The Silent One

by M K Farrar

  She and Shawn crossed over to the security office, nestled between the several tall buildings that served as student accommodation. The university was like a small town, with its own gyms and cafés, and shops and even a bank. A student could be self-sufficient here without ever having to step out into the city.

  The security guard was different to the one they’d spoken to the night before. He was in his late fifties, a tall but scrawny man who still had a full head of greying hair.

  Erica introduced herself and Shawn.

  He got to his feet. “I’m Richard Caldecott. I wasn’t the one on that night, though. I tend to work the day shifts.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “We’re not here to talk about that. Residential services sent us over. We’re here to search Adam Humphries’ room and seize any laptops or phones we might find.”

  “Yes, of course. I can help you with that.”

  “Thanks. We appreciate it. I’d like to ask you one thing before we go up to the room, though.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the print-offs she’d taken from the CCTV footage that they had from the bar and the courtyard. The images were grainy, and in the one from the courtyard, the young woman had her arms up to cover her face, but it was still worth asking. “There’s one student in particular who we want to track down, since she left the student union shortly before Adam Humphries, and then we have her on footage from one of the halls of residence entering about half an hour later. That walk should have taken a matter of minutes, so we want to find out what she was doing for the rest of the time? There’s a chance she may have seen something. We believe she’s a student here and is most likely living in one of the halls of residence. Do you recognise this woman at all?”

  Richard leaned in and stared at the pictures.

  He screwed up his face and ran his hand across his mouth, then shook his head. “Nah, sorry. They’re not great pictures, and to be honest, a lot of the girls look very similar. We have facilities to house almost two thousand pupils, and it’s a new school year, so it’s not as though I’ve had the chance to get to know many of them either.”

  He handed her the pictures, but Erica pushed them back again.

  “Just take another look. Do you recognise the dress or the hair, even if you might not know her face?”

  He sighed but bent over them again.

  “No, sorry. Honestly, these students all do tend to blend in after a while. I recognise the ones who’ve been around for a couple of years, but not the Freshers.”

  “Okay. Can you keep an eye out, though? If you spot the woman in the picture, can you make up a reason to stop her and ask her name, and then call me?”

  She swapped the images for one of her cards.

  He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Okay. Will do. Do you want to go up to the room now?”

  “Sure.”

  The master key was locked in a safe with an electric padlock code. The security guard punched in the number, and it buzzed open. He opened the safe to display numerous keys, each hung with various numbers beside them.

  “Every floor has got its own key,” he explained. “With this many students, buildings, and floors, it’s still a lot of keys.” He located the one for the floor they needed and unhooked it. “This way.”

  They received curious glances from handfuls of students as they walked to the accommodation. Erica studied each brunette female they passed, hoping they’d get lucky and spot the girl. But the guard was right. The picture was so pixilated, and in black and white, and it was impossible to pick one young woman out of these hundreds—no, thousands—of students. They were all so young and slim and pretty. Jesus, she felt so old herself. She never thought of herself as being older normally, but here, among this throng of youth, she suddenly felt positively matronly.

  She noticed how Shawn received some curious, appreciative glances from the female population. He was a little younger than her but hadn’t gone through having a child and losing his spouse. It was no wonder both his looks and attitude seemed so much younger than hers.

  They stopped in front of one of the doors, and the security guard moved past them to use the key. The bedroom door swung open, and he stepped back to let the two detectives in.

  Erica had the search warrant case containing gloves, protective shoe covers, evidence bags of all sizes, and a camera. She opened it up, and she and Shawn donned gloves and footwear to protect the scene.

  Erica had prepared herself for a teenager’s room, but what she walked into surprised her.

  Adam Humphries’ room was immaculately tidy. The bed made. The desk cleared of clutter. No discarded clothes were slung over the back of the chair. The room had an en-suite bathroom, and she flicked on the light and stuck her head in. Just like the bedroom, the bathroom was free from clutter. The sink was free from toothpaste smears, and the toiletries were all carefully lined up. It looked as though a cleaner had been through the place before they’d arrived.

  Erica called out to the security guard, “Has anyone else been in here since he died?”

  “Umm, not that I’m aware of.”

  “You’d know, though, if someone had checked out the key?”

  “I’m not on twenty-four seven. There are a few of us who work shifts.”

  “I’ll need their names so we can get in touch and make sure nothing was moved before we got in here.”

  “You think someone came in to tidy up?” Shawn asked her.

  “I’m not sure, but how many teenagers do you know who live like this?”

  “Not many,” Shawn agreed. “But maybe he was just a clean freak.”

  “We’ll need to check with his parents to see if he was naturally tidy. They’re due down later, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, unless they’ve changed their plans. We must make sure we get the chance to speak to them face to face.”

  Erica turned her attention back to the job in hand. Using the camera that had been in the case, she took photographs of the room as they’d found it.

  “Let’s work clockwise so we don’t miss anything,” she instructed Shawn.

  She glanced up at the ceiling, checking for movable tiles where something might have been hidden overhead, but both the ceiling and the walls appeared solid.

  The laptop sat on the desk with the lid shut. It was still plugged into the wall, so Erica unplugged it and then took the charger from the wall. She checked the desk drawers.

  “Adam didn’t have a phone on him when he was found,” she said to Shawn, “but I can’t find one here.”

  “Is there much of a chance he didn’t have one?”

  “Unlikely. Keep looking.”

  Shawn got on his hands and knees, checking under the bed. “Spotless,” he commented. Then he got back up and pulled the bed away from the wall, before turning the mattress, and patting everything down. “No sign of a phone, or anything else for that matter.”

  “So, the one that was found near the crime scene might well be his then, even if it didn’t have any of his prints on it.”

  Shawn shrugged. “Maybe the killer wiped it down and then threw it in the bushes.”

  She couldn’t think of any reason why someone would do that, but she couldn’t rule out the possibility.

  “We need to find out if Adam Humphries had a phone contract.”

  “If he did,” Shawn said, “and it turns out the phone we found doesn’t belong to him, we have to ask ourselves what happened to his phone.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You think the killer might have taken it?” She thought about it again. “He would have taken Adam’s and lost his own? Is that likely?”

  “Maybe not likely, but it’s certainly possible.”

  “You’re right.”

  Erica went through the drawers. She guessed the owner had watched one too many episodes of Marie Kondo, with each drawer dedicated to a certain item of clothing and which were all folded perfectly. She kept an eye out, not just for a phone, but for anything else Adam Hump
hries might have been hiding. If he’d had enemies out there, he might have received threatening notes or something similar, though with this generation, anything like that tended to be online.

  There was nothing.

  The search hadn’t revealed anything of interest, but at least they had the laptop.

  They left the room and thanked Richard Caldecott for his help. The security guard locked the door behind them again, and she and Shawn removed their protective gear.

  They crossed the courtyard back towards the car. She spotted Rudd nursing a coffee at one of the benches outside the café, and caught her eye, but kept her face schooled as to not show any reaction. She hoped Rudd would see someone trying to locate the missing phone, though she knew it was a long shot.

  Erica had been hoping to speak to some other students and see if anyone else recognised the woman in the CCTV images, but they needed to get the laptop back to the office and get the right department to unlock it for them. She was also aware that Mr and Mrs Humphries might be on their way down to London and she wanted to make sure they got back to the university in time to catch them.

  She had a lot of questions about their son.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Before she reached the car, her phone buzzed.

  Erica answered. “Swift.”

  “It’s Lucy Kim. Thought you’d want to know that I’m done with the pathology report. I know you were chasing it earlier.”

  She mouthed to Shawn: It’s Kim.

  “Yes, we were. We can come now, if you’re free.”

  “I’m never free,” she said brightly, without a hint of concern in her tone, “but I’ll take time to run you through what I’ve found.”

  “Excellent. Will be there in twenty.”

  She hung up.

  “Pathology report is done?” Shawn guessed.

  “Yes. We’ll go there first.”

  They drove to the borough’s mortuary office, where the forensic pathologist was waiting for them.

  Lucy Kim was always a pleasure to be around. Most people would assume that someone who was around death all day would be downtrodden and morose, but Kim was the opposite. Though her appearance, with one side of her head shaved in an undercut, and sleeves of tattoos that covered her whip-thin arms, meant she looked more like she should be a singer in a rock band than a forensic pathologist, Kim loved her job.

  Kim greeted them both with a wide smile, shaking first Erica’s hand and then Shawn’s.

  “You know I would have just emailed these over,” she said. “You didn’t need to come all the way down here.”

  “And miss an opportunity to be in your company?” Erica replied warmly. “Never.”

  In truth, she preferred to get the pathologist report direct. Seeing the body again rooted her to the case, reminding her that the victim was a person, and not just a name on a sheet of paper.

  Kim flapped a hand in front of her face, as though she was blushing. “You flatter me. Shall we go through?”

  Erica grinned. “Of course.”

  They pulled on protective clothing and entered the examination room. Kim went to the surgical table, where a body lay beneath a sheet. She pulled the sheet back so they could see.

  Once more, Erica was struck at how young Adam Humphries had been. Eighteen years old might have legally made him a man, but right now, even with the thick stitches sewing his torso back up after the post-mortem examination, he very much looked like a boy.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” she prompted Kim.

  “Cause of death was from a lethal brain injury caused by the blow from the brick. From the angle of the blow, I’d say the killer is either taller than the victim, or else was at an elevated position when they drove the brick into the back of the victim’s head.”

  “How tall is he?” Erica asked.

  “Five feet eleven inches.”

  “So, the killer, assuming they weren’t standing on anything, would have been taller than that?”

  “I believe so, yes.” Kim continued. “There are no superficial injuries other than irregular bruised abrasions on the forehead, knees, and chest. There were no injuries on the palms of the hands, which makes me think he was struck unconscious almost instantly, since he didn’t put his hands down to save his fall. I’ve also recorded bleeding from the left ear. There doesn’t appear to have been any kind of a struggle, so my guess would be that he was caught by surprise. He had a blood alcohol level of zero-point-zero-nine percent, so although he was above the legal limit for driving, it wasn’t by much, and I don’t believe alcohol intoxication contributed directly or indirectly to the victim’s death.”

  “You mean that wouldn’t be enough for him to have passed out and hit his head on the way down?” Erica checked.

  “No. And the blow was too hard for it to have simply been a fall. The force of the edge of the brick cracked his skull in two.”

  Erica nodded thoughtfully. “That would have taken some strength.”

  “Yes, I’d say so, though the elevated position might have helped if it was done by someone smaller and weaker. Gravity would have helped as well.”

  “So, we can’t rule out whether a man or woman was responsible.”

  “I’m afraid not. Something else you need to know—I found fibres on the head wound. They’re a dark blue, cotton-polyester blend. It’s often used to make shirts or sweatshirts, since it keeps its shape well when washed and is breathable.”

  “We do have a suspect, so we might be able to narrow down what he was wearing to the fibres, so that’s still helpful, thanks.”

  Kim’s dark eyes brightened. “You’re welcome.”

  Erica’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it from her pocket. Rudd’s name showed on screen, and she answered quickly.

  “Did someone search for the phone?” she assumed.

  “No, but you might want to get back here. Adam Humphries’ parents have arrived.”

  “Okay, will do. I’ll just drop his laptop off at the office and then we’ll be right there. Make sure they don’t leave.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  She ended the call and turned back to Kim. “Sorry, we’re going to need to make a move. We’re needed elsewhere.”

  “Of course. I’ll email over everything we’ve discussed, together with photographs the forensic tech took,” Kim said. “You’ll have it within the hour.”

  “Excellent. Thanks again for your help.”

  Erica and Shawn saw themselves out, moving at a fast trot towards the parked car.

  “How tall would you say Paul Young is?” Erica asked Shawn as they slipped into the car.

  Shawn frowned. “I’ve not really spent any time with him, but at a glance, maybe about five feet ten.”

  “So not tall,” she said deliberately, starting the car.

  “Ah, I see your point.”

  “Can you imagine Paul Young climbing onto a wall to hit one of his students over the head with a brick?”

  Shawn pulled a face.

  “No,” she continued, “me neither. I think we have to consider the possibility that this had nothing to do with Adam being a student, or the university. Yes, it happened after he’d started and on the university campus, but there’s a chance whoever did this was from his life outside of uni. Maybe he made an enemy in a bar in the city one night, where he might have pissed someone off. What about his homelife—could have someone followed him down from Middlesbrough? Let’s not allow ourselves to be blindsided by the fact he was a student and it happened on student grounds.”

  Erica stopped at the station to drop off the laptop to Digital Forensics, and then drove back to the university.

  Rudd had moved to one of the benches and was pretending to be deep in a paperback. She saw Erica and Shawn and jerked her chin towards the building.

  A middle-aged couple emerged from the halls of residence. The man held a large cardboard box in his arms, while the woman clutched a pillow to her chest. Both seemed deflated, beaten, as though every ste
p took monumental effort. There was no way these were anyone else other than the people Erica was here hoping to catch.

  The mother’s eyes were rimmed red from crying. Her complexion was pale and free from any makeup. Erica guessed her to be in her late forties to early fifties, but she appeared far older. She wondered if Mrs Humphries had always looked older, or if grief had added an extra ten years to her overnight.

  They loaded the box into a Dacia four-by-four outside. The university must have given them special admission to allow them to drive the vehicle onto campus. Normally, only emergency vehicles would be allowed this far in.

  “Mr and Mrs Humphries?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Mr Humphries turned to face them, his gaze flicking suspiciously between them. The dark circles beneath his eyes hinted that he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep any time recently either, not that she could blame them.

  Erica understood the reason for the suspicion and showed him her ID. “We’re not reporters, Mr Humphries. I’m DI Swift, and this is DS Turner. We hoped you might have a little time to speak with us in person.”

  “We spoke to one of your colleagues back in Middlesbrough. Isn’t that enough?”

  “There are just a few things I want to double-check. I’ll try not to keep you too long, but it really is important.”

  Across the courtyard was the coffee shop that was mainly filled with students and staff, but was large enough to provide a quiet corner for them to speak. Erica would have preferred to take them both down to the station to talk to them, but she could see the state they were both in. This must be hard enough for them as it was. She’d see how things went, and if they mentioned anything that caught her interest and that she felt needed to be recorded, she’d get them in for a more formal interview. She didn’t want to push it and for them to refuse to speak to her at all.