. You had enough on your mind.’
‘Can we find out who owns the car?’
‘I’m trying. Obviously, if I had my London hardware I could do it more quickly but I only have my laptop so it’s taking time. I’ve been in touch with Eddie and he’s helping.’
‘This is all adding up to something I don’t like,’ Joshua said. ‘My dad seems to have been part of something underhand. My uncle knew he was still alive and let me live here for five years without telling me.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t his choice,’ Rose said softly. ‘Maybe Brendan put pressure on him.’
Joshua shook his head. ‘Stu was a strong bloke. He wouldn’t have done anything he didn’t want to. Maybe . . .’
‘What?’
‘Maybe he was part of it in some way.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, Rosie!’ Joshua said, his voice raised. ‘If I knew exactly what happened to my dad then I’d have some idea of how he was involved.’
Rose flinched at his anger.
‘And my mum,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Maybe if you stop thinking of your dad and your uncle then you might remember that my mum is part of this as well.’
‘Hey! You two! This isn’t getting us anywhere.’
‘Sorry, Rosie,’ Joshua said, reaching out and grabbing her hand. ‘I just feel like I want to hit someone.’
‘Not me?’
‘No,’ he smiled.
Skeggsie was standing by the table, holding the key ring up. Two keys hung down. He was looking closely at them.
‘Keys to the money box,’ Joshua said.
‘There’s two.’
‘You always get a spare.’
‘But they’re two different keys.’
Joshua took the key ring from Skeggsie and held the two keys together.
‘They are.’
‘That might mean there’s another box somewhere. Something else that your uncle has hidden. This must be the key for it.’
‘But you’ve looked everywhere,’ Rose said.
Joshua stood up. He dropped the two keys on the table.
‘He’s put it somewhere that he knows I will never look. Like that was in his school,’ he said, pointing at the mobile phone.
‘Where, though?’
‘We looked in every single place. Unless . . .’
Joshua went out of the room and up the stairs. Skeggsie followed him. Rose went after them. He went into his uncle’s bedroom and stood at one corner of his bed. With an effort he edged the bed to the side.
‘Help me,’ he said.
Skeggsie got to the other side.
‘We’ll pull it out as far as we can. I can get underneath. Maybe he’s loosened the floorboards.’
It was a double bed and hard to shift. They edged it along as far as it would go, so that it was flat up against the wardrobe doors. Josh lay down on his stomach and slid under the bed.
‘Get the bedside lamp down.’
Rose lifted the lamp down and shone it under the bed. Joshua stayed there for a few moments and then slid out. He shook his head.
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br /> ‘It looks untouched. No cuts in the floorboards. Nothing.’
Rose replaced the bedside light. On the cabinet she saw an envelope. On the front of it were the words Last Will and Testament in a strong black font. Written in handwriting underneath was Stuart Johnson. Rose picked it up. She hadn’t seen it there earlier when she’d been unpacking the box.
‘I found his will in this drawer. It wasn’t even with all his proper paperwork,’ Joshua said.
‘You tried the loft and the garage?’ Skeggsie said.
Joshua nodded glumly.
‘It has to be somewhere that you would never go,’ Skeggsie said.
‘There’s just one other place.’
‘Where?’
‘The MG!’
‘What?’
‘The car that Stu has been renovating for the last five years. It was the one thing he got stroppy with me about. Don’t ever touch it, he said. It’s my pride and joy.’
Joshua was out of the room and off down the stairs. He went into the kitchen and through the door that linked the house with the garage. Rose was behind him. Poppy forced her way through. Skeggsie followed. The garage was freezing. In the middle of it sat a car covered with tarpaulin. Rose hugged herself while Joshua began to fiddle with ropes and ties. After a few minutes’ exertion he pulled the tarpaulin off the sports car. He stood back, the rubberised covering falling about him on the ground. Rose wondered whether she should gather it up.
‘I don’t know where it could be. It’s not exactly big, is it?’
It was a two-seater car. Most of it was blue but one wing was a dark grey. It had no tyres and was up on blocks. Joshua opened the door and pushed the seats forward.
‘There’s barely enough room for two people to sit in here,’ he said.
He went to the back of the car and opened the boot. There was a spare tyre screwed down. He looked round the garage and then stepped across and picked up a spanner. He began to loosen the wheel nut, grunting several times until it came off.
‘Hold that,’ he said, giving Rose the nut and spanner.
He pulled the wheel off but there was nothing underneath. He stood still one hand pushing his hair back.
‘Has this car ever been driven?’ Skeggsie said.
He shook his head. He was clearly upset.
‘What about there?’ he said, pointing at the bonnet.
‘The engine?’
‘Maybe he was rebuilding that as well.’
Joshua didn’t answer. He looked perturbed and walked round to the front of the car and fiddled with something. There was a click and the bonnet came up. He pulled out a rod and fitted it into the bodywork and the bonnet stayed up.
‘Well, well . . .’
Rose looked in. There were some sections of engine, oily and black. On the right-hand side there was something covered with a tea towel. Joshua took it out and let the towel drop. It was a steel box like the one they had in the kitchen. This one was the size of a ring binder, slim and locked. Without a word Joshua walked back to the kitchen, Rose and Skeggsie following him, closing the cold of the garage out. He placed the box on the table. Skeggsie picked up the key and opened the box.
Inside was a pile of newspaper clippings. Joshua took them out.
Underneath was a notebook. The three of them stared at it.
It was exactly the same type as the two they already had. Skeggsie picked it up and placed it on the table, carefully as though it might break. Then he opened the first page. There, just like the other two books, was a photograph. This time it wasn’t a man, or a teenage boy. It was a young girl wearing a school uniform and smiling at the camera. Underneath was handwriting, five words printed out in sturdy capitals.
JUDY GREAVES THE BUTTERFLY MURDER
TWELVE
‘The Butterfly Murder?’ Rose said. ‘What is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joshua said, pulling the book from her.
Skeggsie was looking closely at the pile of newspaper clippings. In among them was a folded large brown envelope that had been roughly opened. Rose looked at it all with mounting frustration. What did this have to do with anything else? They didn’t need more information. They needed to make some sense of the information they already had.
‘There’s no code in this book. Look at the first page. It’s handwritten. It’s Stu’s handwriting. Then it’s just newspaper stories. Stuck in, page after page.’
‘Let’s see. Put it here on the table so that we can all read it,’ said Skeggsie.
Joshua flattened the book on to the surface of the table. The three of them stood very still, reading the text that was in front of them.
The Butterfly Murder
June 2002. Ten-year-old Judy Greaves went missing. She was in a car in a supermarket car park with her older sister. Her sister got out of the car at one point to go and remind the mother to buy something. When she returned the car was empty.
The sister hadn’t been able to find the mother and was now afraid of being in trouble. So she did nothing until the mother came back. At first she told the mother that Judy had gone into the shop to find her. The mother ran back into the shop and looked everywhere. She went back to the car and still there was no sign of her. She alerted the staff. The police were called and the area scoured. No one in the car park saw anything. A nearby CCTV camera picked up an image of a black Ford Explorer leaving the area soon after. There was a man in the driving seat and a girl in the passenger seat.
There was no other sighting of interest.
Five days later a body was discovered in a room in an empty house, 6 Primrose Crescent. The house belonged to an elderly man who had gone into care. The girl was found by an estate agent who had come to meet a client. The room was unfurnished except for pictures on the wall of mounted butterflies. The walls were covered in these pictures as though someone had been a serious collector. The crime became known as the Butterfly Murder.
After a thorough examination human DNA was obtained from hair fibres that were found on the floor of the room. Those fibres belonged to thirty-eight-year-old Simon Lister, a painter and decorator from Newcastle who had a criminal record for abuse of a minor. He also ran a dark blue Ford Explorer.
He was charged with the murder of Judy Greaves. The trial look place almost a year to the day that she went missing.
At the trial Simon Lister’s defence was that six months previously he had decorated that room for the owner, Mr Timothy Lucas, before he was taken into care. His barrister made the case that in an empty, unused house hair fibres could lie for a long time.
Simon Lister was acquitted.
Joshua checked that they’d all read it and then he turned the pages of the notebook. The newspaper clippings were in date order. The headlines read like a narrative. Ten-Year-Old Girl Abducted from Morrisons’ Car Park; Please Give Us Our Daughter Back, Mother Pleads; CCTV Footage Used to Identify Car; Black Ford Involved in Snatch of Girl: Mother Makes Second Plea; Re-enactment of Abduction in Morrisons’ Car Park; Child’s Body Discovered in Empty House; Room of Death Wallpapered in Butterflies; The Butterfly Collector; Girl Found Dead Among Specimens; Six Hundred Attend Butterfly Girl Funeral; 38-Year-Old Man Arrested For Butterfly Girl; DNA Evidence Will Pin Down Butterfly Murder; Butterfly Murder Trial Begins; Judy Held For Days Before Murder; Trial Halted As Family Members Abuse Accused; Butterfly Jury Out; Not Guilty of Judy’s Murder; Butterfly Accused Found Not Guilty.
Joshua turned the pages. After that the lined pages were empty.
‘This letter,’ Skeggsie said, as he flattened it on to the table.
‘It’s Dad’s writing.’
The letter was dated 18th May, 2004. The handwriting was neat, slanted, sometimes difficult to read.
Dear Stu,
Thanks for sending me the information about this terrible case. I’ve returned the scrapbook you sent. I hadn’t realised it happened in Primrose Crescent, so close to you. The details are shocking. I’d read about it in the national papers of course
– who could forget the Butterfly Murder – and of course the terrible business of the killer getting off. Getting away with murder is not a new thing but it’s particularly upsetting when it concerns a child. I expect the police in Newcastle have Simon Lister in their sights.
My new job is working on cold cases and you’re right that these are old unsolved crimes. Most of the stuff I look into is to do with organised crime. You wouldn’t believe how many so-called respectable people get away with murder (and worse) by organising other people to do their dirty work for them. So my colleagues and I spend months on a particular network, say drugs or trafficking, and sometimes we have success and sometimes we achieve nothing.
What I’m going to say here is harsh. The murder of a ten-year-old girl does not fit into the cold cases brief. Especially as it seems clear that they know who the murderer is but simply don’t have the evidence. It’s really up to the local force to continue investigating it. My boss has his ‘targets’ and this case is not among them. Really sorry.
I know you said that the girl’s sister is in your form group at school. Dreadful for her but lucky she’s got you as her teacher. You’ll look after her, I know you will.
Josh is well and I’ve met this new woman, Kathy. She’s just been transferred to our team. She’s pretty amazing and I think things might work out for us. She’s got a daughter, Rose, who plays the violin.
I was thinking of coming up to see you in August, maybe the weekend of the 23rd. Kathy and I could drive up on Friday night and come back Monday. Her daughter can stay with a friend and so can Josh. It’s ages since I saw you and I’d like you to meet her!
Sorry again about not being able to help regarding the Butterfly Murder. Bren
The three of them were quiet. Skeggsie had turned away and was looking at the remaining cuttings which he’d spread over the table. He seemed to be sorting them out into some order. Rose read over the letter again. Joshua was muttering.
‘Stu must have asked Dad to take on this case. This girl who was murdered. He must have sent this book of clippings to Dad and then Dad said he couldn’t.’