by Sibel Hodge
Yes, but what kind of stuff? I thought as I stared down at my bowl.
He threw his head back and laughed at the expression on my face. ‘Just try it. I guarantee you’ll like it.’
I scooped up a spoonful and ate slowly. ‘Actually, it’s all right.’
He gave me a knowing look. ‘Told you.’
‘That’s nice of you, to look out for people. I was worried there was going to be a lot of bitchy people here. I got… um…’ I did my best embarrassed, awkward face. ‘There was a lot of bullying at my high school. It’s actually one of the reasons I took a few years out before coming to uni. I couldn’t face it again.’
His eyebrows furrowed with concern. ‘That’s horrible. I was pretty lucky. We had a zero tolerance for bullying at my school, but I’ve met a lot of people who had bad experiences. I can honestly say, though, I haven’t come across any kind of bullying here with any of the people I’ve met. I mean, yeah, there are nasty people everywhere, and here’s no exception. But not full-on bullying.’
I smiled. ‘That’s good to hear.’ I took another bite of oats. ‘I was actually thinking of going to another uni, but then I heard about a student who’d died there in some kind of hazing prank gone wrong.’
‘Really? What happened?’
‘They were playing chicken on the motorway after a drinking challenge. Got hit by a car.’
He let out a slow whistle. ‘That’s bad.’
‘I know. I hope there’s nothing like that here.’
He took a bite of oats and chewed thoughtfully. ‘We’ve had a few suicides here, but nothing like hazing. The rugby club gets up to a few pranks. Although that’s kind of standard for rugby clubs and usually involves a lot of alcohol. But I haven’t heard of anything specific going on here.’
‘That’s good to know.’ I paused for a moment then said, ‘And I also heard about some cult in London who recruited students for some kind of dodgy stuff.’ I stared at him, watching for some kind of giveaway that he knew exactly what I was talking about.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Seriously? I didn’t know there were any cults here. Thought it was an American thing.’
‘Yeah. I was shocked, too.’
‘Hmmm.’ He shrugged. ‘You learn something every day.’
His body language seemed casual, as if he was genuinely unaware of such things. He didn’t seem nervous or worried I’d struck a chord. My words seemed to have no significant impact on him at all.
We made small talk while we ate, but I didn’t learn anything else of interest as we finished our breakfast, so I stood up to leave. I wanted to go to the scene of Vicky’s and Ajay’s deaths and Natalie’s car accident to experience it firsthand and see if there was anything else the coroner’s officer might’ve missed.
I said goodbye to Curtis and went in search of lecture block one, where Vicky had dived off the railings. It was nearly 9.00 a.m., and the campus had filled up with students out and about, heading to classes.
I entered the door to the two-storey building and glanced around the entrance hallway. Unfortunately, there were no CCTV cameras inside that I could’ve checked. The only ones in the uni were just inside the front gates and at the admin block. Directly in front of me were the stairs. I followed the flow of bodies upwards, got to the top, and leaned against the metal railings on the gallery landing, looking down to where I’d just been. I shuddered as I studied the small ledge on the other side of the railings—just wide enough for a small pair of feet to stand on before launching off. I imagined Vicky standing in the same spot, looking down to the unforgiving tiled floor below, wondering what kind of despair had been going through her mind.
‘Are you lost?’ a voice asked.
I turned to my right and saw a young guy with glasses and curly hair. ‘No, I’m good, thanks.’
‘Do you need any help? I mean, you weren’t thinking of…’ His gaze darted to the railings with a horrified look.
‘Oh, God, no!’ I smiled back.
‘Phew!’ He pressed a hand to his chest. ‘Only someone else did it a while back.’
‘I heard about that. It must’ve been terrible.’
He glanced down at his feet, a sombre expression clouding his face. ‘Yeah, it was. I was just coming up the stairs when she went over. I had to give a statement to the coroner people.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I didn’t know her. But… well, it’s not the kind of thing I ever want to see again. That’s why I asked if you were okay.’
‘That was really sweet of you.’ I glanced over the railings. ‘So she definitely jumped then. She didn’t… just fall? It wasn’t an accident?’ The witnesses who’d spoken to the coroner’s officer had all said she’d dived, and I doubted someone could’ve accidentally fallen over the railings because they were about a metre high. Still, I wanted to make absolutely sure. If this guy was a witness, his statement should’ve been amongst the ones I’d read.
‘Yeah. She definitely did it herself. I saw her climb over the railing.’ He sighed.
‘I’m Becky, by the way.’
‘I’m Fred.’
Aha. Fred Parsons. I had read the statement he’d given about Vicky’s death.
He glanced at his watch. ‘As long as you’re really okay, I need to get to my lecture.’
‘Yeah, sure. Thanks for your concern, Fred.’ I turned back to the railings and wondered again why someone who was scared of heights would choose that way to die.
Chapter 21
Detective Becky Harris
I stood on the path next to the same zebra crossing where Natalie had run over the elderly man. Although it was a busy main thoroughfare, there were no cameras in the nearby vicinity.
I glanced up and down, getting a view from both sides. Traffic flowed steadily past. There was a park a hundred metres further down, so the crossing was used regularly by parents, kids, and dog walkers, hence the amount of witnesses who’d seen the accident that day.
I watched one young mum on the opposite side wait at the crossing for the traffic in both directions to stop before she walked across the black-and-white lines towards me, hand in hand with her little boy.
I turned my head to the right and looked along the road. Natalie’s vehicle had approached from the south at an approximate speed of fifty-five miles per hour, way over the thirty-mile-per-hour limit. The seventy-five-year-old victim had walked slowly, his age, arthritis, and osteoporosis taking its toll. Natalie’s vehicle had struck him when he was about two metres from the end of the crossing, and she’d ploughed straight into him. He’d bounced off her bonnet and fallen to the ground, hitting his head against the kerb and shattering several bones. The injuries had resulted in his death at the scene. She’d driven away, seemingly calmly, leaving a lost life in her wake as she headed back to the university like nothing had happened.
I walked further down, to where Natalie had approached from, and looked up at the crossing. It was a straight road with no blind spots. Witnesses had described how her head was facing forwards, in the direction of travel. She wasn’t on the phone, fiddling with the stereo system, or eating or drinking. Surely she must’ve known he was there. They said it was almost like she’d driven straight at him with purpose. Was it simply a misjudgement in timing? Her foot hitting the accelerator in error? A split-second distraction? Those things happened with traffic accidents every day. Was it shock that caused her memory loss about the incident afterwards? Some kind of traumatic amnesia? Was her memory loss of the event real or staged? Perhaps some kind of schizophrenic episode had caused hallucinations at the time. It was a mystery.
I sighed with frustration. I’d hoped I might’ve spotted something pertinent that the traffic officers had missed, but I still had no clue what was going on, so I drove to the third scene.
Ajay’s rental house that he’d shared with Jaxon, Toby, Ivy, and Phoebe was a five-bedroomed place on the edge of a residential street about two miles from the university. Most of the surrounding pr
operties had been converted to flats or were rented out to students because of their size. The ground floor of the house on the opposite corner of the road had been converted to a newsagent’s shop.
I parked outside the property, behind a builder’s van, and pulled out the photos taken by the scene of crime officers after the fire. I perused through the ones of the house. The roof had partially collapsed on the right-hand side where the joists had caught fire. The PVC double-glazed window in what had been Ajay’s bedroom was melted and charred, the glass broken. A small window next to it was also melted and charred. Soot marks licked up the outside of the brickwork. Apart from that, the exterior looked pretty much intact, but some of the internal upper floor and the stairs had been left in a bad state.
I put away the photos and got out of the car, looking at the house. The renovation and repairs were already in full swing, and as I approached, a builder exited the house, wearing a hard hat and carrying the remains of doorway architraving that was blistered and burnt. He dumped it in a half-filled skip on the road in front of his van.
I greeted him, pulled my warrant card out of my pocket, and showed it to him. ‘I’m DS Harris. I need to have a look around inside.’
He wiped his hands together to get rid of some residual soot. ‘Oh, right. I thought the police were finished with their examination. We have been working in here for a few weeks now.’
‘That’s okay. I just want to see where it happened. What’s your name, sir?’
‘Jakub. I work for the company employed by the owner’s insurance company.’
‘Is it safe to go in?’
‘Yeah, no problem. But you’ll need a hard hat.’ He strode to his van, opened the back doors, and came back with a protective hat for me. ‘We have taken the stairs out. They were wooden, so they were too damaged. There is a ladder to get to the second floor.’
I put on the hat and followed him inside. ‘Did the insurance company tell you what happened?’
‘Yeah. Horrible, isn’t it? My oldest daughter wants to go to university. I don’t think she should go. It is not worth it if this is what happens. Too much pressure on young people to succeed now. They think a high-powered job and money is the only thing important.’ He snorted. ‘And they all come out with too many of them overqualified because the government say they must do higher education or apprenticeship until they are eighteen years old. So they end up working in a coffee shop or supermarket with their degrees because there are not enough jobs.’ He clicked his teeth with his tongue. ‘They should be teaching them to be happy instead. We cannot all be Einstein.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said, wondering again if it could simply have been the pressure or the stress of uni life that had forced Vicky and Ajay to do what they’d done. None of their friends thought so. But were they just really good at hiding things? And what about Natalie? I couldn’t see how she fitted into things at all. But the coincidences were stacking up too much for my liking. There were more odd similarities between the three students than differences. I’d relied on my gut instinct in previous cases, and it had been right every time. And my gut told me that something sinister was happening here, even if I didn’t have a clue what.
He pointed to the heavy-duty ladder reaching the second storey. ‘The ceiling joists and floor have been replaced, so it’s safe to walk up there, but just no stairs yet. Do you need me to be around, or can I get back to work?’
‘No, you carry on. Thanks.’ I climbed the ladder as he disappeared back outside.
Upstairs was a small square hallway with five doorways leading off to four bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedroom downstairs at the back of the house had been Phoebe’s room. The doors were all gone because they’d been too damaged to salvage. The floorboards on the hall floor were new, but the smell of freshly sawn wood wasn’t enough to cancel out the lingering smell of smoke.
I stood in Ajay’s doorway and took in the room. The plaster had been removed from the walls, and it had been stripped back to the brick. The ceiling had been newly plastered, and more new floorboards had been laid in this room, as well. New wiring hung out of electric socket holes, ready for fixing. Apart from the smell, all traces of the fire had been removed.
Tears pricked at my eyes. Self-immolation must’ve been one of the worst possible ways to go.
I walked to the newly fitted window and looked outside, scanning the street before my gaze settled on the newsagent’s shop. I checked the front of the building, searching for what I’d hoped might help me. The UK had the highest number of CCTV cameras per person in the world. Big Brother was definitely watching us. But while we seemed to be one of the most-surveilled countries, there’d been no correspondingly big drop in crime figures.
There were no local-authority-owned cameras in the street, and there was nothing obvious on the shop. It was possible they had a hidden one that could’ve caught someone who’d visited Ajay and incited him to do what he’d done. The coroner’s officer had never enquired at the shop because all the evidence suggested suicide. Ajay had probably hidden the petrol in his room for two days before dousing himself in it and lighting the match. No suicide note had been found, but it was possible he’d left one that had been destroyed in the blaze. It was all too much speculation with no proof so far.
I wandered around the rest of the property, but nothing relevant jumped out at me, so I headed across to the newsagent. A middle-aged woman stood behind the till, serving a young mum with a baby in a pram.
When she’d finished, I introduced myself and told her I was investigating the fire at the property across the street and was interested in whether they had CCTV.
‘Yes. Because we had a burglary a few years ago, which we reported to you, but no one ever gets caught.’ She narrowed her eyes at me, her voice sharp. ‘By the time the police come, it’s too late! They’re gone! So we got cameras then.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. And I was. It was tragic how constant budget cuts in policing meant that the public were less protected every single year. ‘Where’s the camera? I couldn’t see one up outside.’
‘That’s because it’s tiny. New, modern high-definition stuff. It’s hidden under the fascia board.’
‘Do you record footage, or is it just real-time monitoring?’
She said it was recorded and stored, and I asked if I could look at the footage from the day of the fire. She looked as if she were about to say no, which would mean wasting time getting a warrant to seize it. But she just shrugged. ‘Come with me. It’s out the back.’
I followed her through some double doors into a storage area with boxes of produce stacked up. At the far end was another door that led to a small office. A closed laptop sat on a desk filled with piles of paperwork. She opened the laptop lid and clicked on the icon for her surveillance cameras. Then she scrolled down to a folder with the relevant date on it and clicked it open. Several video boxes appeared that showed footage for the external camera and the internal ones.
‘This is the one you want that covers outside.’ She pointed to one of the video boxes and left me to it.
I sat at the desk and clicked to play the video. The camera was positioned pointing downwards at a slight diagonal angle, so it had a view of the shop’s entrance, plus the path in front of Ajay’s house and part of the road.
I skipped to the footage of around the time Ajay’s friends had said they’d left to go shopping in town, which was half an hour before the fire was reported by neighbours. And there they were—Jaxon, Toby, Phoebe, and Ivy exited the path and walked down the street, their backs to the camera, before disappearing from the frame. I sat back and tapped my foot, watching a few cars driving up and down the road. Some parked outside the newsagent and disappeared from camera view as they went inside to purchase something before driving off again a short time later.
Nothing much happened for fifteen minutes. Then another car arrived from the northern end of the street and parked just before the shop, but no one got out
of the vehicle. I had a good angle of the silver Peugeot 206, including the registration number, but I couldn’t see the driver clearly through the windscreen, just a shadowy shape. Whoever it was sat there for another few minutes. I zoomed in on the windscreen to get a better glimpse of the car’s occupant, but his head was angled to his right, like he was watching Ajay’s house. All I could see was the side of his head. He stayed like that for a few moments before turning back to face the windscreen, giving me a good shot of his face. I leaned closer to the screen, my back stiffening, eyes narrowing. It looked like the guy in the hoodie I’d seen exiting the medical block the night before.
I paused the footage and studied it carefully. He had a very distinctive long nose that tapered to a blunt point, squarish jaw, and prominent cheekbones. It was definitely the same guy.
‘What the hell?’ I stared at him frozen on the screen, chewing on my lip.
What was he doing outside Ajay’s? And if he was watching Ajay, was he the same person Natalie had thought was following her, too?
I snapped a close-up photo of him on my mobile phone, before zooming out and taking a photo of the vehicle and registration number. Then I restarted the video, watching as he looked sideways at Ajay’s house again. He stayed like that for another twelve minutes before anything else happened.
The first sign that something was wrong was when an elderly man walking his dog just outside the shop jumped almost out of his skin. He stopped abruptly, his gaze searching the street before turning towards Ajay’s house. His dog barked and tugged on its lead, trying to pull the man away, obviously frightened. A neighbour next to the newsagent came out of his front door and looked towards Ajay’s house. There was no audio to accompany the footage, but this must’ve been when Ajay’s bedroom window exploded from the heat, the first external sign that the fire had taken hold.
