“Thank you, sir,” I said gratefully and saw myself out, feeling a renewed determination after seeing Gaskell’s tiredness and being granted access to the files.
It took until after lunch for Sedgwick to send the reports over, but I expected that the murder case was keeping him busy. Sedgwick had been put in charge of a high priority murder investigation, upon the awful discovery of that poor student girl’s dead body and now led a large team of people, all of which he had to coordinate. Perhaps Stephen was a little right in saying that I was jealous of Sedgwick being able to direct the focus of the investigation and of the resources he had at his disposal, but I certainly wasn’t jealous of the stress and pressure that he and Gaskell would both be under.
I read the post-mortem examination report and Sedgwick’s own reports thoroughly once they arrived and took notes on the parts that stood out to me. The post-mortem examination report gave asphyxiation as the cause of death and, as there was no sign of trauma to the tissues of the neck or to the cartilaginous structures of the airways, this asphyxiation had not been achieved through the application of the kinds of external pressure present in cases of strangulation. Hannah had not been strangled, she had been smothered to death. The distinction interested me, and I wondered whether the animals had been smothered too, or strangled with brute force, as we had thought to be the case. Their fur or feathers would cover any marks that hadn’t bled.
Sedgwick’s reports talked about his interviews with Hannah’s friends, flatmates, classmates, and family. By all accounts, she’d been a nice woman, passionate about her football and capable academically, too.
I felt a pang of sadness reading her family’s emotional accounts and thought it must have been worse for Sedgwick, who’d had to ask the hard questions: did she have any ex-partners who might have harmed her? Had Hannah ever engaged in risky behaviour? Who did they think might have wanted to hurt her? Had she contacted them close to her death?
The answers weren’t all that helpful. She’d not dated recently, and no-one had noticed anyone in Hannah’s life that wanted to hurt her or would have any reason to. Sedgwick still had Hannah’s football friends to talk to, who did seem like the ones she had been closest to and, interestingly, had been the group she’d been with on the night she was grabbed by the killer. It’d been a football society night out, apparently, which they did every couple of weeks or so, according to their university Facebook page.
“Darren,” Stephen said sharply, breaking me from my thoughts.
I turned around. “Yeah?”
I’d been so focused on my work that I hadn’t heard his phone ring, and he had it pressed to his ear with a concerned look on his face. He switched to speakerphone, and I startled at the sound of crying.
“Who is that?” I mouthed to Stephen.
“Abby,” he said aloud, into the phone. “DCI Mitchell is here. Can you tell him what you told me?”
There was an inhale of breath and sniffling as Abby got herself back under control.
“T-there’s another one,” she said croakily.
“Outside your door? Are you in-?”
“No,” Abby interrupted softly. “It’s i-in the window. I c-came back, and it was t-there.” She hiccuped, sounding on the verge of tears again.
“Okay, thanks for telling me,” I said soothingly. “Are you downstairs now?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, good. Is your door locked?”
“D-door to my room?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No,” she said. “I just- just ran away.”
“Okay, don’t worry,” I said quickly. “Do you think you could go up and lock it for me, Abby? You don’t have to go inside. Actually, it’d be best if you don’t. Just lock the door, so that no-one messes with it.”
She made a soft noise. “Okay,” she said quietly.
“Thank you. We’ll be along as soon as we can.”
Stephen hung up, and we looked at each other for a second. “Well,” he said.
“Yeah.” I sighed, grabbing my coat. We had the kit we’d need for finding and collecting fingerprint evidence in the car, so I picked up my phone, and we headed out.
I sent a brief email to Gaskell from my phone to let him know that Abby had called, and then Stephen and I were leaving the station and getting into the car. Stephen drove, and I sat back, staring out the window as I thought about what Abby had said. We didn’t know the details yet, but this was clearly even more of an invasion of her space than leaving that first macabre offering outside her door had been. I rubbed my hand over my prickly jaw and thought about Taylor, hoping that she’d not received anymore “presents” left on her doorstep for her to discover. I had to trust that she’d call if that happened.
We parked up in Halifax and walked quickly over, with me carrying the case containing our fingerprint evidence kit. I was hoping that the fact that the intruder had actually been inside Abby’s room this time might mean they touched something, and may have left at least a partial fingerprint behind.
A slim sliver of hope, I thought. They would probably have worn gloves, if their pattern of liking things done neatly had not been disrupted.
The door was answered almost immediately after we knocked, as if Abby had been hovering nearby or watching for our arrival. Her eyes were puffy and red with distress, and her mascara had run.
“Hi, Abby,” I said gently. Another woman, one of Abby’s flatmates I knew from talking to them all after the first incident, came out of the kitchen and pulled Abby into a hug when her shoulders started shaking.
“Nicola, is it?” I asked, and the flatmate nodded. “Can you look after Abby for a few minutes? We’ll need to look in her room, but then we’ll have to ask her questions, I’m afraid.”
“Sure,” Nicola said quietly, rubbing her friend’s back.
“Abby?” I said. “Have you got the keys to your room?”
She pulled away from Nicola with a small nod and pulled a set of keys out of the pocket of her jeans, handing it to me with shaking hands. Nicola led her away into the kitchen, and I sighed.
Stephen patted me on the back. “Come on, mate.”
“Aye.” I hated seeing Abby so upset.
We headed up the flights of stairs to Abby’s room on the third floor. I had to jiggle the key in the lock to get it to turn and swing the door open. Abby’s room was as tidy as it’d been last time, but it was still a relatively small space. The dead bird hung from the skylight, almost directly in the centre of the room.
“Disgusting,” I muttered.
The bird looked like some sort of corvid, a large crow or a small raven, and was hanging from the top of the skylight by a string around its neck. String had also been run through each of its wings, lifting them up as if it was in flight. It looked like a sick imitation of a baby mobile, with the bird twisting very slightly in a draft.
“That’s… different to last time,” Stephen said.
I hummed in agreement. “Still neat, though. No blood. And it’s been arranged again.”
I looked around the room, looking for anywhere someone might have touched. The skylight obviously had no windowsill, but it did have the bar across the top that was used to open it. But it was also quite high up, high enough that I reckoned that whilst I, being six foot four, could reach it fairly easily, it would be out of reach for Abby without a chair to stand on.
How tall had the person who strung this poor bird up been?
“Don’t touch anything,” I warned Stephen, as I unpacked the equipment I needed to search for fingerprints: powder and brush, clear tape, paper, and sample slides.
Stephen pulled an offended face. “I know, Darren.” His hands were in his pockets, as if to ward off any possibility of putting his hands down on some surface.
“Right, sorry,” I said absently.
I spent the next forty minutes or so dusting and checking every possible contact point I could think of: the skylight, the back of the chair, the desk. We’d ha
ve to take Abby’s fingerprints to rule them out, as well as anyone else who’d been in her room recently, but I was hopeful that one of the fingerprints I’d found might belong to the killer.
“As smart as they seem to be, I’d be surprised if they didn’t wear gloves,” Stephen pointed out glumly.
“I know,” I conceded, before holding up a finger which was mucky with the powder we used to check for fingerprints. “I was thinking the same thing, but seeing that bird hanging there like that raised my hopes.” He gave me a questioning look. “How difficult do you think it’d be to tie those knots with gloves on?” I pointed to the small, tight knots holding the bird up to the skylight.
“Very difficult, fair point,” Stephen said, nodding.
“Right, I think I’m done.” I cast a final look around the room. “I’ll cut the poor bird down, while you clean off the mess I’ve left all over Abby’s room?” Checking for fingerprints left ashy dust behind, and I didn’t want anything left in Abby’s room to remind her that we, this bird, or any stranger had been in here. She was going to have a difficult enough job trying to sleep in here as it was.
“Sounds good,” Stephen said, pulling a clean, folded handkerchief from his pocket and wetting it at the sink.
“You carry hankies?” I said, amused.
“Yes.” He sent me a look that dared me to mock him.
I snorted, shook my head and got back to what I was doing. Before I cut the bird down, I took several pictures from different angles. My mobile was hardly the quality of the pictures the forensics team took, but they’d have to do. Once I was satisfied with those, I used a pair of small, sharp nail scissors I’d spotted near Abby’s sink, to cut through the strong string, holding the bird up carefully with my other hand while I did.
Stephen was ready with a bag when I’d finished with the third string. I lowered the bird gently into it, strings still attached. Then I opened the window wide before washing my hands and the borrowed scissors and turned to nod to Stephen, who was ready to go too.
“Time to ask Abby some questions,” he said.
“Aye.” We headed downstairs, and not wanting Abby to have to see the bird in the plastic bag, I sent Stephen to put it in the car while I went ahead to talk to Abby. Stephen was a lovely guy, but he was fairly scary looking to someone that didn’t know him, especially to a young person like Abby who’d just had a bad fright. I was still a tall bloke, but at least I didn’t look as much like a bare-knuckle fighter as Stephen did, especially when he was frowning.
When Stephen had gone out with our bagged bird, I pushed the kitchen door open, stepping inside.
“Abby?” I said.
She and her flatmate, Nicola, were sitting close together with Nicola’s arm wrapped around Abby’s shoulders. Nicola was the first to look up, and Abby sluggishly followed, looking at me tiredly.
“I’m afraid I need to ask you a few questions. It’s okay if you’d like your friend to stay,” I added.
Abby nodded, twisting her hands together, and I took a seat opposite her at the kitchen table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes as I got my notebook out, but that was okay.
“Did you call us right after you arrived at your room?” I asked first, a question to ease us in.
She thought for a moment. “Maybe ten minutes after,” she said quietly. “I was so freaked, I came down here, saw Nicola.” She nodded towards her friend.
I nodded. She’d needed time to gather her nerves before calling. “And what time did you leave your room? Was it this morning?”
“Yeah,” she said. She had her phone in her hands and was turning it over absently, still looking shaky and upset, although she’d settled down quite a bit since Stephen and I had spoken to her earlier. “I had a nine am lecture and left in time for that.”
I noted that down. “Okay, good. And do you remember if you locked your door before you left?”
She hesitated briefly before she gave a decisive nod. “Yeah, I did. I’m sure. I dropped my keys, and it was annoying because I was late, but I made sure to lock it. I always do.”
I frowned slightly at that. We were looking at someone capable of lockpicking or perhaps an employee with a spare key. We’d check with the university faculty after this to be sure. “Have you seen anyone following you recently? Or anyone strange hanging around?”
Abby looked unsettled and glanced towards Nicola, before she shook her head. “No?” she said in a small voice. “I mean, not that I’ve noticed.”
“That’s good,” I reassured her. “Has there been anyone in the flat recently that’s not one of your housemates?”
Abby frowned and shook her head. “Not that I know of?” she said, making it a question again.
I was thinking about my next question when Stephen came in quietly, and Abby and Nicola both turned around as he walked around the table to take a seat next to me.
“You haven’t received any strange messages, letters, emails? Anything like that?” I asked. I thought Abby would’ve told us if she had, but I wanted to be sure. Predictably, she shook her head.
I glanced at Stephen, silently asking him if he had any questions for Abby, but he shook his head.
“Alright, thank you-” I started.
“I’m going to go home for a while,” Abby said quietly. “I-I can’t be here anymore.” She audibly swallowed.
Stephen and I shared a look. “That sounds like a good idea for the present. Can you give us your parents’ address and landline, in case we need to contact you that way?” We already had her mobile number from when she’d called Stephen, but if it was turned off, or reception was poor at a critical time… no, it was best to have all the available contact numbers.
I pulled out one of my new business cards, ignoring Stephen’s very slight smile, and Abby wrote her parents’ details on the back with my pen.
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll call you with any updates. We will need your fingerprints to go on record, so that we can rule out those that match them. When will you leave?”
Abby tucked her blond hair behind her ear. “My parents are coming for me later.”
Later today, I assumed, and nodded. “Can you drop by the station at Hewford before you go?”
She agreed to ask her parents to bring her by. I thanked her again, and we saw ourselves out, both of us thinking it all over.
Or maybe Stephen had just been thinking about his lunch. “I’m starving. Sainsbury’s when we get back?”
I snorted. “Sure,” I agreed.
I drove us back, very aware of the dead bird in the boot which we dropped off at the lab. Sam wasn’t in today, so we couldn’t speak with her. After thoroughly scrubbing my hands clean of the taint, we walked across the road to Sainsbury’s and then took our lunches back to our desks. It was a gloomy sort of day and I was shivering without a coat.
“Need to put some meat on your bones,” Stephen said, not cold in the slightest.
I waved my meatball baguette at him. “I am.”
“Eat more cake, do less running. Keeps you warm,” Stephen said wisely, though I could tell by his crooked smile that he was taking the mickey.
“I’d rather wear a coat, thanks. Less risk of a heart attack.”
“Harsh, Mitchell.” He didn’t look too bothered, though.
I wrote up our visit to Abby’s whilst eating my way through my lunch and getting tomato sauce everywhere. I went off to fetch a cup of coffee, feeling badly in need of the caffeine by then. The aftermath of eating made me feel dopey, despite the morning’s events. We’d dropped off the fingerprints I’d collected at the same time as our newest bird, to be enhanced, if needed, then run through the system for a match. The system database was far from all-encompassing, and it was likely that we wouldn’t get a match at all, unfortunately. Despite this new incident, we were still stumped on major leads.
My phone buzzed as the kettle was boiling and I pulled it from my pocket, my eyebrows lifting when I saw that it was an unknown number. I tipped the boiling
water into my mug and then clicked open the message.
Hi, it’s Taylor :)
I smiled at the short text and replied briefly, asking her about her day. We chatted for a couple of minutes about nothing important, before I excused myself to go back to work, even though I’d rather have stayed talking to her.
Carrying my coffee back to my desk as I tucked my phone away again, I came up short as I stepped into the office.
“Stephen?” I said as I reached our desks, already uneasy. There was too much bustle with too little noise about the place suddenly, and I got the strong feeling that something bad had happened. Only the fact that I’d literally just texted Taylor convinced me that nothing had happened to her. “Is it Abby?”
Stephen looked up at me from where he’d been staring blankly at his screen, lost in thought. He shook his head, snapping out of it and looking grim as he met my worried gaze.
“The supe’s just let everyone know,” he said. “There’s been another student murder.”
Ten
My stomach dropped, and I swore, sitting down heavily in my chair and setting my coffee down on my desk.
“When? Where?” I asked.
Stephen shook his head again as he started to get to his feet. “I don’t know details,” he said. “Gaskell’s about to give a press conference.”
He nodded towards a conference room that was connected to the office at the end where the other police officers seemed to be gathering. I followed him as he headed over. There was a large television there, playing the local news, and a small crowd of officers all watching in silence.
Gaskell came on about a minute later, with Sedgwick sitting at his side, and began explaining the situation. There’d been another killing, another female, first-year student found at a different club in York. The case had officially become a serial murder case. I pressed my hand to my mouth as I watched, feeling vaguely sick. I worried for Abby and Taylor and was glad that Abby was going home today and would not be staying any longer, in a room that some malicious, and possibly murderous, stalker could clearly get access to.
DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Book 1-3 Page 34
