“My gran used to say that you should eat a spoon of local honey for hay fever,” he mentioned casually.
“Old wife’s tale,” I answered, having already tried such a remedy, in fact. “Besides, Kask’s garden is hardly local.”
“True,” he replied with a shrug. “What were you making notes of back there, by the way?”
“Some of the plants were familiar,” I told him, “I thought we could get in touch with Dr Quaid and see if he can tell us about them.”
Thatcher nodded as a waitress came over and placed some dishes down on the table.
“Any of them ring a bell from this morning?” He asked, from the research we’d done into wholesalers.
“No. But I might know them from somewhere else,” I remarked, picking up a chip. “Maybe a glimpse from one of Abbie’s studies or out in the greenhouse.”
“Well, it can’t hurt to find out,” Thatcher said. “Maybe we can run a few past Dr Olsen too,” he added.
I looked over at him, chewing on his sandwich. He’d been quiet as we drove, and I had pegged as much down to what Sharp discussed with me earlier. But perhaps I’d been wrong on that foot.
“You suspect him of being involved?” I asked. I couldn’t quite see it myself, but then I hadn’t really spoken to the man.
“I think there’s something there that’s making me pause,” he told me. “Maybe the same thing that made you stop and take notice of those plants.”
I nodded, chewing thoughtfully on my chip. Kask must know more than he let on; he’d known both Sonia and Abbie, had probably even met Luke Campbell at one point in time. He’d been on the study, would have been there for the protestors and the threat, and yet, he barely had anything to offer us that was genuinely useful. It seemed most of our information was having to come from the two people who couldn’t actually tell us anything. What I wouldn’t give to have Abbie Whelan suddenly waking up, the name all ready to go and all the pieces carefully slotted together. But that was our job, making sense of all the muddle, doing right for the people who couldn’t do anything themselves.
In the midst of my rambling thoughts, Thatcher’s phone rang, making us both jump a little. He pulled it from his pocket with a grimace, looked down at whoever was calling and relaxed slightly.
“Lena,” he answered, taking another bite. He listened to whatever Dr Crowe was saying with a thoughtful expression, nodding along and then swallowed his mouth. “Got it. We’ll be there soon.” He hung up and put his phone face down on the table, and looked at me.
“Lena’s finished her autopsy, and she’s ready to give us her report.”
“That was fast,” I observed.
“Sometimes these things are just as obvious as they seem,” Thatcher replied. “I could talk to her alone, if you wanted to head out and talk to Dr Quaid.”
I nodded, better to split up and get through these things as fast as we could rather than wasting time pottering around together. We finished our lunch fairly quickly after that, with me practically shoving half a plate of chips into my mouth and trying not to choke on them. We paid the bill and jumped back into Thatcher’s now very muddy car, making our way back to the city, the tall hedges, trees and fields blurring around us on all sides.
I looked over at Thatcher as we drove, his grey eyes staring straight ahead to the road. I’d meant what I said earlier, about him moving out here. The further away from the moors and the countryside we got, the tenser Thatcher became. By the time the city came into view, he looked ready to rip the steering wheel off with his bare hands. I wondered if being out here stirred up old memories for him. Sharp had told me very little, and not much more than I already knew. Whatever had happened between Thatcher and his mother, whatever the sad, bitter story for why he was always turning her photograph around or worked himself to the bone trying to pay some promise, wasn’t my business. But Sharp had told me that when his mother had died, it had been in August, and that every year was the same for him. He got distant, careless, surlier than usual. It must have been bad, whatever had happened there, bad enough for him to still feel it so keenly all these years later. Whatever the case, I didn’t press, and so far, that seemed to be working well for us. I kept quiet, tuned the radio into a station that blasted eighties music all the livelong day and sat back in my chair.
He pulled into the station car park, and I jumped out, beelining directly to my car.
“Ring me if there’s trouble,” Thatcher called as he walked into the building. I gave him a wave over my head, sliding into my own car and dug through the glove compartment to find the small box of antihistamines I kept there for days such as these and swallowed one of the small white pills before turning the engine on.
Dr Quaid had closed the gardens for the time being, so I was glad to not have to suffer my senses through that again today, and he had given us his home address. I dug through my notes for it and put it into the sat nav, following the directions out of the city, to a
