“Not a fan of public speaking?” I said.
Stephen silently shook his head. “He couldn’t have given us ten minutes to prepare?” he said, sounding a touch panicked. His voice had gone tight, and he fiddled with his shirt, straightening his sleeves before patting his hair down self-consciously. He looked like he’d rather take on a fistfight or a rugby scrum then go in there and stand at the front.
“Stephen,” I said firmly. “I’ll do most of the talking, okay? But we don’t need time to prepare. You know this case inside out just like I do. You could recite the names of Abby’s flatmates just like I can and probably remember the breeds and ages of the dead birds too.” Stephen gave a weak smile and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, exhaling heavily.
I patted him on the arm. “It’ll be fine. Take a breath.” He did. “Alright, let’s go.”
My heart rate had sped up once Gaskell told us we’d be talking to the whole team who were working on Hannah’s murder case, which was upwards of twenty officers in total with Sedgwick at the head. But I had never had particular trouble talking to a crowd and the sparking buzz I felt made me feel more focused. Besides, in my last case, I’d survived being shot at twice, this could hardly be worse. I headed in, Stephen following behind.
The talk went absolutely fine. I laid out the basic facts and drew the similarities between the two cases. Sedgwick’s case was a murder and on the further, while mine and Stephen’s looked like a case of creepy stalking or intimidation. But the methods were actually similar, and many killers started out with animals before working up to people. Stephen chipped in a couple of times with specific dates and times and bits I missed, and though his face had gone red with embarrassment, he held his own.
Gaskell nodded when we finished, and we stepped aside to listen to the full results of the post-mortem. Stephen released an audible breath beside me, and I nudged him.
“Good job,” I said quietly and smiled, which he returned, looking relieved.
The post-mortem didn’t tell us a whole lot more than we already knew, to my disappointment. The student, Hannah, had been suffocated and then placed into position soon afterwards, the livor mortis told us. There had been some fibres caught in the sequins on her dress which the lab had traced to a kind of carpeting used in many cars that was extremely common. It didn’t tell us anything more than that she’d been transported in a car. Her blood alcohol levels had been high, and there weren’t any signs that she’d had the chance to struggle.
“Neat, efficient,” I muttered to Stephen, who nodded grimly.
“Her friends said that Ms Clements very rarely got drunk,” Sedgwick was saying. “That it was out of character and they hadn’t seen her actually drinking on the night, which suggests that her drink was spiked.”
I clenched my jaw. Definitely not an opportunistic killer at all, I thought, but a planner, someone who probably picked Hannah out in advance. That was much worse.
Sedgwick speculated about the position that Hannah had been arranged into, but they weren’t exactly sure what it meant, and he rounded up the meeting soon afterwards.
Stephen and I worked through the afternoon, looking on social media and talking to the university, trying to find anything that might connect Taylor and Abby, and Hannah too, though I wasn’t formally privy to the interviews Sedgwick had done with Hannah’s friends and family. There was a certain amount of information available about most young people on social media, so I got a general impression of her.
Still, we weren’t exactly making strides, and we both headed home around half-five, him to his family and me running back to an empty flat. I was still breathing heavily from my run when I got in, toeing off my soggy trainers and hopping straight into the shower before making a bowl of pasta. Comfort food after a long day.
I did the best I could to stay professional when dealing with these cases, but I couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t hard to look through one, two, five years of online pictures showing someone’s life and know that there wouldn’t be any more pictures being added. That there’d be no more birthday wishes or parties, nor a celebration for graduating from uni.
With my stomach comfortably full and with a glass of wine in me, I was falling asleep on the sofa when my phone buzzed at me. I ignored it at first, but it was insistent, and I groaned as I sat up to answer it.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Stephen.” His voice was tight and hard, and I blinked myself fully awake. “We’ve got a student missing and the uni’s worried. The supe’s calling everyone out to look for her.”
“Got it,” I said gruffly. “Meet you at the station?”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
I hung up and dragged on my crumpled work clothes. I hadn’t done any washing in the last couple of days so these would have to do for now. I took my car out of the garages at the back of the flats and drove as fast as was safe to Hewford station.
The place was busy, considering it was nearing eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and the sight unsettled me. It took me a frustrating few minutes to find a parking space and then I jogged round to where the patrol cars were kept and found Stephen already inside ours.
“Evening,” I said, and Stephen just nodded. He was already behind the wheel, so I plugged in, and we were on the road. Stephen filled me in on Gaskell’s brief. After the attack on Hannah, the university had sensibly told all their students to pair up with a buddy and to stay with them if they were going out. But, Stephen explained now, one of a pair of the Fresher’s Week new arrivals had called in to say that she couldn’t find her partner.
I hissed a breath through my teeth and cursed silently. One murder was already too many. We didn’t want another. The student in question wasn’t Abby, at least, and almost everyone in the station was out looking for them.
“There’s a picture of her in your email,” Stephen said, and I brought it up, studying the young woman, who had inky black hair and an undercut. I tucked my phone away.
“Where was she last seen?”
“At the club where Hannah was found.”
“Aw Christ.” My stomach tightened, and I regretted the wine I’d drunk.
Gaskell had directed each patrol car to check a different part of the city, and Stephen took us over to our section, where we crawled through the streets, eyes peeled for the freshers student, who had looked painfully young in the picture, despite her make-up.
We went over the section with a fine-toothed comb, and I even got out a few times to shine my torch down dark alleyways we couldn’t see down, but we didn’t see anyone that looked like the student and an hour in, Gaskell sent us a new spot to look at, further away.
Stephen and I switched places and sat in tense silence as we searched. The radio crackled a number of times, but it was always false alerts, and the tension was painful.
By the time one o’clock ticked around, I was yawning despite my worry, and so was Stephen. My eyes felt dry and sore from scanning the dark streets.
The radio came to life, and both of us tensed up. But, as the call came through, I sagged in relief: The student had been found alive and well. I pulled up at the side of the road and dropped my forehead to the steering wheel.
“Thank God for that.”
“Aye,” Stephen agreed, rubbing his eyes. He looked dead on his feet, and I reckoned I looked the same.
“Bedtime,” I said decisively, and turned the car round to take us back to the station.
“Do me a favour, will you?” Stephen asked.
“Yeah?”
“My house is round the corner. Can you just drop me off? I’ll grab my car in the morning.”
“Sure, mate,” I said easily and pulled in where he directed. I raised my eyebrows at his place, which was a nice, detached house with a large front drive.
I whistled. “Nice digs, Huxley. You get this on our salary?”
Stephen laughed tiredly. “Nope. My wife has her own business, does pretty well for herself.”
> I nodded, impressed. “Good for her.”
Stephen gave me a smile and climbed out. “Thanks, Darren.”
“Anytime.”
I turned on the radio as I pulled away, glancing back to see Stephen making his way up to his front door. My adrenaline fell quickly on the drive back to the station, and I desperately wanted some sleep. Getting into my own car, I made the final drive home and staggered up to bed, collapsing gratefully onto my old, slightly lumpy mattress. It had never felt more comfortable than it did just then. I fell asleep with the car keys clutched in my hand and my coat still on.
Eight
After the scare with the missing student, it was almost nice to have some peace and quiet. It turned out that the fresher had gotten drunk and gone home with someone and neglected to let her worried friend know where she was going. I’m sure she received a telling off from the university, and from her friend too, no doubt, but we were just glad that she’d turned up safe and sound .
The relief of that resolution didn’t make it any less frustrating not to be able to call and tell Abby or Taylor that they could rest easy. They didn’t know that we suspected the person who’d left those dead animals outside their doors might be a murderer, too, but they’d still be worried, and so was I.
I’d been looking into Abby’s flatmates’ social media sites, and then at sites online related to the university, which was a bit of a reach, I knew, but we were stumped. The lab had looked at the fox but only confirmed that it had been asphyxiated like the other animals and Hannah had.
“What d’you think of this?” I asked Stephen as he came back from the break room with a tea for himself and a coffee for me. He looked over my shoulder at the screen as I took a sip of the coffee he’d made, which was exactly as strong as I liked it.
“Birds?” Stephen said, sounding confused.
I nodded. “I was searching for any link between birds and the university of York, and this guy won a photography competition, apparently. It’s his Instagram. He’s called Cal Melville.”
Stephen hummed. He sat down at his own desk and rubbed his chin, which was rough with stubble.
“Worth having a chat with him, I guess,” he said. We shared a despondent look, both of us aware that this was hardly a solid lead.
We called up to get his address off the university and found that he wasn’t living on campus, but was pretty close by.
“His parents must do alright,” Stephen murmured as we pulled up outside. I looked up at the large, red brick house and raised my eyebrows at Stephen. It was a nice place, but not so flashy that I’d have thought you’d need to have rich parents to afford it.
Stephen nodded back towards the university. “It’s close to the uni, isn’t it? Barely five hundred yards. This close costs a premium.”
“Makes sense,” I said, as I got out of the car and Stephen followed, falling into step with me as we approached the house which looked large enough to have at least five bedrooms for students.
I knocked sharply on the door and stepped back to wait. A petite guy with dark hair opened the door, wearing flannel pyjamas, and looking startled to see us.
“Hello?” he said hesitantly.
“Morning,” I said, before introducing us. “We’re looking for your flatmate, Cal Melville, is he in?”
The student blinked at us for a moment before nodding. “In the kitchen,” he mumbled, before backing off to let us come in. The house was fairly standard inside, though it’d clearly been freshly decorated, and the students seemed surprisingly clean, with all their shoes lined up tidily by the door.
I wiped my wet boots on the welcome mat and followed Cal’s flatmate, who looked over his shoulder to check that we were following. The house extended further back than I’d expected, with what we found to be a large kitchen at the rear.
“How many people live here?” I asked. The kitchen was easily bigger than my living room and kitchen put together.
“Nine,” the student said. He kept glancing over to where a guy with light brown hair was curled up on one of the large sofas, a bowl of cereal in his lap, a spoon in one hand and some kind of portable games console in the other. He was so engrossed in it that he hadn’t looked up since we came in. There were two other students in the kitchen, standing beside the fridge and hovering with matching expressions of wary curiosity on their faces.
“That’s Cal?” Stephen asked the student who’d opened the door for us and pointed towards the guy on the sofa. A nod.
Cal looked up when he heard his name, and his face blanched when he saw us. It was something of an extreme response, I thought, and I watched him carefully, but in the end, he seemed to gather himself, and he cleared his throat.
We walked over to him as he set his bowl and game console onto the coffee table. I perched on the edge of the sofa to the right of Cal while Stephen stayed standing.
“Uh, can I help you?” Cal said, still looking somewhat worried.
“Cal Melville isn’t it?” Stephen asked before introducing us. I glanced around the room as he spoke and sent a pointed look at the two students quietly listening in, and they scarpered, closing the door behind them. I turned back to Cal.
“Cal, have you heard about any incidents at the university involving dead animals?”
Cal’s eyes widened, and I saw him swallow. “Dead animals?” he repeated, less like he hadn’t heard me than he was trying to process what I’d said. I couldn’t tell whether he was anxious in general, or whether we, in particular, were stressing him out. “Yeah,” he said after a second, looking between us with small movements of his head. “I did hear, yeah.”
“What did you hear?” I asked.
Cal blinked a couple of times and then rubbed his nose, before his gaze drifted off above my right shoulder, like he was thinking.
“A second-year student, a girl, got- stuff left outside her door,” he said haltingly, pausing over ‘stuff’ like he’d been about to say something else. “That’s all, really. People were creeped out.”
I couldn’t quite read Cal. His narrow shoulders were hunched, and he had his feet up on the sofa almost defensively, close to his chest. He was clearly agitated, but it didn’t seem the same as Dan’s antsiness after we started asking him questions. Cal didn’t have any of Dan’s arrogance, for starters, and he wasn’t acting as shifty. And yet, we were definitely making him uncomfortable, as he fidgeted and rubbed his hands on his pyjama bottoms, like they were clammy.
“You like birds, don’t you?” I said, curious whether the change of topic would unnerve him further or relax him, since it was something he liked.
He jumped, and I noted the reaction. “Yeah?” he said, voice tight. I resisted the urge to narrow my eyes when Cal wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“You must know where to find them, when you take pictures?”
He nodded, a slight furrow at his brow as if he was having as much trouble figuring us out as I was him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I go to the woods, or onto the fields. I have bird feeders out back.” He gestured towards the garden, which could be seen through the kitchen windows and was larger than I’d have expected for a student house.
“Have you hunted birds, Cal?” Stephen asked, when I paused. I glanced at him, thinking the question was a bit direct, but Stephen just shrugged at me.
Cal swallowed again with a clicking noise. “No,” he said, his voice firmer than it had been. “I’d never hurt a bird. Any animal.”
I studied him for a minute, and he briefly met my gaze, looking almost defiant for a second before he shrunk away again.
“I see,” I said. I found myself inclined to believe him. “What’s your favourite bird?”
He looked startled for a moment before relaxing. “I love finches,” he said warmly. “Goldfinches are beautiful. But birds of prey are stunning too, right? They’re so majestic.” He flushed, clearly embarrassed by how much enthusiasm he’d shown. “But I like all of them, really,” he mumbled.
I nodded. “W
hat’s your course, Cal?” I was most of the way convinced that Cal, though nervous, didn’t have it in him to kill the birds and the fox in the calculated way they’d been dealt with, or at all. I was just fishing for any more information, whilst consigning this weak lead to another dead end.
“Uh, I’m doing physics.”
“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. “That’s nothing to do with animals.”
Cal looked away, his brow furrowed again. “No,” he said. He was quiet for a second, but I waited. “My parents wanted a different- they wanted me to do a more solid degree.”
“I see,” I said, feeling somewhat sorry for the lad. I looked over at Stephen. “Anything else you wanted to ask, DI Huxley?” He shook his head. I looked back at Cal and gave him a smile as I stood up. “Thanks for talking to us, appreciate it.”
Cal walked us out, and we headed back to the car, with me driving this time.
“Thoughts?” I asked, as I took us towards the station.
Stephen made an undecided noise. “I don’t reckon he has it in him to strangle animals.”
“Aye,” I agreed. “And yet, he was pretty nervy.”
“Probably never talked to the police before in his life. He didn’t have a record, did he?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing. He seems like someone used to obeying his parents. A good kid, you know?”
“Yeah. Kind of nerdy.”
“A little,” I agreed.
I parked up in the station, and we crossed the road to grab lunch from the shop opposite, which was stocked with Halloween decorations, trick or treat sweets and a selection of kids’ costumes. The ground was damp outside, but it was a pleasant enough day and balmy for mid-October, so when Stephen suggested eating on the bench outside the station, I agreed.
We ate in silence for a while before I said, “How’re your kids?” Despite working together for several weeks now, I still didn’t know Stephen that well. Or not as well as I’d known my old partner, anyway.
Stephen looked surprised at the question. “They’re alright,” he said. “My little girl’s still sleepwalking. Daryl, my boy, started school this September.”
DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Book 1-3 Page 32