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

“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. It 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