Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 4)

by Oliver Davies

  “Mr Kask, do you notice anything wrong with these images? Anything missing?”

  He bent over them, looking some distraught at the state of his house, and shook his head.

  “No. That’s—that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”

  I put the photos away and braced my arms on the table. “In a burglary, yes. But we don’t believe that your home was intruded by a burglar. We believe that the intrusion is connected to the attack on Abbie Whelan and the murder of Sonia Petrilli.”

  Kask’s face went blank, pale, like I had punched him in the gut with the words. He blinked, panicked and looked around the room. “What?” he managed to get out.

  “Eight years ago, Miss Whelan, Miss Petrilli, and yourself worked on a botanical drug study that before it got shut down was the target of protestors. Both Miss Whelan and Miss Petrilli received threats for their involvement in the study, and both have now suffered.”

  “You think that they came for me too?” Kask asked, bundling his hands up in his sleeves, a thin sheen of sweat on his face. “Why?”

  “I’m guessing,” I told him patiently, ‘that it has something to do with that study that we can’t find any trace of.”

  “The study,” he murmured, looking down at his hands.

  “What happened, Mr Kask?” Mills asked him in a gentle voice. “Why did it get shut down, and why will no one tell us about it?”

  Kask breathed in deeply and paused long enough for me to snap at him, but before I could, he met my stare with watery, bloodshot eyes.

  “We’d been working on it for a while,” he said in a croaky voice. “We reached the stage where it was ready to be tested on humans. We had some volunteers, mostly a few university students looking for some extra credit and a bit of cash.” I nodded, encouraging him on. “One of the volunteers,” he swallowed loudly, “passed away. Not,” he very quickly added, “as a result of our work. Not at all. It was a few months later. The hospital said it was a complication with his heart, nothing to do with our research. But the boy’s family, they thought it was our fault. Blamed us, called us murderers. I think the threats that Abbie and Sonia received, they came from them. The boy’s mother. They shut the study down after that.”

  “You didn’t get one?”

  Kask shrugged. “My name wasn’t on the paper,” he said simply. “I never met them. That was all Abbie and Sonia’s role. I just did the plants.” His face fell.

  I sat back, letting all of that information air out. A dead volunteer. This would have been useful to know back when we first found Abbie. I wanted to scream at people sometimes. Did they not realise that the more they told us, the faster all of this got sorted out?

  I turned and looked at Mills, who seemed to be along the same thought process as I was. A dead student, a grieving mother. Why anything would be done about it eight years down the line was a wonder, but perhaps the new, accredited work the two women were doing now was just the catalyst needed.

  “Mr Kask, do you remember the name of the volunteer? And his family?”

  “Jordan,” he answered quickly, perhaps unable to forget the name. “Jordan Picard. His mother was called, Michele, I think. Michele and Jordan Picard.”

  I clocked Mills jotting down the name and straightened up in my seat. “Have you received any contact from Michele Picard in recent years?”

  “None,” Kask told me in a sad tone. “I left the research gardens after the study got shut down and haven’t looked back.”

  “Mr Kask,” I began hesitantly. “We have a reason to believe that Abbie Whelan was visited by a man, not long before she was attacked, at her home. Did you pay her a visit at any time?”

  He’d claimed not to have seen her, but he’d also claimed to not know much about the study, and it was amazing the things people revealed when they thought their life was in danger. I could feel Mills looking at me in surprise and remembered that through all the grogginess of the morning, I hadn’t shared that with him yet. He handled the surprise well, turning to look at Kask with an expression eerily similar to mine.

  “No,” Kask muttered. “I haven’t seen her years.” He kept his eyes down when he said, focused on his hands that toyed with the hem of his jumper. My eyes narrowed slightly, but the man was in shock, scared as anyone would be when their home was broken into.

  “Until we’ve found our assailant and arrested them, we think it would be best for you to take the protection we’re going to offer. A uniformed officer will be stationed outside your accommodation. I take it,” I said, “you’re not ready to go home yet?”

  “Not at all,” he quickly agreed. “I think I’ll stay at the hotel for a while.”

  I nodded, more than happy with that arrangement.

  “What about your garden?” Mills asked.

  “I’ll need to go back,” Kask muttered quietly. “Can I take the officer with me?”

  “They’ll follow from a distance,” I assured him, and he nodded, looking visibly calmer.

  “Mr Kask, is there anything else you think we ought to know in this investigation? Anything about the past study or similar that you neglected to tell us before?” He flinched slightly at my choice of words, but it was neglectful, and knowing about all that before could have put us on the right track a while ago.

  “Not right now,” he said.

  I nodded and reached forward, my finger hovering over the recording switch. “Terminating interview at 11.14 am.” I switched it off and rose from the chair, taking the recording with me. We walked Kask back out to the station floor, arranging a constable to be posted outside his hotel. He left gratefully, his hands still balled into tight little fists.

  “What did you make of that?” Mills asked. We stood at the top of the stairs, watching him leave.

  “I think we have a grieving mother to track down,” I answered bitterly, not looking forward to that at all.

  “I’ll start looking,” Mills said, wandering over to the office. I stayed put for a while, even after the doors shut and Kask slipped out into the street. Something tugged at me about him, but I wasn’t sure what it was. He’d not been honest about the study. Perhaps he wasn’t fully honest about Abbie too.

  Twenty-Two

  Thatcher

  I decided to take a look into Jordan Picard and his death before we went off to interrogate his mother. We managed to track her down to an address in the outskirts of the city that hadn’t changed for over twenty years, so at least we knew where to find her when the time came.

  “You’ve been quiet,” Mills observed once the door to our office was closed, the noise of the station beyond muffled. “Is it something Kask said?”

  It was, to an extent. It was also the time of year and Jeannie’s flowers, the lack of sleep and the image of Grace in my head, curled up against Abbie’s side as though she’d wake up at any moment.

  “Just wondering why he didn’t tell us about Jordan Picard to begin with,” I muttered, shaking the computer to life. My neck hurt like hell from the awkward position I’d been in to get some sleep, and I yanked a drawer open to fish out some ibuprofen, stretching my neck and shoulders.

  “I’m not finding anything, sir,” Mills answered, peering over the top of his screen to look at me. “The only mention of him I can find is his obituary. Nothing about the research centre.”

  “Well, if Kask was honest about it, then they weren’t really involved,” I replied. “Or they didn’t let it get out.”

  I crawled through my own results, flicking past social media pages of people with similar names, often not even in England, until I found a website that reminded me sharply of the one we tracked Lin Shui down using. Only this one, as old as it was, targeted the research centre specifically, pictures of the researchers with their eyes marked out and bold, spiky letters calling them murderers and liars. I quickly picked up the phone and rang through to Wasco, his low, nasal voice quickly answering.

  “This is Wasco.”

  “It’s Thatcher,” I told him, copying t
he website’s link and putting it in an email to him. “I’m sending you the link to a site; can you track the IP address for me?”

  “Can do,” he answered. I stayed on the phone, listening to his quiet breathing and occasional whistling as the email sent. “Wow,” he muttered, “excessive use of red.”

  Mills got up and walked around to look over my shoulder at the site. I leant to one side so that he could reach over and scroll down the website, towards the comments. The most recent one came from a few months ago, a regular comment posted every year, reading,

  “Justice for Jordan Picard.”

  Mills scrolled down further, until we were several years back, where the bulk of the comments were. They faded over time, losing impact and gradually less and people seemed to care about what happened to Jordan, or that the research team had anything to do with it. Further back, to around eight years ago, when the site was created, several interactions unfurled all through anonymous usernames.

  “Looks like it came from a place on the edge of the city,” Wasco said slowly. I rattled off Michele’s address to him, my fingers crossed under the desk, and after a moment’s pause, Wasco replied, “Yep. That’s the place.”

  “Brilliant. Thank you, Wasco.”

  “Anytime. I’m into that laptop, by the way,” he added. Sonia’s laptop. “But it’s pretty blank. I’m guessing she backed up a lot of her files onto a hard drive. I can try to access them anyway, but you’d have more luck finding that.”

  Damn it.

  “Alright. Cheers, mate.” I hung up and spun my chair around to look at Mills. He was still reading through some of the comments, a frown on his face. “Wasco says that the site’s address is coming from Michele Picard’s home,” I told him, though I think we had both already assumed that. “And he’s gotten into Sonia’s computer, but it’s pretty blank. He thinks she backed her work onto a hard drive.”

  Mills straightened up, scratching under his shirt collar. “We could head back to her house, see if she kept it there.”

  I nodded. From the little we really knew about Sonia Petrilli, she didn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d leave things lying around at work. I took some screenshots of the website and sent them to the printer before shutting the computer down and pulling my coat back on.

  “Shall we get lunch before or after?” I asked Mills.

  “Before,” he quickly replied. “I’m not taking you to talk to a suspect on low blood sugar levels.” I pretended to be offended, but he had a point. I wasn’t the friendliest person to be around on an empty stomach, and I imagined we’d need to tread carefully with Michele Picard. Suspect or not, going into the home of a grieving mother and bringing up her dead son wouldn’t bowl over all that well, especially if she chose to share such information with the press.

  “You’re paying then,” I told him happily, striding out of the door. We went to the café across the road, not wanting to stray too far or get side-tracked looking for somewhere else. Mills, without a grumble, paid for the sandwiches, and we made the most of the dry day, sitting at one of the painted wooden tables outside the brightly coloured café as we ate, pigeons hopping around our feet, hoping for dropped crumbs and snacks. There was a woman a few tables down from us, nursing a large coffee whilst a dog that was probably bigger than her slumped by her feet.

  “I’d like a dog,” I muttered. If work wasn’t so demanding, I’d probably get one too.

  “Same,” Mills replied. “Wouldn’t be fair to the dog, though, I’m never home.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I’ll add to the retirement list.”

  Mills grinned. “House in the countryside and a few dogs? Sounds pretty ideal.”

  “Well, they’ll fire us more likely if we don’t get a move on,” I said, popping the last bite of sandwich in my mouth.

  We threw our rubbish away and paced back over to the station car park, piling into Mills” car. He put Michele Picard’s address into the SatNav, and we set off, arriving around fifteen minutes later to a modestly sized house in a neat and tidy part of the city. It looked a bit like a postcard for suburban living. Neat lawns, nice flowers, well-kept houses, shiny cars. Not, I had to admit as we climbed from the car, the sort of place I imagined housing the woman behind such a gruesomely detailed website. But what did I know?

  I rang the doorbell, taking a small step back as we waited for someone to answer. We didn’t wait long; the door swung open, and a middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway. Her hair, slowly turning grey, was kept in the sort, styled manner of a lot of women her age. Her clothes were simply expensive, everything perfectly dusted, polished and in place. I frowned, not sure what exactly I had been expecting, but very certain that this wasn’t it.

  “Yes?” She asked in a rather snippy tone.

  “Michele Picard?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Detective Inspector Thatcher and Detective Sergeant Mills, North Yorkshire Police,” I said as we showed her our id’s. “I wondered if we might borrow a bit of your time?”

  She blinked up at us. “May I ask what this is about?” she asked, not moving from where she stood in the doorway.

  “It’s about Abbie Whelan and Sonia Petrilli,” I answered. Michele Picard looked confused for a moment, repeating the names silently, her mouth spelling them out. Then clarification hit her, and her eyes widened.

  “Good God, why?”

  “I’ll explain it all, Mrs Picard, I guarantee you. Only perhaps not out here,” I added with a meaningful look to the road. A house across the way had its curtains twitch, and Michele looked over there with a curl to her lip.

  “No, perhaps not. Come in then,” she said with a sigh. “Through to the dining room.”

  Everything inside the house was cream. The carpets, the walls, the curtains, complete with little paintings and staged photographs of family members, children in school uniforms and dogs. The house smelt strongly of both cleaning products and some sickly sweet candle.

  Michele shut the front door and looked down at our shoes. We quickly kicked them off and followed her through a door into the dining room, my socked feet sinking into the thick carpet. She sat us around a large table, her hands folded together on the polished surface and looked at us expectantly as we settled down on chairs opposite her.

  “We understand that you knew Abbie Whelan and Sonia Petrilli,” I began, a little uncertainly.

  Michele scoffed. “They killed my son.”

  “We heard that your son volunteered for their research study and sadly passed away a few months after,” Mills took over from me, his low voice soothing. Michele nodded and picked some invisible lint from the sleeve of her jumper.

  “Not that anything happened about it,” she said with a sniff.

  “I take it you’ve heard the news recently?” Mills asked her. “About what has happened to them?”

  Michele looked up; her eyes squinted. “And you’re here to blame me? Ridiculous.”

  “We’re here to follow every lead we’re given, Mrs Picard,” I assured her firmly. “That includes you. We’d just like to understand what happened eight years ago. We believe that their work is what targeted them.”

  She crossed her arms pointedly, scanning my face and then Mills” and pursed her lip. “Jordan was nineteen,” she told us. “He was in his second year of university, studying microbiology. When the study opened itself up to volunteers, he was delighted. He wouldn’t tell me what went on there, had to sign a non-disclosure, and since he was nineteen, I couldn’t make them tell me. He seemed alright, a bit groggy every now and then, a bit achy and painful, and then a month after, he died. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

  She squared her jaw. “They, of course, denied having anything to do with it, that it wasn’t their research,” she spat the word out, ‘that killed him. But I knew better. I bet they even paid off the hospital as well,” she added haughtily. She held herself up, not letting her façade slip, but emotion started to colour her voice. I
t was an old wound, but it would hurt her for the rest of her life.

  “Is that why you started this website?” I asked, sliding the images of the website across the table. She looked down at them with a brief glance and sniffed, pushing them slightly away with a manicured finger.

  “People needed to know,” she answered simply.

  “What else did you do, Mrs Picard? Did you send threats to the researchers? To Abbie Whelan and Sonia Petrilli?”

  “Not a crime,” she answered snappily, “if I had.”

  “No. But then those two women have received threats, and now one is dead and the other in hospital, it could be.”

  Michele sighed. “I sent them eight years ago,” she pointed out. “Why would I do something to them now?”

  “Because their research is going well,” Mills suggested. “Their well-funded, on their way to making a good name for themselves. Sonia Petrilli was working towards a PhD. Perhaps you didn’t think they deserved all that.”

  “They didn’t,” she answered. “My baby boy is dead because of them. Why should I care?”

  I held in a sigh, looking around the room. Pictures of a boy filled up the mantle, him as a baby, as a toddler, as a teen. Jordan.

  “Abbie Whelan has a four-year-old daughter,” I told her. “Her name is Grace, and every day at the hospital, she curls up by her mother’s side for an hour waiting for her to wake up and take her home.” Michele’s stoic face flickered. “Because Sonia Petrilli had two loving parents who have just lost their baby girl. Someone did kill their daughter, Mrs Picard. Sonia was murdered. And I’d like to think, they deserve the same justice you wanted for your son.”

  Michele looked away from my direct stare, over to the photographs, her eyes faintly lined with tears. Mills pulled a packet of tissues from his pocket and offered her one, which she took with surprise clear as day on her features.

  “I made the website and sent the threats,” she admitted quietly. “The study got shut down, and I was happy about that, but then it all stopped. People stopped coming to the protests, people stopped coming to the website. It was like they’d all just forgotten. My husband nearly left me. We had to go to therapy, work through everything, and I told him I’d stop all the site business. And I kept my promise. I had nothing to do with what happened to those women.”