SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS

by M. G. Cole

  “If he goes into Europe, I reckon he’ll go to ground.”

  “Yeah. I’m afraid so. We have enough on Thorpe to bang him up on Class-A charges.”

  “Oh, Leon has been singing about that, sir. The NCA want to talk to them both the moment we sort out the murder charges.”

  Garrick felt suddenly dizzy. He sat on the edge of a desk and pinched the bridge of his nose as the headache hinted it was returning.

  “But we have nothing that connects him directly to Jamal’s murder, or links him in any way to Galina.” He pointed at Mircea’s picture. “We have to focus on him. Put Thorpe on the back-burner. We have twenty-four hours to find a single piece of evidence to bring him down. We need to get everybody on it.”

  He was suddenly reminded of his MRI appointment in the morning. With the clock ticking, he couldn’t afford to spend the time going down to Tunbridge Wells for it. Then again, could he afford to risk his own health by not going? He was sure Chib was more than capable, but he also knew that if the case fell apart because he was stuck in hospital, then he’d never forgive himself. It was an unwinnable dilemma.

  “We had some responses from the churches,” Wilkes said. He caught Garrick’s puzzled look. He tapped Galena’s picture. “We canvassed a few churches with her picture, since she was Catholic. A couple of priests think they recognise her, but since it was over three months ago, none of them can be a hundred percent sure. They say they get a lot of refugees in for mass. They don’t ask questions, of course. It’s a safe space for them all. They also get gypsies in too.”

  Garrick was suddenly able to ignore the pressure between his eyes. “Romani?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Any particular church?”

  “They get Travellers in them all, but there was only one who recognised her and mentioned the Romani.”

  Our Lady of Good Counsel was a Roman Catholic church out in Hythe, about five miles from where Galina had been murdered. It was a pleasant enough modern, red-bricked building, but the interior was as bland and functional as Garrick expected. He was not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination. Not exactly an agnostic, he often found moments of impromptu belief were thrust upon him when he needed them most. But that was because he preferred to cover all his bases.

  Whatever he had been expecting the priest to be like, the skinny thirty-something who was on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, was not it. The priest bound to his feet when he saw Garrick and tossed the hard-bristled brush into a bucket of water.

  “Good afternoon! The service isn’t for another three hours today.” He gestured to the pews. “But you are welcome here.”

  Garrick indicated to the large damp patch on the floor. “I hadn’t expected you to be cleaning every inch of the church. That is dedication, Father.”

  The priest laughed, nudging his round wire-framed glasses up his hawk nose. He had a fuzzy black stubble on his cheeks, and his hair was slicked back. “I’m afraid some people can’t handle a little communion. Especially if they have had a little of their own the night before. Or even in the morning.”

  Garrick was thankful the smell of vomit was obscured by the pungent bleach.

  “I see. I’m not here for…” he waved his hand vaguely towards the font. “I’m DCI Garrick. One of my colleagues asked you about a young woman, a refugee, I’m just following up.”

  The priest’s face transformed to concern, and he wrung his hands.

  “Of course. Anything I can do to help. I pretty much told the officer all I could remember. I’m Father Cillian, by the way. ”

  Garrick held up his phone so Father Cillian could see Jamal’s picture. He peered at it and nodded.

  “Yes, I am quite sure she had been here on more than one occasion for mass. Before Christmas, that is. Pastor McConnell should be here. I’m filling in for him. He has been rather ill, unfortunately.”

  “Why do you recognise her? You must have many people come through your doors.”

  “Few of Middle Eastern heritage. She does rather stand out and is obviously a refugee from somewhere. We have a few come through our doors, and we are part of a communal outreach scheme that helps them. Guiding Hands.”

  “I’ve spoken to Trisha Warren.”

  Father Cillian’s smile brightened. “She is a smashing woman. Whipped up that group out of nothing. A lot of people depend on her now. They all love her.”

  Garrick kept his phone up. “Was she part of the Guiding Hands scheme?”

  “I personally don’t get too involved, but not that I was aware of.”

  “Do you remember her ever coming with other people? Or did she have friends here?”

  Father Cillian puffed his cheeks and expelled a long sigh as he cast his mind back. “Not that I recall. She was a loner. I remember that. I had the sense she was a frightened or nervous. That’s another reason I assumed she was here illegally.” He held up his hands defensively. “We are not here to make judgments on people.”

  “Only on their eternal soul,” quipped Garrick. The good Father didn’t seem to share his sense of humour. “Did you ever speak to her?”

  “Of course. I tried several times. I was curious to know where she came from.”

  “I believe you get a lot of the Traveller community through here, too?”

  “The Irish Travellers know they have a safe place here. And I’m Irish myself, so perhaps there is a little bias in me.”

  “Bias? Towards the Irish… but not towards the Romani?”

  Father Cillian’s head tilted back as he regarded Garrick with fresh eyes. “Your good officer was asking such probing questions. May I ask why?”

  “The is a Romani community currently in the Downs who took a young refugee girl under their wing. Not her,” he indicated to his phone. “Another.”

  “As I said, we have all people come here, Detective. Irish, Romany, Middle Eastern. What does it matter? We are all God’s children.”

  “Unfortunately, both of these children were murdered.”

  The gravity of the news struck Father Cillian. He blinked in surprise. “Forgive me. The officer hadn’t told me.”

  Garrick studied him. He looked like a smart fellow, but he wondered why, when he had been shown a photograph of a woman lying on a morgue slab with her eyes closed, he hadn’t made that deduction himself. Admittedly, Garrick had cropped the image to show only her face, so she could pass for sleeping, he supposed…

  “That’s a tragic shame. Two of them? I wish he would have told me.”

  “Would that have improved your memory?”

  Father Cillian adjusted his glasses again. “Perhaps it would have focused my attention. Disparate questions may make sense to you when seeking answers, but they’re of no use helping me offer something that may be of use to you. You ask about the Travellers in relation to two dead girls, and I can make my own conclusions. And in doing so, maybe recall something useful.”

  He pressed the knuckle of his index finger against his lips as he sieved through his memories. He paced as something occurred to him.

  “She was here when there some Romani and a few local folks got into something of a shouting match outside. I’m afraid a few punches were exchanged. I broke it up,” he caught Garrick’s dubious expression. “I know I hardly look like Hercules, but fortunately they both sides respected the Lord and his servants.”

  “Was the girl involved?”

  “She seemed to be at the centre of it. I’m not sure if she knew any of them, but she was just as much a target as the Romani group. I know she left in a hurry on her own.”

  “What were they arguing over? Was it drugs, by any chance?”

  The priest blinked in surprise. “Good Lord, no! It was about work!”

  “Work?”

  “The locals were accusing the Travellers, and her of taking work from them. I know it’s the same old story even now after the great Euro uncoupling. Unemployment means that the outsiders get targeted for stealing the jobs that are not the
re. Between you and me, I can’t see any of the local lads picking fruit or getting their hands dirty over some menial back-breaking tasks.”

  “Who were the locals?”

  “I’m not sure of names, but they still come. They are some of the more vocal nationalist members of our community.”

  “Ah, racists…”

  “Let us call them people with precise differences of opinion.”

  “I call a bigot a bigot, Father. Was this a general lynching, or was it something specific?”

  Father Cillian didn’t approve of the word’ lynching’, but he let it pass. “It was over some work on a farm near,” he stopped to think. “Forgive me, I’m still getting to know the area. It sounded like an Apple.”

  Garrick was stumped. “Cox? Gala? Pippin?”

  Cillian raised his finger. “Braeburn!”

  Garrick shook his head until the penny suddenly dropped. “Brabourne?”

  “Yes, that was it.”

  Garrick took a card from his wallet and handed it to the priest. “Thank you for time. If anything else occurs to you, please call me.”

  “Of course. Good luck.”

  Garrick slowly walked from the church, out into another bout of light snowfall. He wasn’t sure if any of the Priest had offered anything useful, but it helped add a little texture to Galina’s life. The link to the Romani was tenuous, but the bigoted behaviour was all too familiar.

  His decision about what to do next was answered when his Land Rover, now covered in a sprinkling of snow, failed to start. A call to the RAC had him waiting for recovery. The jolly mechanic told him his battery was knackered. Garrick felt that was an analogy, if ever he needed one, of how he felt about himself.

  20

  The image of a watch hand, ticking down the seconds, played in DCI Garrick’s mind even when he had his eyes tightly closed. It was all the more disturbing because the only clock he had looked at all morning was the digital display on his phone.

  “Comfortable?” The voice was slightly metallic.

  “Yes,” Garrick replied without opening his eyes.

  “Good. Nice, slow deep breaths…”

  Hell was suddenly unleashed, as if the hordes of the damned were banging metal drums directly down his ears. The pulse from the MRI machine was frightening, even though he’d had experienced it before. He was slightly claustrophobic, so having his head fully in the machine’s metal ring felt like placing it in the guillotine. The heavy rhythmic pulses brought about it a sense of approaching dread. Logically, he knew it was a perfectly safe, non-invasive technique, but he also knew that logic crumbled in the face of primal fear. He had seen that many times over his career.

  Each sonorous thud seemed to stir his thoughts, like a zephyr through the fragments of his memory. But like fallen leaves, they slipped through his grasping fingers.

  After an eternity, silence descended over the room. He lay still, not daring to open his eyes, until a gentle female voice spoke close to him.

  “That’s it, David. All done.”

  He quickly dressed and was told the results would be sent directly to his consultant. He had hoped to see them there and then, with a doctor casually pointing out that there was nothing to worry about after all, and the growth was shrinking. Instead, he now faced the uncomfortable wait for a phone call that could be days away.

  Following the lines on the floor, Garrick walked to his next port of call for a phlebotomy. It sounded sickening enough on the reminder letter he had received, and he wondered why they hadn’t stuck with the more understandable, bloods. It was hardly likely that the people of Kent would get that mixed up with the violent Los Angeles street gang.

  He toyed with his phone, but deliberately kept it switched off. He pretended it was out of respect for the hospital rules, but the actual reason was because he knew that if there was the slightest whiff of a lead on the case, he would be out of the door like a bullet.

  He sat on an uncomfortable plastic bucket seat in the small waiting area. It was mostly populated by elderly patients, but a couple of younger faces gave him hope that he hadn’t yet crested the age hill that led to a one-way slope, towards the inevitable. The nurse on station hadn’t even looked up when she told him to take a ticket from the small round dispenser bolted on the wall.

  He stared at the small oblong pink paper. The number sixty-four was printed in thick bold type. With no display on the wall, there was no way to judge how far along he was.

  “Forty-eight!” called a male nurse, wielding a clipboard as he waited to see who would stand. An elderly man managed it, leaving heavily on his walking stick. He took such small shuffling steps that suggested the waiting time would suddenly be doubled or tripled.

  Garrick stared at the ticket again.

  Then he jumped to his feet, holding it out in the palm of his hand as if he’d just won the lottery. He pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and turned it on as he rushed for the exit.

  He called Chib first, but she wasn’t in the incident room. Fanta, as usual, was at her desk.

  “The Galina case. There was a ticket we found on her. A pink one. Did DS Wilson ever find out what it was for?”

  He heard the clatter of a keyboard as Fanta checked. Then she started humming.

  “The computer is slow today,” she reported back.

  Aren’t we all? He thought. He paced outside the hospital, torn between going back inside or making a dash for his car, which at least started first time this morning, thanks to the new over-priced battery the mechanic had fitted the previous night.

  She came back in her sing-song voice. “Here we go. Nothing fun to report, sir. It was tagged as a bog-standard ticket used for a bunch of stuff, from lotteries to queuing systems.”

  “So nobody checked hospitals?”

  There was a pause. “Well, as a matter of course they contacted hospitals with her description, but got nothing back. But then again, they didn’t have a name. Do you want me to run it?”

  “As a priority.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  He hung up, itching to be heading towards some meaningful action, but that wasn’t the reality of detective work. It was hours, days and weeks of painful inactivity until some clue poked out from the chaos around it. He couldn’t help but think of his fossil. He was pretty sure he was close to the delicate cleaning stage of solving the case. Everything was there, he thought. Or rather, hoped.

  The thrill of his sudden burst of inspiration was already ebbing. It could take Fanta hours or days to get a response. Somewhat sheepishly, he returned to get his bloods taken, only to discover he had missed his number and had to take a new ticket.

  He was driving to Hawkinge, aware that time was marching on, and Chib had nothing new to report, when Fanta called back. She had a match. There was a Galina with a patient record at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford. She couldn’t be sure it was the same woman, but with that name, the odds were in their favour. Not only that, Galina had an appointment the morning before her death. Fanta had insisted that hospital security access the video files to see if they could make a positive identification.

  He arrived at the hospital the same time as Chib, and they made their way inside.

  “We have to release Mircea in four hours if we’re not formally charging him,” she reminded him. “Thorpe’s going to be transferred to Maidstone prison, we’ve got him on the drugs charges. He still insists that Mircea is the kingpin, now our Romanian is claiming Thorpe is just bitter because he wouldn’t have sex with him.”

  “What?”

  “A smoke screen, in my opinion. An easy explanation as to why two men would know one another in a service station. There is no indication Thorpe is bisexual or gay, but even if he is, we don’t have anything to nail Mireau for drugs trafficking, other than an empty smuggling compartment in his cab.”

  Garrick was painfully aware of the pitfalls of releasing him, but also the dangers of holding him with flimsy evidence. If he tried to sue, Mireau’s
legal team would make mincemeat of the case, leaving Garrick open for accusations of harassment and making it difficult to make further charges stick.

  His case was not helped by the fact it hung on the theory that Jamal was alone in the Romanian’s cab, when in fact the man himself insisted that he was there, having sex with her. Few guilty people ever tried to prove to the police that they were in contact with the victim hours before their death.

  The phone records proved Mircea was at the Truckstop the same evenings both women had been killed. And now that Garrick had discovered the little escape run from the truck compound, he was now convinced Mircea was responsible for both, and Thorpe was caught in the middle because of the trafficking.

  The hospital’s Senior Security Officer was a middle-aged Jamaican woman who introduced herself as Brenda. They were still using clunky old video to back up, but she had already pulled the tapes in question from the archive and had the footage ready at the correct time of Galina’s appointment. Garrick couldn’t help and admire how proactive and friendly Brenda was, and berated himself for speculating if she was single. Her efficiency was purely down to the excitement of being involved in something more substantial than a parking violation in the car park, rather than Garrick’s animal magnetism. But because of her effectiveness, one of the first images they saw was Galina walking towards the main entrance. From the angle she was approaching, Brenda suggested she either lived close by, or had arrived by bus. Taxis and cars usually dropped off outside the door.

  Garrick leaned closer to the screen as Brenda switched tapes to show the young woman checking in at the reception desk. She looked the same as he’d found her. Long jet-back hair cascaded either side of her face and ran halfway down her back. Her soft brown skin enhanced her beauty, even as she timidly glanced around the reception. Like Jamal, she looked vulnerable, but that was not the case. Both women had been strong-willed fighters. You didn’t make your way across an entire continent using nothing more than your wits without real true grit. He admired that and doubted he had such resolve himself.