Detective Henry Kendrick stepped out of the miserable apartment near the corner of Duke and High in Glasgow. The street was crowded with curious passersby that ignored the instructions of several officers to keep walking, all drawn by the wailing mother, screaming for her dead husband and children.

The scene turned into mayhem when the officers removed three bodies out of the building. The inconsolable woman launched herself over the stretcher carrying the smallest body, accidentally throwing it to the ground, revealing the lifeless body of a little girl. The crowd gasped and screamed in horror as the mother was dragged into the back of a police carriage in a futile attempt to contain the chaos.

"Sir!"

Kendrick's assistant was calling for him, rushing out of the building, urgency creeping into his voice.

"Sir, you need to see this," he added, showing him an empty candy wrapper.

"Sugar Quill..." Kendrick read aloud, looking intensely at the letters. "Where did you find it?"

"Under the children's bed."

"Find a neighbour or anyone that knows the family. Ask if they had a third child," he ordered before walking to the police carriage to try to speak to the mother, even if he was quite certain that in her state she would not be of much help.

It was not the first occasion that a sugar quill candy emerged in an investigation, but still, no one knew the origin or the store that distributed them. There was an old case in London and two more recent ones in Edinburgh, and in all of them, the constant was a missing child just shy from entering their teen years. But if the cases were indeed related, a family butchered at home was a horrible escalation.

He was aware of the difficulties encountered by his colleagues with the investigations. In an unsettling way, the families seemed reluctant to speak much about their missing children, especially regarding their education. In all cases, there was a mention of a boarding school, per neighbours' accounts, however nobody remembered the name of such institution. But since the children went missing during the holidays or the summer, the investigations never invested too much time trying to dig into that aspect.

Notes: First incursion writing a fic in English so probably there are going to be issues all over the place, the one I'm sure is present is the punctuation on the dialogues, is different to Spanish so I'm trying to get used to it. I may change some details of this or the first chapter later, but nothing big. Also, I'm finishing my master in December and I'm trying to finish a long fic (Just 6 more chapters to go) so this story will be frozen for a good couple of weeks if not months.

Suggestions and critics are welcome and much needed if I'm going to be honest.