“That’s good,” he said. “Offer still stands, sir. If you ever need an extra pair of hands, or just someone around to take you to A&E every now and then.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” I told him. He made a slightly uncertain sort of face, but it quickly faded when he leant back in his chair, face tipped to the sky, the sunlight bringing out an orange tint to his black hair. I looked up too, happy enough to enjoy a cold beer and warm weather before we delved back into the cold, dead gardens tomorrow.
Nineteen
Thatcher
When I woke up the next morning, there were some lilies delivered to my door. I took them from the courier, glancing down at the still unflowered buds with a frown and kicked the door shut, walking into the kitchen and fiddling for the small card attached to the stems. I wondered if they’d been delivered to the wrong house, not that I had a problem with free flowers. I found the card at last and flipped it open.
“Thatch. I know this time of year is hard. Thinking of you. J.”
Jeannie. White lilies, my mother’s favourite. I was surprised she’d remembered, surprised she’d sent them after months of silence. I found an old jug large enough to put the flowers in until I could take them to the church, my movements unsettled and shaky. She caught me off guard. Of course, she did. That was classic Jeannie. Not even here, and she made my stomach flip.
I left the card on the table and finished getting ready for work. I had work to do with Abbie’s laptop, looking for any trace of the study that got shut down, for Toomas Kask or anyone else who might have worked on it, anyone who directly opposed it. For all we knew, she and Sonia had carried on with the study, managing to get a target on the back of their heads in the process.
I didn’t rule it out, nor did I completely rule out Luke Campbell, who’d stuck around in the city of late, but according to Susanne, had stayed well away from Paige and Grace. I fumbled with my tie, the knot ultimately wonky, and with the memory of my grandfather’s voice in my head, I set to work making it straight, hands still wobbly. It was August now, Jeannie had timed that well, and I was already all too aware of the cloud that began to roll in over my head.
I shook it off. I had a murderer to catch, and a deadline if I wanted to spend a proper evening with Liene when she got back. The thought soothed me enough to throw my jacket on, wolf down a bowl of cereal and stride from the house, yanking my coat on and balancing a thermos of tea as I kicked the door shut. Coming up the steps as I came down, my landlady Mrs MacIntosh hobbled up with her bag of cleaning supplies.
“Morning,” I greeted her.
“Good morning, pet. Let me in, and I’ll give the place a once over.” I raised a brow, but reached back and opened the door for her, trusting her to lock it up when she was done. I jogged down the stairs, my coat flapping around my legs like a cape, hitting the kerb just as Mills swung up into the street. I hopped into the car and gave him a nod.
“Mills.”
“Morning, sir.” He didn’t bother with small talk today, both of us starting to feel the clock ticking, and simply sped off to the station, narrowly avoiding a rather fat pigeon in the road as his tyres squealed along.
The station was fairly quiet when we arrived, swapping quick pleasantries with the desk sergeant before making our way upstairs. We were greeted first by Smith, who held a pile of sheets in her hands.
“Smith,” I gave her a nod to follow us along to the office.
“Sir. Got all the statements from the botanical gardens put together, all the alibis square up.”
“Figured as much,” I answered, taking my coat off and hanging it up.
“And Wasco asked me to give you this, sir,” she pulled out Abbie’s laptop from her arm full of crap and handed it over. Mills took it, letting her rebalance her things. “Said that there was nothing that stuck out to him, but you’d know better what you’re looking for, and he’s trying to get in Petrilli’s work computer now.”
“Thank you, Smith. Did you take a look in Lin Shui?”
“I did. She’s clean, sir. Time of Sonia Petrilli’s death, we can firmly place her at work. In the middle of a rather complicated tattoo fix. Something about an old flame’s name.”
I shook my head with a tut, powering up Abbie’s laptop. “Should never get someone’s name tattooed on you. Not unless it’s your child or your mother,” I added, watching the laptop whir to life.
“I’ll remember that one, sir,” Smith said with a faint chuckle, giving us another nod and quick smile before backing from the room. Mills shut the door after her and dragged his chair over to me to look at Abbie’s home screen. A photograph of the three of them, Abbie, Paige and Grace all sitting on a beach somewhere filled the organised screen, and I opened up her documents, ready to begin trudging through them.
“I had a thought,” Mills muttered after watching me click through some folders, turning up empty-handed.
“Do share it,” I replied.
“If we’re going as far back as eight or nine years, we might be looking in the wrong place.” I paused and looked over my shoulder at him. “I mean,” he went on, “have you ever kept the same laptop for that long? A work laptop at that?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Okay, well, would Abbie?” He tried. “And even if she did, keeping one for that long means it’d get clogged up with all sorts of stuff. Maybe she has spread out her work.”
“You mean maybe she has a hard drive somewhere?” I asked, pushing myself back from the desk.
Mills shrugged, flipping a pencil between his fingers. He used to smoke, I’d learned not long ago, and he toyed with pens and pencils like they were cigarettes.
“Why have a study, a shutdown study, from that long ago on a laptop that’s otherwise mostly just pictures of her daughter?” he pointed out. It was a thought, a very interesting and very valid thought that I was annoyed we’d only just come to.
“We’ll need to go back to the house,” I murmured, “and ask Paige if there’s any sign of one.”
“Unless she kept it somewhere else,” he suggested. “Like at work?”
“You think that the mess in the greenhouse wasn’t just a fight?” I realised, sitting back and letting him theorise.
“Could be that the killer was looking for the study, maybe that’s why they had to come back for Sonia,” he suggested. I pieced his ideas together, letting them play out in my head, watching the narrative unfold. It made sense, vaguely, and explained why there’d be no break-in at Abbie’s house. If the killer was connected to the study in some way, you’d think they’d be looking for what was left of it, if there was anything left of it.
“This all hinges,” I pointed out, “on our belief that the killer doesn’t already have the study. If they do, what reason do they have to show up again?”
“Sonia and Abbie might not have been the only people working on it,” Mills said. “We’ve only just learnt about Toomas Kask. There could be other people’s names left out, under the radar.”
More botanists, I thought with a slight curling of my lips. I was getting a bit sick and tired of all the gardening. I looked back at the laptop, the screensaver now running across. I watched, for a moment, as pictures of baby Grace, teenage Paige and another couple, the sister’s parents perhaps, raced across the screen. I looked to my own computer, with its generic background of a field and frowned.
“Awfully personal for a work computer,” I murmured. “Especially a work that requires ID and access cards to get into most of the rooms.” A very lax password as well, now that I thought about it, particularly lax for the sort of work that Abbie would have been doing. “Do you know many people who store pictures of their daughter eating ice cream on their work computers?”
“I do not,” Mills said slowly, catching up to where I had gotten. “You think she has another computer?”
“I think there’s a significant lack of privacy and actual work on this.” She’d get pages, Pdfs and scanned images of books, research papers
and articles, but there was nothing of her actual work on the computer. Nothing jumped to Wasco because there was nothing to jump out full stop.
I picked up my phone, scrolling through the contacts for Paige’s number. It rang for a while, and I was girding myself up to leave a voicemail when she at last answered.
“Inspector Thatcher?” She asked, must have saved my number, I realised rather happily.
“Hello, Paige. Sorry to bother you. We were wondering if you knew whether or not Abbie had a separate computer for her work.”
“A separate laptop?” Paige asked, her voice lost in the wind slightly. I could hear Grace giggling in the background and wondered if they were making the most of the nice weather outside. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I can have a look around the house.”
“I’d appreciate that very much,” I told her.
“I’ll do it as soon as we get home,” she said. “We’re at the park,” she added, “needed to let Grace run out of energy a bit.” She sounded a bit fatigued, and I wondered if the pressure of looking after her niece, her sister in the hospital, was starting to get to her.
“Why don’t we meet later?” I suggested, hopefully taking some of the strain of the day off of her young shoulders. “At the hospital, if you like. That way, you don’t have to worry about Grace?”
“We planned on going there anyway,” she said in a much more relieved voice. “Five? That gives me time to look.”
“Five is fine. And don’t worry if you can’t find anything,” I added, “it’s just a hunch.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she did,” Paige said. “She liked to keep things separate. I’ll see you later, Inspector.”
“See you later, Paige.”
I hung up and spun my chair around to look at Mills.
“Has Susanne said anything about her? How is she holding up?”
Mills shook his head, looking concerned. “Should she have?”
“I’ll find out later,” I told him. “For now, let’s clear through some of this paperwork, eh?”
A rather large mound had built up on our desks, almost the same height as the photo frame on my desk. A frame that I studiously avoided, dragging the stack of sheets towards me as Mills groaned his way to his own desk.
It was dull work, tedious as anything and my hand ached by the end of it, but it sped the day along. We stopped for lunch, chatted to Wasco for a while before getting back to it, and then the afternoon was gone, and I pulled my coat on, ready to head to the hospital.
I bade Mills goodbye, and as I walked towards the stairs, Sharp appeared out of nowhere, a sympathetic look on her face.
“You off home?” She asked, pulling her bag over her shoulder and joining me as I walked towards the doors.
“Hospital,” I told her. “Going to have another chat with Paige.”
I could feel her looking at me.
“Take care,” she told me in such a gentle voice that I actually stopped and looked round at her. She smiled at me, reaching up and patting my shoulder before striding outside into the car that waited for her, her husband waving at me from the driver’s seat. I waved back and stuffed my hands into my pockets, walking to the hospital.
Take care, I thought to myself. It wasn’t so bad this year. Maybe all the work in the coaching house really was working. But every step I took towards the hospital felt like walking through tar, and the horrible feeling that riled up in me, that exact same as it had those years ago, as the looming building came into view. I made my way to the lift, passing the floor she would have been on, and walked towards Abbie’s room, nodding to the officer outside who gratefully scarpered off for a piss and some food.
Paige and Grace were already there, so I knocked on the door and pushed it open, only walking when Paige turned and nodded.
“How are you both?” I asked, wandering in and sitting in a spare chair. Abbie was looking, not well, but better. Her bruises had all but faded now, and though she was thin and wan, she didn’t look like she was knocking on death’s door anytime soon.
“We’re okay, aren’t we, Grace?” Paige said, a nod coming from the curly red hair. Grace knelt on a chair, her head pressed against Abbie’s shoulder, her thumb stuck in her mouth.
“I couldn’t find another laptop, though,” Paige told me mournfully. “Maybe she kept it at work?”
I nodded. “Thank you for looking. We’ll likely be checking there next.”
Paige gave a small smile, jumping like a rabbit when her phone suddenly trilled out. She looked down at it with a sigh, her eyes flicking to Grace.
“It’s work. Do you mind…?” She pointed to Grace, trailing off.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” I assured her. She smiled gratefully, answering her phone and stepping outside into the hallway, where we could still see each other through the window.
I looked at Grace and felt awkward. Children were not my strong suit.
“I like your bear,” I told her, pointing at the familiar shape of Paddington nestled under her arm.
“Mummy gave me him,” she told me, looking sadly at Abbie. “She’s still sleeping.”
“My mummy slept in here too once,” I told her through the pain in my chest. She looked over, her eyes widening.
“Your mummy?” I nodded. “She woke up?” Grace asked.
I faltered, not really wanting to be the one to introduce this sweet little girl to the concept of death.
“She’s not here anymore,” I told her simply.
“Mummy’s tired,” Grace had already moved on. “That man came after bedtime.”
I looked over at her, cocking my head to one side. “What man?”
“Tall man. Talked to mummy at bedtime. She didn’t let him in,” Grace told me a loud whisper, like it was the greatest secret her four-year-old brain could imagine. “No tea.”
“No tea,” I repeated. “Have you seen the man before?” I asked her.
Grace shook her head, lying back down on Abbie’s shoulder and sticking her thumb back in her mouth. I watched them for a moment, my own grief threatening to spill tears from my eyes and was saved when Paige walked back in with a loud sigh.
“I might quit. When you wake up,” she told her sleeping sister, “you’re helping me find a new job. Everything okay?” She asked me. I quickly arranged my face in a more professional manner.
“Grace mentioned Abbie talking to a man,” I told her quietly.
Paige’s head snapped over to her niece. “What man, poppet?” she asked sweetly.
“Tall man.”
“Hair like yours?” Paige asked in a dark voice. Grace shook her head, and Paige relaxed.
“Any idea who?” I asked her.
“None at all.”
Twenty
Thatcher
I went straight home from the hospital, my mind whirring over who the man Grace saw with Abbie could have been. He’d been at her house, so whoever he was, Abbie must have known him. At least Luke Campbell was ruled out, faintly, though I doubted he’d have simply shown up at the door and demanded to come in. I considered Dr Quaid, but Grace knew him, having met him several times over her life. Toomas Kask, she did not know, and I wondered over just how involved he had been with that study as I made my way home, stopping at the chippy for a large cod and chips, the smell almost irresistible to ignore until I got home, where I sprawled out in front of the telly, watching reruns of an old sitcom and eating my dinner.
I also considered texting Mills and sharing with him what I had learnt from Grace, but he’d probably be home by now, maybe even with Susanne, and it was nothing that couldn’t wait until morning, where I’d have another good dive into Abbie’s laptop for a search of this mystery man. My house, at least, was spotless, and Mrs MacIntosh had even been kind enough to iron my laundry, so I had clean, smart clothes for the day ahead. It was a small load off my mind, but a useful one, and meant that I could draw the evening to a close.
Tidying up my mess and making sure the door wa
s locked, the lights all switched off, I lumbered into the bathroom for a quick shower and then into my bedroom for an early night. Collapsing on the bed and with nothing to distract me, those unpleasant memories began to rear their ugly heads again, so I rolled over with a grunt and picked my phone up, finding some app that Elsie had made me download that was supposed to help you sleep. I put the phone back and slumped down, an arm thrown across my face as the low, rhythmic music quietly filled the room.
It did the trick, and before I knew it, I was out like a light, faint dreams skittering across my eyes of my grandparents and the coaching house back in its prime. Standing on a rickety stool, peeling apples in the kitchen whilst someone sang, slightly out of tune alongside me. I knew whose voice it was, but when I turned to look at her, she was gone, the song with it. Instead, some horrible ringing piped up, and my eyes shot open.
It wasn’t the smoke detector I quickly figured out, thank goodness for that, and it didn’t really sound like my morning alarm. I groaned, blearily blinking and pushed myself up onto my elbows, head spinning slightly, and the sound continued to play. I dared a glance over to the window, the curtains drawn, and no light managed to peek through. Still dark then, too early to be morning.
My phone, I realised with a moan. I reached for it with a fumbling hand, nearly knocking over my glass of water in the process. It was half two in the morning, and it was Smith’s name flashing across my screen.
“What?” I answered grittily, my voice still thick with sleep.
“Toomas Kask, sir,” she answered quickly and apologetically.
“Is he dead?” I asked, numbly, sitting up properly and rubbing my eyes.
“No, sir. He made an emergency call; someone broke into his house. He’s fine. We’ve picked him up and are bringing him back to the station whilst the house gets checked.”
Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 4) Page 16