SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

by M. G. Cole

  He leaned back in his chair and was visibly shaking; aware of the potential trouble he was in. “Mircea found her on his truck. He introduced us, but I only saw her around the Truckstop. Got chatting every now and again. She wanted to settle down here, but was afraid if she turned herself into the authorities they’d deport her. Told me she had no family left back home. They’d been killed.”

  His voice trembled with emotion, but he pulled himself together. “I got daughters of my own. I felt sorry for her. I could see she could do with the cash. She wanted to save and study here. This’ll make you laugh, she wanted to study law and help refugees.”

  This is the part Garrick hated. Until now, she was plain old Jane Doe. Not a person, just a corpse. Now, Thorpe was adding layers of history, of personality. Outlining hopes and dreams that had been snatched from one so young. Dealing with victims’ families was always painful for all involved, yet Garrick thought the real tragedy was that Jamal wouldn’t be missed by anybody. An innocent victim of fortune. A fighting spirit who had rallied against the odds to shape her own destiny, only to have it savagely taken from her.

  Thorpe exhaled a long pent-up breath.

  He picked up the picture and stared closely at it. “This was the last time I saw her.”

  “Where did she go after you spoke?”

  “I gave her two kilos of coke to sell. She already told me she wasn’t doing it no more, but Mircea had arranged one last run. She hated doing it, and to be honest, I felt bad for asking her. But she was frightened that Mircea would turn her in if she didn’t.”

  “So when he found her stowed away in his truck, that was the deal? She sells the drugs and you both keep quite that she’s illegally in the country.”

  “She wasn’t happy, but she was earning money she couldn’t make any other way.”

  “That’s a nasty position for a young girl to be in. Especially such an attractive one. She must have felt vulnerable.”

  “I didn’t touch her.” Thorpe’s voice rose sharply. “I never touched her.”

  “You didn’t find her attractive?”

  “Of course I did. She was, but that doesn’t mean a thing!” he was almost shouting now. “That’s what Mircea had threatened her with. When she started to understand that she might be able to claim asylum here, turning her in was no longer a threat. That’s what Mircea was probably doing in his truck. Trying to scaring the shit out of her.”

  “She was also frightened because he abused her.”

  Thorpe blinked in surprise. “Abused her? He’s a bender! Gay.” He clarified. “No, he got into her head. When she came to see me, she was a mess. She even threatened to turn herself in and expose us all.”

  Now it was Garrick’s turn not to give anything away, yet inside the words had ignited a Catherine wheel of motives that led to her death. It was the kernel of a confession he needed.

  “That’s quite a Sword of Damocles to have hanging over your head.” The blank look on Thorpe’s face told him all Garrick needed to know about his exposure to the classics. “All the effort you had both put into this operation, and she now thought she had the power to take it all away like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I don’t know how I would go about changing her mind. She was obviously strong-willed.”

  Thorpe nodded, now nervously crushing the side of his empty paper cup. He was on guard, and Garrick had to keep him unbalanced if he was to get the confession.

  “So she sold a lot of coke, but who to? I mean, your student, I can see the market there. But, and this is probably me being really naïve, I can’t see the market in selling to a bunch of poor illegal immigrants.”

  He thought back to Napier Barracks. The impromptu community that didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Addiction of any kind was the last problem they needed.

  “She wasn’t staying with them though, was she.”

  “Who was she staying with?”

  “She’d met a bunch of pikeys who’d taken a shine to her.”

  “Travellers?”

  “Whatever you wanna call them.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Travellin’, ain’t they? They’re knocking around somewhere. She told me once that when she gets her degree, that she’d campaign for their rights. I told her it was a waste of time.”

  “So she sold the drugs to them?”

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t wanna know. She came back with the money, that’s all that mattered. Like I said, she shifted a lot of the stuff. That’s why we didn’t want her to go.” He immediately regretted saying the last few words.

  “I think it’s fair to assume when she left that night, you felt as if she might really carry out her threat and drop you all in it. Is that what you and Mircea were calling each other about? Five calls, I believe.”

  Once again, Thorpe fell silent and studied Garrick, trying to ascertain just how much he knew.

  “Mircea was worried.”

  “Was that when the decision was taken that she was too much of a risk.”

  “I suppose…” Thorpe was suddenly suspicious. “Hold on a second. I didn’t kill her.”

  “Mircea didn’t leave his truck all night. After all, he is the kingpin in all of this. He can just drive away into the sunset and never come back. Set up elsewhere. He doesn’t really have much to lose if you think about it. Whereas she’s your employee, as you’ve said. If she talks, the first person who is going down isn’t Mircea, it’s you.”

  Thorpe slammed both palms on the table and raised his voice. “I didn’t kill her!”

  “Can anybody vouch where you were between leaving work and eight the following morning?”

  “No… but…”

  “Peter Edward Thorpe, I am charging you for the murder of this woman.”

  Thorpe’s jaw clamped shut. He slumped back in his chair and glared at Garrick with contempt and hatred. Garrick saw that as a sign of a job well done.

  12

  At four-thirty, just as it was getting dark and more snow was blanketing the area, Chib’s search team found the phone at the Castle Hill viewpoint, close to Folkestone Castle. A site more commonly known by locals as Caesar’s Camp, it was barely a few rocks on the earthen mound that now stood guardian over the town. A perfectly isolated place for a clandestine meeting.

  The battery was dead, so there was no immediate way to be sure it was Jamal’s, but the odds were on their side. Forensics took it to the lab as the team continued searching until the last ray of light disappeared.

  Garrick was overjoyed. They were going to have to burn the midnight oil, yet none of the team gave the slightest complaint. There was the unspoken collective feeling of a case rapidly coming together, and that alone was worth any amount of effort. As much as they moaned about conditions and pay, they all had got into the job so they could make their mark on the world and ensure scumbags didn’t get away with their crimes.

  By eight o’clock, after a brief stop back home to eat, get changed, and warm up, Chib was back at the station in time to receive the information from forensics. The phone was locked, so they faced problems accessing the data on it. As it wasn’t one with sophisticated facial recognition, it meant she couldn’t even use the dead girl’s face to unlock it. Ironically, the older phone was much more secure than the latest models.

  However, they had contacted her phone carrier and received a list of calls she had made over the last week. There was just one unfamiliar number. A call made within moments of leaving the Truckstop. It was the last call she had made.

  At his desk, Garrick stopped wolfing down the Mexican tostadas the Deliveroo driver had just dropped off. The news had upset his appetite, even though the office was now an abundance of flavoursome smells as the rest of the team tucked into their late dinners.

  “What’s wrong, sir,” Chib asked, as Garrick stared at the call list.

  He ran a finger along a number that had called her twice before she arrived at the Truckstop.

  “This is Mircea’s number.
Setting up their meeting. Then nothing. Nothing from our boy Thorpe either.”

  “But we have them in the same location.”

  “Mircea never left his truck. And he never abused her. He was gay.”

  “There was no indication of sexual assault,” she reminded him. The sex-worker angle had been ditched in light of the drugs.

  Garrick pondered that. “So our motive centres on her reluctance to continue being a drug mule.”

  “She must have said something really inflammatory for them to want to kill her.”

  “But Thorpe still gave her the drugs. Mircea didn’t leave his lorry until the morning and there are no obvious communications between the two men.”

  Chib sat on the edge of the desk and mused. “Maybe Thorpe has a change of heart, goes after her to retrieve the drugs? If she’s found with them, then that’s a smoking gun. And we found no drugs on her.”

  “Right. A drugs exchange gone wrong.”

  “Right.”

  They both fell silent, staring at the numbers on the screen. Finally, Garrick spoke.

  “Feels a bit bloody thin, doesn’t it?”

  “Like water.”

  Garrick clicked his way through the computer menus until he found the folder containing the Truckstop surveillance videos. He played the last one, showing Jamal hurriedly walking from the restaurant, across the carpark and down towards the Orbital Park roundabout where she was lost from the cameras. Garrick replayed it twice.

  “Look at what she’s doing.”

  “On her phone.”

  “Not making a call. She’s typing a message.”

  “She’s using a messenger app. We’ll need to access her phone to know which one.”

  Garrick switched back to the call log and pointed to the third from last number called. “Look at the timestamp. The call was made before she left the restaurant.” He replayed the footage, and they compared the time on the recording. “Literally seconds before she left.”

  PC Fanta Liu hurried in with a beaming smile. “Sir! I have the IEMI responses from the phone towers!”

  “Oh, that’s good, Pepsi,” said Garrick, not quite following her.

  “Fanta,” she corrected him primly as she sat at her computer and logged on. “And yes, it is wonderful because I can now trace her route.”

  Curious, Garrick and Chib rolled their seats over to her. Fanta’s gaze didn’t leave the untouched tostadas.

  “My dad always said that it was criminal to waste food,” she said with an air of longing.

  Garrick suddenly realised that she looked hungry. “Do you want them?”

  Her smile returned as she reached for the food and was already scooping mouthfuls with one hand and she typed with the other. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she mumbled. She hit a key on the computer. “Behold the wonder of dynamic call tracking.”

  A map appeared on the screen. White dots flashed from seemingly random locations. She looked pleased.

  “What are we looking at?” Garrick asked.

  “Now we have her phone’s IMEI, we trace every time it connected to a mast, whether or not she was making a call. It sort of checks into the network and says, ‘hello, any messages for me?’ Each dot is her phone connecting to a tower.”

  “But we can’t see the messages,” Chib clarified.

  “Correct. But we can triangulate her position. Look.”

  A circle appeared with a dot in the centre. The dot slowly moved down Waterbrook Avenue. As it did so, flashes from the phone masts at the leading edge of the circle flashed.

  Fanta explained. “The dot is the phone’s approximate position. As she moves forward, it pings the towers ahead, so the software is roughly working out where she is.”

  The dot suddenly stopped at the roundabout opposite the McDonald’s. The lights regularly pulsed for almost two minutes.

  “She just standing there, waiting,” said Fanta.

  Then the dot vanished. Before Garrick could speak, Fanta widened the map, and they saw the circle was hopping up the A2070 towards the M20. It was moving rapidly as it made huge jerky leaps over the map.

  “Assuming she was no Usain Bolt, he’s in a vehicle,” Fanta said with a mouthful of tortilla. She accelerated the animation as the signal moved along the M20 towards Folkestone, taking junction 13 and arcing around – past her eventual murder site – before looping northwards on the A260 and eventually stopping on Crete Road. “Now she’s at the top of Castle Hill and walking to the viewpoint.”

  “Why would she do that?” Chib asked. She saw the timestamp. “It’s almost one in the morning. It would be pitch black.”

  “She’s passing the drugs on.”

  The dot then never moved from that position until the battery died almost twenty-four hours later. Garrick sat back in his chair. Fanta finished the food and put the carton on the side of her desk.

  “Thanks for dinner, sir.”

  Garrick nodded. “So somebody picked her up and drove her there. As good a place as any for a drugs trade. Her last number, who did she call?”

  “123.”

  Garrick blinked. “The speaking clock?”

  Chib bobbed her head thoughtfully. “Easy to mis-dial calling for help with cold hands, in the dark, terrified.”

  “I would have thought 999 was relatively easy to dial,” Garrick said.

  “After crossing Europe to get here, I would have thought 112 was more natural.” The catch-all European number for emergency services. “Whatever happened, after that, she left her phone. To me, that means she was already in danger. The phone had a torch on it, she’d need it to see where she was going. It was the only thing she had on her to call for help.”

  “It was her lifeline,” Garrick said as he widened the map so that it included the retail park she had been found in. “It’s not far from the hill, across the motorway, into the carpark. Three hundred metres? Downhill, mostly. That gives her, two hours tops, hiding, running, as somebody pursues her. Finds her outside Londel and kills her.”

  Fanta and Chib nodded in agreement.

  “But we’re forgetting the drugs Thorpe gave her. Did the killer take them?” Garrick sighed. “Obviously Thorpe could have made the journey. The only issue is that security footage has him leaving the Truckstop roughly the same time her phone stops moving at Castle Hill. It’s a twenty-minute drive, maybe a bit quicker if he’s hammering it. And why is he going after her now, when it seems she has already planned to sell them on?”

  “He still could have still made it to the retail park and killed her,” Chib pointed out.

  Despite himself, Garrick wasn’t convinced. “It looks like she was picked up from the Truckstop and was driven to the hill. Possibly to a pre-arranged rendezvous and the deal went wrong. Either with whoever drove her, or the driver simply dropped her off… or she was taken there against her will.”

  They stared at the map in silence, hoping for inspiration.

  Garrick stood, frustrated. “Any of those ideas places both our key suspects far from the scene and introduces a third player who we know nothing about. We need to make more connections. I need something that puts Thorpe right on top of our crime scene!”

  He was beginning to feel the threads of the case were starting to slip from his fingers again.

  Ah, the ebbs and flows of an investigation.

  He hated them.

  It was past ten-thirty when members of the team started drifting home. Fanta stayed slavishly at her computer, waiting for more phone data to come in. When it did, her excitement had completely fizzled. She picked up her coat and crossed over to Garrick, who was hunched at his desk, rubbing tired eyed.

  “The phone company gave us tracking data for both our suspects’ phones.”

  From her face, Garrick could see it wasn’t good news.

  She put on her coat. “Mircea’s never left his cab. Thorpe took his home and slept with it.”

  They both had digital alibis. Fanta said goodnight and left the same time as Chib.
Alone, and sitting in an officer that smelled as if it was the hub of an international kitchen, Garrick concluded that coppers were messy bastards. He also mused that the case, which was supposed to bring him back with phoenix-like grace, now had more holes than Swiss cheese.

  He should turn it in for the night. His mind was mush, and his eyes dry and sore. He was about to shut the computer down, when he had a thought. On impulse, he checked the phone records they had for Mircea. His Romanian phone provider had yet to respond to their request for information, but the O2 network, which handled his roaming service in the UK, had been swift to offer everything they had.

  Garrick scrolled through the data, checking dates. Mircea was in the UK at the same time Galina was murdered. Not only that, his IEMI put him at the Truckstop the same night. It also revealed that he didn’t leave his cab either.

  Two murders.

  It was coincidental, surely. But Garrick didn’t trust coincidences.

  Perhaps Thorpe was simply caught up in events as he claimed. Was Mircea the killer?

  Garrick logged off his computer and took his coat. As he marched towards the exit. The immediate problem was one of time. They had arrested both Thorpe and Mircea on suspicion of murder and had them until Monday. Without solid evidence, they would have to be released.

  The thought consumed him all the way home.

  13

  “A rich and much maligned culture.” John Howard reached over and, after examining three of the scones in the basket, before choosing the second one to put on his plate.

  The coffee shop on the corner of Church Street was rather quiet for eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, with just two elderly women chatting in the corner as they shared a teapot, and a tall, thin, stony-faced man in the corner reading a newspaper. Every time he moved his arm, his heavy wax jacket made a crinkling sound that distracted Garrick. He hadn’t slept terribly well and had been looking for an escape from the office all morning. A call to John had provided just that. He put the distinct lack of customers down to the new owner’s decision to rename café: Wye Have Coffee?