“Well, like I said, my boy, for a botanist, a lot of these are staples. So long as you’re careful and know what you’re doing with them, all should be fine. Where did you find them?” He asked.
“In a garden,” I answered simply, wrapping the tissue back up and flipping my notebook closed. Dr Quaid hummed and took his glasses off to clean them.
“Thank you for this, Dr Quaid. You’ve been a real help. Throughout the investigation,” I added. It wasn’t often we were met with such a lack of hostility. The change was jarring, but not unwelcome.
“I only I had been able to do more for Abbie and Sonia,” he told me regretfully. “I mean, I was only in the house when Sonia—” he broke off, clearing his throat and blinking his now wet eyes. “I shall be paying closer attention to my staff from now on. I can tell you that much, sergeant.”
“I’m sure that there was nothing more you could have done,” I answered, rising from the table. “Out of interest, Dr Quaid. Do you grow Nerium at the botanical gardens?”
“We do. But those sorts of plants are very closely monitored. If there was even a leaf out of place, we would know.” He said it with such conviction that I couldn’t doubt him. But it did seem strange, that he would have careful attention applied to the plants, more so than the people. He seemed more comfortable around them. That much was clear. He stood up from the table, and I shook his hand, letting him walk me back to the door.
“Do you remember a Toomas Kask working for you?” I asked. “It would have been some years ago now.”
“Toomas? Vaguely, yes,” he scratched his chin. “I’d have just taken over then, right when he left, in fact. He was a good botanist, but I’m afraid that’s all I could tell you about him.”
“No worries. Thank you for your time and wisdom, Dr Quaid, and my apologies for the sudden intrusion.”
“Anything I can do to help,” he assured me, holding the door open. He stayed there, waving as I got in the car and drove away.
A botanist staple, I thought as I drove. On their own, I doubted that there was much about these plants that would make a jury stop and listen, but together, used in the right way by the person with the right sort of expertise, who knew.
My phone rang as I headed back into the city, the Bluetooth thankfully connected, and I answered.
“This is Mills.”
“It’s me,” Thatcher told me, his voice hurried. “Where are you?”
“Heading back now. I’ve got some interesting notes about some of these plants, sir.”
“Good. Crowe’s found some interesting stuff too, and Dr Olsen’s on her way in.” Dr Olsen? Things were moving.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I told him, speeding up a little as I hit the city outskirts. Thatcher hung up without much further ado, and I focused on the road, zipping through the streets as fast as I could, trying not to run over slow-moving herds of tourists or cyclists that seemed to emerge in great swarms of Lycra. My brother was one of them, to my horror, and I was doing all I could to keep the boys from donning their own spandex and joining him. Luckily, my sister-in-law was also on my side, so we were doing well on that front.
I reached the station before I knew it, parking the car and heading into the station, where I directed myself straight down to Crowe’s lab. I found Thatcher leaning against the wall outside, two cups balanced one on top of the other in one hand and his phone, that he grinned down at like a schoolboy, in the other.
“Sir,” I called as I strode over to him. He looked up, put his phone away and past me one of the cups of coffee.
“We’re just waiting on Dr Olsen,” he told me. “Lena’s upstairs giving her report to Sharp, so she’s locked us out until she gets back.”
“She’s very trusting,” I said dryly.
“I knocked over one beaker,” Thatcher groaned, “One, about five years ago, and now I need to be supervised in there like an eight-year-old, apparently.”
“What was in the beaker?” I asked him. He gave me a sheepish look and took a large swig of his coffee, very much looking like he wished it was beer instead, or indeed something stronger.
“Very nosy today, Mills. Tell me about your tattoo. What was in the beaker?” He parroted.
“Yes, tell me about the tattoo, I haven’t forgotten. And we’ve got time to kill.”
He glared at me, spared by the sudden arrival of Lena, who appeared in the hallway on silent feet.
“Good, Mills is here. You’ve got some plants?” She asked. I patted my pocket where my notebook sat. “Good,” she unlocked the lab door, “we’ll need that.”
Eighteen
Thatcher
Mills hay fever came as a small blessing, the cup of tea and plate of chips in the roadside café really hit the spot and put me in a much better frame of mind to talk to Crowe and see what she had found. I drove us back to the station, having ignored most of the curious glances Mills cast my way over the drive, and clambered from the car, running an annoyed eye over the muddy, dusty state of it. One thing that I did not miss about living out there: the bloody mess of it all.
As I walked into the station, Mills drove off, a familiar, burning idea in his eyes that I had learnt was best to let him pursue. He was right more often than he was wrong, and when he got an idea stuck in his head, it stayed there, much like my own self. Whatever had caught his eye in Kask’s garden, I wanted to know about it too. There was something about the botanist and his vast garden that niggled at me, but I shrugged the thoughts aside. Let Mills root around that particular problem. I had a date with a dead body and a gay pathologist to get to.
I stopped in the kitchen, making two steaming cups of coffee and carried them both down to Crowe’s lab, knocking on the door with the back of my hand. The door opened, and she looked out at me with a confused face.
“It wasn’t locked,” she pointed out. I wordlessly held out the coffee, and she nodded in understanding, taking it from my hand. “Ta, muchly. Come on in,” she held the door open, letting me through to the cold room. “No Mills?” She asked, glancing out into the hallway.
“He had something he wanted to follow up on,” I told her.
She looked me over with a knowing smile and sipped her coffee. “You look a bit sad without him,” she observed. “Like a little lost lamb.”
“Lena,” I groaned.
“And to think, it wasn’t all that long ago when you couldn’t keep a sergeant for toffee.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I defended myself, leaning against an empty desk, cradling my warm mug.
Lena just raised a brow at me sardonically and turned around, walking over the sheet-covered body that lay on her metal table.
“Ready?” she asked, taking one more sip before her coffee safely aside. I followed her over, watching as she pulled the sheet carefully away from Sonia.
Her olive skin had turned drab and grey in death, shiny black hair dull. She wasn’t as badly bruised as Abbie, I noted straight away. She looked like there had been less of a fight that ended her up here, which was a little strange to me.
“Puncture mark,” Lena waved me over to the other side of the table, and I left my coffee behind, walking over to stand beside her. I followed her glove covered finger to Sonia’s neck, where a small, but visible puncture mark had bruised the skin slightly.
“There’s some light bruising on her wrists as well,” Dr Crowe told me. “I’m guessing our killer held onto her,” she demonstrated on me, pinning my two hands together, “and drove the needle in from here. It’s on a slight downwards angle, so I’d say whoever did it came from above. Someone taller than her.”
“Stronger too, if they were able to hold her steady enough,” I observed as she let go of my wrists. She’d have been awake then, I thought, and then said aloud to Crowe, who nodded.
“I imagined she’d have cried out,” she added. “There are no markings around her mouth to suggest that they tried to muffle her unless they did so very lightly.”
I breath
ed in deeply and walked back over to my coffee, taking a long sip. “Cause of death?”
“Definitely whatever they injected her with,” Dr Crowe told me. She pulled the sheet back up over Sonia and yanked her gloves off, nodding to a report on the desk. “I’ve been taking a little look into the toxicology, but it’s not my area. I’ve asked Dr Olsen to come in and take a look. But,” she brought her mug over to stand beside me, “I’m guessing our killer got their recipe right this time around.”
“Practice makes perfect,” I muttered darkly. “What about a time of death?”
“I’d say anywhere between one and two,” Lena answered.
“The,” I hesitate, not sure what to call it. It wasn’t a drug, per se. “The formula,” I settled with, “it’s got the same compounds as the other one?”
“Looks that way to me, Max.”
“Plants, then,” I said with another slow sip. “I should call Mills,” I decided, fishing my phone out of pocket.
“Outside,” Crowe ushered me to the door, “I need to take my report to the boss,” she told me, pushing me out into the hallway and locking the door.
I watched her do so with an insulted expression, which quickly turned to a pout when I realised she’d also locked my coffee in. I turned to her, but she was already gone, her tuft of white-blonde hair vanishing up the stairs. I sighed, gave the coffee machine along the drab hallway and mournful look and turned back to my phone, quickly dialling Mills.
It rang for a moment, and I worried that he was still with Dr Quaid, but his voice distantly answered. “This is Mills.”
“It’s me,” I told him, frowning at his weird sounding voice. “Where are you?”
“Heading back now. I’ve got some interesting notes about some of these plants, sir.” In the car then, that made sense.
“Good. Crowe’s found some interesting stuff too, and Dr Olsen’s on her way in.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he answered succinctly, and I hung up then, plodding my way over to the coffee machines with a sad face. I could just wait for Lena to come back, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t much like the thought of drinking something that had sat in a room with a dead body for that long, and nobody liked lukewarm coffee, anyway. Not even Lena, who had taken hers with her. I hit a few buttons on the machine, making one for Mills too, and made idle chit chat with a PC who had come down for a few minutes silence from the holdings. Once he ambled off, I took both coffees, one stacked on the other and leant against the wall, waiting for Lena or Mills, and pulled my phone out of my pocket again, beaming to see a text from Liene lighting up the screen. Something heavy lifted from my chest, and I let out a silent whoop as I scanned her words. She’d be back early and wanted to get dinner when she did. That was good news. I replied eagerly, half aware of a set of footsteps snapping their way down the hall.
“Sir.”
I looked up to find Mills with me, his face a bit flushed from hurrying. I put my phone away and handed him one of the coffees.
“We’re just waiting on Dr Olsen. Lena’s upstairs giving her report to Sharp,” I told him, “So she’s locked us out until she gets back.”
“She’s very trusting,” he said with a smirk.
I groaned, knowing it was my own doing. “I knocked over one beaker. One, about five years ago, and now I need to be supervised in there like an eight-year-old, apparently.”
“What was in the beaker?” Mills asked with his eyes narrowed, a grin already forming on his face. It might have been something that ought not to get spilt, something with a long, complicated chemical name and warning symbols. I looked away, taking a large sip of bitter coffee.
“Very nosy today, Mills,” I told him, mimicking his voice. “Tell me about your tattoo. What was in the beaker?”
“Yes, tell me about the tattoo, I haven’t forgotten. And we’ve got time to kill.”
I glowered then. I regretted mentioning the tattoo, and certainly did not want to share the story of how I got it. Luckily for me, Lena decided to make her triumphant return, skittering down the hallway to us.
“Good, Mills is here. You’ve got some plants?” She asked. Mills nodded, his hand going to his trustworthy notebook. “Good, we’ll need that,” she said, unlocking the lab door and letting us both back in.
“You leave your drink in here?” She asked, taking the now lukewarm mug and emptying it down the sink.
“I did. Thanks for locking me out.”
“I don’t take chances with you around. Like a bull in a china shop you are,” she was clattering away at her keyboard, and then she looked over the computer screen and appraised me from afar. “Did you play rugby?”
“Maybe,” I muttered. She chuckled triumphantly and bent her head to her screen again. I turned my attention to Mills, who, despite the fact he was trying to hide his smile by sipping his coffee, was still less likely to take the piss out of me.
“Kask’s plants?” I asked. He sobered up quickly and fished his notebook out, handing it over. I opened it to the most recent page, where his quick, jagged handwriting identified the plants and then a few words with each one about what they did. Underneath them all, he’d written, “botanist’s toolkit.”
“A lot of these are not very nice,” I muttered, looking at the underlined words of poisonous or deadly. “Paralysis?” I read aloud, bewildered.
Crowe’s head shot back up. “Show me that,” she snapped, holding her hand out for the page. I passed it over, and she looked over the plant names and then over at Sonia.
“The levels are different,” she muttered.
“Inspector,” the front desk sergeant stuck his head in the door. “Dr Olsen for you.”
“Send her in,” I ordered quickly, moving over to stand with Crowe when the frazzled toxicologist drifted through the door.
“Hello, again,” she greeted us all, dropping her bag on a chair with a rattle and pulled her coat off, revealing her lab coat underneath. She and Crowe exchanged a nod, and then Dr Olsen swanned over to Lena, and the two of them bent their heads over the many pages and reports and Mills” notebook. He shuffled over to me, looking briefly at Sonia’s sheet-covered form before looking anywhere else.
The two doctors muttered together, too quietly for me to understand what they were saying, and then Lena moved suddenly, pulling a pair of gloves on with a loud snap and lifted Sonia’s sheet, giving her another look, running her fingers along the dead girl’s arms and back.
“Lena?” I asked.
“I presumed,” she began tutting at herself, ‘that our killer altered the measurements for the Nerium. Killed her outright, but that’s not what we’re seeing.”
“Yew,” Dr Olsen went on with feverish excitement to her eyes. “She was paralysed, died slowly.”
I winced and then looked back to Crowe. “That’s why she didn’t call out,” I realised, “why he didn’t need to stifle her.”
“He?” Mills asked.
“Whoever killed her was taller and stronger,” Crowe quickly told him, “and Sonia’s no small lass, so odds are we’re looking for a man.”
“So that’s what went wrong with Abbie?” Mills pieced together. “Why she was able to fight back, how she got out from the greenhouse before the rest of it kicked in? The paralysis didn’t work on her?”
“He got his recipe wrong,” Dr Olsen confirmed, looking over Crowe’s report. “Nailed it now, though. You have lovely handwriting,” she added randomly to her friend.
“Thank you,” Lena said earnestly. “These lot hate it.”
“You have doctor handwriting,” Mills pointed out.
“Fancy that,” Lena shot back, pulling the sheet back over Sonia.
“Yew is definitely a component,” Dr Olsen had fished out her own work and was cross-referencing, a pen lid dangling from her mouth.
“What about the others?”
“Not that I can tell, but their quantities are smaller, and there are other places you’d find these compounds.”
“But it’s safe to assume so,” I hedged, “given we know our killer’s a fan of plants.”
“I’d say so, Max,” Lena told me with a wink. “But these, as Mills has cleverly ascertained,” she added as she handed him his notebook back. “Are pretty common plants.”
“It’s not the plants that stand out,” Dr Olsen added. “It’s the method. You’re looking for someone with the know-how to pull this off, to see where they’ve gone wrong and adjust it accordingly.”
As good as it was to know all of this, it sat knocked me unpleasantly in the gut. Poor Sonia, poor Abbie. The hospital was still working on bringing her out of the coma, but there was nothing that anyone could do for Sonia now. Expect us, I supposed.
“Why not call it a day, sir?” Mills suggested quietly as the two doctors returned to their conversation. “Fill in Sharp and stop for a pint? I’ll buy.”
I smiled and clapped an arm around his shoulder. “Good lad, Mills. But I’m still not showing you my tattoo,” I added, watching his face fall slightly.
“Just catch him wearing shorts one day,” Lena called over. “It’s on his knee.” She sent Mills a roguish grin, and when he started laughing, I steered him from the lab.
“Yes, thank you, Lena!”
“You are very welcome, love!” she called back, her laughter echoing around the cold lab.
I suspected that Mills had other ulterior motives for hurrying through our debrief with Sharp and leading me out the pub, settling down in the garden with a large pint of cold beer. The same reason he’d been casting me wary glances since Sharp had her little chat with him. August, I thought grudgingly.
“How goes the coaching house?” He asked tentatively, his eyes focused on something out towards the park as he spoke.
I hadn’t been out there for a while, actually. Hadn’t really had the time, to my shame, and when Liene came back, I doubted I’d have much then. The guilt kicked me like an angry donkey, and I took a large swig of beer, hoping to push it all down.
“Stairs are fixed,” I told him with a small smile. He returned it with a chuckle, his eyes flicking up to my head, where the nasty cut I had gotten falling through said stairs had now faded, also conveniently covered by my hair.
Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 4) Page 15
