SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

by M. G. Cole

  Garrick gave a humourless smile. “I know. Interviewing him straight after he’s murdered his father would be better. That is, if your wacky idea had merit. So it’ll be a race against time. But that’s Monday’s problem, not today’s. What else have we got?”

  “Something to cheer you up, sir. Noel Johnson. The student who ran from you. PC Lord is interviewing him now.”

  Garrick hurried to the interview room, forgetting to take the bag out of his cup. By the time he reached the room and sipped it, it was stewed and tasted bitter. He stood with Chib in the room outside, watching the Harry and Noel over the webcam. A middle-aged woman was acting as the kid’s solicitor.

  “…that’s a lot of money, Noel,” said Harry as he made notes.

  “That’s why I was doing it.” There was an arrogance to the student’s reply. From the way he had fled the scene, Garrick had suspected him to be plea-bargaining for his life.

  “And you kept a list of everybody you sold to?”

  “I am studying Business A-level,” he replied indignantly.

  “He thinks himself as a regular Tony Soprano,” Chib muttered.

  “I would like to see those lists.”

  “I bet you would.” Noel gave a derisive snort.

  “He’s a regular little shit, is what he is,” Garrick replied.

  “And Peter Thorpe supplied you with everything?”

  “Yep.”

  PC Lord seemed to have run out of steam with his questioning. With a sigh, Garrick marched into the room.

  “Don’t get up.” Nobody had been about to. He took some satisfaction in seeing a tremor of uncertainty cross Noel’s face when he recognised him.

  Garrick sat down, nursing his mug in both hands.

  “Let the record show that DCI Garrick has joined the interview,” Lord said, a little put out that his limelight had been taken by his boss.

  “How many other monkeys did Thorpe have running around?”

  The question threw Noel.

  The solicitor spoke up, and Garrick now remembered her from a past case. He also remembered that she hated him. “Detective, I must object to the term monkey.”

  “I object to your client selling class A-drugs on my turf, so it just goes to show you can’t always get what you want.” He stared at Noel. “I know he had others who were turning over far more than you.”

  That annoyed Noel. Good. Time to wind him up.

  “I bet he even had students doing a degree in Business.” Garrick extended his little finger. “You are this guy here. Small fish in the shark tank. Fish food. Oh, there was this girl…” Garrick rolled his eyes around the room, searching for her name. “Foreign sounding…”

  Noel’s cheek twitched in anger. “Jamal? She was a stupid cow he kept around because he was screwing her!”

  “Oh. Well, if you say so…” Garrick leaned back in his chair and played nonchalant. “He told me she could sell… cocaine to Eskimos. I’m surprised he didn’t get you both working together.”

  Noel shrugged. “I met her a few times when he was handing me the merch. She was fit, but stupid. I work better on my own.”

  Garrick smiled encouragingly. “I see. She didn’t go for your charm. They can be like that.”

  Noel nodded in agreement. “Exactly.”

  “When was the last time you saw her? We’re trying to find her.”

  “Couple of weeks ago.” He shrugged and picked at the table to show he was bored with the questions.”

  “Where did you do these hand-offs with her?”

  “Always some place quiet and out of the way. Usually up at Castle Hill.”

  Garrick’s gaze bored into him.

  “Is that a fact?”

  Garrick was once again frizzing with excitement when Noel was taken to his cell. He unleashed his train of thought on Chib and Harry outside the interview room.

  “We have Thorpe and Jamal at Castle Hill, and we have Mircea and Jamal at the Traveller camp. Both suspects with her at key places of interest, reported by witnesses.”

  “Neither of them were anywhere near Castle Hill that night.”

  “Their phones weren’t. They were safely tucked up in bed. Doesn’t mean they were.”

  “I asked around his apartment block,” Harry said. “Nobody saw him coming in or out. So he has no witnesses to confirm he was there.”

  “What did the apartment search throw up?”

  “No sign of drugs, but a hundred and thirty quid in cash. There was nothing at the Truckstop either. He was smart enough to keep the illegal stuff well out of his hands.”

  Chib sighed and shook her head. “It makes no sense for Thorpe to give her package, then race to stop her selling it. And Mireau didn’t leave his truck…”

  Garrick decided it was time to call it a night before he fell victim to further disappointment.

  The snow had abated, so the drive home was under a crystal clear sky. Travelling down the quiet B-roads, the Land Rover baulked on a few black ice patches, but he kept it slow and steady so he could enjoy seeing the stars stretch from one horizon to the other.

  Once more his mind’s eye catapulted him to Illinois, and the night his sister was murdered. Had she been looking out on a similar vista, under an endless canopy of stars? He could only imagine such parallels. And for whatever reason, on that drive home, he felt her loss more than he had in weeks. He put it down to the fact his own case was getting under his skin.

  The more intricate a picture he built of Jamal’s life, the more her death sank its claws into him. She was a refugee. Other than the Romani, there was nobody to feel her loss. Who was going to mourn for her? Was he subconsciously assigning that task to himself?

  The same applied to Galina. The poor girl they’d found last year. Except he still hadn’t managed to build any profile on her life, so his professional detachment was still intact. Nobody had come forward to claim her, either. Even the Romani didn’t seem to know about her. She was truly a lost soul. Two innocents cut from a world that had never cared for them, and never would.

  After a shower, still had plenty of time to make it to his date. He turned on the TV and checked the post, some junk mail and a letter from the NHS reminding him of his appointment Monday morning. A good thing too, he’d put his MRI out of mind. And with any luck, he’d forget about it in the morning too. He didn’t want his weekend taken up worrying about something he had no control over.

  He switched the television off as the title sequence of a new cop show started, Grimm Up North. It was the rating’s grabber everybody was talking about, so naturally Garrick had no desire to watch it. He sat at the kitchen table and laid open the book he’d bought from John. The art of fossil preparation. There was a heavy academic preface he quickly scanned through, but moved to the illustrated pictures showing the best techniques to air scribe the fossil from the surrounding rock matrix. The rock in question was one he had found on the beach on the north coast of the Isle of Sheppey after a storm last December.

  He’d gone for a walk to take his mind off his sister. Ordinarily it was a place he enjoyed exploring, with views across the North Sea, across to the Red Sands Fort – massive concrete structures rising from the water on spidery legs, as if they were some alien war machines landing on earth, rather than the remnants of Maunsell Forts built during the Second World War to protect the Thames Estuary. One had even washed up on the beach; an enormous concrete house that provided a surreal play area for adventurous children.

  He often found fossils here. Usually uninteresting ones. On this occasion he had found the distinctive spiral shell of a mollusc poking from the rock. An inch in diameter, he could already see some exposed detail. It was the most marvellous thing he had ever found.

  Since then, he hadn’t dared touch it until he had both the correct equipment and technique to extract it in one piece. His air pen, a handheld stylus that used compressed air to chip away the matrix, had only arrived two weeks earlier. Now he had the methodology laid out on the pages in
front of him.

  He put on a pair of protective googles and started the air pen. It buzzed to life like a dentist’s drill. Angling a pole-mounted magnifying glass, he began the delicate work of freeing his prize.

  An hour flew by. Progress had been painfully slow, yet a small section of matrix had been removed, and a little more of the black spiralling shell had been revealed. After five-hundred-and-forty-million-years, evidence was finally beginning to surface. He had to call it a night. His eyes were strained and his brain had entered some sort of slumber mode.

  Then he looked at the time and realised he would be late for his date.

  17

  “A policeman? Now, should that make me feel nervous?”

  “Only if you have a guilty conscience,” Garrick said with a chuckle, and immediately regretted it. What a pompous moron he must sound. His date dutifully smiled, but she didn’t take him up on the leading question. “Detective, actually,” he added, before realising that sounded desperate.

  Wendy pulled a little face, pretending to be impressed, then sipped her wine, before quickly putting it down.

  “I should make that last,” she said quickly.

  She thinks I’m going to arrest her for DUI, he thought with a sinking feeling. He glanced at his watch. He had been fifteen minutes late, and they were only thirty minutes into the date, and it was a train wreck already.

  You shouldn’t have looked at your watch…

  “It’s not as exciting as it sounds,” he added, taking a longer sip of wine, and aware that she had not opined whether or not being a detective sounded exciting. “What is it you do?” he added hurriedly.

  Wendy didn’t look quite like her profile picture, but who did? She was a tad bigger than the action-hiking profile suggested, but in a very good way. With straight blonde hair past her shoulders, and round blue eyes that sparkled with curiosity. Her face was a little fuller, but better for it too. She kept reaching for her hair to comb back a lock.

  She worked in a school as a teaching assistant. Her hands moved animatedly as she described the problem kids, but countered that by laughing about the shafts of joy the job brought when she could help them. Work was clearly the focus of joy in her life, and Garrick related to that. He listened with encouraging nods as she talked in a quick, nervous patter. She never had the patience to train as a teacher and thought that she was probably not clever enough.

  By the time Garrick had seen the window to throw in a complimentary, I’m sure you are, she had already moved on.

  She’d had her heart set on becoming the school librarian, but when the staff member announced his retirement, the school’s short-sighted headmaster made the decision that the twenty-first century didn’t require libraries any more. So while she loves her job, and the rest of the staff, she now feels penned in, with no opportunities for promotion or expansion.

  She took another nervous sip of wine before ploughing on.

  “That had been a wake-up call, really. A realisation that my life was in a rut. Well, not a rut, but certainly on a single track going forward. Replaying the same routine over-and-over again. So I thought, if I can’t change my job, I shall have to change everything else.”

  She was no longer looking at Garrick, but glancing out of the window, unloading a stream of conciousness that he suspected had been bottled up for some time.

  “I’d had a few serious relationships, but lately they tended to veer towards other members of staff and in such a tight team, things get awkward.” She finished her wine, clinging to the glass like a life preserver. “So it was something of a relief to escape and see what was on offer online. Another change of scene!” She held up her empty glass, and Garrick clinked it with his.

  Finally, he had a way into the conversation. “My sister forced me to sign up online. I know what you mean about dating people in the same profession. I’ve always been in the force. Never date a copper.” He added, before wondering if he was subconsciously self-sabotaging his date.

  “Your whole life? Wow. That’s serious commitment. Before the school, I used to be a commercials manager for KMFM. That was a tough gig. I didn’t sell the commercials, I was effectively selling chunks of radio silence that would be later filled with commercials.” Garrick nodded, which broadened Wendy’s smile. “Yeah. Just like that. I could have parked an advert for a car dealership in there.” She nervously went to take a sip of wine, before remembering the glass was empty. Garrick sipped his, prolonging the awkward silence. He glanced out of the window. Had the beer garden not been blanketed with snow, there would have been a delightful little waterfall outside as the Great Stour flowed passed. Instead, the view was bleak.

  They were saved when the waitress came to take their order. They both skipped a starter and went for the main course. Wendy chose a chicken salad while Garrick went for the blue cheese burger and chips, he was no longer feeling sophisticated, so any pretence to impress Wendy had jumped out of the window.

  The small talk as they waited for the food was just as awkward as they discussed family. Or rather, Garrick listened as Wendy told him about her two brothers, retired parents and an assortment of eccentric aunts and uncles. Garrick had nothing to say about his own family, so was pleased when the waitress interrupted to ask if they wanted more drinks. Wendy pointedly ordered sparkling water instead of another wine.

  The food came, and the conversation switched to rambling. Wendy was a fan and part of a local group, which seemed to be how she spent most of her free time. They were nearing the end of the main course when she asked Garrick about his interests. He thought long and hard before answering.

  “I like finding fossils and cleaning them.”

  Wendy’s smile didn’t flinch, but she hadn’t been expecting that answer. Garrick wished the ground would open up and drop him in the Stour. When it came to dessert, neither of them had an appetite.

  Garrick offered to pay the bill, but Wendy insisted on paying half, reminding him that it was the twenty-first century. An awkward parting handshake in the car park, and they parted just as it snowed again, with half-hearted promises that they should ‘do that again’.

  Garrick wasn’t sure his paycheque could stretch to such an overpriced burger more than once per month.

  Driving home, he interrogated himself over the disastrous lunch. What had he been thinking? Wendy was an attractive, articulate woman, while he struggled to be monosyllabic. If anything, it served to show him how dull his life had become. Wendy had been right about shaking things up. He needed to do the same.

  He needed a break in the case.

  He found himself driving towards Ashford as he thought about what they had overlooked at the Ashford Truckstop. That was the one location placing Jamal with the two suspects at the same time, but just not physically together.

  There was a piece missing in the jigsaw.

  It was dark when he arrived, and the wind began to whip up the snow. Garrick showed his ID card to the security guard at the gate and parked up. It was already busy with trucks from across Europe. He strolled over to where Mircea had parked his truck, on the far side of the car park and directly opposite the restaurant building, affording him a full view of everybody coming and going. He’d backed into a berth, his cab facing out with the doors to his trailer snug against the perimeter fence.

  Garrick recalled the security footage in his mind. He pictured Jamal climbing from the cab and walking five-hundred feet across the carpark, into the restaurant.

  What was he missing? It was a clear path. They had footage of Jamal entering the site. Climbing into the lorry and then, forty minutes later, heading to the restaurant before leaving.

  Forty minutes in which she was alone with Mircea in his cab. What had they been doing? Mircea claimed she was a prostitute, but Thorpe was adamant that the lorry driver was gay. The girl had no signs of recent intercourse.

  Thorpe claimed she had been pleading with Mircea to let her go free while he subjected her to threats of turning her in to the
government. But hadn’t Thorpe told him she had decided to claim with authorities anyway? That would effectively rob Mircea of any hold he had over her. Why would Thorpe lie?

  Garrick traced Jamal’s steps towards the restaurant. Had she told Mircea that she was no longer going to do his dirty work? If so, there had been no signs of a struggle in the cab. And if she had done so, why did she then enter the restaurant to speak to Thorpe?

  If both men knew that she was no longer selling his drugs, then why had he given her a parting quantity? Why had she accepted?

  Garrick stopped outside the restaurant and turned back to the imaginary lorry. This was a similar angle to the camera footage he had watched several times over. Jamal opening the cab door, climbing down, and walking towards the building.

  Opening the door… climbing out…

  Then it struck him. She had entered and exited on the driver’s side of the cab. It was a continental lorry, and likely that Mircea was resting on the sleeping cot in the back. It was also possible to come and go through the passenger door on the opposite side, which the camera was blind too.

  Had Mircea actually been in the lorry at the time?

  Garrick hurried back to the spot. In his mind’s eye he judged exactly where the lorry would be and tried to line himself up with another camera on a pole in the opposite corner. In theory ,the lorry would be in its line of sight, but it had been a busy evening and the service station was running to capacity. Other trucks could have easily blocked the view. His team had given him the best footage, but he hadn’t seen everything… because the cameras were unable to see everything.

  He walked to the perimeter fence. It was made from green plastic-coated metal, and woven into a large mesh, he could just fit his fist through. It was damaged from age and neglect. In places the plastic sheath had peeled back, exposing the wire which rusted under the elements. The mesh was slightly crumpled at the bottom. A quick check revealed the same superficial damage right along the fence caused from lorries that had backed too far and damaged it in places, tearing it from the supporting pole, like folding the corner of a page in a favourite book. Garrick kicked the bottom, and the mesh moved freely. He knelt and pulled at it. It easily came away from the floor from and he could lift it up high enough to crouch through and into the woods beyond.