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

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 the 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