Catcher Told Me I Was Rotten

>Four:

He needed to take a break from the kid; the only thing to do was to put him back into custody, just for a short while, so that he could move on and see if he'd be able to get anywhere else with the next interviewee. The lack of progress was... frustrating, to say the least. It was cases like these that drew the public eye, and increased pressure on the police force to get the damn thing solved.

Liam carried in what felt like his seventeenth cup of shitty Maxwell House and sat down with a sigh. His latest intended didn't look all that distraught; but there was something in his expression that was difficult to pin down, something that sparked a vague and slightly macabre sense of interest inside Liam. He sat forward, the coffee forgotten.

"Thanks for coming down to us, Professor." It must have been an oddly familiar yet entirely new sensation, being the one that was in the hot seat for once, Liam reflected with a grim satisfaction. "Can I get you anything before we start?"

"Eh – no, you're alright. One of your boys offered me a cup of water, but I'll pass, thank you." His accent was strong enough – definitely Irish, with a touch of the posher effects that came with working in a place like Cambridge. A confident looking man – sat up straight, shoulders back, strong. He would definitely possess the strength that it took to strangle a young woman, especially one so petite. But Liam was getting ahead of himself already. He had questions to ask.

"Alright. We might as well make a go of it, then." He picked up a pencil, starting to note the time and the date in the margin of his file. He'd never been the most meticulous when it came to filing, but he'd never had all that much cause to, either. This was the first high profile murder that he'd worked, heading the investigation entirely by himself. There would be days in court, reviews of evidence, discovery, all that fun stuff as soon as whoever they decided to charge presented themselves. Liam fiddled with the tape recorder in front of him, eventually getting it to work, and awkwardly cleared his throat. "Case number 40937... this is the 7th of June, 2017. Now... for the record, this is Detective Inspector Liam Collins, interviewing James Stewart of Cambridge University... do you consent to being recorded?"

The Professor gave a short cough and nodded. Although his face was a mask of serenity, the muscles in his arms were giving away the fact that he was fiddling with something underneath the table, relying on whatever it was heavily to pose some sort of distraction. "Oh, sorry. I do."

"Do you understand that anything you may say can be used as evidence in a court of law?"

"I do."

"Do you understand that you may exercise your right to refrain from comment at any time?"

"I do."

"Are you aware of your right to a solicitor?"

"I am."

"Let the record note that there is no solicitor present of behalf of Professor Stewart." He turned to the hastily scribbled page of notes that he'd taken at the crime scene. As he briefly scanned the words, Liam caught flashes of the low-key horror that had etched itself into his mind; slippery, muddy banks that rose up from a churning river, the still-dripping corpse of the young woman that they'd pulled out of the water. Dirt had matted her blonde hair; the whites of her eyes had greyed and blistered red over the week or so that she'd been weighed down at the bottom, and there was obvious, violent purple bruising staining her wrists, thighs and neck. It reeked of a sex crime, down to the DNA underneath her fingernails and the tears in underwear. DNA which had happened to come up a perfect match for Augustus Beauchamp.

However, the... other sources that had been found inside of the victim wasn't viable enough to get a sample, and if what the kid had been saying happened to be true, then they were out of options.