Rose had spent most of the previous evening thinking about her mum and Brendan and the sudden appearance of the ex-policeman. From time to time her thoughts had been interrupted by the events surrounding Rachel Bliss’s death. She wondered what had happened to Molly. The idea of her being arrested seemed cruel and unjust yet she had pushed Rachel into the water. She was the cause of Rachel’s death. She’d pictured all the girls at lunch as they’d had been on the previous Friday when she’d first arrived. The news about Molly Wallace would be the main topic of conversation. They would all look at Molly in a new way, in awe of what she’d done and scandalised by the results of her actions.

  Her grandmother, Anna, had spent some time with her, telling her about ex-Chief Inspector Munroe’s phone call and his wish to inform them all about what had happened to Kathy Smith and Brendan Johnson. Rose and Joshua were to be told first. Then Munroe had told Anna that he would visit her in the afternoon and give her the relevant information about her daughter. Anna was slightly miffed that she was not to be included in the trip to Childerley Waters but she said that she had patience and she would wait. At last she would know what had happened to Kathy.

  Rose was apprehensive about what James Munroe would say.

  That morning, when she was waiting for Skeggsie to come and pick her up, she got cold feet. She didn’t want to go. The previous few days had drained her and she didn’t know if she wanted any more emotional turmoil. When the car pulled up she said goodbye to Anna and left, pulling her grey coat around her and putting a black wool hat on her head.

  Now, sitting in the Mini waiting for James Munroe, Joshua and Skeggsie had gone quiet. They had ten minutes or so until the meeting time. Rose was in the back and she looked out of the window at The Cambridge Centre and wondered what story they were here to find out about. The last thing they had heard from Frank Richards was that her mother and Joshua’s father were alive. Rose had a terrible feeling inside her that this would not be confirmed today. She stared at the building, her eyes trying to make some sense of it. There was a stillness about it, as if nothing had ever happened there. The lane was silent; no cars had passed since they’d parked. The trees were static, not a breath of wind anywhere. There was a funereal mood. Even Joshua looked gloomy.

  Skeggsie was using a blue inhaler sucking some drug into his lungs as a black car came slowly up the lane.

  ‘Here he is,’ Joshua said, sitting up.

  The black car passed them and Rose expected it to turn into the entrance to The Cambridge Centre. Instead it pulled in front of them and James Munroe got out of the driver’s seat and walked towards their car. He ignored Skeggsie and went round to the passenger window which Joshua had opened.

  ‘You need to follow me. It’s a five-minute drive. Then we’ll talk.’

  James Munroe did not wait for an answer. He walked back to his car and got in. Then he slowly moved off. Skeggsie followed him.

  There was anticipation in the car. Rose was craning her neck to see where they were going. She undid her seat belt and moved to the centre of the back seat so that she could see more easily. A padded envelope was in the way and she picked it up. It was the letter she’d received from Rachel Bliss’s grandparents. She’d forgotten to take it out of the car the previous evening. She shoved it aside and leant forward between Joshua and Skeggsie, looking straight ahead to see what they were heading for.

  In spite of her previous gloomy thoughts there was excitement in her chest. She put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder and gripped it. Joshua put his over the top of hers and held it there, his clasp strong and warm. Looking up at the rear-view mirror she caught Skeggsie’s eye. He held her look for a few seconds. There was something all knowing about Skeggsie. As if he had read her emotions and knew that her feelings for Joshua had got out of her control. She withdrew her hand aware that the black car had its indicator on and was turning off the lane on to a track.

  ‘Remember what we said last night. Whatever he tells us we don’t mention The Butterfly Project nor the notebooks. We can talk about Frank Richards and the Russians because he probably already knows about that but the rest we keep to ourselves.’

  No one spoke. No one needed to. They’d gone over this the previous evening.

  They turned into the lane and passed a public footpath sign and another which said Childerley Waters. Underneath were the words South East Hydration Services. Please keep to the paths.

  ‘We heading for a reservoir?’ Joshua said.

  ‘No,’ Skeggsie said. ‘These are old chalk pits that have been filled up. They are used for some water systems but mostly its unofficial sports and boating facilities. There’re a few companies who use this as a place for trainee scuba-diving. I researched it.’

  Rose saw the car in front turn again, going slowly, on to an even narrower lane, the foliage dense, the branches of trees hitting the car.

  Old chalk pits that had been filled with water. Rose felt a terrible feeling come over her. She didn’t like the idea that this place was somehow associated with her mother and Brendan. She sat back in the seat, no longer keen to see where they were going. A great pool seemed to form at the back of her throat and she swallowed a few times.

  The black car stopped.

  The Mini pulled over and parked.

  They got out, Rose waiting until Skeggsie had pulled his seat forward. Once out of the car the three of them stared off to the right. A vast pool of water sat there, like a lagoon. The edges of it were rocky and grey and there was none of the green foliage that surrounded the boating lake at Mary Linton. It looked bleak, the water still and dark. Far away, across on the other side, she could make out some canoes and a larger motor boat pulling a waterskier.

  ‘What is this?’ Joshua said.

  James Munroe was standing holding a brown file. Rose looked sideways and could see the word Classified on it. She was reminded of Lauren Clarke’s words the previous day. They must have been important people, Rose. Only now did she register that the police officer had used the past tense. Have been; in the past; no more.

  ‘Why don’t you get into my car? It’s warmer there.’

  ‘Skeggs is coming,’ Joshua said, hooking his thumb at Skeggsie.

  James Munroe nodded.

  Somehow Rose ended up in the front next to the ex-Chief Inspector. She sat sideways so that she could see Joshua and Skeggsie. When she looked back to the front all she saw was a flat plain of water stretching away to the horizon. On the Norfolk mudflats they hadn’t seen any water even though they’d been close to the sea. Here, in the middle of the country, there was water as far as the eye could see.

  ‘I know that over the last couple of months you and Joshua and your friend have been researching the disappearance of your parents. Indeed, this is all rather coincidental. Recently certain mysteries about their disappearance have been solved. There was no way I wanted to inform you of this until I was completely sure.’

  ‘Why is it anything to do with you?’ Joshua said. ‘I thought you weren’t in the police any more.’

  ‘Not on the operational side, no. I am a civil servant with responsibilities for certain aspects of policing.’

  ‘National security? Foreign relations? Spies?’

  Joshua simply couldn’t wait. He had to lay all his cards down on the table. At once.

  James Munroe shook his head.

  ‘If you let me talk I will tell you what we’ve found out. The real detail of it is in this file. This is for you to examine in your own time. My number at the Home Office is there should you want to contact me. I will be available for you. This is a direct line to me.’

  Joshua looked like he wanted to say something more but he didn’t. Rose looked past James Munroe to the water beyond. It lay like silk, as if it could be cut through with a pair of scissors.

  ‘Your parents were looking at the cold case of five teenage girls who had been suffocated in the back of a container lorry in 2003. They were part of some people trafficking scams that had been taking place. These girls ranged from thirteen to sixteen. They came from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus. Two of them were never even claimed. No parents came forward, no one was connected to them. Those two were eventually buried in a Whitechapel cemetery.’

  Rose listened hard. She was tensing herself for the end of this story.

  ‘Your parents linked this case to Viktor Baranski, a so-called Russian businessman who lived in Kensington with his family. Respectable. Former Russian navy, rumoured to have sold secrets to the British government. All nonsense we thought. A front. He was a gangster who trafficked young people and sold them around the UK and Europe for as much as he could get. In 2006 it looked like we had a good case against Baranski. Indeed, a lot of it was resting with the Crown Prosecution Service. We had to be sure we could get him and then – out of the blue – he disappeared and days later was found in the sea at Cromer.’

  There wasn’t a sound in the car.

  ‘The problem was Baranski owed money to some bigger gangsters. German. Two million pounds. When Baranski’s body washed up the Germans thought that Kathy and Brendan had deliberately informed the Russian secret service so that they could get their hands on Baranski’s money. The Germans wanted that money back. They wanted Kathy and Brendan.’

  Two million pounds. It sounded like Monopoly money. Rose imagined it piled up on the table, next to the board.

  ‘So they had to disappear. Look as if they’d gone out of the country. It had to look as though they’d run off with money. That’s why they had to leave both of you behind. No one would think it was a put-up job if they left their children behind. Three or four weeks, that’s what we thought it would take to flush out these gangsters. It was a really important case. Your parents’ lives were in danger and actually so would yours have been if we hadn’t caught up with the people that Baranski owed money to. We liaised with the police in Germany and there were traps set to try and catch the people in the organisation. Meanwhile Brendan and Kathy came back from Warsaw under false names and stayed in the cottage in Stiffkey. They were supported by us. Three weeks went by and the German operation concluded successfully. We were about to take them out of hiding when . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They vanished.’

  Rose made a noise in her throat. A kind of childish exclamation. To hear that they had disappeared for a second time was too much. Too much for one daughter to bear.

  ‘We looked everywhere for them. We searched every single place we could. There was nothing left of the Baranski empire, just the son and his family and the restaurant. The German end had been concluded and we had an empty cottage and two children who had no mother or father. It was a dismal day.’

  ‘So you don’t know where they are or what happened to them?’ Joshua said, looking down at his knuckles.

  ‘They had access to a car, a silver Audi. It wasn’t at the cottage; it was parked in a garage in Holt. When we went to check it was gone. We’ve kept looking for them. We’ve never stopped.’

  ‘Frank Richards says they’re alive.’

  James Munroe shook his head irritably.

  ‘Frank was the support person in Stiffkey. He looked after them for three weeks. He’s never seen them since. He’s a loose cannon, a maverick. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

  ‘Why are we here? Why have you brought us to this place?’

  ‘I want to show you something. Come with me. Here, put this in your car, for safe keeping.’

  He handed the Classified file to Skeggsie. They got out of the car and waited while he put the file in the Mini. Then they all walked down the track towards the water’s edge. It took five minutes or so. There were tyre marks down to the water’s edge. Joshua was looking at them.

  ‘People bring their sailing boats here. On a windy day,’ James Munroe said, as if anticipating a question. ‘And you can see how close this place is to The Cambridge Centre, the Cold Cases centre. Anything that happens here might be a direct message for the Cold Cases team. Look, we can do this, even on your doorstep.

  Something was gripping Rose’s arm. She looked down to see that it was her own hand.

  They got to the edge of the water and stood looking in. The flat black surface looked solid, like a gel. Rose wondered how deep it was. She was going to ask but suddenly she couldn’t speak because she knew she was going to cry.

  ‘Four weeks ago a diver located a car at the bottom of the quarry. It was a silver Audi and it matched the registration number of the car which your parents had access to. There were the remains of two bodies inside the car. Male and female. DNA tests are still taking place to positively identify the people concerned and find out the cause of their deaths.’

  Rose turned away. She felt the ground go beneath her feet.

  In her heart she’d known they were dead five years ago. But recent weeks had thrown up real doubt and she had begun to hope again. Now it was as if she was that twelve-year-old girl again and James Munroe was in Anna’s drawing room sitting across the coffee table from her and telling her to be a brave girl.

  She had lost her mother once. It had broken her heart.

  Now it was going to happen all over again.

  Twenty-Nine

  The flat in Camden seemed cold and bare. For the first time since she’d rekindled her relationship with Joshua she wanted to leave and go home to Anna’s house. She couldn’t, though. James Munroe was going to see Anna and she didn’t want to be there when he visited. She pictured him dressed in black with a top hat; the chief mourner. In her mind he would always be associated with death. Five years before he’d told her to take the news like a grown-up. Now that she was grown-up she took it as though she was a five-year-old child.

  Anna would sit in one of her winged chairs in the drawing room and hear a replay of what he’d told them earlier. She’d have her legs neatly crossed and her fingers laced through each other, her manicured nails glossy like jewels.

  Maybe Anna would weep. Rose didn’t want to be there for that.

  In the car, on the return journey from Childerley Waters, Joshua was stonily silent. Rose cried noisily. She sniffed and blew her nose and cleared her throat. When she dried up she stared out at the passing countryside. Every now and again her body gave an involuntary shiver, an aftershock of so much upset.

  ‘Don’t believe him just because he was once a policeman,’ Skeggsie had said, coughing from time to time.

  But Skeggsie’s view of policemen was tainted. His father had been in the force and Skeggsie was sceptical because of all the stories he’d heard.

  So Rose cried again. Her skin was wet, her eyes were swollen and she let it go on and on. When they reached Camden her head felt bigger than its normal size, her eyelids raw. She went straight to the bathroom and ran some cold water into the sink. She sat on the corner of the bath and cupped it up with her hands and held it against her eyes. When she’d dried her eyes she found Skeggsie and Joshua sitting at the kitchen table. In the middle of the table was the file marked Classified. It looked like one of the files that she used for her college work. Inside it was the flat plain truth that they had wanted for five years. If only we knew the truth, they’d said over and over. We just want to know what happened, they’d said.

  Now they did and it gave little comfort.

  Forensics could not give an exact amount of time that the silver Audi had been in the water. The best estimate was four to five years. The investigation was still open-ended but it was James Munroe’s view that Kathy and Brendan had been taken from the cottage at Stiffkey and murdered soon after.

  The file contained the detailed notes, yet it sat on the table untouched. Joshua who had been the prime mover of the search for their parents didn’t reach for it, hadn’t opened it, wasn’t interested. Skeggsie looked as though he would have liked to open it but held back. It was Rose who had to reach for the file. Rose, who had been reluctant to get involved in the search for their parents, who had dealt with her grief and wanted to let the dead lie in peace. But she’d been seduced by Joshua’s fervour. She’d been pulled along in spite of her reluctance only to find that she had to go through the grieving process all over again. She opened the flap of the file and pulled out a wad of papers. On top was a photograph of the car. Her breath skipped in her throat as she saw it. It had been taken at the place where they’d stood hours earlier, Childerley Waters.

  The shot had been taken from a distance. The silver car was being pulled out of the water. She thought of Rachel Bliss being lifted out of the lake by the gardener and the groundsman. The photo in her hand showed a big tow truck. There were pulleys attached to the back of the Audi and it was being dragged up from where it had sat in the depths for so long. There were people round, a frogman, a police officer, the man who was working the machinery.

  She placed the photograph on the table in plain view but Joshua did not reach for it.

  ‘Will there be a funeral?’ she said suddenly.

  No one answered.

  She wanted to go back to Anna’s. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

  ‘I’ll go out and get some food,’ Skeggsie said, standing up. ‘We might as well eat.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

  Joshua got up and walked out of the kitchen. She heard his bedroom door close. She frowned and was about to follow him when Skeggsie touched her arm.

  ‘Leave him to deal with it on his own.’

  They shopped, walking round the streets of Camden. They bought bread and salad and a cooked chicken. Skeggsie picked up some fruit and some crisps and a bag of doughnuts.

  ‘Comfort food,’ he said.

 

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