A Memory for Murder: Mystery (Madigan Amos Zoo Mysteries Book 6)

by Ruby Loren

  “It’s strange that they moved out together, isn’t it?” Katya said when we reconvened in my car with some shop bought pastries. I took a bite out of my sausage roll and chewed while I thought about it.

  “Perhaps alone they couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage repayments, or something. When one moved out, the other might have had to downsize, too.”

  “Couldn’t they have just moved to Sussex together?” Katya asked.

  “Why would they have wanted to? They fought all the time, according to the neighbours.”

  “It’s just strange.”

  I nodded. “I know. Without any family, apart from her sister, and at the age she must be at, she’s probably living, forgotten, in a retirement home. Mrs Kendal told me she was back in Wales. Something to do with them needing a country between them,” I recalled.

  “Today has been sad. I don’t want to get old,” Katya suddenly said. “I probably won’t, given my line of work,” she completed before turning back to me with a sunny smile.

  I never found out what she was going to say because the next second, she’d pushed my head down so I was bent double with my face stuffed against the steering wheel. She ripped the hairband off her plait, pulled her phone out and pretended to be checking her makeup.

  I would have asked her what the heck was going on, but she was leaning on me so heavily, it was hard to breath.

  A second later she let me up.

  “A truck just pulled up with Rose Gardening and Maintenance written on the side of it. When a woman got out, I figured that she must be here to see the old man, but when I got a good look at her face, I saw that her nose looked like it’s been broken. Recently.” Katya gave me a look filled with meaning.

  “She’s the one who attacked us?” I risked a look out of the car window in time to see her knock on Joe Milligan’s door. Even without our prior knowledge of what she was capable of she looked like she was on the warpath. I hoped Joe had the good sense to keep the door shut.

  Sure enough, Katya’s phone rang a moment later.

  “She’s outside banging to be let in!” Joe said, sounding panicked. “Can you send someone out here? I think I may be in trouble.”

  “Tell him to call the police and to tell her that’s what he’s doing,” I said to Katya, who repeated it over the phone.

  I wasn’t particularly surprised when the woman who’d tried to kill both of us turned away from the front door and hurried back down the path… back towards us.

  I turned my head in time to avoid having it slammed into the steering wheel by Katya, who pretended to be on the phone whilst checking her sat nav - as if lost.

  Judging by her relief when the truck engine started up and the vehicle pulled away, she hadn’t noticed us.

  “Should we follow her?” Katya asked when I was once more in an upright position.

  “Oh, I should think so,” I said, starting the engine and pulling away from the kerb.

  Luckily, a gardening truck is an easy target to follow. It was strange that hundreds of miles away from where all of the real secret service action was presumably taking place right now, we were out doing the most spy-like thing I’d done to date.

  The truck pulled up and parked outside a shabby looking cottage. It wasn't in as bad a shape as the house this woman was in charge of looking after was, but it wasn’t much better either. The only thing nice about it was the garden. All of my suspicions were confirmed when I saw it.

  “It’s the same design style as the Bridges’ garden.”

  “And the planting at Mellon Zoo,” Katya added.

  “I think our landscaper is definitely Rosalie Bridges… but why did she try to kill us?”

  We both hit the deck when Rosalie herself walked back out of the cottage, jumped into her truck, and drove away down the road we’d followed her down.

  “Do you think she noticed us?” I asked. The road was pretty well-littered with cars, as it was hardly the middle of nowhere - just a rundown Welsh housing estate.

  “Only if she’s living with paranoia every day of her life,” Katya said, getting out of the car. “How about we go and find out if anyone else is at home?”

  “Are we still using the council ruse?” I asked.

  “If it ain’t broke…” Katya replied.

  I was pretty surprised when the door was opened by a dead man.

  Unfortunately, it must have shown on my face.

  “Hi, we’re from the council…” Katya said at the same time as Matthew Abraham pushed me backwards off the front doorstep.

  Katya reacted fast - probably from years of experience to expect the unexpected - but she was focusing on the wrong person. I was winded and couldn’t call out a warning before Rosalie Bridges wrapped a loop of rope around Katya’s neck.

  Pull yourself together! My brain screamed at me. Now was no time to lie on the concrete like a ninny. My hand was lying on something hard. I realised that in order to ensure good drainage, everything in the garden had been planted on chunks of slate… and some of the pieces looked like they’d make pretty good throwing missiles.

  Katya only just managed to drop down in time to avoid the first one I threw. Fortunately, my erroneous aim and her reaction resulted in Rosalie’s face being right in the rock’s trajectory. It smacked her already broken nose with surprising force, and she went down with a moan. I heard something crunch when she landed at a funny angle, but there was no time to think about first aid right now. Matthew now held a machete.

  I looked across at Katya, who was still rubbing her rope-burned neck. “Who the heck keeps a machete in the house?” I complained.

  Matthew raised it up, but there was worry in his eyes that clued me in that he wasn’t the action man in this relationship.

  “Matthew… we just want to talk about what happened to your family,” I said, wondering if it was too late to be reasonable.

  “I’m not who you say I am. You came here and attacked me! I’m just defending my property.” He said it like he was trying to convince himself, rather than us. After all - I knew full well that he was the one who had pushed me first.

  However, my words had achieved their aim. While he’d been focusing on me, Katya had edged a little closer. In a lightning strike movement, she lashed out with the heel of her palm, driving a stunning blow into the side of Matthew Abraham’s head. It was so powerful his head bounced back off the door frame and all of the fight went out of him.

  Katya kicked the machete away and pulled his hands behind his back, pulling her ‘security guard’ cuffs from her back pocket. “Let’s get them inside,” she said, looking around at the neighbouring houses.

  I privately thought that this wasn’t the kind of place that had neighbourhood watch, but I tried to do what she said. Ten seconds later, Katya walked back out and helped me with my impossible task of trying to lift the very tall, very well-muscled Rosalie into the house. On the plus side, either the stone hitting her, or the arm she’d broken when she’d hit the ground, must have been enough to knock her out.

  “I’d better not use cuffs, but watch her,” Katya warned me, as if I were a complete novice at this. I was about to tell her as much when I remembered that I would far rather be a complete novice. This shouldn’t be the norm. I spent a good three seconds wondering if I was living my life all wrong before I remembered that because of me, a family of three had been found. I know I’d been seven years too late to save them, but at least it would give those who still missed them some closure.

  However, I was fast realising that at least some of the people who were supposed to be missing them might have had their closure all along.

  “You’re supposed to be dead. There were three skeletons on the roof,” I said to Matthew Abraham once we’d dumped Rosalie on the sofa - still passed out. Katya had given him a chair and a stare that suggested he sit in it.

  “What roof?” Matthew said, but the colour had drained out of his face. He’d known they were up on the roof, and obviously he knew that
he wasn’t up there.

  “The roof where you left the bodies of your family before running away to start a new life in Wales. Why’d you do it? Why’d you kill them?” Katya jumped in.

  “What? I didn’t kill anybody!” Matthew looked so horrified, I kind of believed him. But he’d still definitely known about the bodies on the roof, and there were still three bodies to account for. Maybe he hadn’t done the killing himself, but he knew who had done. And it wasn’t the little green men from Mars.

  “At the moment, I’d say you’re suspect number one,” I lied, hoping Katya would cotton on fast. “My associate here is an undercover detective who’s been working to solve the case. It’s all over for you and Rosalie. If you weren’t the one who killed your family, you should tell us. Right now.” I added for luck.

  Matthew glared at me for a second, before his resolve began to wobble and he looked down. “It was all a horrible accident. It wasn’t anyone’s fault…” he began.

  Over on the sofa, Rosalie groaned, but didn’t wake.

  “Rosalie was up on the roof with mum. I was supposed to be ill. They hadn’t pushed for me to go into university for lectures, even though they knew I was faking, but I was meant to be doing work inside. They were working on the living roof when apparently mum said something about Rosalie not being good enough for me.” He shook his head. “I think she thought that Rosalie was too mature and was deliberately using me, just because she knew when we’d met that we were moving to England and had this plan for a zoo. Rosalie herself helped with the plans, but she wasn’t using me. She loved me. We love each other,” he said, looking over at his passed out girlfriend.

  “What happened?” Katya pressed.

  “Their argument turned into a fight. My mother was actually similar to Rosalie, in terms of how tough she was. Rosalie said they had a proper brawl.” He blinked rapidly. “I think Rosalie hit her with a spade, only… she swung it too hard.”

  “What happened next?” I asked, already feeling the horror of how the family had met their end and the way the cover up had worked.

  “Rosalie came straight down and told me what had happened, leaving mum up on the roof. We were young and panicking, and we did something that could have got us all sent to prison right there and then. We told Auntie Audrey.”

  I felt myself stiffen. “Audrey was there?”

  Matthew licked his lips.

  “Where is she now?” I asked, starting to grow suspicious.

  “In Sussex.”

  I put two and two together. “The woman calling herself Mrs Kendal isn’t your real grandmother, is she?”

  Matthew shook his head.

  I felt like kicking myself. The woman pretending to be Mrs Kendal had been in on it all along! No wonder she’d been so angry when she’d realised why I was asking all of my questions. She was worried I was going to dig up the past. Literally.

  I wondered why she hadn’t called Rosalie and Matthew to let them know the bodies had been found. That’s when I realised I’d made a pretty big mistake driving off to Wales in such a hurry.

  “You had your phone turned on, right? No one called you?” I said to Katya.

  I’d agreed with Jordan that I’d be turning my phone off for today because I needed some time to myself.

  “Hmm,” she said, following my train of thought. “The police don’t have my number. I don’t think it would have been one of their priorities.” Her dark eyes were full of implication and warning when she said it.

  She needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t about to start spouting government secrets.

  “What happened next, Matthew?” I asked, wanting to hear him say it.

  He winced and looked sorry for himself. “Auntie Audrey said that dad would tell. He was really ill. He was going to die soon anyway. What we did was probably a good thing. I told him that mum wanted him to come up to the roof. When he walked round one of the corners looking for her, Rosalie hit him with a spade, too.” He hesitated. “We knew it wasn’t going to be as easy to get Nanna Fiona to climb up onto the roof, but Audrey said she would tell, too. So, she had to die. Auntie said that being a widowed woman without any children of her own, no one really cared about her. People had mistaken her for Nanna Fiona for years, so she would take her place and no one would know.” Matthew looked away at Rosalie’s still form. “Audrey poisoned her tea and then we took the body up onto the roof. Later on, Rosalie finished the living roof and then she drove to Wales with me in the boot. Auntie Audrey had always lived off her sister, who’d been left money by her late husband. Now that Fiona was dead and she’d taken her place, she used some of her money to get me a last-minute rental in Rosalie’s name. We’ve been here ever since.”

  I rubbed my aching back and reflected that my bruised spine and all of this nonsense could have been easily avoided if the police had got their act together and identified the bodies on the roof in time to tell the world that two of the skeletons were female. Budget cuts would be the death of me. If I’d known that Matthew Abraham was still alive, I wouldn’t have acted like such a fool on the doorstep. It was lucky that I’d brought Katya with me or I might have ended up dead with plants growing over me, too.

  “Your auntie just happened to have poison on hand?” Katya looked sceptical.

  “She likes herbs and pickles. I think she’s a witch,” I told her, not finding the concept quite as intriguing as I had before. A stuffed lucky lion was one thing, but poisoning your own sister - no matter how much she annoyed you - was quite another.

  “Why did Cedric Jameson think he saw Mr Abraham wearing his going out hat?” That was still bugging me.

  Matthew sighed. “It was just another one of Auntie Audrey’s ideas. She knew he was coming to do the parking space that afternoon, and we needed to buy ourselves a window of time to get away. We needed the night to fix everything up and make it look right because the bodies were just lying out on the roof after we did it all. Rosalie had to cover them with plants. Mr Jameson came by and I made sure I walked into the kitchen wearing my dad’s hat and one of his jumpers whilst I kept my back to the window and made a cup of tea. Jameson shouted hello, and I just raised a hand. I guess he assumed that dad was having a bad day because I don’t think he ever mentioned that bit to anyone.”

  I nodded, privately thinking that he’d probably simply forgotten. The human brain wasn’t as good at recalling things as it liked to pretend. That was why witness testimonials could be so unreliable.

  “After that, I went outside as myself and chatted to him about the concrete. A little while later, Auntie came out pretending to be Nanna Fiona and said that her daughter, Molly, was up on the roof with Rosalie.” He shrugged. “It was a pretty neat story, and it worked. It worked better than we could have ever hoped.” I heard the sound of the cuffs tightening when he pulled against them. “We were so close! Why did you have to get so interested in affairs that had nothing to do with you?” His eyes took on a feral look when he said it. I saw something like hope flash into them, and I shouted a warning to Katya just in time. The secret agent turned and lashed out, knowing that Rosalie was about to attack her. Her fist hit Rosalie’s nose and she collapsed back down onto the sofa, clutching it in agony.

  “I need to go to the hospital,” she said in-between the fast little breaths she was taking.

  “Me too,” Matthew jumped in.

  “What do you think?” Katya said to me.

  “I believe we’ve just heard the truth, and I also believe Matthew was just getting to the part that makes me lose all sympathy for the supposedly panicking perpetrators.”

  “If you’re talking about the money, that was all Audrey and Rosalie. I didn’t have a clue about any of that. I was just a kid. I did what I was told,” Matthew said, spouting excuses left, right, and centre.

  “You’re not a kid anymore,” I pointed out and turned away from him, so we had two pairs of eyes on Rosalie. I’d long since realised that she was the real threat here.

  “I’m g
uessing that dear old Auntie Audrey never called to warn these two because she knows she’s about to be questioned about the third body on the roof - the one that’s the wrong age and gender,” I said to Katya.

  “The police still wouldn’t have figured it out, if no one knew about these two. What’s this about some money?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing that seven is the magic number when it comes to cashing in on your missing, presumed dead, family. They sold the farm, and what’s the betting that Art would have had a hefty life insurance payout that would go to the surviving kin? All this time, I bet the deal was that they'd split the cash between them - Audrey’s half and Fiona’s half - and congratulate each other on their good fortune. After all… what’s a seven year wait when you know you’re going to be loaded at the end of it?” I glared at Rosalie.

  She shook her head and turned away with a sigh. “That was Audrey’s view, not ours. My only argument was with Molly. It was a terrible accident.”

  “Good luck convincing the police of that after you’ve covered it up for seven years,” Katya told her before turning to face me. “Madi, a moment…”

  We walked back out into the hall with Katya promising Rosalie that all sorts of terrible things would happen if she even considered trying to move from that sofa.

  “I can’t be involved with this. It’s bad enough that they might be able to ID me. I’m in enough trouble as it is with the company.”

  “Are you saying we can’t report them to the police?”

  Katya tilted her head from side to side and looked furious. “No, they have to pay for their crimes.”

  After some further deliberation we walked back into the living room and found things as we’d left them. It was pretty obvious that the pair did need to go to hospital.

  “We’re willing to cut you a deal,” Katya announced. “We’ll call an ambulance for you and then you’ll call the police and hand yourselves in. You’re going to forget that we were ever here and make up a story about how you got your injuries. Maybe you both tripped and fell.” She shot me a sideways look. “In return, we won’t tell the police that you tried to kill us. Twice,” she amended, remembering the encounter outside the elephant enclosure.