Free Dead and Buried by Anne Cassidy

participant. That she went along with it because she loved Brendan.
     
    Rose thought back to the Skype recording they’d seen around Christmas. Her mother and Brendan had been speaking directly to them. It was the first sight of them they’d had for over five years. The quality of the film hadn’t been good but still Rose had hung on to every moment, her eyes searching the screen for facial expression, eye contact, hand movements. Brendan had done most of the talking. He’d explained the life they’d taken on before and since disappearing; her mother behind his shoulder, in his shadow, had said very little. She’d looked strained and grim. Brendan had talked earnestly about their choice, about the things they had done, but her mother had just looked burdened by it all.
     
    Right from the beginning , Rose wrote, on the night they disappeared my mother left her glasses case behind in the restaurant. In it there’d been a card for a Bed and Breakfast place in Twickenham. It had seemed like a clue left on purpose. Then, the false surname they had used in the B and B had been Brewster, the name of the road we had lived in. On top of this my mother had not tried to disguise her handwriting when she’d signed the guest book, her ornate lettering giving away her true identity.
    It seemed as if she was leaving a trail for me to find.
     
    And then there was the Butterfly Murder.
    It was the crime that started the whole ‘mission’. Her mother had not been part of this. Rose turned back a few pages in the notebooks. There, a week or so before, she had written about it.
     
    The Butterfly Murder was the beginning of everything .
    In 2002 ten-year-old Judy Greaves was abducted and murdered, her body left in a room full of mounted butterflies. She was discovered by a policewoman. A man called Simon Lister had been arrested and tried but was acquitted through lack of evidence. Brendan’s brother, Stuart, had known the girl’s sister, and had become obsessed with this miscarriage of justice. He’d contacted his brother and asked him to look into the case but Brendan couldn’t. Brendan went up to Newcastle in 2004 to visit him, taking my mother, his new girlfriend, with him. Stuart had gone to Simon Lister’s house and stabbed him. He got back home with blood on his hands. Brendan had been shocked. In order to save his brother from a life sentence he’d rushed round to the crime scene, removing the weapon and any trace that his brother Stuart had been there.
    When the dead man was found the police searched his home and his computer and found evidence that he’d murdered Judy Greaves as well as others. They also found photographs and plans to abduct a further young girl.
    It seemed to them that the murder had been a good thing.
    The experience changed Brendan. Other police were involved in the cover-up and they must have stuck together. Policemen and women who were tired of criminals getting away with major crime. They decided that they would mete out justice and if that meant taking the lives of killers and those in organised crime then they would do it.
    When exactly had her mother become involved?
    Had she ever actually killed someone?
    The only murder they knew about in any detail was that of Viktor Baranski. And as far as Rose knew her mother had played no part in that case. She turned forward a couple of pages and found the section of her statement that dealt with it.
     
    The Second Notebook.
    The photograph at the front of this book was of Viktor Baranski, a Russian businessman. He was linked to people trafficking and in 2003 the bodies of five teenage girls were found in the back of a container lorry. They had suffocated and the youngest was thirteen. They were being smuggled into Britain in order to become prostitutes. Viktor Baranski was never charged with this crime although the Cold Cases team (who were already investigating Baranski for other crimes) were convinced that he was responsible.
    In 2006 he