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STORM
Tuesday morning arrives bringing no good news. The search team had broken up at sunset yesterday without having found any trace of India Lawrenson. It has been four days since she was last seen. There are no significant leads on who murdered Rachel Garrett either.
Rachel’s parents, Ronald and Alicia Garrett, had driven to London from halfway across the country yesterday to carry out the heart wrenching duty of identifying their daughter.
Storm had stood beside them while Alicia Garrett had sobbed over her daughter’s body. She’d reached out a hand to touch Rachel’s face, to smooth back Rachel’s dark hair that was so like her own, but Storm had had to request for her not to. The forensics examinations were still underway. Preservation of evidence seemed a poor reason in the face of a mother’s grief.
The pathologist had carefully left everything covered up except their daughter’s face. A white cloth had concealed her dismembered hand and the knife wounds on her torso that had been inflicted with enough force to break two ribs and almost cleave off a portion of flesh.
The white cloth was a mercy, doing its best to disguise the fact that Rachel had been reduced to a cadaver. There was no need for her parents to see that. The memory would haunt them to their own graves. So long as they only looked at Rachel’s face, even with her eyes now closed and no hint of a smile on her pale lips, they might still see their sweet daughter who had departed for London with such joy, leaving behind the bittersweet melancholy of an empty nest.
For Storm, speaking to parents about their deceased children is one of the worst parts of his job, secondary only to speaking to children about their deceased parents, the latter bringing back memories of his own childhood. It doesn’t help that parents sometimes mistake his determined emotional shutdown as coldness and lack of caring. He is not looking forward to interviewing the Garretts.
He had volunteered to interview them at their hotel room this morning, thinking the more homely environs might make it a less distressing experience for them, but they had insisted on coming into Agency Headquarters. They had wanted to see the workplace of those investigating Rachel’s death, to reassure themselves that something was being done to bring her killer to account for taking her away from them. For snuffing her out like she meant nothing. For not knowing that she had been their everything.
They had said she was their only child. They had not mentioned India at all yesterday, as if she was a great unknown that they were too scared to define yet. As if their minds were roiling and they did not like the thoughts that had come into them.
Ronald and Alicia Garrett arrive at Agency Headquarters at mid-morning. They sit side by side in the interview room, close but not touching. Not holding each other’s hand for comfort. Their eyes take in the bare walls and the large opaque window behind which is another room where DI Zael and his sergeant are watching unseen. They sense they are being watched and it makes them uncomfortable, as if they are suspects.
Had Zael not insisted on watching, Storm would have held the interview in his office.
“Sorry about the room,” Storm says.
“It’s okay,” says Ronald Garrett.
Leo arrives with the teas that the Garretts had requested when Storm offered. In proper mugs, to give them something comforting and hot to clutch at. They accept them as if they are lifelines.
“Any news?” Mr Garrett asks Leo, as if something will have changed in the ten minutes since he had last asked Storm. His eyes search Leo’s face, as if looking for any bad news that Leo might be keeping from them.
Leo shakes his head.
Whether they know it or not, their concern for India is showing. Storm takes note. It means they do not think she is capable of hurting Rachel.
Storm knows there is often a gulf between what parents believe about their kids and the truth.
Mr Garrett is rubbing his left thumb over and over with his index finger, hard and insistent. He seems unaware that he is doing it. Storm knows that this convulsive motion is the man’s way of keeping his tears at bay. He seems to not want to cry in front of his wife, whose bloodshot eyes with their dark circles seem to distress him every time he looks at them. Mr Garrett, with his full head of silver hair, appears a couple of decades older than his dark-haired wife. Storm can see he has been the stronger figure for much of his life. He doesn't seem to know how to stop.
“She’s a good girl,” says Mr Garrett. “She’s all we have left. You have to find her.”
“Please,” adds Mrs Garrett, as if she has some hope that pleading will change the results of the search. Her voice is tremulous.
She looks like an older version of Rachel, her black hair cut in a bob unlike Rachel’s long tumbling locks. Grief has left her haggard. She seems to have accepted the inevitability that the chances of finding India alive after four days is slim. By now India will have bled out if any severe injuries had been left unattended. By now she will have perished from dehydration if she had been left without water.
“We can help,” says Mr Garrett. “We’ve come prepared to join the search after this.”
Mrs Garrett does not contradict him, but she shakes her head as if the possibility that she herself might discover India’s dead body is too much for her to bear.
“The search is already underway,” Storm says gently. “We have experienced staff leading the way and volunteers who know the area.”
He leaves it unsaid
that the Garretts’ desperation is unlikely to aid the search party’s efforts, and that their unfamiliarity with the local area will only tie up the volunteers who end up having to babysit them.
Mr Garrett seems to understand this. Even so he says, “I have to do something.”
“You are doing something,” Storm reassures him. “The information you give us today will be invaluable in helping us understand what was going on in Rachel and India’s lives. It could help us find India. It could help us catch who did this.”
“But I don’t understand why you haven’t found her yet,” pleads Mrs Garrett. “You have magic. Shouldn’t you have found her by now? I heard blood magic can be used to locate people anywhere in the country!”
