The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 223

Chapter 201: What Margaret Knows

Caleb POV

Clam

The word that stayed with me was what Jade had said in the courtroom, right before the guards took her

away.

Stripped of all her composure, she had shouted, “You’re not even my sister. Ask her what you really are.”

I had been standing in the gallery, three rows back. I watched Bella hold Jade’s gaze for seconds. Then, Bella turned and walked toward me. I took her hand at the end of the aisle, and we walked out into the cold Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t say anything about it because Bella said she didn’t want to think about it, and I respected that.

But the word stayed with me, I thought about it on the drive home thought about it that night while Bella slept and I couldn’t. I thought about it the next morning at five-thirty over coffee, and by six, I had made a decision.

The trial had produced hundreds of pages of paperwork-witness statements, forensic accounting, and communication logs from the remand facility. My legal team had read every page twice to prepare for testimony, and I had read most of it myself.

What I had not looked at carefully enough was the visitor log from Jade’s second month in remand. I pulled it at seven in the morning.

Margaret Hart had visited Jade at Harlow Remand three times. Each visit lasted forty minutes, and all three happened within the same two-week period.

I sat with that for a while.

A mother visiting her daughter in remand was not unusual. What was unusual was the timing. Jade had been locked up for months before those visits. Margaret had not come when Jade was first arrested, or during the early hearings. She had waited.

The visits were not recorded. I had no transcripts, but I understood how people moved and why. Margaret Hart was not an inventive woman. She was calculating and vindictive, but she did not invent things. She worked with material she already had.

And Jade, in that courtroom, had used that material.

Jade had walked into her sentencing hearing knowing she was going to prison for a long time. With nothing left to lose, she chose that specific sentence as her final move. It wasn’t leverage; it was just a grenade thrown at the person she blamed for everything.

She had got the information from Margaret.

Margaret had sat with her daughter for forty minutes, three times, and handed Jade the one piece of news that could hurt Bella. She didn’t do it to help Jade. Margaret never did anything to help anyone else. She did it because she needed a delivery system, and Jade-furious and convicted-was perfect.

Margaret was sitting on a secret about Bella’s identity, and she had been sitting on it for years. She handed it to Jade because she knew that, eventually, it would reach Bella.

Chapter 201 What Margaret Know

Lealled the investigator at eight.

Claires

“Margaret Hart,” I said when he picked up. “I need everything. Family history, birth records, siblings, and anything connected to Bella’s birth. Go back as far as the records go.”

“Timeline?” he asked.

“Forty-eight hours if you can manage it said and hung up.

He called back in four hours. “I’ve got a problem,” he said.

I set my pen down. “Talk to me.”

“The law firm you’re looking for dissolved in 2003,” he said. “The files went into storage with a third-party company. That company was bought out twice. Now, the files are with a large records group in Edinburgh.”

“Can you get to them?”

“Possibly. But we would need a formal request and proof of legal interest. That means identifying yourself.”

“Which means Margaret Hart finds out someone is looking,” I said.

“Yes.”

I thought for a moment. “Don’t touch the law firm records yet. Work around them. What else is there?”

“The birth certificate looks clean,” he said. “Isabella Hart, mother Margaret, father Richard, registered in. But the registration date is eleven days after the birth. It is within the legal window, but at the very end of it. It looks like someone was hesitating.”

“Keep going,” I said. “Go wider. Look into Margaret’s family history. Siblings. Anyone connected to her before she married Richard.”

“That’s a longer dig.”

“Then start digging,” I said, and hung up.

I spent the next few hours doing my own research.

す

I started with Companies House. The dissolved law firm appeared in a public record from 2003: Ashworth and Cole, Solicitors, located in Clerkenwell. The firm had closed after a partnership dispute. Two directors were listed, but death records showed they were both gone. A third name on the original documents, Gerald Cole, appeared in a retirement notice from 2011 with an address in Dorset.

had my own lawyer make the call. She framed it as a routine estate inquiry, the kind of call a firm gets twice a week.

She called me back within the hour.

“He was polite,” she said. “Cooperative, to a point. He said he remembered very little, that the records were in storage, and that we should go through the proper channels.”

“But?” I asked.

Chapter 201 Whol Margaret Knows

Clam

“Before he hung up, he said, ‘If it’s about the Voss matter, I’d advise leaving it alone. Then he ended the call quickly

I wrote the name down on my notepad. “Did he say anything else?”

“No. Just that. He said it like a warning, like he had been expecting the call for a long time.”

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