Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 4) by Oliver Davies (free e books to read online TXT) 📕

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 between 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