Butterfly Grave (Murder Notebooks)

by Anne Cassidy

  ‘So how come he’s dead?’

  James Munroe looked uncomfortable. He crossed one leg over the other then uncrossed it.

  ‘We asked someone to speak to him, threaten him, if necessary. Not someone in our organisation, you understand. An old contact from the days when Margaret and I worked in the area. This person did what he was told. He spoke to your friend, perhaps roughed him up a little. But your friend put up a fight.’

  Rose stared at the man. He spoke to your friend, perhaps roughed him up a little. It was a euphemism for saying that some thug pulled Skeggsie into the alley and gave him a beating while at the same time demanding that he stop the search for their parents.

  ‘Not exactly an equal match – your associate with a knife and Skeggsie using his fists,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Well, Joshua, you should ask yourself who exactly put this young man in danger. If you hadn’t involved him he might still be alive.’

  Was he saying that it was Joshua’s fault that Skeggsie was killed?

  Joshua pulled at the cuff on his arm and tried to kick his legs out in the direction of James Munroe. Munroe flinched.

  ‘What happened to Skeggsie?’ Rose insisted.

  ‘Your friend fought back. He was ferocious we were told. Our associate was cornered. He hadn’t expected any trouble. He said he had no choice.’

  Tears sprang into Rose’s eyes.

  Why did you put up a fight? she thought. Why this time?

  But she knew the answer. Skeggsie had been fired up after the drama in the pub smoking area. He’d wanted to stand his ground. Possibly he’d thought that by standing up to this person he was making a stand against all the bullies he’d ever faced, even making a stand against Joshua’s protectiveness. Instead of accepting a couple of punches and threats he had put up a proper fight for the first time in his life.

  ‘We are sorry. Our organisation never meant for this to happen but the boy was digging into things he couldn’t possibly understand and maybe, in the long run, putting our operatives’ lives at risk, including those of your parents. I can’t say any more about it than that.’

  Rose didn’t speak. James Munroe was looking less formal than she’d ever seen him, wearing a jumper over a T-shirt. His shoes had been heavily polished, neat brown leather lace-ups. The upset hadn’t affected his sense of wardrobe.

  ‘He’s dead because he looked up a car registration number?’ Joshua said, his voice breaking.

  ‘No. If we’d wanted to hide Margaret’s identity we would have changed the plates on her car. No, Margaret runs a respectable security company. I am a civil servant. We have nothing to hide.’

  ‘Why then?’ Rose said.

  ‘Because of all this.’ James Munroe swivelled round to the brown suitcase and flipped up the lid. ‘All this meddling. It seems that your young friend spent hours and hours trying to decode these books which should never have existed in the first place. Unfortunately one of our organisation took it into his head to document every mission that we carried out.’

  He took out one of the notebooks by the corner as if it was something disgusting that he couldn’t bear to hold. Rose thought of Frank Richards, the man with the suitcase on wheels. He’d been the first person to tell them that their parents were alive. Joshua had stolen the notebooks from him and Skeggsie had revelled in trying to decipher the code. It had taken him weeks to decode a couple of pages.

  ‘You stole Skeggsie’s suitcase?’

  ‘We are security specialists. It’s not hard for us to enter a property.’

  ‘You stabbed him?’ Joshua said.

  Munroe shook his head. ‘We are a professional organisation, Joshua. We’re not criminals. But perhaps we should get down to the real point of this meeting.’

  ‘What is the point of this meeting?’

  ‘It’s time for your parents to speak to you. Maybe you will listen to them.’

  Rose sat up with start. Joshua looked around warily.

  ‘Maybe you will finally understand how important our work is.’

  Rose stared at the door, expecting it to open.

  Was this the moment that they would see their parents again?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  James Munroe leant down to the carpet and picked up a laptop. He opened it and sat it on his lap. Rose felt her hopes dashed in a second. There was going to be no physical meeting after all. Just some communication from them, an email perhaps, some words that Munroe would claim that they had written. It would be like what happened weeks ago when he took them to Childerley Waters and showed them a picture of a car that had been pulled from the reservoir weeks before. Their parents’ bodies had sat in that car for five years, he’d lied.

  Now he was going to try something similar.

  She would not believe a word of it.

  Joshua was staring dully at Munroe as though the same thoughts were going through his head.

  ‘Your parents have asked me to pass this on to you,’ Munroe said.

  Rose crossed her arms and stared at the carpet.

  ‘They are in great danger . . .’

  ‘From Lev Baranski?’ Joshua said.

  ‘From various sources. They are in hiding. They are working on a mission and if their cover is blown they will be killed. I can assure you that is the truth. But don’t take it from me. Hear it from them.’

  ‘A mission?’ Joshua said. ‘So it is about national security?’

  Munroe shook his head emphatically. He tapped on some keys and then turned the laptop round so that it was facing them. Rose moved forward but Joshua could not. How was he supposed to read the email?

  After a couple of seconds a still picture appeared.

  It was an image of Brendan and her mother.

  Rose gasped. Joshua grabbed her arm with his free hand.

  Rose got closer still. It was a head and shoulders shot. Brendan was in front, closest to the camera, his head bigger; her mother was behind him, only two-thirds of her face showing. Brendan was clean-shaven with no hair and he was wearing pebble-shaped glasses. He looked thinner but Rose would still have recognised him. Her mother’s hair was pulled back and she was wearing heavy framed black glasses. She was pale and seemed to be clenching her jaw.

  Munroe pressed a couple of buttons and the still image started to move. Brendan’s face had a puzzled look on it, her mother was staring intently at the screen.

  ‘Is it working?’ her mother said.

  ‘I think so, here . . .’ Brendan said, his fingers coming up to the screen.

  It made Rose’s heart soar to see them.

  ‘Rose and Joshua, I know you’re watching this and I know that both of you must be angry about what has happened but I wanted – we wanted – you to know that what we have done is for the greater good.’

  He paused as if he was thinking before he went ahead. Her mother seemed to say something in his ear.

  ‘Kathy wants you to know how much she loves you, Rose, and of course, Josh, the same goes for me.’

  Rose felt her hand go out to the screen as if she might touch it.

  ‘Rose,’ Brendan said, coughing, his hand over his mouth. ‘You spoke to me a couple of hours ago on Stu’s phone. I had no idea about his accident. I was there with him on the cliff but he was OK when I left. I don’t know what to say . . . And Josh, I believe you tried to contact us on the same number . . .’

  A couple of hours ago? Rose spoke to Brendan on Christmas Eve, almost a week ago. Her mother’s face came more into view. She looked tense and unhappy. It was a Skype recording and the quality wasn’t good. It was jerky and looked as though it might disintegrate at any moment.

  Brendan carried on speaking.

  ‘Josh and Rose, I’m going to try and explain to you why we are doing what we are doing. Then you have to back off. It’s dangerous for you to get anywhere near us. There are people who are looking for us and if they think you know anything then your lives are in danger.’

  Kathy edged closer to the camera. ‘Rose,
this is why we left. This is why we had to go.’

  Rose’s mouth went dry. Her mother’s hand was out as if she might reach through the screen to touch her.

  ‘I’ll start at the beginning. In 2004 just after Kathy and I got together I visited Stuart in Newcastle. I took Kathy with me. Stuart was very wound up about one of his students whose sister had been murdered two years before. The man had got away with it. Stuart had become obsessed about it. While we were up there he got very drunk and showed me where the man lived. He also showed me a knife he’d put aside in order to kill this man. I tried to placate him and promised him my team would help with the investigation. I was really worried about him. He seemed unhinged. I thought he had calmed down but that night he stormed out and came back later covered in blood. I couldn’t believe that he’d done such a thing and he told me that he’d dropped the knife in the man’s garden. The killing was premeditated. I knew he would spend a lifetime in prison for it and I couldn’t let that happen. I went round to the garden where the dead man was and I combed the crime scene. I found the knife and I disposed of it. He was my brother, I had to help him out. In the days that followed the police found evidence of this man’s intention to kill another girl and they also found belongings of other missing girls. Stuart was ecstatic. It wasn’t a murder, he said, it was punishment. It was an execution.’

  Brendan stopped.

  ‘What the police found in Simon Lister’s house would have shocked the most experienced officers. Some of it came out in the papers. Kathy and I were back in London but because we were serving officers it was easy for us to find out the facts. This made us think about the things we were doing, the cases we were involved in.’

  Rose’s attention was on her mother’s face. Her eyes seemed hollowed out behind her glasses. She looked tired and older, as if more than twice five years had passed since Rose last saw her.

  ‘Many of us, people like James Munroe and Frank Richards, we were all fed up with criminals literally getting away with murder. We worked on cold cases. We saw it every day. Men who had been responsible for murder and drug dealing, trafficking and prostitution. But these weren’t the men who went to prison or who were even arrested. They sat in plush homes and lived off the earnings of legions of small-time crooks. So we decided to do something about it. We decided to mete out justice. And when people were guilty of murder, people like Viktor Baranski, we punished them.’

  ‘No . . .’ Joshua said.

  ‘I can’t say any more because the less you know the better. I’ve told you this now to stop you looking into it any more. I also want you never to mention this to your uncle. When he comes out of hospital you have to put it out of your mind. It was a moment of madness for him. He’s not been involved since and he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  Brendan seemed to turn away for a moment and mumbled something to her mother. Rose was frowning. She thought about what Stuart had said to Greg Tyler on the cliff walk. The world would be a better place if you were out of it. She hadn’t told this to Joshua. Had Stuart really intended to hurt Greg Tyler?

  ‘In a few months Kathy and I will have done our last job. Then we will contact you.’

  The screen went black suddenly but not before Rose saw her mother’s mouth open as if she had something to say. Rose sat up straight, disconcerted.

  ‘That can’t be all there is?’ she said.

  James Munroe had turned the laptop round so that the screen was facing him. He began hitting the keys.

  ‘Wait!’ she said, standing up, stepping towards him, grabbing hold of the corner of the laptop. ‘There must be more. Wait. I want to see it again!’

  ‘Deleted!’

  ‘No,’ Rose said. ‘I just want to look at it again.’

  ‘That was the agreement we had with your father and your mother. You could see it once and then it had to be deleted.’

  ‘You had no right . . .’

  Rose felt herself heating up.

  ‘It was Brendan’s wish. You heard what he said.’

  Munroe was closing the laptop, his hands gently pulling it down until it clicked.

  ‘NO! YOU HAD NO RIGHT. THAT WAS MY MOTHER!’

  Munroe stood up. He towered over Rose. His face had no expression. He’d deleted her mother. He’d pressed a button and erased the faces and the words and the life that had been on that screen. She’d hardly spoken, just stayed at Brendan’s shoulder, backing him up with her presence. And yet it had seemed in some way as if she had spent the time staring into the camera as though she’d been peering through a window at Rose, the daughter she hadn’t seen for five years.

  She looked round at Joshua, still handcuffed to the leg of the bed. He was staring at the carpet, suppressed fury on his face. Munroe had deleted Brendan as well.

  After a moment of bright light they were back in the dark.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Moments later Margaret Spicer came into the room.

  Close up she looked thinner, the veins on her neck sticking out. Rose studied her face to see the resemblance between her now and in the photo with her mum in the restaurant. She couldn’t tell because Margaret Spicer wouldn’t make eye contact.

  ‘Where’s the dog?’ she said.

  She surveyed the room, her eyes skimming across Rose, who was sitting on the floor next to Joshua.

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘Are the cuffs absolutely necessary?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Have they seen the Skype?’

  ‘They have. Which is probably why they’re both so quiet.’

  Margaret Spicer looked ill at ease. Rose pictured her on Christmas Eve, walking past the alley while someone was in there waiting for Skeggsie. Maybe Skeggsie passed her and she said to him something like Was that a noise there? Is someone hurt? in the same way that she, Rose, had said it to Joshua. Skeggsie would have gone straight to see who was there. He wouldn’t have linked this woman to the car that had been following them. In any case he wouldn’t have thought for a second that his life was in any danger. Perhaps it had happened differently. Margaret Spicer may have been walking after Skeggsie and may have signalled to the associate who was waiting to warn him off. If only they’d known Skeggsie a little bit. They might have understood then that they could never have warned him off.

  The woman was an unlikely assassin and yet she had been the intermediary. She was as guilty as James Munroe.

  ‘Now we go?’ Margaret Spicer said to Munroe.

  Munroe nodded.

  ‘Don’t you care?’ Rose said. ‘Don’t you care that our friend is dead?’

  Margaret Spicer looked startled at being spoken to.

  Munroe spoke. ‘Margaret was patrolling Primrose Crescent when a young male estate agent ran out of a house screaming. He was hysterical and Margaret tried to calm him down. He kept pulling her arm and in the end she followed him into Number Six. She saw Judy Greaves’s body. Five days the girl was missing. When she found her the girl was still warm. Lister had her for five days. He killed her an hour or so before he’d arranged to meet the estate agent in the house. The estate agent was hysterical but Margaret sat with the girl until the authorities came. Margaret knows how important this project is. She doesn’t want to see guilty people get away.’

  ‘Can’t she speak for herself?’

  The woman was holding clothes that she’d taken out of a drawer. Rose noticed then an open suitcase on the floor. They were leaving. It seemed as though as soon as she and Joshua sniffed these people out they packed a suitcase and left.

  ‘You found Judy. We found Skeggsie. How does that make you feel?’

  ‘This is about the bigger picture, Rose,’ Munroe said. ‘It was a mistake and we must move on.’

  Margaret Spicer continued to pack. Munroe stared at Joshua uneasily.

  ‘The Skype recording was made on Christmas Eve, right?’ Joshua said. ‘A few hours after Rose spoke to my dad when he rang my uncle. Midday.’

  Munroe nodded.

&n
bsp; ‘So my dad knows nothing about Skeggsie’s murder.’

  ‘What makes you think that? There are no secrets in our organisation.’

  ‘My dad couldn’t have spoken to me like that if he’d known that my best friend was dead, killed by you. He couldn’t have looked me in the eye with that knowledge in his head.’

  Rose thought of Brendan looking Joshua in the eye. In reality it had been the tiny lens of a camera embedded into the screen of a laptop. Had Brendan seen through that? Had he, in his mind, looked into the eyes of the son he hadn’t seen for so long?

  ‘Your father has gone through a lot. He’s not the same man you knew.’

  ‘He’s still my dad. He would never hurt me knowingly. He didn’t know about Skeggsie’s murder, did he?’

  ‘We should go,’ Margaret Spicer said.

  James Munroe stood up, placing the laptop in its carrying case. He stacked it next to the case that they were packing on the floor. Then he picked up the brown suitcase. Rose looked at it with concern. It was Skeggsie’s and full of the things that he’d thought were important about the Murder Notebooks. It held the very things that had got him killed. Now Munroe had it.

  ‘You haven’t told him. My dad’s not any part of Skeggsie’s murder.’

  ‘I don’t call it a murder. I call it an accident.’

  ‘What makes you think we’re not going to go straight to the police as soon as you’ve gone?’ Joshua said.

  ‘You can of course. But I tell you this, Joshua. If the police come for me or Margaret I will reveal everything that has happened in the last five years and your father and your mother will be exposed. And don’t for a minute think that I mean they will be arrested. No, no. They have upset a number of people and if I expose their whereabouts then they will most certainly endure a horrible death.’

  ‘Come on,’ Margaret Spicer said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘In the last five years six evil men have been removed from our society. That is a good thing. I’m very sorry about your friend.’