Dead and Buried Read Online Free PDF Page B

Brendan Johnson went out for a meal at the Tuscan Moon restaurant in Islington. They never returned to us. We found out what happened to them from a waitress who contacted us via the web. They left their car parked in a side street and took a taxi to a B and B in Twickenham. The next morning they went to Heathrow and took a flight to Warsaw. We do not know where they went after that.
    We think that they may have come back to England and spent some time in a cottage at Stiffkey in North Norfolk.
    The next sighting of them was in a photograph on Cromer Beach. This photograph was taken in June 2012.
    Our most recent sighting of them was in a Skype recording. This recording was made in December 2012.
    On 29 December they sent us a text from a place in Essex. Somewhere in the area between the following three villages: Wickby, Southwood and Hensham.
    Up to that time we know that they were alive.
     
    The word alive gave her a jolt. How important that had been when she and Joshua first found out that they were not dead. They had Frank Richards to thank for that. Rose flicked to the end of the pages she had written and found the section where she had described the meeting with Frank Richards. She’d given it a heading – The Notebooks.
     
    Frank Richards was a friend of Brendan Johnson’s, a policeman who had been dismissed from the service. Joshua knew him by sight but I did not. In October 2012 we found him in a flat in Twickenham. He told us that my mother and Brendan were alive and he also said that my mother had asked him to look after me while she was away. He claimed he had done this over the five years that I’d lived with my grandmother, keeping an eye on what I was doing, checking that I wasn’t being followed. When we found him he was packing to leave England. He had a pile of notebooks and Joshua stole two of them. When we looked at them we found the strangest thing. Each had a photograph of someone and then the rest of the book was full of coded handwriting. These notebooks were ordinary exercise books and were both in the same handwriting. We believe the code was taken from an old hardback book called The Butterfly Project . We had a copy of this for a while but were unable to decode the books, just scraps of pages here and there. We think that each of these two notebooks outlined the killing of a person. We believe, from things we heard afterwards, that one of the notebooks belonged to a series (the remainder held by Frank Richards) which documented the killing of criminals.
     
    Rose had stopped writing there because she hadn’t been able to find the words to go on. There was more to tell but she couldn’t really state the blunt awful truth about what her mother and Brendan had become without explaining the rest. The whole story of The Butterfly Murder had to be told. Other people involved had to be described. The story of Viktor Baranski and his son, Lev. There was much more to say.
    She looked down at the notebook in her hand. She could have written her statement on sheets of paper but somehow she had decided that a notebook was the right thing to have. In the shop it had taken her a while to make up her mind. There had been other colours but she had chosen red. The colour of blood. Was she being too dramatic? She closed it, flattening it with the palm of her hand. She had no stomach to write anything in it now. She slipped it into the envelope and then into the file and placed it back in the drawer.
    Later she went to bed.
    She was restless, turning her bedside light on and off, reading for a while, then listening to the radio. In the end she stopped trying to go to sleep. She heard Anna’s footsteps on the stairs and then the sound of her door opening and shutting. There was no knock on Rose’s door, no call of Goodnight! – just Anna, going about her day-to-day business as if she was living alone. Rose was used to it now but in the early days when she’d first been sent to live there after her mother