“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. “What’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.”
“Yeah? Does he like it?”
We talked for a while about Stephen’s family, and I watched his face light up as he described his wife and kids. He clearly adored them, and the sight made me smile a little sadly.
“What about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
He rolled his eyes as he finished his sandwich and crushed the box. “Any romantic interests? Jilted lovers? Old flames?”
“Oh, shut up,” I grumbled, and he laughed. “No, I’m married to the job.”
His mouth tweaked downwards at that, like he felt sorry for me. “Well,” he said with almost forced cheer, “guess that’s why you’ve got to be DCI so fast.”
I snorted. “By not getting married? Nothing to do with my police work, then?”
“Absolutely not,” he teased. “Clearly, they only wanted someone who had spare time.”
“Gee, thanks. Just as I thought we were bonding, you wound me.” I squashed my baguette wrapper into a ball and tried to throw into the bin, but the wind took it, and it rolled away.
Stephen wagged a thick finger at me. “Don’t litter, DCI Mitchell. I might have to write you up and steal your job.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” I said, hiding a smile as I went to pick up my rubbish and dump it in the bin. The sky was clouding over steadily, and I shot it a frown as we walked back to the station.
“Oh no,” Stephen said.
“What?”
He shot me a wry look. “You’re daydreaming about running again.”
I gave a long-suffering sigh. We continued to bicker good-naturedly as we headed upstairs, before falling into a companionable silence back at our desks. There was paperwork to fill in, reports to update, which took a good chunk of time, and then I got stuck into trying to find a satisfyingly solid link between Abby, Taylor and the first-year, Hannah, who’d been killed. I looked into their university records, and delved through their social media again, but found very little. It was infuriating.
I sighed and sat back in my chair, stretching my arms behind my head. My back and shoulders clicked, and I grimaced as I rolled my stiff neck. I was going to end up with hunched shoulders like a turtle when I was old, from all this staring at a computer.
“What’re you looking at?” I asked Stephen.
He sighed, his good humour from lunch fading like mine had. “Not much, really.” He ran a hand over his cropped short hair. “You looked at links to the uni, so I was looking through the uni’s social media, but it’s all curated and sterilised. Not particularly useful.
“Aye,” I sighed. “And I can’t find any links. From what they post online, Hannah was a big football fan and played at the uni and her old school a lot, Abby goes out partying but not that often, and Taylor posts little online, occasional political posts, family pictures, and cute cats.”
Stephen laughed a little at that. “Not much similar there, then.”
“Nope. And they don’t look especially similar either,” I pointed out. “Taylor’s older than the students, obviously, and they don’t have a similar body type.”
“Like a stalker or killer usually goes for,” Stephen said solemnly. “So far, the only link is the arrangement of the…” he trailed off.
“The bodies, yeah,” I said grimly. “But there’s got to be a way the killer/stalker is picking them. I don’t believe it’s random.”
“Me either.”
I exhaled heavily, and we were silent for a moment. “You haven’t heard from Taylor, have you?” I asked, knowing that I was opening myself up to get the piss taken out of me.
Sure enough, Stephen shot me a smile and winked. “Maybe you should have given her your own number,” he said.
“Stephen.”
He held up his hands. “Nope, sir, I haven’t had any contact from the pretty teacher.” He did pull out his phone to double-check, but she hadn’t been in touch. Which was good, I thought. She would’ve called us if there’d been any more animals. But on the other hand, she lived alone, and if Stephen and I were right about the cases being connected, we suspected that a killer had shown interest in her.
I’d been chewing my lip as I thought, and Stephen sent me a knowing look.
“I have an idea,” he said.
“Don’t hold me in suspense.”
“How about… you go and check on Ms Solomons and see if she’s got anything to report, hm? Maybe take your own card over, if you’ve finally got round to having some printed?”
I hadn’t and made a noncommittal grunt. “I’m getting coffee,” I told him, and didn’t offer to get him any. Stephen chuckled, going back to his internet searching while I went off, not towards the break room, but to go and get some business cards printed.
I returned to my desk with a pocketful of still-warm cards that one of the admin staff had kindly shown me how to print and a mugful of coffee.
“I think I’m going to go check on Ms Solomons,” I said casually. Stephen laughed, and I ignored him. “Might give her my business card.”
“Oh yeah?”
I shot him a grin, taking a card out of my pocket to wave at him. “Yep.”
“Took you long enough.”
Stephen ribbed me lightly while I finished my cup of coffee. Grabbing my coat, I left him to his dull research and made my way down to our car. The drive to Taylor’s was short, but there was enough traffic at this time in the afternoon that it took me a little while before I pulled up outside her pleasant-looking house. It looked fairly quiet, with no lights on in the windows, and I wondered whether she was lecturing down at the uni. It would have made sense, and I should have called ahead, really.
I was here now, though, and went up to the door to knock smartly. There was no answer for long enough that I sighed and began to turn around to head back the car. But then I saw a curtain twitch off to the right and peered around, things falling into place in my head. Of course, Taylor would be nervous about answering the door to someone who she wasn’t expecting at a time like this.
“Hi!” I called through the door, my cheeks flushing in faint embarrassment. “It’s Darren Mitchell, the DCI.”
The door opened almost immediately, Taylor blushing as much as I probably was.
“Sorry!” she said immediately. “I… I wasn’t sure who it was and-”
I lifted my hands, fending off her apologies. “Please, don’t apologise. I should have called first. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.”
“Oh,” Taylor said, and her flush deepened. She had pale skin that easily showed the blood in her cheeks, and her layered hair was curled into elegant waves today, making her look exceedingly pretty. “Please come in. I’ll get you some tea?”
“Oh, you don’t have to-” I tried to say. I didn’t want her to feel pressured to invite me in by me turning up uninvited.
But she gave me an almost coy look from under her dark lashes. “If you’ve got time, I’d like you to,” she said quietly.
I was flustered enough that I couldn’t immediately summon an answer to that and just nodded. She shot me a bright, genuine smile. Her front teeth stuck out slightly, giving her bunny-ish look that shouldn’t have been as sweet as it was.
“Tea, coffee?” she said, as she led the way into the sitting room, rather than the kitchen where we’d sat last time. It was a warm room, with dark couches and a gas fire merrily burning in the background. “I know it’s a bit early.” I turned, not quite sure what she meant, and she gestured to the fire. “I get cold easily.”
I accepted her offer of coffee and asked for it strong. She raised one eyebrow.
“How strong?” she
said lightly. “Normal strong, or more-coffee-than-water strong?”
I laughed quietly. “The second one, if you’ve got enough coffee.”
She smiled and nodded and left me while she went to make drinks. I studied the room, standing up to admire the attractive landscape painting on the wall. It looked a little like a Scottish loch, with a dark pool of water and ragged hills around it.
“You like it?” Taylor asked as she returned, startling me slightly.
I turned around and sent her a smile as I accepted the mug she offered me. She came over to my side, and we looked at the painting together.
“It’s well done,” I said. “Whoever did it was clearly talented. The light coming down here… it’s really nice.” Taylor made a slight noise beside me, and I turned to look at her. “What?”
She sent me a look I couldn’t interpret and then pointed to the bottom right corner.
“Oh,” I said, and chuckled. Her signature was artfully scribbled in the corner. “I stand by what I said.”
She grinned at me. “You’re a charmer.”
“Only by accident.” We shared a smile, sitting down on the settee with our drinks. Taylor had made my drink as strong as I liked it, and I sipped appreciatively.
We talked together for half an hour or more, and I learnt that she’d been teaching for a couple of years now, that she had a little niece she adored, and that she’d like another cat, but Wanda had got into fights with any cats Taylor had tried to introduce to the house.
The cat in question had padded over as we were talking and rubbed herself up against my legs, looking the picture of innocence as she covered my trousers with cat hair.
In return, I told her about how I’d lived in Yorkshire all my life, but mostly out in the country, rather than in a city like York.
“How do you like the big city?” she said, smiling gently.
I shrugged with one shoulder, finding myself growing serious as I considered the question.
“It’s growing on me,” I said truthfully. “I miss my old station and the friends I had there, but my new partner is a good guy-”
“Huxley?” Taylor remembered, and I nodded.
Campus Killings Page 9