SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

by M. G. Cole

  SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

  MG COLE

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

  A DCI Garrick mystery - Book 1

  Copyright © 2021 by MG Cole

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover art: Shutterstock

  1

  “Hold steady.”

  The words are nothing more than a whisper delivered by stale breath, betraying nothing of the identity of the weight crushing down on her from behind. There had been no warning. The patter of rain on her hood had drowned almost everything else out as she hurried across the car park towards the welcoming white and green lights of the supermarket.

  She thought she had escaped, but a sixth-sense warned her something was amiss. It had been a sense that had served her well through many arduous moments over the last five months but, as she looked around, there had been no sign of danger.

  She was too tired to run any further.

  As she passed a row of large metal containers, a great weight had struck from behind. She fell face-first into pooling rain water. Pain shot through her knee as it absorbed the impact, and she only just managed to use her hand to protect her face from cracking against the floor. She tried to stand, but she was pinned down. Her struggles made the steel grip crushed her wrist tighten further.

  “Sssshh,” cautioned the voice.

  She inhaled sharply, gathering all her breath to scream. Then a hand clamped across her face, forcibly angling it so she tasted the puddle. Water seeped into her nose and her scream was muted by an inch of water.

  Now came the fear of drowning.

  No. She couldn’t let that happen. Not here. Not like this. Not in a puddle in some dark urban corner. But try as she might, her assailant kept her pinned. Something tore. It was the smooth sound of nylon slicing open. She became vaguely aware that her back was now slightly cooler than the rest of her.

  Pain shot through her scalp as her hair was violently tugged back, yanking her head out of the water. She wanted to scream, but she need to breathe more.

  “Can’t have you drowning,” whispered the voice close to her ear. “Not yet. Not when there is so much for us to do.”

  Before she could even whimper, her face was thrust back into the puddle.

  “I don’t want you missing out on this.”

  A white hot pain suddenly seared her back, forcing her to scream into the puddle, exhausting all her oxygen. The pain was unrelenting.

  She finally understood what a mercy it would have been to let her drown.

  2

  “Morning, Dave!”

  The chirpy greeting stopped DCI David Garrick in his tracks. He was standing at a desk, his desk he assumed, although he couldn’t be sure. Aside from an off-white computer screen and keyboard, there were no personal affects, no sign this is where he belonged. He’d been standing there for a moment, mustering his thoughts before he’d been assaulted with jolliness. Now he became aware he still hadn’t answered.

  “Yes.” What a stupid reply. The last thing he wanted to project on his first day back was an aura of incompetency. “I mean, yes. Good morning,” thankfully the uniformed sergeant’s name came tumbling without him having to think, “Harry. Sorry, it’s just,” he circled a finger around the office, “I’m not used to the layout. And you’re one of few people I’ve spoken to in the flesh since Christmas.” Except my therapist, he thought, best not to let the lads in the department know about that one.

  “Well then, happy new year. Good to have you back,” the uniformed PC Harry Lord said with a genuine grin. Not that they were friends, but they’d had a couple of drinks since the sergeant had joined them, just a few months before Garrick had left to take time out. “I suppose it’s all different here and with what happened to you…” Now it was Harry’s turn to fade off, unsure how to continue. Instead, he decided on a curt nod, a smile in place as he remembered the deference he was supposed to show. “Sorry, sir. Just meant it was nice to have you back. I’ll fetch you a cuppa if you want.”

  “No, it’s…” but Harry had hurried away before he could answer. Garrick hoped he wouldn’t return with a drink of any kind. He vividly recalled Harry’s brews tasted weak at the best of times, and the water in the office always left a white limescale pattern on the surface. Since the doctor had warned him to reduce his caffeine intake, Garrick hadn’t touched the stuff. These days a green tea was a heady rock ‘n’ roll experience for him.

  He sat at the desk and ran his hands across the smooth plasticised surface. When he first started on the force, they had real desks, like old school pitted wooden ones that had notches and cigarette burns to give it character. The new furnishings were bleak and easy to wipe clean, more suited to a nursery than Kent’s Serious Crimes Department.

  Since he was last here, the department’s headquarters, just outside of Maidstone, had been shunted into half the space, and the regular plod had taken over the other half after losing their dedicated station. All parts of swingeing budget cuts, courtesy of the Home Office. Long gone were the days you could run to your local police station on the corner and report a crime. Now you had to phone for a crime number before…

  Phone. There was no phone on his desk. A quick check revealed his computer wasn’t even plugged into the power or the network.

  “David, aren’t you stopping?” Superintendent Margery Drury peered at him through black-framed glasses that he couldn’t recall her wearing last time he saw her.

  “Mmmm?”

  “Not taking off your coat? I know it’s not exactly baking hot in here, thermostat’s on the blink, but you can strip off.” She gave a small half-smile. Drury was a decade older than him, plump, but she wore it with astonishing finesse. Any thinner and she wouldn’t look half as attractive, he thought, then immediately kicked himself for such archaic behaviour, and less than five minutes back at the office.

  He’d been single for far too long. Which wasn’t helped by the fact Drury was a deliberate flirt. Subtle, but intentional. If their sexes had been reversed, then he had no doubt that she would have been reported multiple times for harassment, however ‘innocent’. If anybody broke the rules; then she became aggressive. And God help anybody patronise anybody else – man, woman or in between. Drury would come down on the aggressor like a ton of bricks. She was, by far, the finest boss he’d ever had.

  He took off his rain soaked Berber and draped it over the back of his chair.

  “Nothing seems to be connected. It’s as if you weren’t expecting me,” he forced a grin.

  “I’ll get IT on it. A word in my office to bring you up to speed.”

  Garrick looked left, then right, then shrugged
. “You better lead the way. I don’t know where that is anymore.”

  “Jeez, Garrick, some detective you are.”

  Drury’s office was a ghost of its former self. Previously she had the luxury of space. Garrick had seen bigger broom closets. A chill February breeze seeped inside through a small window left ajar on a near-permanent basis, yet it was unable to shift the lingering scent of fresh paint. The pinboard that would have once been covered in case notes and reminders was bare, save a pair of laminated CPR and fire evacuation instructions. A reminder that environmental waste was frowned upon almost as much as murder these days.

  “Welcome back, I suppose,” Drury said as she sat in her chair opposite him, the fake-leather creaking in harmony with an involuntary sigh she released.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Drury winced at the formal mode of address and took a sip of the coffee, still steaming on her desk from a mug with a faded silhouette of a film noir style detective. Even the smell of the coffee was bitter to Garrick’s senses.

  “I was happy with you taking another couple of months off.”

  “Then you may have had a case were the victim had died of boredom.”

  “Give up on your stone collecting?”

  Garrick knew that he was sitting rigidly upright in the chair. A sign that he was still tense and prickly to the most innocuous comment.

  “They’re fossils, ma’am. Not stones.”

  It was the one childhood interest he had carried forward. What kid doesn’t like dinosaurs? The moment he had discovered that they lay on every beach in the United Kingdom, Garrick had been obsessed with examining every rock he could flip on the seashore. As with most things, adulthood stripped away the excitement. The notion that he may unearth a T-Rex was relentlessly thwarted when he only found traces of trees or the fossilised mollusc, but it was enough of a curio to keep his interest. The thought of what lay hidden within the protected heart of a stone still thrilled him, even if it bored others. Cutting the surrounding matrix away to reveal the prize within was therapeutic, inducing an almost Zen like state. However, since the incident with his sister Emilie, he had not even set foot on the beach.

  “Still,” Drury continued, “with your sister still missing–”

  “Dead,” he interjected sharply. “Let’s not beat around the bush. I know she’s dead.”

  “I thought they hadn’t found her body?”

  Just her fingers, Garrick thought. Hacked off amongst the barbarically dismembered remains of some other poor unfortunates that had been found on a farm in Illinois. Including her fiancé. Beyond talking refuge in the snow, the police there still hadn’t put together a satisfactory picture of why they were at the ranch, or what had happened. His sister, perhaps two others, and the killer, were still missing.

  Garrick had taken time off mid-case the moment he had been informed. While he wanted to jump a flight over to the States and see the crime scene himself, he knew he’d just be hampering the investigation. Off-duty transatlantic crime solving partnerships were the sort of thing only ever happened in the movies.

  The current working theory was that the missing bodies would be found in the surrounding farmland, but with such a ferocious winter and a vast landscape to explore, the investigators had become snow-blind. Nobody was expecting progress any time soon.

  For the last three weeks, information from the Americans had slowed to a dribble, then nothing. He had never been close to his sister. Their relationship had been tempestuous at best, but for almost the last year she had been reaching out with various olive branches, well, olive twigs, was how he thought of her attempts. They hadn’t seen each other for four years. Not since their parents’ death, which had exploded in a wave of acrimony and blame that had lain dormant for most of their lives.

  Still, the loss was more painful than he had expected. In his professional life, he had always compartmentalised his feelings. It was difficult not to see a murder victim as human, robbed of their dreams and ambitions, yet he had made it this far in his career by viewing them with clinical detachment. Dealing with their family was another matter. It was nigh on impossible not to be drawn into the emotional vortex that formed around a grieving family. He had always dreaded such encounters and marvelled at the skilled family liaison officers who dealt with them directly. That job took a form of courage he didn’t possess. The tragic fact was, he emoted more with the villain of the piece. Only by opening himself up emotionally, could he walk in their shoes. Drift into their perceptions of how badly the world was treating them. He’d read the textbooks and knew the concept of sociopaths was a very real one, but in his experience, even the most heinous of crimes were committed by the perpetrator’s misguided belief they were doing the right thing to address some esoteric perceived crime that their victim had committed.

  If people were complicated, murderers were on a whole other level. And in that case, families trumped them all in the pecking order of tangled recriminations.

  All David Garrick could do was focus on his own life, and that started again from now.

  Drury leaned across the desk, toying with her mug. “Are you sure that you’re feeling up to speed?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You drifted just now.”

  Garrick pulled himself together. Living alone, he had fallen into long periods of silent reflection. A far cry from the friendly sarcasm he was known for amongst his team.

  “Sorry, ma’am, just tired. I’m in need of a challenge, not more moping around the house. That really takes it out of you.” He couldn’t even recall the question she had asked him. He absently rubbed his head – and quickly stopped and lowered his hand into this lap.

  The headache was another issue.

  Drury leaned back in her chair. “As long as you feel you’re ready, David.” She eyed him thoughtfully.

  Garrick couldn’t think of anything more to add, so he forced a confident smile. Not one he felt inside, but it seemed to do the trick. Drury’s eyebrows raised in a sign of acceptance, and she took another sip of coffee. “It just so happens something’s come through. I’ll email it to you. No printouts these days. Your DS is heading down there now.”

  “Ah, I wondered where Wilson was,” he said, as he searched his pocket for his mobile phone. He’d left it in his Barbour, hanging on the back of his chair.

  “It’s not Wilson.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s been seconded up to Staffordshire when that case you had before Christmas ran out of steam.”

  Garrick felt uneasy. Detective Sergeant Eric Wilson was bright, reliable and almost a friend – not that he had many of them on or off the force. They’d just arrived at a murder scene when Garrick had received the call about his sister. Wilson had kept in touch over his compassionate leave, updating him when he could, although Garrick had been removed from the case. Since the new year, communication had fizzled out. Garrick felt guilty for not paying attention, but the lad did not know when Garrick was returning and he had to pursue his own career.

  “Your DS is Chibarameze Okon,” Drury said without looking up from her own phone. “And don’t pull that face.”

  “I wasn’t pulling any face.”

  She looked at him slantwise from above her phone and seemed satisfied. “My mistake. I forgot that, despite your passion, you’re not one of the dinosaurs.” Battling prejudice her whole career, Drury was always on the lookout for any signs of it she’d have to eliminate.

  “I’m forty-one!”

  “And they youth of today is even younger than they used to be. She’s a rocket, but I’ll level with you, a bit of a know it all.”

  “Perfect,” said Garrick dryly. It received a smirk from Drury.

  “I knew you were the right one to palm her off on.”

  3

  It had been raining from the moment David Garrick had woken up, to the instant he arrived in the largely empty Londel supermarket carpark, in Folkestone’s Park Farm Retail Park. Uniformed officers at the entran
ce had moved the cones and instructed him where to park. The knot of activity around the bank of brown, blue and green recycling dumpsters in the corner told him where the body was. The entire superstore had been shut, and the cold, incessant rain and slate skies added a depressing layer to the scene.

  White clad SOCO officers were already there. A dozen small, numbered cones marked points of interest around the site. Standing several yards away watching them was a slender, petite black woman, wearing a long blue raincoat and scarf tight against the cold. She sheltered under broad black umbrella that amplified the patter of raindrops.

  “DS Okon?”

  She turned, her knitted brow vanishing as a smile broke her high cheekbones. Wide brown eyes sparked despite the gloom.

  “Good morning, sir.” Her accent had a private school edge. She extended her free hand, not to shake, but offer a covered paper cup. “I took the liberty of picking this up for you.”

  Garrick automatically took it. “Thanks, but I don’t drink coffee.”

  “It’s a matcha green tea.”

  Garrick popped the lid and sniffed. Then took a sip of the still warm beverage. It was delicious, and a reminder that he hadn’t had a brew since leaving the house.

  “How did you know…?”

  Maybe she didn’t hear as she stepped around a puddle, leading Garrick to a white plastic sheet covering the victim who was positioned just behind the recycling bank.

  “We have a female. No ID. I think she’s in her early twenties.”