Getting my phone out, I turned on the torch and crouched down beside the dead animal, running the light over it. No blood. Again, it was neat. I didn’t know what position foxes naturally adopted after death, but the arrangement of the creature’s limbs didn’t look at all natural to my inexpert eye. It looked poised, in a way, with its front legs tucked up close to its furry chest, and its back legs extended.
“Arranged again,” Stephen agreed with my thinking, and I nodded. Stephen cocked his head, considering it. “Looks like its jumping.”
I nodded. “You’re right.” The fox did look like it was mid-leap. Just like the birds had been arranged as if they were flying. Dead animals made to look alive and killed so neatly that no injury was obvious. It was all strange, and unease itched at me.
I sighed and stood up, looking down at the animal for a long moment. If it wasn’t for how stiff it was, it almost looked like it might turn its head and sit up at any moment. But it didn’t move as I looked at it, and it couldn’t tell me who had done this.
Taylor returned with two mugs of tea and invited us into the house to drink them. Her house was a pleasant space, tidy and bright, and her kitchen was done up in an old, farmhouse style that I always associated with a cosy homeliness. The cat purred like a motorbike and butted its head up against my leg until I petted it, making me chuckle.
We sat down at her oak dining table, and I sipped absently at my tea while Stephen asked the basic questions of when Taylor had found it, and whether she could think of anyone who might have done this.
“I don’t know. I have no idea,” she said, as Abby had. “I don’t have any creepy exes, if that’s what you mean. I almost thought at first that the fox,” she waved vaguely towards the front garden, “might’ve died on my porch, you know?” I nodded. This wasn’t like the birds, which had been left inside Abby’s flat. “But I’d heard about the incident with the student,” Taylor said, “and the fox didn’t look… normal, somehow.”
I nodded again. “How did you hear about the student?” I wondered aloud. “Do you teach her? Did she attend any of your lectures for her courses?”
She shook her head, and my hope of a connection deflated. “Ah, no.” She shrugged with one shoulder, before pulling her cardigan more tightly around her. “News travels fast at the uni, and I do teach second-years, which is what I believe the student was?”
I nodded. “Have any of your students seemed particularly anti-social?” I asked. A perpetrator of student age could make sense, considering the focus on the university, but Taylor shook her head.
“Not really, nothing that would suggest this, at least not that I’ve noticed.” Her cat rubbed up against her and Taylor bent down to pick it up, settling it in her lap. She looked up and saw me watching, so she gave me a smile. “This is Wanda. She let me know the fox was there. She never claws at the front door like that normally.”
“A guard cat,” I said, smiling slightly. “Nice.” We shared eye contact for a moment before Taylor looked away, and I cleared my throat. “We’ll take some pictures of the animal, and then take it away for you,” I said. I checked my watch. “Are you due at the university today?”
Taylor nodded. “At twelve.”
I made a noise of acknowledgement. “Do you walk in?”
“I can drive today?” she said, a question. I nodded.
“Might be a good idea. I don’t really think there’s anything to worry about,” I added honestly, when she looked justifiably worried, “just don’t go walking alone at night, if you can help it, okay?”
“Sure,” she agreed easily enough. There was still a wrinkle of worry at her forehead, and it made me want to fix things for her in a way that would smooth it away.
I checked my watch and finished off the dregs of the tea before standing up, and Stephen followed me.
“Thanks for talking to us,” I said. I patted my pockets and cursed quietly. Stephen looked at me in surprise and then started laughing.
“Still, Mitchell?” he said. I sent him an exasperated look.
“Huxley,” I said, giving Taylor an apologetic look though a smile lingered at my mouth, “would you be so kind as to give the lady one of your cards?”
“Sure,” Stephen said, making a performance of getting out one of his cards and offering it to Taylor, who looked amused but a little confused.
“I need to get some printed,” I explained. “But it hasn’t exactly been high on my list of priorities recently.”
Stephen rolled his eyes. “You’re welcome to keep stealing mine until you get some.”
“Gee thanks,” I said before my expression settled into seriousness as I looked over at Taylor. “We’ll be following this up and doing our best to get to the bottom of it. But call us the moment anything feels off, okay? If there are any more incidents, or you see anything that worries you, give us a ring.” I pointed to the card in her hand, and Stephen nodded, too.
“I will,” Taylor said. “Thank you both.”
We saw ourselves out and went back to the car to fetch a bag large enough for the fox, only to find that there wasn’t one. I ended up carrying the unnaturally arranged fox on the slightly damp cardboard Taylor had put it on and setting it down in the car boot.
“I want the car deep cleaned after all this,” I muttered.
Stephen grunted. “It’s not exactly messy,” he pointed out.
I pulled a face, closing the boot and hiding the fox from sight. “It’s the principle of the thing.” Then, as I got into the front passenger seat I mused, “That Dan kid’s out on bail, but I truly doubt that this was him.”
Stephen nodded, turning the car key in the ignition. “Yeah. It’s completely in the style of the first incident, not the second.”
“He’ll go to magistrates soon enough and probably get off with a fine and community service.”
Stephen made a quiet grunt of agreement as he took us back towards the station. “Maybe it’ll be enough,” he said. “He’s not done something like that before.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Horrible thing to do.”
“I know. Still, I reckon he’s nothing more than an entitled, spoilt kid, not actually bad all the way through.”
“Hope so,” I said, “for his sake.”
“Not like whoever killed that student, Hannah,” Stephen added quietly. “That was evil.”
I glanced at him, catching the furrow at his brow, and wondered if he was thinking of his own little girl. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder.
“You’ve said yourself that we’ve got to trust the other officers,” I said gently. “Sedgwick will do a good job investigating, and that’s all we can do too right now.”
Stephen sighed. “Guess so.”
The car radio crackled, and Gaskell called in. I answered it, since Stephen was driving, and Gaskell told us to get a move on back to the station. He didn’t explain any further and Stephen and I shared a glance.
Stephen took us over there and parked up, before we walked in a determined silence up to Gaskell’s office.
“Sir?” I said politely. His door had been open, and he told us to come in right away. He was standing up and straightening the papers on his desk. He didn’t make a move to sit as we entered, and I watched curiously as we waited for him to talk.
“The post-mortem came back,” he said, confirming my thoughts on why he’d called us in. He looked up and met my eye. “You were right. She was suffocated.” A buzz went through me at the news, a mixture of tension and adrenaline as I thought about what the next step would be.
“Sedgwick isn’t entirely convinced the cases are connected, but we both agree that the similarities are striking.” Gaskell didn’t seem to need a response, so I just nodded. Picking up his papers, Gaskell gestured for us to head out and followed after us, before leading the way towards the meeting room as he spoke.
“I want you to run through the basics of your case with everybody, to fill them in. It might come to nothing, but we’re following a
ll leads. Alright?” He turned to look at both of us as we arrived at the door of the full meeting room, and I nodded. Stephen looked a little pale and Gaskell noticed. “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, before heading inside.
“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 wit
h 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.
Campus Killings Page 8
