“And you’re sure that there was nobody else on the property this morning?” I asked him, my voice darkening.
Dr Quaid lost some of his confidence at my question, and he went back to fumbling with his glasses.
“None of my staff checked in, but it’s a big place. I didn’t see anyone,” he said resolutely. “But I would never have hurt Abbie. I valued her as a worker and as a friend. She got me this,” he tapped the pot of a cactus on his cluttered desk, “for my birthday this year.”
I couldn’t quite imagine him being the sort of man to stab a woman in the neck with a needle, but appearances could be deceiving. And yet, I was inclined to believe him.
“If you can get us footage from all the CCTV you have here, we’d very much appreciate it, Dr Quaid,” I told him.
“I’ll get it together as soon as I can. Shall I send it to the station?”
“My email address is on the business card I gave you earlier. Feel free to send it there.”
“I shall let the company know.”
“Thank you. Now, if we can, I’d like to speak to Miss Petrilli.” I stood up, and Dr Quaid shuffled to his feet, pushing his glasses back onto his face.
“Certainly. This way, I shall take you to her.”
Mills picked up Abbie’s coat and back, and I tossed him the car keys as he walked to the door. We passed the stairs that curved up to the first floor, where the security was tightest, and I wondered what exactly they had up there. I watched a man walk up, fishing a card from his pocket as he reached the landing, swiping it to get through the door. In the brief moment, it was open, and from where I stood below the stairs, I could see the hallway beyond, lined with metal doors, all with similar card readers. The door shut with a clunk and a hiss.
Mills jogged back in, handing the keys back, and Dr Quaid led us on, into the maze of glass walls and desks, over to a water fountain where a woman stood, inky black hair swept into a plait, her lab coat rolled up to her elbows.
“Sonia, this is Detective Inspector Thatcher and Detective Sergeant Mills. Gentleman, Sonia Petrilli, Abbie’s research partner. I shall leave you to it,” he said, giving Sonia a light squeeze on the shoulder, “and see what I can do about those cameras.”
He wandered off, leaving us with the olive-skinned woman who looked down her nose at us with a frown between her eyebrows.
“Abbie’s alive?” she asked simply, her voice expressionless.
“She is,” I confirmed.
“Good,” she said. “How can I help you, Inspector?”
Five
Thatcher
Sonia led us over to a quiet table, the white surface gleaming and smelling faintly of antiseptic. She sat herself down and regarded us with a somewhat unimpressed expression.
“So, what happened to her?” she asked, sipping her water.
“It looks like she was drugged,” I answered, my dry tone matching hers. “The hospital is still working on exactly what it was.”
“Through the arm?” Sonia asked.
“Neck,” I told her.
She gave an impassive nod and set her cup down. “I’m sure Quaid’s told as much already, but I wasn’t in this morning. I came not long after you and your team rolled away.”
“What time would that have been?” I asked. “The more precise timings we have, the better.”
“Clocked at ten fifty-two,” she said with a tight smile. “Bit of a stickler for being on time.” She brushed an invisible crumb from her spotless coat.
“Never a bad thing,” I told her. “Dr Quaid told us that Abbie came in this morning early.”
“She did.”
“Can I ask where you would have been this morning between nine and ten?” I asked.
“I was at home. Down in the local village,” she pointed in a vague west direction.
“Can anybody vouch for you being there at that time?”
She sucked a tooth and nodded. “My parents. I’m living with them until I get my PhD sorted. Easier. Here.” She tore off a scrap of paper from a desk behind her and scrawled down a number that I passed to Mills.
“Thank you,” I smiled. “We hear that Abbie came in to check on some of your research before taking her holiday.”
Sonia nodded. “I would have done it myself, but Abbie insisted. She’s not the sort of person I waste my breath arguing with. Like trying to argue with a brick wall.”
“You’ve worked together a long time,” Mills said.
“We have. Got a few studies under our belts. We got on well, make a good team in the lab.”
“What about outside the lab?” I asked.
“I never see her out of work,” Sonia told me. “She’s a mum, so when she’s not here, her world revolves around Grace. Where is Grace?” She sat abruptly upright in her chair.
“With Paige Whelan,” I told her, and she nodded, relaxing again.
“Cute kid. Anyway, when she’s not here, she’s with her daughter or her sister. Not one to come out for a night out or anything, you know? Though, nor am I really. We’re very different,” Sonia stated matter-of-factly. “Which is fine in the lab, but if we didn’t work so well together, or if I met her at school or something…” She trailed off with a shrug.
“You wouldn’t have been friends?” I guessed.
“Seems like not the best thing to tell a police officer investigating her attempted murder now that it’s out there, but there we go. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have hurt her. She’s a good lass and a mum, and I need her for this project. I might not get my PhD without it.”
“Was Abbie working towards a PhD?” Mills asked.
Sonia shook her head. “She used to talk about it now and then, before Grace. Now, the only thing she’s been talking about future wise is moving to a new house or Grace starting school. But that’s small talk, when we’re waiting for the kettle to boil.”
“Do you know anything about Grace’s father?” I asked, since Paige had not been the person to ask earlier.
“No, and I know that we don’t ask. He’s nothing more than a sperm donor, Inspector, certainly not a person worthy of conversation. All I know about him is that he’s ginger.”
“Like Grace?” I asked, and when she nodded, I went on. “So is Abbie.”
“She started dying it when Grace was born, so that they looked more alike. She’s a brunette naturally.” Like Paige, I realised.
“Dr Quaid tells us that you’re working on a natural treatment for cardiovascular diseases,” I said, drawing us back to why we were talking to Sonia in the first place.
“That’s right,” she nodded, lifting her chin slightly with pride.
“Would you be able to show us the greenhouse where Abbie would have been working?” I asked.
“Can do,” Sonia said. She stood up, drank the rest of her water and tossed the paper cup into a bin, leading us out through the back of the house, down into the gardens.
“How many more buildings are out here?” Mills asked her as we passed a wooden shed with a bolt and chain across the door.
“Quite a few,” Sonia told us. “Storage, tools, plant food, wheelbarrows. All those exciting things. And some more greenhouses, some smaller, some bigger, potting sheds. We’re bigger than we look.” She pointed down towards where the gardens sloped and rose with the hills.
She led us along the gravel path, our coats brushed by the extending arms of plants on either side, to a greenhouse that was not far from where Abbie had been found, shadowed by a large oak to one side. She stopped suddenly and frowned. The door was open, squeaking on its hinges.
“Are they normally left open?” I asked, coming to a stop behind her.
“No,” she answered shortly. “No, they are not.” She stepped aside, letting me enter first. I ducked beneath the low doorway into the warm room. It was a mess inside.
The stone floor had soil spilt across it, shattered remains of some pots and glass beakers glittering across. One of the big wooden benches was on an angle, the pap
ers on top almost falling off, the wireless radio toppled to one side.
“Abbie was messy, but this is not normal,” Sonia said, stepping in to look over my shoulder at the mess.
“She must have fought back against whoever it was,” I murmured, looking at the scuff marks on the floor. Sonia hung back, her hand stuck into her pockets as I moved over the broken ceramic and glass. A bottle had been tipped over, a puddle of clear liquid pooling on the uneven stones that I stayed away from. There had been something of a fight, or at least, this was definitely how Abbie got some of those bruises.
I turned around to look at the viewpoints from the greenhouse, unable to see too far up the path, or the house in the distance. There was a scuffle, and I turned to find Mills bending down slowly amongst the shattered pieces, a pair of gloves on his hands. He picked up a large shard of pot that was stained dark on the jagged point.
“Blood?” I asked, walking over to him as he rose, examining the piece.
“I’d say so. Dried now. Was Abbie cut anywhere?”
“Her head,” I answered, picking up another piece with similar dark splatters. She could have cut herself on any one of these, or the sharp edge of the bench. “Bag them separately,” I told Mills as he fished some evidence bags from his pocket. “Just in case only some of this is hers.”
I handed him the piece I held and looked over at Sonia, who was staring at the mess with an ashen face and curled lip.
“I take it that nobody’s been down here,” I guessed, and she looked up to meet my gaze.
“No. We’ve all been in the main lab really since Sean told us. I was meant to come down here later and check on what she did. Guess it’s a good thing you got here first.”
“Aside from the obvious,” I spread my arms around the evident mess, “is there anything else that looks wrong or out of place?”
Sonia looked around; her dark eyes narrowed. “The radio,” she pointed at it. “It’s on the wrong bench. She kept it on hers.” She pointed to another bench pushed up against the glass where an empty mug also sat.
I went over to the bench, scanning some of the notes on the pad of paper, unable to understand at all what they meant. They looked like formulas or equations, and the sheer number of them hurt my head. There were a few plants on the desk, little shoots that were getting the benefits of the proximity to the glass, a small round framed picture of who I took to be Grace as a baby, an old coffee pot filled with pens, a small watering can and a wind-up toy snail.
Behind me, Sonia moved deeper into the greenhouse, stepping around the shards and looked down at the puddle with a grimace before stepping over the top. There was another table of plants at the back that she moved towards, counting the pots quickly with her long fingers. She froze and counted again, and then again the other way before turning around.
“One’s missing,” she told me.
“A plant?” Mills asked, carefully lying his evidence bags on a table.
“One of our research plants, imported from Peru. Abbie looked after them. One’s missing. How can one be missing?” She turned around and kicked the leg of the table. “We needed that!”
I walked over, looking down at the plants. They were fairly standard, green plants, the buds not yet flowering, but I imagined that its value was more in its properties than in its appearance.
“Why would someone steal one of them?” I wondered aloud.
“How useful are they?” Mills asked Sonia.
“To someone who doesn’t know what they are, barely at all. Whoever took it must have known.”
“Do you have any competition in this study?” I asked her. “And rivalries?”
“None,” she stated. “It was just us, privately funded.”
I stepped back, looking at the mess, the almost vandalized state of the greenhouse.
“What about protests?” I tried. “Are there people who protest against the research?”
Sonia rolled her eyes. “We’re a scientific research facility, Inspector. There are always protestors, but Abbie and I are well used to them, believe me.” I met Mills’s eyes over her head and gave me a grim smile and a jerk of the head. I breathed in deeply and stepped back so that Sonia could turn and walk back towards the door.
“We’ll take these back to forensics and see what we can find,” I decided. “And call someone in to give the place a dust over for fingerprints. Here’s my card.” I dug on from my wallet and handed it to Sonia, who held it in her fingers like I’d given her an old tissue. “Please give us a call if you think of anything that might be useful, or if anything comes to light.”
“What about the plant?” she asked as Mills picked up his bags, and we made for the cooler air outside. “The missing one.” She shut the door behind us.
“My guess is, is that when we find whoever tried to kill your research partner, we’ll find the missing plant with them,” I told her. She didn’t look all that pleased, but she marched onwards, leading us back up to the house where we said goodbye to Dr Quaid and went directly to the car.
Mills placed everything in the boot with Abbie’s thing and slid into the passenger seat as I started the engine up.
“If Abbie was able to fight off her attacker,” Mills said as he clicked his seatbelt into place. “I’m guessing she got a good look at them.”
“I’d say so.”
“So, they would not want her to wake up anytime soon,” he finished in a dark voice.
“They would not,” I agreed, reversing from the spot and taking us up the drive, through the gates and onto the road. “What are your thoughts?” I asked him, turning the radio down to a lower volume.
“I’m drawn,” he told me. “Could be the work of some protestors wanting to derail the study, but to go so far as to actually attack one of them in the process seems, not right. The sorts of people protesting science research aren’t usually the ones that go around with syringes in their pocket.”
“Not usually. Unless they never meant to use it, maybe Abbie wasn’t meant to be there.”
“If they were there to ruin the research,” Mills asked, “why not take all the plants? Or burn them? Why only take one?”
“Could be a competitor then, not wanting to kick up too much dust to get ahead.”
“Drugging a woman doesn’t exactly accomplish that.”
“No,” I agreed, drumming on the wheel, slowing to a halt as a farmer herded his sheep across the road.
“This is why I hate the countryside,” Mills muttered, slumping down as the sheep ambled across.
“Come on, it’s lovely. Look at their faces. We’re hardly in a rush, are we?”
“What if we were in a rush?”
“We would take a picture of it and use it to explain why we’re late,” I told him pleasantly.
“Sounds like you’ve done that before, sir.”
“I did go to school no more than thirty minutes away, Mills. Used to run cross country with flocks of these bad boys,” I added, waving back to the grateful farmer who shut the gate on the field and drove on.
“I used to get stuck behind the bin men,” Mills muttered.
“Oh see, that’s worse. They have a dedicated time and route, easy to get around. No knowing when a man’s going to move his sheep. Anyway,” I shook my head, thoughts of cold mornings on a farm vanishing, “Sonia was saying that she was counting on this research to get her PhD.”
“Which was why she needed Abbie there,” he added.
“Yes. To look after the plants.” Mills turned his head to the side and looked at me.
“But if Sonia took one for her own, she wouldn’t need Abbie, and she could get the study done herself.”
“Full credit for the treatment, she’d be guaranteed her doctorate. Abbie wasn’t so invested in it as she was. Maybe they locked horns over Abbie taking several weeks off. Maybe Sonia decided to finish things off herself and needed Abbie fully out of the way to do that.”
Mills leant back in his seat, flipping his pen betwee
n his fingers on one hand, the other lifting to push his black hair away from his forehead.
“Christ,” he muttered. “Plausible. And Abbie’s not dead, for all we know. That’s an assumption of our own. Could be that whoever attacked didn’t want her dead, just out of the picture for a while.”
“Hospitalized, in a coma, but not actually dead. No murder on their hands.”
“Whoever did it would have known she’d be in this morning,” Mills added. “Early as well, before anyone else really showed up, so chances of being seen would be slim.”
“They know their way around the gardens and the greenhouse,” I added.
“We ought to get Sonia’s alibi checked fairly snappily,” Mills mused.
“We will,” I told him. “And we’ll look into some of these protestors that Sonia mentioned. See if any of them have bites as well as barks.”
Six
Thatcher
Back in the station, we took the broken and bloodied shards of pot and glass from the greenhouse down to forensics, who seemed very happy with the dried blood and spurred to life immediately. They had some of Abbie’s details from the hospital, so if there was a DNA match with her, they’d found out soon enough.
We headed up to our office then, Mills carrying Abbie’s coat and bag, and we pushed a table into the middle of the room, emptying the contents out, each pulling a pair of gloves onto our hands, coats hung on the hooks, sleeves rolled up to our elbows.
“I hate these,” Mills said grumpily as he snapped one into place. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them.”
“Why such a strong opinion on gloves?” I asked, faintly amused.
“They make my hands sweaty,” he answered, looking over at me. “Don’t they make your hands sweaty?”
“A little. But you do get used to it,” I assured him. The concerned look on his face wavered, and I managed not to smirk at him, turning my attention to the work at hand.
We walked over to the table, looking at everything Abbie’s bag had to offer. I had asked Mills to give Paige a quick ring from the car to make sure there was no problem with us going through her things. She’d assured us, in a quietly colourful turn of phrase, that if he helped us find the bastard who put her sister in a coma, we could go through every bag she’d ever owned. There were a few more swear words thrown in there, quietly, because of wherever Grace was at the time, but it was good enough for us.
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