by M. G. Cole
Breathing was impossible. Smoke was filling his lungs. He crawled to the door and tried to open it, but a fallen bookcase blocked it. He was trapped.
With streaming eyes he could barely see. He blindly groped over the books cast across the floor and found something big and heavy. An old tome about the Canterbury Trail. He hefted it at the window. Glass shattered and a snowy eddy gust into the room. He threw another book to clear a wider space and crawled over the broken glass to escape.
The snow was stained crimson from the cuts on his hands. He made it into the road, before hearing feet running towards him.
“Sir?” It was Chib’s voice. He had told her to meet him here, but she had been stuck in a jam on the M20. “David?”
She was nothing more than a blurred outline, back lit by a warm orange wall of fire that crept up to the first floor of John Howard’s house, consuming everything in its path.
28
David Garrick hated hospitals at the best of times, and his private ward William Harvey Hospital came top of the list. Overnight he had been on oxygen and his glass cuts stitched together, along with a scar on his scalp from where a heavy book had struck him. All evening he had been in and out of consciousness.
It was late morning when he had felt well enough to sit up in bed so that PC Harry Lord to take his statement about what had happened. Garrick’s own questions about the case were sidestepped by Harry. It became clear why just before lunch when Superintendent Margery Drury came to see him. She had wanted to update him on the investigation herself.
“I didn’t know if you liked chocolates,” she said, taking the seat next his bed.
“Love them.”
Drury shrugged. “Oh well. I didn’t bring any, so maybe next time.”
She listened without interruption as Garrick talked her through events from the moment he had arrived at Sihana’s crime scene. He edited the details of his appointment with Dr Rajasekar and highlighted the key information Fanta had churned up on the dark web. He was annoyed at himself for listening to John Howard’s sustained disinformation about the Romani, all designed from the very beginning to subtly twist his thinking away from who the real culprits were.
Drury gave a little shrug and told him not to worry about it. They had all chased the bait. That morning Chib had led the search on Sam Feilding’s farm. He was exporting wine, just as he said, but the vans that were arriving had been carrying drugs. The wine was a handy pretext to keep the supply route open. As far as they could tell, none of the workers on the farm had known about the contraband.
The Audi had been valeted many times by the poor, misused, cheap labour he was employing, but forensics had found traces of Duke’s blood, presumably off the knife that had killed him. One of the farm labourers recalls John Howard visiting several times, and at some point the knife must have been passed back and forth between the men, but only Fielding could answer that one.
As for John Howard, he died in his shop as it burned down around him. The damaged had extended to the building next door before the fire brigade had arrived to tackle the flames. There wasn’t much left of John Howard, his lamps, or his books.
Garrick thumped his head back against the pillow. From all the head trauma he had sustained in the last few hours, it would be just his luck a pillow was the final nail in his coffin.
“So we lost all the evidence against him?”
“Not everything,” Drury said with a playful smile. “There was a shed in the back that hadn’t been damaged. He used to store packaging boxes, bubble wrap, all he needed for online trade. It was also where he hung and dried the skin he cut from the girls. Sihana’s was still hanging up, and the lab boys are saying it’s a treasure trove of DNA evidence.”
She pulled a Mars bar from her pocket and slowly unwrapped it.
“I thought you said you didn’t bring any chocolate?”
“Not for you.” She bit into it thoughtfully. “This is what passes for lunch these days. I hate to say it, David, but all things considered, good job.”
It didn’t feel like it, but he didn’t see the point in correcting her.
He was discharged by four o’clock and Drury had told him in no uncertain terms not to come back to the incident room for a couple of day. Chib was doing a competent job at winding down the investigation, and HR would roast her alive if she let him come back so soon.
He considered joining the team for Harry Lord’s yet-again delayed birthday drinks, but he just couldn’t summon the enthusiasm. He stopped off at the pharmacy to pick up his prescription of co-codamol and took some immediately. His head had been constantly throbbing since he’d woke that morning, but he hadn’t had the courage to tell the doctors.
He just wanted to go home.
That evening, David Garrick sat alone, and in silence at his kitchen table. He had intended to finish cleaning the fossil, but the shrill whine of the air pump provoked his headache. He must have stared into nothingness for a good half hour. Thoughts of the young girls who had been butchered on a whim, came unprovoked. Short lives, all cut short.
He had seen an email from Fanta that she had been obtained from the Marines. It was a psychological report on John Howard after the Falklands War. He hadn’t been the medalled hero, as he had always claimed. He had been dishonourably discharged after being accused of executing young Argentinian prisoners. Nothing was ever officially proven, which Garrick thought was code for a military cover-up, but he had suffered PTSD ever since.
Another email outlined what the team were piecing together. John Howard had met Galina at Fielding’s farm and charmed her to her death. That was his first attempt are grafting skin. Jamal fell into his sights when he became embroiled with the gypsies passing through the village. Her connection with the Romanian was a bonus. Mr Constantine, as his business associates called him, represented everything John Howard hated. So setting him up to take the fall for the murders he was planning was surely a public service. The killing of Duke was a complication, but either way, it ensured the spotlight would never be cast in his direction.
Desperate for some absolution, Mircea had started to talk in rather excellent English. He admitted to killing Duke, claiming it was self-defence. He had run after Jamal, chasing her down Castle Hill and into the retail park. Not to kill her, of course, but to convince her to stay with him. Only then had he become aware that John Howard had been watching everything from afar. From the moment they had met on Castle Hill, he had followed her into Folkestone. Mircea had watched Howard prey on Jamal and had fled before she had been killed.
The answer to whether Sihana’s death had been timed to mock Garrick’s investigation, or if John simply couldn’t resist, was something that had died with him.
Garrick closed the email. He didn’t want to know any more right now. He felt betrayed by a man he had known and trusted for years. A man he looked up to as an inspiration.
It was during this fugue he suddenly remembered the text from Wendy.
Are you doing anything this weekend?
He hadn’t even replied. He hesitated, then typed: nothing much. Fancy a better lunch?
He pressed send before he could change his mind. Less than thirty seconds later, a reply:
Yes! x
Despite feeling like an emotional punchbag, David Garrick smiled.
Then his landline rang. He didn’t know anybody who had the number – except the Americans. He hurried into the living room and scooped up the wireless handset.
“Hello yes?”
There was silence on the other end. Probably an automated junk call trying to connect him to a pre-recorded message. He was about to hang-up, when he heard the distinct sound of movement on the other side, and a sharp distorted expulsion of breath across the microphone.
“Hello?”
A clunk, as if the handset had dropped, followed by more shuffling.
“Hello?”
Then, a voice:
“Davey…”
It was on the edge of hear
ing, so far away that it was a pale whisper. Then the line went dead. Had he imagined it?
With shaking fingers he dialled 1471, the British Telecom automated voice told him the time of the call but concluded, “we do not have the caller’s number.”
That’s what it always said on international calls. Such as the ones from the American PD. Except this was very different. The voice he had heard… or thought he had heard…
He was certain it was Emelie. It was too faint to be sure.
But she had been the only person in the world to call him ‘Davey.’