MURDER IS SKIN DEEP by M.G. Cole (read dune .txt) 📕

unanswered. The only other call was to an unregistered mobile made five minutes after Crawford had struck officer Lord. It lasted for three-minutes four-seconds.

A quick check of his emails, text messages, Facebook and WhatsApp revealed no new activity for the last couple of days.

Garrick’s head was literally spinning. He made a note of the unregistered mobile number and emailed Fanta to check it out as soon as she reached the incident room. He handed the phone back to the SOCO, thanked the team for their efforts, and squelched back to his car.

He turned the radio on and blasted nineties dance tunes from KMFM just to keep him awake. It didn’t quite work as the repetitive beats of Snap’s ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ lulled him. His mind kept circling the anomalies scattered amongst the evidence.

While there were plenty of connections between the various players and a snarl of motivation, animosity, and bitter romance, none of them linked in the right way. He had been relying on Crawford to provide him with that spark of final inspiration, but now that had been snatched from him.

Back home, Garrick threw his damp clothes into the bathtub and, naked, collapsed under the bedsheets. He sank into a brooding series of dreams in which he was being pursued while his sister constantly attempted to warn him of something, but the words were never clear and, at times, backwards.

He woke in the morning feeling even more tired than he had at the start of the night.

An email from PC Liu confirmed that the three-minute phone call Crawford had made was to an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone. Garrick made the decision that a grief counsellor should break the news of Crawford’s death to Terri before they interviewed her. That was one session he was not looking forward to today, and one that he couldn’t, as a leader, throw to Chib to deal with. Although she would be much better at handling it than him.

He had a sparky email from Wendy, which painfully reminded him they hadn’t talked since that night in Pizza Hut. What must she think of him? He promised to call her at lunchtime before she thought he was being stand-offish.

Overnight, a polite refusal from Fraser’s bank in Panama to hand over any information had arrived. He was just finishing his breakfast when he received an irate call from Dr Rajasekar.

“You missed your appointment!” she snapped with no preamble.

“I didn’t think we had an appointment booked.”

“For your MRI!”

Garrick’s stomach jolted. “I completely forgot. Wait, I thought it was the end of the week? I remember you saying it was the end of the week.”

“No, David. I spoke to you yesterday and said it was first thing this morning. An hour ago! They called me to ask where you were.”

With everything that had happened, Garrick was getting confused. He remembered her exact words, or perhaps he’d been distracted.

“To be honest, I had to pull a few strings to get you that.” Rajasekar was determined to make him feel bad. “This is your health we’re talking about. You must take it seriously.”

“I do.” He sounded like a chastised schoolboy.

“As luck would have it, they’ve had another cancelation this morning and juggled appointments around for you. Get to Tunbridge Wells for ten-fifteen. Same place as last time.”

The words ‘I can’t’ caught in his throat. He glanced at the time; it was eight-thirty. By the time he got to the station, he would have to perform a U-turn and go straight to the hospital, so it wasn’t worth leaving. He mumbled an apology and his thanks before assuring her he’d be there on time. Then he hung up and called Chib, who was at her desk and catching up with the overnight events. Now it really looked as if he was throwing her under the bus as he asked her to interview Terri Cordy. Although, if she thought that, she never let on.

“We’re releasing Rebecca in the next hour. We’re just waiting for her solicitor to turn up. Should we be following her?”

“The way things are going, that will not make us look good if she finds out. Let’s make sure Border Force alert us when she tries to leave.”

He filled her in on his time retrieving Crawford’s body. She had read the incident report, but Garrick’s account added a missing layer of tragedy.

“I don’t get it,” said Chib. “He was a good-looking bloke. A medical student with great grades. Why would he jeopardise any of that?”

“The corny answer is what drives anybody to do extreme things: Love.”

After finishing his call, he realised he had a good fifty minutes on his hands before he had to leave. He made himself a matcha tea and sat in front of his ammonite. He hated the MRI, so tackling the finer details of his fossil with a small metal brush proved to be a relaxing distraction.

He alternatively sipped his tea and used the mounted magnifying glass to peer closer into the ridges of the shell. Apart from the ridges he had accidentally shaved away, the rest of the detail was rather magnificent. Mounted on a base of the rock he found it in, it would look quite handsome on the mantlepiece. He felt proud. Impulsively, he powered up the air pump and use the air scribe to cut away a little more of the base to give it shape. The scribe’s tiny needle chipped effortlessly through the rock, but the shrill whine of the pump triggered another pounding headache. Surely this had to be psychosomatic, he thought. It was a question to pose to Dr Rajasekar. He was distracted. Too distracted.

A chunk of matrix the size of a two-pound coin suddenly fell away. There had been a crack in the rock he hadn’t noticed. As the base material crumbled, the beautiful ammonite fractured in two.

Garrick stopped the pump and angrily tossed the air scribe aside. He picked up the two halves. They neatly fitted together, so he could glue them, but that would be