Killing Rachel (4 page)

‘Why haven’t they rung?’

‘Probably both their phones have run out of charge. They know we’ll be all right. You go to sleep. When you wake up they’ll be here.’

She went to sleep almost immediately. When she woke it was early morning, still dark. The clock on her bedside table showed the time as 6.27. From downstairs she could hear murmuring. A low conversation was taking place in the room below her. She got up and went to the door of her room. She opened it and saw Joshua sitting on the top step dressed in the same things that he’d been wearing the previous night.

‘Are they back?’ she said.

He didn’t look round at her. He just shook his head.

Rose found herself gripping the edge of the old sofa, her eyes misting. Not now, she thought, she would not cry now when they’d been given new hope. She stood up and took a couple of deep breaths. She put the rubbish in a plastic bag, turned off the heater and the music, and went out of her studio and closed the door firmly behind her. She walked round a laurel hedge and up towards the house. The light was on in Anna’s drawing room. She had friends round. Rose had nodded politely at them as they arrived.

She went into the kitchen and washed the plates. The drawing room door must have opened because the sound of people talking and laughing got louder. Anna came into the kitchen.

‘There’s a message for you on the answerphone. From one of your friends at Mary Linton. Sounds like a nice sort of girl although a little wound up about something. It was a surprise, I must say. You don’t usually get calls here.’

Rose frowned. A phone call from Mary Linton.

She dried up both plates as a feeling of anxiety took hold of her. Rachel knew her home number from the time when they’d been friends. When she replaced the plates in the cupboard she went across to the handset and pressed the message button. She recognised the voice immediately.

Rose, I’m hoping you got my letters. I’m hoping to hear from you soon. You won’t let me down, will you? I’m depending on you.

Rose stood very still for a moment.

How many times was this girl going to try and contact her? She jabbed her finger on the
Erase
button and went up to her room.

FOUR

Rose didn’t have a class until late morning so she decided to work at home for a couple of hours. Her grandmother had left early and the house was quiet.

The sound of the post arriving came from downstairs. She went out on to the landing and looked down to the hallway. There was a stack of letters on the hall mat. The sight of them gave her a tickle of apprehension. Underneath, at the edge, she could see a blue corner sticking out. She went downstairs and picked up the mail. She could feel the heavy linen paper underneath the pile of letters and when she placed them on the hall table she pulled out the slim blue envelope. Irritated, she went back upstairs and opened the bottom drawer of her desk. The other two letters were in there. For some reason she’d smoothed them out and kept them. She tossed the unopened envelope of the third letter in and closed the drawer.

She decided to go on to her blog, Morpho. In the last weeks she’d not posted much on it but since recent events had given her and Joshua some new hope about their parents she’d made a decision to use her blog to document what was happening. The blog was
Invite only
and at the moment she was the only person who had access to it. She thought that maybe, one day, she would share it with Joshua.

At the top of the post she typed the words The Notebooks. Then she sat back and pulled up her left sleeve to look at her butterfly tattoo. She’d had it done weeks before, lying to the man in the tattoo parlour about her age. It had hurt; tiny stinging movements as he drew on to her skin.
Are you sure you’re all right?
he’d said a couple of times, looking concerned. The blood had oozed out in pinprick bubbles. She’d nodded for him to go on, watching each movement with fascination. She’d been overjoyed to find that Joshua had a similar tattoo on his chest, but when she discovered that Brendan had one as well as her mother it seemed unreal. It had been a strange link between them. They had all drawn blood to have this image on their bodies, like some kind of secret ritual.

She thought for a moment before starting to write. The blog was a way of her explaining what was happening, maybe even explaining it to herself. She began to recall the events after it became clear that their parents had gone.

When our parents went missing I lost touch with Josh. Even though we’d lived together as a family for three years, he was sent to live with his uncle in Newcastle and I lived with my grandmother in London. Then one day, six months ago, I had an email from him. It was the most amazing moment. We swapped emails over months and eventually we met up in London. We spent our first weeks together trying to find information about Mum and Brendan and one day we found a man who told us the most astonishing thing.

Our parents were alive.

Rose pictured this man, Frank Richards, the last time she saw him.

He was tall and thin. He travelled light with just a suitcase on wheels and a holdall. He was also a policeman and had been friends with Joshua’s dad, but he’d been sacked. Neither Rose nor Joshua knew why. This was just one of the many things they didn’t know about Frank Richards. They didn’t even know if
Richards
was his real name. Coming face to face with him had been completely unexpected. More amazing was the fact that he also had a butterfly tattooed on his arm. When they questioned him (desperately, intensely) he’d held things back, he’d refused to answer saying
I’ve already said too much
.

And he had. He’d told them the one thing they’d wanted to know. Kathy and Brendan were alive. In a single sentence he had resurrected her mother and Joshua’s father and changed their lives for ever.

Frank Richards had been keen to get away from them. They’d followed him out of his flat into the street where he was trying to get a taxi to take him to the airport. He gave Rose a telephone number to ring in case of emergencies, in case she was ever in danger.
Why would I be in danger?
she’d wanted to ask but he’d jumped into a passing taxi, dragging his suitcase on wheels behind him and left. She’d keyed the number into her mobile even though she wasn’t sure why she would ever want to get in touch with Frank Richards again.

Joshua had been elated by this meeting.

And thrilled with the notebooks.

We stole something from Frank Richards. In his flat he had a pile of notebooks next to his case. There were about six, like exercise books. Inside were photographs and maps and diagrams. There was a lot of writing but it was all in code. There was also a battered copy of an old hardback book called The Butterfly Project. While Frank was packing his stuff, Josh hid two of the notebooks in his coat. We can’t understand the code but we’re trying. Our friend, Skeggsie, tried to crack it but he came to the conclusion that the code was linked to an ‘unknown’ source. Maybe a book that was held by all participants of the code. We immediately thought of The Butterfly Project.

A couple of weeks after they’d met Frank Richards she had gone round to the flat and found Joshua and Skeggsie in a state of excitement. On the kitchen table, laid out in front of them, were the two notebooks. She looked at the notebooks for the hundredth time, letting her fingers play around the edges. One notebook was closed but the other was open showing a photocopy of a photograph. The face was that of a man of about fifty. He was thin and he had cropped grey hair and he was looking at the camera rather than posing for it. His eyes were dark and his eyebrows heavy. He had on a white shirt and dark tie and a suit jacket as if he was on his way to some formal event.

They’d had no idea who this man was. Skeggsie had used his computer to access facial recognition systems but his hardware did not have the scope to link up with bigger sites and he’d found nothing.

‘Tell her, Skeggs,’ Joshua said excitedly.

‘This guy at college? He has access to the college hardware. He works part-time there, blah, blah . . .’

Rose wrinkled her eyebrows. Skeggsie had begun to use the words
blah, blah
whenever he couldn’t be bothered to explain something.

‘So I asked him if he could put this photo through the college computers.’

‘And?’

‘He found a match.’

‘Wow. Who is he?’ she said, staring at the face of the man in the notebook.

‘His name is Viktor Baranski. He’s Russian,’ Joshua said and carried on. ‘We’ve googled him. He was a former Russian navy man. He came to London in 2000 as a businessman. He bought property in Mayfair and Kensington and mixed with people in high places. Skeggsie looked at some Russian newspaper archives at the time he came to Britain and there was some suggestion that he sold information to the British government. Information about the Russian navy.’

‘Skeggsie can read Russian?’ she said, impressed.

‘Got it translated,’ Skeggsie said dismissively.

‘The thing is,’ Joshua went on, ‘he was murdered in 2006. He was found washed up on the Norfolk coast. Skeggsie read that he might have been killed by the Russian secret service as some kind of payback for giving information to the west.’

Rose blew air out through her teeth. It was too complicated.

‘What’s this got to do with Mum and Brendan?’

‘Well, they may be involved with the secret service? MI5?’

‘James Bond? It’s a bit far-fetched.’

‘Just about everything to do with this stuff is far-fetched,’ Joshua said, his voice falling. ‘Why should this be any more unreal?’

‘Anyway,’ she said, trying to be positive, ‘it’s great that you found out who the guy is. It’s a start.’

‘Not me. Skeggsie.’

Skeggsie looked up at Rose. Rose gave a grudging smile.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Darren Skeggs, blah, blah,’ she said, using his full name for the first time.

‘You’re welcome, Miss Rose Smith, aka pain in the backside.’

‘That’s what I like to see,’ said Joshua. ‘You two guys getting to like each other.’

Joshua now thinks that our parents may have been working for the government. It sounds weird to say it but he believes that they may be spies or spooks, whatever they’re called now (not 007).

She stopped typing because the house phone was ringing.

She sat back in her chair. She should answer it but she didn’t want to in case it was Rachel Bliss again. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with her would use her mobile or her email. It might just be for Anna and whoever it was would leave a message. She waited until the phone stopped ringing and looked back over what she’d written on the blog.

I don’t believe our parents are spies. I think it’s a ridiculous thing to say but I can’t explain that to Josh because he is so driven, so passionate about finding the truth. It’s really because of him that we’ve found so much out. It was because of him that we found Frank Richards, mostly. It was because of him that we got hold of the notebooks.

The phone rang again.

Rose tensed. She just
knew
that it was Rachel Bliss. She looked round and wondered what to do. If she answered it maybe she could tell her to leave her alone and that would be that. On the other hand Rachel – if it was Rachel – might pull her into something, might say something that Rose wouldn’t be able to ignore. Better if she left it to ring and then she could just erase the messages as soon as she heard Rachel’s voice.

She looked back to the blog, reading over the last couple of paragraphs, distracted now, not really remembering where she was in this story.

Joshua thinks that the notebooks are everything. They are the key to finding out more. I’m not so sure. There a number of reasons why I think the notebooks are not so important.

1.        Who uses notebooks for important things? When there are laptops and memory sticks, email and so on.

2.        Frank Richards was an odd man. Maybe the notebooks are specifically to do with him. Maybe they don’t link to Mum and Brendan at all.

3.        Who uses code? In this day and age?

Maybe the notebooks are red herrings and we are wasting time trying to figure out what they mean.

Reading over what she’d written made her feel guilty – as if she was mocking the things that Joshua said, the theories he had. She should be less negative. If it hadn’t been for him they would still think that their parents were dead, killed because of some cold case they were working on. She ended her blog.

We are certain we will find out more about the notebooks.