In her office, smiling, Gardner typed O’Brien a text message thanking her for breakfast. After sending it, her phone rang.
Fiona Lane.
Her smile fell away as she recalled their recent frosty encounters.
‘Morning, Fiona.’
‘I wanted to put you in the loop immediately regarding a line of enquiry that’s been thrown up.’
Straight to the point… Not even a good morning!
‘We’ve recovered traces of a reddish quarry dust from the skull, the remains at the Atkinson farm and even the handwritten notes. We’re testing it now. If this quarry dust has a unique mineral composition that differs from other sources, then, well, we’ve something significant. Historically, we’ve had results from similar findings in other cases.’
Gardner felt a surge of excitement. She’d encountered this before during a case in Salisbury. In that instance, it’d been soil acting like a fingerprint due to the specific combinations of minerals. It’d taken a while to source local farmyards to identify the location, but it’d proven itself to be a breaking lead.
‘Brilliant,’ Gardner said. ‘How confident are we?’
‘Still early, but we’ve the right people on it. They’ll be examining the shape and size of the particles, and there are some powerful techniques like X-ray fluorescence which could throw up a distinct chemical signature. We need to be collecting samples from your local quarries, so we’re ready for a match. That’s where you come in.’
Except manpower right now is at a premium…
Still, this process had worked before, so she’d need to approach Marsh, guns blazing.
After the call, which fortunately didn’t involve any reference to Gardner’s inappropriate relationship with a younger officer, Gardner made her approach by phone.
Marsh provided a single officer to collect samples.
Better than nothing.
Despite her never-ending anxiety over Riddick and Cecile, she felt somewhat buoyed by the significant step in this investigation and moved with purpose towards her next interview with Robert Thwaites.