Killing Rachel (24 page)

‘How?’

‘I told the policewoman about finding you last night. I’m guessing she’ll be speaking to you sometime today.’

Rose walked out of Tania’s room.

Moments later she heard Tania’s door slam loudly behind her.

She left Brontë house and saw Molly Wallace hanging around the entrance.

‘Hi, Molly,’ she said.

Beyond Molly she saw Joshua waiting by Skeggsie’s Mini.

‘Rose, you know we talked about the ghost?’

‘Actually, I don’t have time to chat now, Molly. I’m on my way out. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

Molly put her hand on Rose’s sleeve. ‘Everything I said was true. Rachel
was
really upset by it but on Sunday evening she came to my room and she was in a real state. She’d just been walking past Brontë House and she said she got a terrible shock. She looked in Tania’s room and saw her standing in front of the mirror wearing a wig and looking just like Juliet. She knew then what had happened. She knew that someone had been messing around with her.’

Joshua was waving at Rose. Rose gave a distracted wave back.

‘She knew Tania was dressing up as Juliet?’

Molly nodded.

‘Did you tell the police this?’

‘No.’

‘Molly!’ Rose said, exasperated. ‘These details are important. Look, the policewoman is coming here at twelve. Make sure you see her. Tell her what you’ve just told me.’

‘I was just keeping a confidence. Rachel told me not to tell anyone. She said she felt enough of a fool.’

‘Rachel is dead, Molly,’ she said tersely. ‘Speak to the policewoman when she comes. Look, I’ve got to go.’

She walked off towards Joshua. Halfway across the grass she paused. Had she been too harsh on Molly? She turned around but there was no sign of her. She had gone.

Rose walked on, quickening her step to get to the car.

TWENTY-FOUR

In the car she told Joshua about her visit to Tania. He asked a couple of questions but she sensed that his heart really wasn’t in it. He was thinking of the visit to the cottage. He reversed the car quickly and made his way up the drive to the lane in silence. She looked at his profile. His face was tense and there was a slight frown on his forehead. The previous night had been awful, worse for him but still he was determined to continue what he had started. His visit to the Kensington restaurant had stirred a nest of vipers but he didn’t care – he wanted to continue his search.

How different she was. She just wanted to go home and try and forget about it all. No matter that it was all somehow linked to her mother and Brendan.

And yet she had just gone to see Tania when there was no need. She’d given the information to WPC Lauren Clarke who would no doubt see Tania when she came to the school later that day. Why had Rose done that? To see for herself what Tania had to say? To get a sense of whether Tania was sorry? She pulled at the edge of her pink socks, making sure they were straight. Maybe she wasn’t so different to Joshua after all.

They drove through Stiffkey and Rose glanced at the cottages and the White Rose as they passed. They turned along the beach road and parked in the small car park, deserted just as it had been both times before. Joshua pulled on the handbrake which made a doleful creak.

‘Do we have to do this?’ she said. ‘Why not go to the police? What happened here, that’s real. We have the name of this Russian. We could identify the man who tied you up. It might be possible to find out something through official channels.’

Joshua was shaking his head.

‘Rosie,’ he said softly, taking her hand in his, ‘I have to do this. Lev mentioned my dad’s name. He threatened him. His father is the key to this. I can’t stop now and hand it all over to the police. They’ll just fold it up into their files and notes and we’ll never hear another word about it.’

Rose didn’t answer. Joshua was rubbing her hand distractedly. She sat very still, feeling his fingers making circles on her skin. It sent ripples up her arm and across her chest. She thought of the previous evening, in the car, when she’d wanted to kiss him.

‘How is your mouth?’ she said.

He picked her hand up and carried it across to his face. He ran her fingers across his skin.

‘It feels a bit better,’ he said.

Her throat felt dry. His skin was prickly and rough, his face warm. She stared outside at the mudflats which were perfectly still and wondered whether something was happening between them.

‘We should go,’ she whispered.

Moments later he opened the door, letting an icy blast into the car. Rose got out and hugged herself. The morning air was crisp and clung to her skin. She’d left her gloves behind again. She pulled her cuffs down over her wrists and started to walk.

Joshua asked her more about Rachel Bliss as they walked towards the path. Rose answered while looking at the vastness of the sky, and the flocks of birds swirling about, dipping and diving, floating on the air currents. At one point she stopped still, leaning backwards to see a tiny plane miles above, leaving a vapour trail. Joshua saw her.

‘Bombers. Lots of RAF missions fly round here.’

There was no one else to be seen. The mudflats stretched away into the distance. She thought of the night before, the sound of the car coming at her from far away, the eerie rumble of its engine as it crept along under cover of darkness.

‘Skeggsie’s feeling better,’ Joshua said. ‘I Skyped him this morning. He looks a bit rough but he’s keen to get on. He told me that he’s got an idea about the code of
The Butterfly Project
. He might have something to show us this afternoon.’

Codes, spies and the Russian secret service. Rose was beginning to feel as though she’d gone back in time to some James Bond film when people had codewords and knives that flicked out of the front of their shoes. A bit of her wanted to laugh, to make fun of it all, but she sensed that Joshua wouldn’t like that. He was serious; never more. She’d just have to bide her time and hope that the whole national security thing fizzled out. Maybe there was some other explanation for Lev Baranski following Joshua to Norfolk.

‘We’ll do the house first, then the boathouse . . .’ Joshua said. ‘I’ll take a lot of pictures.’

They turned off the path and headed down the lane towards the cottage. Looking down, Rose noticed the fresh tyre tracks of the SUV. There were several ruts and she wondered exactly how many times it had gone back and forth to the cottage. Then something awful occurred to her.

‘You don’t think Lev Baranski is back at the cottage now? Some of these tyre tracks look brand new.’

‘No, he’s had his say. He’s given me his message. If he wanted to do any more he would have done it last night.’

‘Still, I don’t remember this many.’

‘It was dark.’

She nodded. She probably hadn’t been looking at the ground at all, just feeling the unevenness under her feet. Up ahead she could see a flash of white. The cottage was coming into sight and seconds later she was relieved to see that there was no SUV parked in front of it. It looked just the way it had the day before. Deserted.

Joshua quickened his pace. He went ahead and then stopped suddenly as if halted by an invisible wall.

‘What’s up?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. It feels funny, different.’

‘How do you mean?’

Rose stood beside him and looked around. The cottage seemed just the same, the door at an angle where it had been opened forcefully the previous afternoon. Rose looked at the land behind. It was quiet, a bird tweeting melodically from some distant tree.

And yet there was something different.

She looked down at the ground. The rutted path had been smoothed out; it was flatter than she remembered. Joshua walked away while she focused on the ground in front of the cottage, as if someone had patted it down, like sand that had been levelled.

‘Look.’

She walked on, following Joshua into the cottage.

He was standing in the middle of the living room.

It was empty. There was not a stick of furniture left.

‘Oh, my,’ she said.

‘Someone’s cleared it out.’

They both stared in disbelief.

At the back of the cottage was the window where she had worked at poking a hole in the wood. Now the wood was gone and there was just a space, the broken glass letting the cold wind in. She went closer and saw that the planks had been ripped off and thrown into what had once been the back garden.

‘Who’s done this?’

‘Baranski?’

Joshua shook his head.

‘This must have been done last night or this morning. I don’t get it,’ Rose said.

‘The boat?’ Joshua said.

He strode off in the direction of the outbuilding. Rose went after him, across the smoothed forecourt and followed him into the dark interior. She stopped still, looking at an empty space.

The boat was gone.

The building was bare, as if there had never been a boat there. The boat, the struts it had sat on, the tarpaulin that had covered it, they had all vanished. She walked across to the space where it had been moored, to the wall that she had sat up against, the corner in which she had scrabbled about and found the identity bracelet. There was no sign of it, no scrapes, no crumbling wood, no dust. There wasn’t even the strong smell of brine that had clung to her nostrils the night before.

‘Someone’s been here and stripped the place. They must have done this in the night or early this morning. Who?’

Rose thought of the night before, of the text she had sent on her mobile.

‘I contacted Frank Richards.’

‘What?’

‘I called the number he gave me. It went out of my head when everything else happened. I was in a panic and I only had a bit of charge on my phone and I didn’t know who to call.’

‘You spoke to him?’

‘I sent a text.’

‘What did you say?’

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked up the last text she had sent.
I’m in trouble. Baranski has Josh in the Stiffkey Cottage. Help me.

‘I tried to send it but there was no signal so I forgot about it and it was only after they left and we were heading back to the car that the message went. I just thought,
Oh, too late to be of any use
.’

Joshua had Rose’s phone in his hand and he started to walk back and forth, a spring in his step.

‘Don’t you see?’ he said, his voice high with excitement. ‘This means that this place
is
important. So important that someone, not just one person, some
team
have been here to clean it up, to strip it. They know we’ve been here. They know through that phone number, through Frank Richards. This isn’t just Dad and Kathy and Frank Richards. This is more than that. It must be to do with national security. No other organisation would have such immediate resources to clean this place. We are close to something, Rose.’

Rose felt trepidation. Something important had happened. She held out her hand for her phone and read over her message. At first it was her mother and Brendan who disappeared. Then Frank Richards was linked to it. Then the Russians. Now she pictured men in dark clothes, vans, lorries, a boat trailer, all marching across the mudflats in the middle of the night to clear the cottage in case two teenagers came back to find out some more about it. They’d even smoothed out the ground in front of the cottage to cover up their tracks.

They’d taken the boat that was called
Butterfly
before she and Joshua had had a chance to look inside it. Rose left the outbuilding and stood in front of the cottage. She looked around and then up into the air. Someone somewhere had known that they were there and had swooped in and snatched any evidence that might have been there for them.

Joshua was right. Something was happening that was bigger than her mother and Brendan.

A beep sounded. Joshua got his mobile out. It was a text.

‘Skeggsie,’ he said and read it.

‘What?’ she said, seeing a wide smile on his face.

‘You won’t believe this. The name on the identity bracelet. The unpronounceable Russian word. In English it’s
Viktor
.’

Viktor Baranski, whose dead body was found just off the pier at Cromer.

‘What are we going to do?’ she said.

‘We’re going to find Dad and Kathy.’

She nodded. She really believed that they would.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘I just have to see the policewoman,’ Rose said, leaving Joshua in the reception area. ‘Then I’ll get my stuff and we’ll be off.’

Joshua nodded but he’d already opened his laptop.

‘I’ll stay here. Email these photos to Skeggsie.’

Rose smiled. She walked away feeling brighter than she had for days. It wouldn’t be long until they got under way to London. Once back there they could continue with their search. Skeggsie had said he might have a solution to some of the code in
The Butterfly Project
. For the first time she felt really interested in the dusty old book and Frank Richards’ notebooks. And Joshua was right. Something was going on that was bigger than her mother and Brendan. They were a part of something. Could it be to do with national security? Had her mother and Brendan stumbled on something to do with the death of Viktor Baranski which had made them go on the run?