I left the card on the table and finished getting ready for work. I had work to do with Abbie’s laptop, looking for any trace of the study that got shut down, for Toomas Kask or anyone else who might have worked on it, anyone who directly opposed it. For all we knew, she and Sonia had carried on with the study, managing to get a target on the back of their heads in the process.
I didn’t rule it out, nor did I completely rule out Luke Campbell, who’d stuck around in the city of late, but according to Susanne, had stayed well away from Paige and Grace. I fumbled with my tie, the knot ultimately wonky, and with the memory of my grandfather’s voice in my head, I set to work making it straight, hands still wobbly. It was August now, Jeannie had timed that well, and I was already all too aware of the cloud that began to roll in over my head.
I shook it off. I had a murderer to catch, and a deadline if I wanted to spend a proper evening with Liene when she got back. The thought soothed me enough to throw my jacket on, wolf down a bowl of cereal and stride from the house, yanking my coat on and balancing a thermos of tea as I kicked the door shut. Coming up the steps as I came down, my landlady Mrs MacIntosh hobbled up with her bag of cleaning supplies.
“Morning,” I greeted her.
“Good morning, pet. Let me in, and I’ll give the place a once over.” I raised a brow, but reached back and opened the door for her, trusting her to lock it up when she was done. I jogged down the stairs, my coat flapping around my legs like a cape, hitting the kerb just as Mills swung up into the street. I hopped into the car and gave him a nod.
“Mills.”
“Morning, sir.” He didn’t bother with small talk today, both of us starting to feel the clock ticking, and simply sped off to the station, narrowly avoiding a rather fat pigeon in the road as his tyres squealed along.
The station was fairly quiet when we arrived, swapping quick pleasantries with the desk sergeant before making our way upstairs. We were greeted first by Smith, who held a pile of sheets in her hands.
“Smith,” I gave her a nod to follow us along to the office.
“Sir. Got all the statements from the botanical gardens put together, all the alibis square up.”
“Figured as much,” I answered, taking my coat off and hanging it up.
“And Wasco asked me to give you this, sir,” she pulled out Abbie’s laptop from her arm full of crap and handed it over. Mills took it, letting her rebalance her things. “Said that there was nothing that stuck out to him, but you’d know better what you’re looking for, and he’s trying to get in Petrilli’s work computer now.”
“Thank you, Smith. Did you take a look in Lin Shui?”
“I did. She’s clean, sir. Time of Sonia Petrilli’s death, we can firmly place her at work. In the middle of a rather complicated tattoo fix. Something about an old flame’s name.”
I shook my head with a tut, powering up Abbie’s laptop. “Should never get someone’s name tattooed on you. Not unless it’s your child or your mother,” I added, watching the laptop whir to life.
“I’ll remember that one, sir,” Smith said with a faint chuckle, giving us another nod and quick smile before backing from the room. Mills shut the door after her and dragged his chair over to me to look at Abbie’s home screen. A photograph of the three of them, Abbie, Paige and Grace all sitting on a beach somewhere filled the organised screen, and I opened up her documents, ready to begin trudging through them.
“I had a thought,” Mills muttered after watching me click through some folders, turning up empty-handed.
“Do share it,” I replied.
“If we’re going as far back as eight or nine years, we might be looking in the wrong place.” I paused and looked over my shoulder at him. “I mean,” he went on, “have you ever kept the same laptop for that long? A work laptop at that?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Okay, well, would Abbie?” He tried. “And even if she did, keeping one for that long means it’d get clogged up with all sorts of stuff. Maybe she has spread out her work.”
“You mean maybe she has a hard drive somewhere?” I asked, pushing myself back from the desk.
Mills shrugged, flipping a pencil between his fingers. He used to smoke, I’d learned not long ago, and he toyed with pens and pencils like they were cigarettes.
“Why have a study, a shutdown study, from that long ago on a laptop that’s otherwise mostly just pictures of her daughter?” he pointed out. It was a thought, a very interesting and very valid thought that I was annoyed we’d only just come to.
“We’ll need to go back to the house,” I murmured, “and ask Paige if there’s any sign of one.”
“Unless she kept it somewhere else,” he suggested. “Like at work?”
“You think that the mess in the greenhouse wasn’t just a fight?” I realised, sitting back and letting him theorise.
“Could be that the killer was looking for the study, maybe that’s why they had to come back for Sonia,” he suggested. I pieced his ideas together, letting them play out in my head, watching the narrative unfold. It made sense, vaguely, and explained why there’d be no break-in at Abbie’s house. If the killer was connected to the study in some way, you’d think they’d be looking for what was left of it, if there was anything left of it.
“This all hinges,” I pointed out, “on our belief that the killer doesn’t already have the study. If they do, what reason
