Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 4) by Oliver Davies (best black authors txt) 📗

at 10.24 am on July the 29th. Mr Kask,” I folded my hands together and turned my attention to him. “You made an emergency call to us at two twenty-three am on the 29th of July. Can you talk us through what happened for your official statement?”

He ran through the same thing he told us last night, less jumpy and more coherently, but nothing in his story had changed. He heard the crash, saw the shadow, hid in the bathroom, made the call, made a run and hid in the lane until Smith picked him up.

With that out of the way, I opened up the folder Mills had given me and showed Kask a few photographs Porters had taken at his house last night.

“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