Campus Killings

by Oliver Davies

  “Was told to.”

  I shared a look with Stephen. “Who told you to?”

  Cal swallowed. “I can’t- I’m not allowed to say.”

  I exhaled heavily. “Right. If you tell us something useful, Melville, I might actually be able to help you, despite what you did to me. But if you want to clam up, we can’t work together, can we?”

  Cal sat in stubborn silence, and I decided that some more scare tactics were needed.

  I stood up with a loud scrape of my chair. Stephen glanced up in surprise, before catching on and getting to his feet. “We’ll see you in court, then,” I told Cal and moved as if to head out the door.

  Cal swore. “No, wait, come on! Alright, alright.”

  I sent him a look like I wasn’t convinced. “You going to say something useful or just string us along with more vague nonsense?”

  Defeated, Cal spread his hands. “I’ll talk, okay? Yeah?”

  I sighed and sat down, giving Cal a tired look, putting on the mask of an officer who was done with Cal and didn’t really think he had anything useful to offer us. Inside, I was anxiously hoping that he was going to lay it all out for us and fill in all the unexplained gaps that were bothering me so badly.

  “And you’ll get me leniency?” Cal asked once we’d pulled our chairs back in. “If I help the- the investigation?”

  Stephen gave him a hard look. “We’ll decide when and if you give us anything useful.”

  Cal’s hand twitched upwards like he wanted to rub his face or push his long, messy hair out of his eyes, but the chain on the cuffs was short, and he let his hands drop back to the table.

  “I never meant for any of it,” he said heavily. “I swear I didn’t.”

  I made a noise in my throat. “So start from the beginning, Melville. Tell us your side.”

  Cal exhaled heavily and was quiet for a long moment. “I really like birds, right?” he said. I blinked at the apparent non-sequitur but let him continue. “I like watching them and taking pictures of them. You saw my Instagram.” He hesitated. Stephen looked impatient, his eyes narrowed, like he thought this was another waste of our time. “But I wanted to study them up close, too.”

  I gestured for him to go on when he dithered, and he continued slowly, “I never wanted to hurt anything- anyone.” He swallowed audibly. “It s-said on the website that it was roadkill.”

  Stephen tensed beside me. “What was roadkill?”

  “The birds,” Cal said. He twisted his hands together. “I bought the birds online and went to pick them up.”

  “Where?”

  Cal glanced up at me. “This industrial place, he left them in a bag.”

  That was probably the same place we’d been to, before we’d headed off home too early to see who dropped off the bags.

  “How does this connect to the other night?” Stephen said snappishly.

  Cal cringed but nodded. “I’m getting to it,” he said. “I bought the birds a few times. And then, then, he was waiting for me at the industrial estate. He took a picture of me before I could react. H-he said the birds weren’t roadkill at all, and he’d been killing them. He said he’d go to the police and say t-that I’d been killing them, that I was some kind of psychopath.” Cal grimaced, looking disgusted.

  “And then?” I asked. I desperately wanted to know who this ‘he’ was that Cal was talking about, but I wanted to hear the rest of his story first.

  “So he blackmailed me,” Cal said, his forehead crumpled into an angry frown. “He wanted me to leave birds outside some people’s houses. I don’t really know why. So I did.” His gaze flickered up to meet mine, and his look was pleading. “I didn’t want to, I swear. But my parents would’ve disowned me if something like this got back to them, right? They’d always thought I was messed up.”

  “Keep talking, Melville.”

  Cal sighed. “Yeah. I left the birds like he wanted. A fox once. Squirrels.” He shuddered. “And then, the other night, he texted me saying that I had t-to grab this girl from Nix.”

  I raised an eyebrow. That was quite a leap, from leaving dead creatures to snatching a woman from a crowd. I thought back to the figure we’d seen on the CCTV back early in the investigation, and they’d been too bulky to have been Cal.

  “I couldn’t- I didn’t want to, I really didn’t!” he added quickly, gesturing with his hands. “But h-he told me that it’d be the last time he ever asked for anything. He said he just wanted to scare her.” Cal had his head down now, like he knew that what he was saying didn’t hold up. “He sent me a picture of her. S-so that’s why I was there.”

  “Cal,” I said, once it was clear that he’d finished. “Have you heard about the killings on the news?”

  He startled. “Yeah?”

  “The two student women?”

  It took him a moment, but his face went white as paper. “No.”

  “Yes,” Stephen said, harsher than I’d been as he played the role of the bad cop. “Tell us who was orchestrating this, Melville, or you’ll be the one taking the rap for those two dead women.”

  “I didn’t- I didn’t-” he started, looking panicked.

  I held up a hand. “Prove it. Tell us who did do it.”

  Cal clenched his eyes shut. “I don’t know his name,” he croaked out, small and defeated.

  “But you saw his face?” I pressed.

  Cal shook his head, and my heart fell. “He wore a mask, like a balaclava.”

  “You heard his voice, though?”

  Cal nodded. “Yeah, I’d probably recognise that.”

  “What about his height and build?” I pressed.

  “I don’t know,” he whined. “It was dark, and I think he was hunched over, and I was stressed, and…” Cal’s voice trailed off.

  Stephen was looking furious, and I was feeling similarly robbed. We’d been counting on this to pull it together, and, in my case, to implicate Will, since I was so sure it all came back to him. The bulky guy on the CCTV. The missing record file. The women who’d wronged him.

  “We need more,” I said coldly. “We’ve got a match on your fingerprints. If you don’t give us something better, it’s not going to go well for you.” I didn’t mention that the fingerprint match had been at Abby’s, not one of the dead women’s flats.

  Cal looked like he might be sick. “You can see my phone!” he blurted. “He said to delete the texts, but I didn’t, my memory’s bad. And I’ll show you the website, okay?” He leaned forwards towards us, desperation making his eyes large and wet. “Please, please, I didn’t do it, okay? I didn’t kill anyone, I swear-”

  “Alright,” Stephen said harshly and stood up. He looked at me. “I don’t think we’re gonna get anything more useful.”

  I made a noise of agreement and rounded up the interview while Cal looked a second away from a panic attack.

  “You think of anything else, you tell us straight away,” I told him, and he nodded hurriedly. I patted the table. “I’ll send in a member of the tech team, you show them this website and cooperate with whatever they ask, understood?” He nodded again.

  Stephen and I stepped out, the low, background noise of the station starting up again. “That website we found-” he started.

  I nodded. “Yeah. It was linked, then.”

  Stephen grimaced and swore quietly. “If he’d just seen the guy’s face,” he muttered.

  I shot him a sympathetic look, feeling the same frustration myself. “I know, Steph.”

  We headed over to the tech team, and I told them what I needed from them. Then we went to fetch Cal’s phone from where it’d been kept with the other personal effects taken from him when he was booked in. We handed that over to the tech guys too, hoping they could find something useful in the texts Cal had referred to. If we could get the most recent texts, the ones telling Cal to grab Abby, and trace them back to Full Sutton, that would be a good first move towards pinning this on Will.

  Back at our desks, Stephen rested his elbow on th
e table and put his cheek on his palm. “He’s not the killer,” he decided aloud. “He’s just too- all over the place.”

  “Yeah, I believed his story too. It checked out with what we already knew.” I sighed. “My bet’s still on this Will guy, but we’ve got nothing solid, no fingerprints or camera footage or, dammit, witnesses either.”

  Stephen checked his watch. “It’s probably too late for prison visiting hours now.”

  I nodded. “Tomorrow, we’ll go and see what the smug jerk has to say.”

  Twenty

  “Darren, calm down.”

  I shot Stephen a look. “Thanks for saying that. I’m so much calmer now.”

  He huffed a sigh. His body language was more relaxed today, in contrast to my own, which was as tightly wound as a wire coil. His daughter was solidly on the mend, and he was much more like his normal, easy-going self. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood. Memories of Will and I’s fight in the dark kept running through my head and making my fingers twitch on the steering wheel. I didn’t want it to have affected me, for Will to have dug under my skin, but it had.

  Stephen patted my shoulder, and I jumped. His expression was worried when I glanced over, before focusing my attention back on the road. We were driving over to Full Sutton and whilst I wanted more than anything to seal this case up once and for all, getting justice for Emma and Hannah and their families, I wasn’t convinced that this visit was going to help any.

  From what Gaskell had said, Sedgwick had already tried to grill Will and had got nothing but smirking silence, and legalese from his barrister. He didn’t have a private lawyer, I knew, and his parents hadn’t come to visit him, even though I knew they were aware that he was awaiting his court date in prison, so he wasn’t getting support from outside. No, he was smug because he thought himself too clever for us to have gotten anything on him, and, to a degree, he was right, and it was driving me up the wall. If he hadn’t tried to smash my head in, he would be back out and running free by now.

  “Seriously, are you okay?”

  I turned the radio on and ignored Stephen. I was fine.

  Getting through security at Full Sutton took the best part of half an hour, and then we were shown into a private room. Seton’s legal representative was already there and politely introduced herself as Ms Golding. I was a moment too slow to accept her handshake, but she didn’t seem too bothered.

  “I understand, DCI Mitchell,” she told me. “It’s a difficult situation.”

  “Is it?” I said flatly.

  “Yes. Every person in the criminal justice system is entitled to representation, but you feel like I’m choosing to argue for his side. That upsets you.”

  I pulled out a chair with a harsh scrape of metal over concrete and sat down. “Thanks for the psych analysis.”

  “Darren,” Stephen said gently. “I can handle this if you want.”

  I sent him a cold look that meant that he should shut his trap, and with a small nod, he acquiesced.

  Seton was shown in a minute later, and I watched him walk in. His throat was bruised, still, from where I’d hit him. Whilst my face was still sporting an ugly black eye, and I had stitches in my hand from Cal’s attack, I was darkly glad that Will hadn’t come off completely unscathed from our scuffle.

  There was a slight smile on his face as he was guided into a chair beside his representative by a guard. He watched me in particular, as if he was taunting me. While I hadn’t appreciated Stephen trying to nanny me, I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was emotionally compromised, what with my lingering anger over Will’s attack on me, how he’d terrified Taylor that night in the bar, and more than likely, murdered two young women. But we had no concrete evidence, and Will knew it. If we didn’t dig something else up, Will was going to get charged with assaulting me, and that would be it.

  I had my notebook out to take notes and focused myself on getting my pen out, calming myself down. I wouldn’t help anyone, except, possibly, Will himself by being so righteously angry I couldn’t think straight.

  “Darren,” Will said, startling me slightly. I looked up, meeting his cold eyes. “Nice to see you again. Taylor didn’t say that you were a cop.”

  Stephen looked between us, and I pulled my gaze away from Will to turn to him. “Taylor and I ran into Mr Seton one night near Halloween, remember?” I had told him about it and, after a reminder, he nodded.

  Will smiled that slimy smirk of his. “Nice to see her getting out there. She could do better, though.” He looked me up and down, while the look on his face stayed jovial enough that his taunt could be taken for teasing.

  “Seton,” Stephen interrupted Will. “Tell us about the night of the attack. What were you doing at the university?”

  Will glanced at his legal representative, who silently shook her head. Will looked back at Stephen and shrugged. “I wasn’t on private property. Just a late-night stroll, Officer, nothing illegal about that, is there?”

  I clenched my fist under the table. “What motivated you to attack me?” I asked, as evenly as I could manage. “That seems an extreme reaction, especially if you were only out on a nighttime walk.”

  Seton spread his hands innocently, his handcuffed hands clinking. “I overreacted, Darren. You were following me and, you know, I had a boxing scholarship once upon a time.” The look in his eyes was singularly unnerving, as dark and empty as mining tunnels. “Those sorts of reactions are instinctive.”

  I didn’t react to his revelation about the scholarship, which I’d had no idea about. Had he taken that out of his university file, or had the scholarship been to a high school or college?

  “You hit me on the head with a rock,” I said. “In an ambush. That’s hardly just an instinctive reaction, is it?”

  “My client has given his answer, DCI Mitchell,” Ms Golding said, her melodic voice firm. I resisted the urge to glare at her. She was, after all, just doing her job. I wondered whether it ever skeeved her out, to be representing remorseless pieces of work like Seton.

  Seton leaned forwards in his chair. Unlike the interview we’d had with Cal the previous day, where the young man had pleaded with us, Will’s movement was predatory, and I had to resist the urge to lean backwards.

  “Why’re you really here, Darren?” he asked warmly, in that charming voice of his that ought to have been on radio or narrating a documentary. I hated how he kept using my name, like he was my friend, or just rubbing it in that he knew something I didn’t. “If you wanted to hear my side of things, you could have asked your grumpy colleague. What was his name?” He snapped his fingers and looked expectantly at Ms Golding.

  She pressed her lips together but obligingly answered, “DCI Sedgwick.”

  Will smiled. “Yeah, him. He frowned even more than you, Darren.” He sat back, sprawling in his chair like he was completely at ease. “I told him everything. You’re really wasting your time, fellas, as much as I appreciate the visit.”

  “Is that so?” Stephen said. He opened the file in front of him, which he and I had made up this morning, before we came over here to confront Seton. He pulled out a sheet that I recognised at a glance and began to read one of the texts taken off Cal’s phone, listing an address and when to pick up the dead animals, not that it mentioned the poor creatures in so many words. I studied Will closely, but he didn’t react.

  “Recognise that?” Stephen asked.

  Will shrugged. “I’m sorry I can’t help you, but I’ve no idea why you’re reading addresses at me.”

  It was such a smarmy denial, and I briefly pictured punching Will in his blocky, handsome face. He turned to look at me, the picture of innocence, like he knew exactly what I was thinking and was enjoying it immensely.

  Stephen took out two A4 pictures from the file and turned them to face Will. I couldn’t look at them without my own stomach turning.

  Will leaned forwards and studied them. “Dead girls,” he said. “Nothing to do with me.” His expression was apologetic, and I clenched
my jaw.

  Stephen took a deep breath beside me, and I knew he was trying to keep his temper, too.

  “You don’t recognise them?” I asked Seton, tilting my head at him as if I might actually believe him.

  Seton smiled gently, like I was going senile and he was kind. “Never seen them before.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Because you met both of them. One of them, Emma,” I pointed at the picture, “tipped a drink over you at a party-”

  Will scoffed. “Oh, come on. I can’t be expected to remember that. I was probably pissed, wasn’t I?”

  “And the other,” I continued, “Hannah, had a lot to say about your abhorrent behaviour online. Ringing any bells?”

  Will raised his eyebrows. “Nope. When was this supposed to have happened?”

  I ignored him again, reaching over Stephen to pull Abby’s picture from the file. “This woman, do you recognise her?”

  Obligingly tilting his head to look at the picture, he wrinkled his nose. “Looks vaguely familiar.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You slept with her. Do you have a diagnosed memory issue, Mr Seton, or are you just lying through your teeth?”

  “Hey now,” Will protested. He grinned. “Maybe it’s different for you, Darren, since you’re getting on a bit, but I’ve got with plenty of girls over the years. Can’t be expected to remember them all, can I? Especially if they weren’t… memorable.”

  I stared at him for a long second, picturing images that were more violent than I might’ve liked to admit to. I gave him a tight-lipped smile as I put Abby’s picture back in the file. “I see.”

  We tried showing him the website we suspected he was in charge of, and Cal’s picture, too, but he kept the same expression of affable apology, claiming that he didn’t recognise any of it.

  I’d reached the end of my tether, and we didn’t have much else to throw at him. He was too confident, and though I’d been hoping it would cause him to make a mistake, so far he’d remained frustratingly collected.