Guilty Conscious

by Oliver Davies

  “What about him?” he asked.

  “May we come in? Might be better to sit down while we talk,” I said, noting the way he swayed on his feet slightly. He didn’t look too enthused by the suggestion, but he grunted and walked into the house, letting us follow. Mills shut the door behind us as we walked into the cigarette and beer scented building, following him into the living room.

  The wallpaper hung off the wall in the corners, bits of damp rising up from the skirting boards, and the floorboards were pale with dust. Mark Helman dropped down into a scruffy armchair, arranging his tatty dressing gown around his knees and indicated the sofa. We sat reluctantly, and I gave Mills a nod.

  “Thank you, Mr Helman. We promise not to take too much of your time.”

  Mark huffed and patted around his pockets for a box of cigarettes. He took one out, offered us one, which we refused, then lit it up and took a slow drag, blowing the smoke out in curls.

  “You’re here about the boy?” he reminded us.

  “Edward Vinson.” Mills nodded. “He was found dead in his university room two nights ago. Murder.”

  Mark’s face didn’t change. “What have I got to do with that?”

  I looked around the room, to where a few photographs barely hung to the wall. I recognised Billie in one of them, in a school uniform, her arm around another girl with little blonde pigtails and the same green eyes. Stella.

  “We met your daughter yesterday,” I told him, taking his attention from Mills and turning away from the picture. “Billie.”

  “I know her name,” he grumbled. “Why?”

  “We know that Edward Vinson was accused of sexually assaulting your other daughter just over a year ago.”

  Mark’s eyes shuttered, and he took another drag of his cigarette with a trembling hand. “What of it?”

  “We wondered what you might know about it,” I said. “If you ever had any contact with Edward Vinson, held him accountable for what happened to Stella.”

  He looked away, over to the grubby mantlepiece where another framed picture sat. A woman with the same ashy hair as Billie sat holding two girls on her knee, a beaming smile on her face.

  “I never saw him,” he said.

  “What can you tell us about Stella, Mr Helman?” I asked. “About what happened?”

  He took another drag and shrugged. “Don’t really know. The girls went out to a party, came back, and it was all a state. Said that someone had hurt Stella.”

  “Did you believe her?” I asked in a cold voice.

  “It’s not that I didn’t believe her,” he muttered.

  “Just that you didn’t do anything about it?” I said. “Didn’t help her?”

  “Billie took her away.” He shook his head, tears building up in his eyes. “Said I wasn’t to visit, that I made things worse. Foul temper, she has. Always has done,” he added in an exasperated voice.

  “Her sister was assaulted, and she was the one trying to look after her,” I pointed out. “I think that grants her a certain amount of anger towards the situation. And to you.”

  “When was the last time you saw Stella?” Mills asked in a kinder voice than mine.

  “Day they moved out,” he said darkly, snuffing out his cigarette.

  “You went to the funeral,” I said. “Billie told us she saw you there.”

  He nodded, rubbing his nose with his sleeve. “She weren’t happy about it.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “How did you feel?”

  “My daughter died,” he said plainly. “Did it to herself and all.” That guilt from before ran through his bleary eyes again, and I leant forward on my arms.

  “Did you blame Edward Vinson for that? Same as Billie does?”

  At the mention of Billie, he looked up at me. “Who else do I blame?” he asked. I thought about saying himself, but that wasn’t a kind thing to do at all, even to a man like this.

  “Did you want some justice for her?” Mills asked. “Some vengeance for her?”

  He shook his head. “Wouldn’t know where to start with all that,” he admitted, rubbing his jaw.

  “Mr Helman,” I said clearly. “Where were you on Tuesday night between the hours of six and seven?”

  He leant back in his chair, his weight making it creak, and thought, struggling with the fact. “Here, I think.”

  “You think?” I repeated.

  He shrugged. I looked around at the house, the empty bottles left on the furniture, the fact that he looked like and smelt like he hadn’t showered for a while, and gave him a grim nod.

  “Any way of knowing for sure, Mr Helman?”

  He shook his head. “I was here.”

  I held in the sigh that was desperate to escape and glanced over to Mills, who offered me a minute shrug.

  “We’ll leave it there then, Mr Helman. We might be in touch again.”

  He waved a hand, not getting up from his chair, so Mills and I let ourselves out, stepping gratefully from the living room and walking to the front door. As it shut behind us, I took a few long strides away, breathing in the fresh air, worried that the smell of the house would follow me around for the rest of the day. I looked over my shoulder to the living room curtains twitch slightly, then fell back into place and nodded to Mills, heading back to his car. We drove away from the house, just down the road, then Mills pulled to the side, and we slumped in our seats, identical frowns on our faces.

  “Well, he’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot,” Mills muttered.

  I laughed, the phrase reminding me so much of Elsie and nodded my agreement. “Can’t blame Billie for not having much contact with him.” I rubbed my neck and grimaced. “No alibi, but barely looks like he can hold himself up, let alone beat someone else down.”

  “He is big though,” Mills pointed out, “and if he was drunk, he could have had enough strength and adrenaline in him.”

  “If he was drunk, surely we’d have more at the crime scene to go on. He’d have slipped up, left prints, or been seen blundering around the campus covered in blood.” You’d hope that would be the case, anyway. Hopefully, Mr Helman wasn’t a smarter man when drunk.

  “Let’s head back to the station,” I decided, wanting to get away from the sad-looking place. “Maybe someone there has some better news for us.”

  Thirteen

  Thatcher

  As it turned out, Dr Crowe had some news for us. We returned to the station feeling somewhat deflated after our meeting with Mark Helman, his ambiguous response to what had happened. His daughter’s death saddened him, that much I could tell, but I wasn’t sure if he looked guilty for having not have been a better father to her, or for some other reason surrounding Edward Vinson’s murder. I also got the feeling that he’d drunk too much to have anything of real value to offer us, which didn’t remove him from my suspicion but didn’t exactly mark him out as a lead suspect. His involvement, or lack of, in his daughters’ lives wasn’t the right thread for me to follow in seeing him as our killer.

  Back at the station, the desk sergeant who waved us down whilst talking into the phone.

  “Will do. Thank you, sir,” he said to whoever was on the other side, scribbling down a note before hanging the phone up and looking up at us. “Dr Crowe would like to see you.” He nodded to the long hallway that would take us down to her lab.

  I nodded in thanks and headed to the stairs and down to the cooler, lower floors. I spotted Lena in the corridor, a folder tucked under her arm, her lab coat swishing around her knees as she bent towards a coffee machine that whirred and clunked as it poured out a watery cup.

  “You know you can go upstairs,” I told her as we joined her. “Get a decent brew.”

  She rolled her eyes at me, blowing the steam away and taking a tentative sip. “That’s a lot of stairs,” she informed me, leading us down the hallway and into her lab. The walls were lined with glass and metal shelves, cupboards that were locked tight and others that couldn’t be seen into. Our shoes clicked on th
e cold, hard floor as she walked us over to the table in the middle of the room, a shrouded body lying still.

  Dr Crowe dumped her folder and coffee on her desk and pulled a pair of gloves on with an audible flourish, standing at the head of the body with her hands on her hips, staring at me.

  “I hear you left early yesterday. All well?”

  “Elsie’s sick,” I told her, and she gave me a sympathetic smile, moving swiftly on and pulling the sheet back from Edward Vinson’s body.

  I held in a grimace looking down at him.

  He’d been cleaned up, the blood mopped away from his face and body, but that meant we could see the mangled state of him. A large cut ran across his head, stitched up now, his forehead dented with the weight of it. A few more cuts and dents were scattered along his head, his hair shaved back in parts so that Crowe could assess them each. Ugly bruises still smattered his skin, and where he wasn’t green and purple, he was as white as the sheet surrounding him. His eyes were slightly swollen, black bruises surrounding them. Dr Crowe folded the sheet just below his neck and let us take a moment to take it all in.

  “Ready when you are, Lena,” I told her.

  “Well, as you can see, he’s been fairly battered. This wound…” She traced a finger over the large, stitched cut that ran across his forehead. “This is the one that likely killed him. Blunt trauma would have gone right through, and it’s where we got most of the blood loss. All the others mean that our killer didn’t know where to aim, so this is definitely a hack job.”

  “Someone with not much coordination?” Mills asked her, likely thinking of Mr Helman.

  “Maybe. Or someone not very strong needed to go a few times to make an impact. The angles are interesting,” Crowe went on, leaning closer to the body. “This one,” the main injury, “runs horizontally. He was hit likely from the side.” She reached over and pretended to knock me in a similar way. “After that, these all come straight in, so he was on his knees or his back when they hit him again, probably from above.”

  I winced at the image.

  “Which is also why they haven’t cut as much. I’m guessing the object had an edge and a flat surface. The edges and corners left the cuts, but the flat side worked more like a battering ram.”

  Mills muttered a curse, earning a tut from our pathologist, and he nodded to Edward’s face. “That’s how the nose got broken then.”

  “This time around,” Crowe told us with some mild excitement. “It’s been broken before and badly set.” She ran a finger around a ridge on his nose, not far from where a new cut lay across it. “He’d had it broken before and not very long ago from the look of it. A few weeks of healing, maybe.”

  “He plays rugby,” Mills recalled. “Could have got it bashed in a game.”

  “Would explain the rather slapdash resetting of it.” Crowe gave him a nod that had him standing straighter, a look of pride on his face.

  “Or someone punched him,” I muttered. “Are we still working in the six to seven window for time of death?”

  Another nod from Lena. “He was still fresh when we got to him, so it hadn’t been long. Closer to seven, I’d say if you pressured me.”

  I nodded, thinking about the weapon itself. Something with a flat edge, but with corners and edges. My mind was, disappointingly, blank of ideas.

  “Would the weapon have been heavy?” I asked.

  Dr Crowe, leaning against her desk now to sip her coffee loudly, dipped her chin in a nod. “Weighted, I think. Gave them a good swing. And not wooden,” she added, walking back over. “He’s got no splinters to be found, so my guess is it was metal. Here.” She pulled the sheet further down, leaving it at his hips so we could see his hands. They were broken at the wrists, bent horribly, the fingernails broken, and I could picture them covered in blood.

  “Looks like he tried to defend himself,” Mills murmured, looking down at his hands.

  “Not for long,” Crowe told us. “A clean break, so he took one hit, then he would have dropped his arms.”

  “So, he knew he was being attacked,” I muttered. “Would have likely seen who it was as well.”

  I tried to picture it. The blow to the head that had him falling to his knees, the next blow he tried to stop with his hands probably had him on the floor, and the last few batters for good measure. It would have been desperate, frenzied, and panicked. No wonder the killer didn’t linger long. It also would have been as bloody as the scene had been, so how they made it from the room without being seen was a head-scratcher.

  I wanted a closer time of death, one that meant we could start ruling people out, one that wasn’t subject to people having cars or enough time to get there and back. An hour was a relatively small space of time, but it gave enough leeway for people to be difficult to pin down.

  “Let’s head to the campus,” I decided. “Start off at Professor Altman’s office and see how long it takes us to get to Edward’s room.”

  I also wanted to see what we could see on that route. Maybe the killer followed Edward, and they might have been hiding somewhere as he walked.

  Mills nodded, and Dr Crowe gently pulled the sheet back up over Edward’s body.

  “He’s off to be incinerated, I heard,” she told us conversationally as we all left the lab, and she locked the door behind us. “His parents will probably keep the ashes.”

  Thinking about his parents, I had to agree with that theory.

  “You’ve got everything you need?” I asked her as we walked back upstairs.

  “I do. I’ll leave my report on your desk for when you get back,” she said, nudging me with her elbow and taking off towards Sharp’s office.

  I shook my head at Mills when he pulled his car keys from his pocket. “It’s not far a walk,” I told him. I hoped that the fresh air and a bit of exercise would help me wrangle my thoughts in order, and Mills seemed of a similar mind, as he put his keys away with another word and followed me through the doors, his hands tucked into his pockets.

  The streets were quiet, the slightly dreary weather keeping people inside working, and we passed only a few people as we walked towards the university. Students milled around with rucksacks and books in their arms, laughing and boisterously jostling each other as they walked from class to class. Security had been upped, which was nice to see. Security guards roamed around with radios on their hips. We headed to the reception building, showing our warrant cards so that we could walk around without causing too much trouble. The woman at the desk directed us towards Professor Altman’s office, in an old, tall building on the far side of the campus.

  We stood outside, looking up at the red brick building, students coming in and out, and Mills muttered,

  “What’s the bet that he’s on the top sodding floor?”

  “High,” I replied, catching the door before it could close behind two students and walked in, finding the board with the room numbers listed and scowling.

  Yep. Professor Altman, top floor.

  I looked up at the winding, old staircase and grumbled, Mills with a dour face behind me as we began the steep climb, all the way up until we stood in the attic of the building, the sloping ceiling making me duck as we stopped outside his door, catching a breather.

  “So. Edward Vinson leaves this room at… let’s say six? We know he calls his parents soon after. Ready?” I asked Mills.

  He nodded, a grimace on his face, and we walked back to the stairs.

  “Professor Altman said he left in a bit of a huff,” Mills said beside me, “so he probably didn’t hang about leaving the building.”

  We sped up a bit, jogging down the stairs like we were young lads with annoying professors, bursting out into the open air.

  “Just been in a boring meeting,” I muttered, “checks the phone.” I pulled it out from my pocket and loitered where I stood. “Answered some messages to his friends, called his parents back.”

  “Probably walked a bit,” Mills said, “especially if we know he was a bit annoyed dur
ing the call.”

  I nodded and paced along the path slowly, meandering, ending up close to a tree.

  “Call didn’t last long,” Mills said, and I put my phone away, “so he carried on.” We walked the most obvious route to his room, a clear cut across campus, through to the courtyard, police tape still stretched before the building.

  I paused there and looked around the space, at the windows overlooking us. “If the killer was waiting for him, there are not many places they could hide,” I pointed out. It was an open space, and if Edward saw someone strange, saw Mr Helman or Billie, he’d have been able to clock them as he approached.

  We carried on, walking to the front door of the building and checking our watches. It had taken us fifteen minutes.

  “That leaves a long amount of time,” Mills pointed out. “We know he goes in, showers, but even then, that still leaves the better part of an hour for our killer to have gotten in and out before Freya arrived.”

  I nodded and turned from the door, looking back towards the way we came. “Maybe he took another route? A longer one.”

  I scanned the buildings. “They must have been long gone by the time Freya arrived,” I said, rubbing my jaw. “The place is fairly wide open, and the only ways out are through the campus where we came out via the gate, neither of which are very discreet.”

  “I’m guessing that our killer knew that, so they found a different way out. And since we don’t think any of this was planned,” Mills went on, “it’s safe to say that they’re familiar with the campus.”

  “I think so.” I propped my hands on my hips and looked around. “These timings don’t add up,” I muttered. “When did Freya say she was going to meet him?”

  “Just before seven,” Mills recalled. “Said it gave them a bit of time before she got the bus home.”

  “But she was late,” I said. “So, she would have missed her bus?”

  Mills shrugged.

  “If she’d been on time,” I mused, pacing a small circle, “she probably would have seen our killer. Her being late was lucky for them, so I’m putting this more in the middle. Half six, quarter to seven.”