The Seminar Murders

By Will Scales

This story opens with a murder: a prominent criminologist at a provincial university is found dead, with his head beaten in. Neither his academic colleagues nor his students liked the victim it seems, and the police investigating the crime are confronted at the outset with too many motives and too many suspects. Then the professor of the criminology department is found with her throat cut. Apart from being colleagues, did this pair have anything else in common? Who hated them both enough to kill them? Who else is at risk? Is there a malign presence stalking the calm corridors of academe, and can the police move quickly enough to prevent further deaths? In a fast-paced narrative, persuasive in its realistic depiction of both university life and a police murder investigation, the reader is immersed in the events and is present at the interviews of suspects. Using multiple strands of narration, the author takes us on a forensic path into the mind of a clever and ruthless killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528987134

Will Scales

Will Scales was an army officer, followed by the police, then an academic till he took up writing full time. He is married with four children and lives in the West Country.

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About the Author

Will Scales was an army officer, followed by the police, then an academic till he took up writing full time. He is married with four children and lives in the West Country.

Dedication

For Helen, Sally, Kit and Maddy; with love.

Copyright Information ©

Will Scales 2023

The right of Will Scales to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528987127 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528987134 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank the following for their ready permission to quote from their published work. I hope they’ll forgive the context in which their words were used.

Cally Bennet-Lucas, ‘I know you skinside out.’ From her collection of poems Cracking Walnut Shells in Bed, Plaisir Press, 2017

L.G. Benson, The Art of Detection, Pallas Police Series No. 3, Giotto Press, Reading, UK, 2014

Alastair Blanchard, ‘Truth really is stranger than fiction: factual homicide versus detective stories.’ A paper to the Silver Wings Crime Conference, 26–28 October 2017, Hay-on-Wye, published in Crime Fiction Quarterly, Spring, Vol. 6, March 2018

Dominique-Ange Foulet, Slowly, Slowly the Wheel Spins, (Lentement, lentement, se tourne la roue), translated from the French by Netty Long, MetaStage Modern Drama, 2015

Edward Frye, Masque of the Vanitys, Parte V, ‘Of my luve’, 1622; this facsimile edition prepared by Francis John Penny, Workbox Publishing, 2019

Martin Goss, Deathstalker, Feeding Frenzy Books, Manchester, 2016

Letitia Hope-Lewis QC, Called to the Bar: My Life as a Criminal Barrister, Norton Publishing, 2015

Charlotte Keene-Brown, Corpus Delicti: Investigating Homicide, Coulsdon Press, 2017

Tam Knight: Procedure and Method; the Practical Guide to Police Interviews, Ellsworth Law Papers, Knebworth Press, 2018

Angela Martin and Piers Grosvenor, ‘He might be bent but he’s charming company’ – corrupt police officers and TV reality. Symposium on Television Script Writing, No 6, Borehamwood Studios, 1 July 2016, Practitioners’ Lecture Series

L G Mortimer, The Homicide Investigation Handbook, Pedersen-Matthews Handbooks Ltd., Coventry, 2020; Introduction: ‘The Senior Investigating Officer.’

Gerra Nabisi-Shah, ‘Sixty-Nine.’ From her collection of songs Nothing Really Matters, Pattern Audio Books, Carisbrooke Festival, 2021

Professor Sinead O’Mahoney, ‘Why and what I teach.’ Podcast talk, BBC Sounds, 3 October 2020

Andrea Patterson, ‘Squaring the circle: witness responses and the accuracy of recall.’ Journal of Proceedings in Criminal Psychology, 21, 8, Summer, 2015, pp.36–52

Astrid Poulx, ‘What Shall I Tell the Darkness?’ Lyric Collections No 4, Sideline Poetry, 2016

Fr Alton Powell, SJ, ‘Innermost Secrets: The powerful urge to confess.’ Keynote Paper, The Charlesworth Seminar on Priests and Politics, 2009, Stamford, Essex

Alys Price-Duckham, ‘Critical faculty or critical facility? The role of the commentator in ascertaining worth and worthiness.’ Colloquium Paper, 3, Biting the Creative Hand: An Enquiry in Conference, Alton Academic Publishing, edited by Professor Parris Syal, 2014

Elliston van Rijn; The Blindfolded Fall from Greatness: Britain’s Rivalry with Germany 1890–2020, Limousin Publishing, Haarlem, The Netherlands, 2020

John Taylor Telford, ‘Escapades of a Don John.’ In Be Damned if I’ll Rhyme, Cascade Poetry Collections, No. 4, 2011

Alice Winfrith: ‘What shall I do? What shall I ever do?’ In A Woman of Colour, Colcannon Poetry Press, 2018

I have a personal debt of gratitude to Martin O’Neill, academic and former police officer, and to Peter Williams, former academic and now a police officer. If I got any procedural details wrong in this story fiction, it’s their fault.

As ever, love and thanks to Clarey for all she does to sustain me and my urges to write. And this time for Maddy too, who was one of the first to read about Amber, Lol, Millie and all the rest.

And thanks to you too, dear reader, for deciding to read this story, despite many counter-attractions and calls on your time. If I hold your interest, I will have done my job.

Chapter 1

Peaceful Academe

The glibness of the long evening shadows in the quad

and the complacency of book-lined studies

are matched only by the isolation of such self-contemplative places

from the sordid triviality of living life in the raw.

What better than to read Law? Murder, by comparison,

is vulgar, too crude to classify in politer form.

[Alice Winfrith: What shall I do? What shall I ever do? in A Woman of Colour, Colcannon Poetry Press, 2018]

"It’s my belief that Dr Marlon Whybrow was always destined to become an academic. By that, I do not mean that he made rarefied research notes in his cot or draped doctoral robes around his den under the kitchen table, or even that he delivered abstruse lectures on the Ming Dynasty to his pet cat and goldfish. No, not at all. There was nothing precocious about Dr Whybrow, but his tendency to analyse, his unshakeable belief in his own rightness about nearly everything and his pedantic absorption of Latin tags and polysyllabic phrases signalled, even early in his school career, that a mortar board beckoned him, rather than a barrister’s wig; the lecture theatre would be his natural background rather than the operating medical equivalent; and epistemology interested him far more than the doctrines of the church, the ceremonial of the Army or the engineer’s blueprint. In other words, Whybrow was lofty, analytical, remote, pompous and vain, much like many of my other colleagues here. Not for nothing have his students christened him ‘Whybrow the Highbrow’, and they do not mean it kindly. With all those attributes at his beck and call allied to a pernickety fussiness about language, Marlon simply had to become a don. Possibly, the other professions would not have had him as a member or aspirant anyway, his pedantry being what it is. Was.

"Alas, for him, Oxbridge did not invite him to join their hallowed colleges. Nor did Durham, or Exeter, or Bristol or Manchester. To his eternal, though quite well-disguised, chagrin, he had to settle for a lectureship at this provincial university here in Reigate, Surrey, in the south-east of England. In time, as he revealed unsuspected talents for organisation and method, he rose slowly through the academic ranks until he made principal lecturer. He had business cards made in which he made ‘Principal’ stand out because it was embossed, along with his master’s degree and his doctorate. By contrast, the name of Reigate University which paid him his salary was in smaller, fainter font prior to disappearing altogether. Larger and in italics was the assertion that he was ‘Visiting Fellow in Criminological Research in the Faculty of Law’ at a much more prestigious academic centre on the far side of the country. Well, of course, I’m not telling you which it is! D’you think I want to lose my job here? Yes, I don’t mind if I have another drink. Anyway, he had been offered this title of Visiting Fellow, in capitals, as recompense for the inglorious task of being an external examiner for their social sciences faculty.

"I have to say that, giving a bald summary like this, Marlon Whybrow seems undistinguished, even mundane. Not at all the sort of person you would expect to be brutally murdered, in his own study in broad daylight. But this appears to me to overlook two very salient, and very academic, facts. He was a prolific writer of journal articles and academic books, and a waspish, caustic and occasionally cruel reviewer and critic. Were these things alone sufficient to have his head beaten to a pulp and entail the distribution of his brains across the immediate landscape? Did I mention to you that Dr Marlon Whybrow was a reputed criminologist? Well, he was. As are most of us here. And it seemed fitting somehow; ironic certainly, that a man so versed in the ways of the criminal mind should himself be subject to a crime at the end, especially as his periodic and acidulated criticisms of you in the police don’t matter anymore since you and your colleagues are now investigating his murder. Well, witness his flattened skull and the debris that was once his neat and ordered mind.

"I’m sorry, Chief Inspector; I’m telling this whole thing back to front. Everyone knows that a good murder mystery unfolds in a linear direction in unified space and time, moving forward with an ineluctable temporal rhythm matched with a physical journey through a landscape, well before the unmasking of the villain in the final pages and here am I beginning with the corpse, before you even know anything about the man whose death brought you here. I’ll have another drink. Yes, I suppose it is a little early, but I don’t mind if you don’t. You won’t? Suit yourself, Chief Inspector Lomax. Let me sketch in the living man while there is still time, and indeed, we should probably go back in time to when he was still living. As head of the Criminology Department in the Faculty of Law, here at the University of Reigate in Surrey, I had access to his career profile. Yes, you will simply have to take on trust that I didn’t kill Whybrow, though I admit that there were many times when I could have done so cheerfully. But I imagine quite a lot of people, particularly those he tossed and gored in his notoriously savage reviews, would feel the same as I do, or did. Certainly, many of his fellow academics, if I can trivialise such a description by including some of Whybrow’s more outré colleagues, would have liked to kill him. Something sly and lingering, using an untraceable poison. But motive is not the same as action, is it? Mens rea in law, as I’m sure you know, is a ‘guilty mind’ but you need the actus reus, actually doing something about it – ‘the guilty act’ – to make yourself properly criminal. Otherwise, the murderer is just like all the rest of us: barrack room lawyers, closet wannabe serial killers, theoretical murderers, paper tigers. People who can be found in any senior common room or pub or dinner party fulminating about lawlessness and the speed with which society is going to the dogs, or ‘to hell in a handcart’ as they say in these ivied precincts. Except that whoever did old Marlon in, suited deed to the thought, didn’t they? I mean, beating his head to a bloody paste is a fusion of mens rea and actus reus if there ever was one. Couldn’t claim it as an accident or self-defence really, could you?

"You really must stop me wandering off the point like this and telling the story backwards. You want to know what happens next. Well, I know you do. You are a police officer, after all. May I call you Millie? Ah, you’d rather it was DCI Lomax. Very well. So, you won’t want to call me Marian, then? Professor Walker-Jonas is what you prefer. Yes, let’s keep it formal. Another drink? No, you won’t mind if I do, will you?

"However, it should be clear by now in this particular narrative that I don’t deplore Marlon Whybrow’s sudden and violent death as much as perhaps I should. I’m in good company. Almost the whole Faculty of Law, and certainly all the criminologists in my department, heaved a collective sigh of relief when the news of the murder was broken to them by Dean Slough. Not to me, no, I found the body. Yes, I know that’s why you’re talking to me! Dear old Charles Slough. The dean, dear. He and the Bursar, Jeremy Steddy, known (but not to their faces) as ‘Slough and Steddy Wins the Race’, have been lovers for years, but they both think that they have kept their relationship a secret. As if. Such a bitchy place, the Senior Common Room. Any self-respecting secret would have died of exposure long since, once the questing noses and darting eyes of the academic staff had latched upon it. But as usual, I digress. I find, as I get older, that the propensity to wander from the point – or in this case the main-stream narrative – increases proportionally with each birthday. I have been wandering from the point for a number of years now, but you must forgive an older woman her foibles. Never you mind how old I am, young woman! Oh, of course, sorry. I’m 54, officer. 25th March 1964. Very well, then; back to the story. I’ll just help myself to another drink to ease the vocal cords. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I’ve got his career notes here somewhere. My PA, Sarah, had put them out for me.

"Ah, yes. Marlon Holroyde Whybrow was born in Bradford on 4th March 1971, to Jemima, née Silverton from Micklethwaite, near Keighley and Wilson Marlon Whybrow from Trinidad/Tobago. As far as I know, Wilson came to the UK in the early 1960s, but how he met Jemima and whether their marriage was opposed or welcomed by her family, I have no idea. The father disappeared very early from the boy’s life and he never really knew who his father was and what he was like. Marlon never talked about either of his parents much, but I remember him saying that his was a one-parent family. The old, old story, I suppose. Betrayed and abandoned. The boy went to St Barnabas’s C of E Aided Primary School in Heaton before going on to secondary schooling first at St Bede’s (a comprehensive), also in the Heaton area and then through a generous scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, by then an independent school, whose sixth form students were accepted with at least five O levels. O levels? They were before GCSEs, dear; they went out in 1988. Marlon was one of the last intakes to sit O levels in 1985 and 1986. Anyway, he evidently had enough promise to get that prestigious scholarship to go to Bradford Grammar in 1987, when he was sixteen and a half, because I believe the family was quite poor. No father, you see. Did I already tell you that? Ah. He evidently flourished in years 12 and 13 there, because he had a spread of A levels in English, history, law and Latin at the end of his time at the grammar. He stayed in Bradford to do his first degree, studying law initially and then switching to criminology in his second year. He made much of the moral and ethical behaviours which supposedly distinguish business practices from crime and did a Master’s at Bristol in that eventually. Well, I agree with you. There’s not much morality in business, is there? It was that dividing line between effective business strategies and sharp practice that fascinated Marlon. He always said that the affairs of great businessmen did not withstand ethical scrutiny and he may very well have been right, but when he started to do some research, he made enemies. Oh, I’m sure of it. He got threats, you see. In the post, and on the phone. Marlon was behind the move for everyone to wear identity badges on campus. It all began when some old woman came to a lecture he gave on ‘rational choice theory’. Ah, yes. The theory means that criminals, like all of us, may make logical, or apparently logical, decisions to make their living from crime, just as others, more legitimately, make their living from building houses. Well, this woman, she just came off the street and into his lecture, just like that. And asked him questions! He was furious, of course. Went to Dean Slough and made much of the role of the university’s duty of care to its staff. Marlon’s theses? Oh, I don’t know what his Master’s was in. His PhD was to do with ‘differential association’, he told me, and he did it at Nottingham. Yes, he studied with Sutherland and Akers and all those others who were so prominent in criminology in the 1990s and the first decade of the new century. Make no mistake, Marlon knew his stuff all right. His problem was that he had no time at all for those who did not know the minutiae of criminological theories, or who came from some other discipline but still felt that they could have views about crime. There was a stand-up row once in the SCR, I remember, between Marlon and a sociologist called Roger Hawksley who maintained that all crime could be explained by the absence of a father figure. Marlon would have none of it. Got very heated. Struck too close to home, I suppose? Honestly, two grown men, puce in the face and shouting at each other in the middle of the common room. So childish. Eventually, Professor Matthieson and Billy Rigby separated them and took Marlon off to calm down. The worst of that was somehow Marlon found out Hawksley was writing a book about ‘Criminal Ethics’, and he afterwards gave such a terrible, biting review of Hawksley’s work that the poor man was never published again. That is the point, Chief Inspector! If you don’t publish papers or articles or books – these days at least once or twice a year – then you’re out on your ear. Contract not renewed. Hawksley left the university last year. No, I’ve no idea where he is now or what he is doing. He’s unlikely to be in academe now. Hasn’t anyone explained the REF to you?

"Oh dear, where to start: it’s the lifeblood of this place, I tell you, and we get no research funding without it. It’s a shame you have no academic background, dear. Otherwise, we could take a lot more things on trust, couldn’t we? Basically, I suppose, the REF is a system that assesses the research quality in universities and research institutions. It stands for Research Excellence Framework; started about ten years ago. I mean, it was always ‘publish or perish’ in this cut-throat business, but REF has brought it right out into the public gaze. People want to know what universities do all day. Every employed academic is expected to contribute towards their university’s submissions for research excellence by publishing their research in a recognised academic journal which is peer-reviewed. Of course, that means in practice looking at what the REF approves in terms of research and promptly doing it. Some places actually recruit people with a publication record, you know, just to boost their REF standing. And there’s a lot of money involved. The REF incorporates the four main Higher Education funding groups and it has a fund of £2 billion to give out each year to support research, so its endorsement of a university’s research work is not to be sniffed at. It’s all to do with status and where you sit, as an institution, on the league ladder; the Russell Group of the top twenty universities scoops most of the REF pool, of course. The more successful you are as a university moving up that ladder, the more money you get from research grants, fund allocations and commissions. But the strategic placement of this university in the best pecking order is rather above my head and my pay grade. I’m just a humble toiler at the coal face of learning and absolutely all I want as far as the REF is concerned is that every single one of the academics in my department publish papers in learned journals at least once a year. The problem with criminology is that no one can really decide whether it’s in law or in social sciences, so a lot of our research is apt to fall between those stools. Is criminology about society and its norms or is it about codified legal or ethical behaviour? Yes, that would be a good title for a thesis, wouldn’t it? What criminology is ‘not’ is a quantifiable science. It’s easier with science, they tell me. Quantifying research in a laboratory is apparently much easier than doing it in a humanities subject or in societal research of the kind we do here.

"Yes, we have gone a long, long way from Marlon’s murder, but if you keep asking questions about academic life, that’s what happens. Well, I’m trying not to ramble! Where had we got to? Oh, yes, Marlon’s academic standing and his work here.

"He wasn’t one for teaching really. Like some other academics, he saw teaching students as a necessary evil, an interruption of his research and writing. I mean, he did teach because he had to, and he liked a few of his students, particularly his postgraduates because they could do research for him in exchange for their names next to his on a paper, but his heart wasn’t in it if you see what I mean. All that organisation, designing the courses, preparing the lectures, thinking about topics for seminar discussion, marking and the sheer amount of time taken up by incessant tutorials, Marlon put up with it, but he was never enthused. He’d much have preferred to be a Reader than a PL. Oh, you don’t know the difference? Well! A Reader is the same as a principal lecturer in grade, it’s just that a Reader does little or no teaching. He or she is expected to do research and to publish, but with such a large student intake in this faculty, despite the lure of the REF, we can only support two readerships and Marlon had neither of them; he was one of four PLs instead. I suppose it rankled a little. Certainly, he used to ask me to put him forward for consideration for Reader on regular occasions. Many of us here really enjoy teaching. Oh, certainly I do. All that contact with fresh young minds and helping to direct their enthusiasm – I find it helps to rekindle my own, don’t you? Yes, that’s true, you do need patience. Never Marlon’s strong point. Another reason why I never made him Reader. Just a small one, then.

"Did he have any enemies? Well, he must have had at least one, mustn’t he? I mean, to attack him so viciously as that, blood and brains all over the place. Well, I found him, you see. So, I saw. Then I went out and locked the door before calling you lot. Yes. People are funny about where death happens. Even when it’s all cleared up, I doubt I’ll get anyone to use that office again. Too many unpleasant memories. A lot of people really disliked Marlon. But I couldn’t say if any of them really hated him enough to do that to him. Is it what might be called a ‘frenzied attack’? More than necessary to kill him, I mean. Oh, I thought you’d know, it being your business as it were. Marlon has had some spectacular rows in the time I’ve known him; one even came to throwing things and I remember once he threw someone’s dog out of the window. Silly little snappy, yappy dog but still. And he was on the first floor!

"The dog was all right, but I shall never forget the look on its owner’s face. Now I think of it, that was a look of pure hatred. People get so possessive about their pets, don’t they? So at least someone hated him for what he did. Late last year. Marlon claimed the dog had bitten him during a tutorial, but we never saw any bite marks, and Emma said that her dog would never bite someone unless they deserved it. Emma Kirk, she was in her final year then. Good student, not spectacular but very hard-working. She’s doing a Master’s now. Oh, here, yes. She never went near Marlon again, of course. She was Dr Meyer’s student. Cassie Meyer; a very popular teacher. Another criminologist. Yes, there are a lot of us, but it’s such a popular subject, you see. Far more popular than straight law. The most popular combined honours we do here is criminal law with criminology. Over-subscribed and has been for two years now. That’s Dr Meyer’s, Cassie’s, course. She teaches and examines it. Her qualifications? I remember that she read law to start with and one of her Master’s degrees is in criminal law, but her other Master’s is in criminology and so is her doctorate. No, it’s quite common to do a couple of Master’s degrees before embarking on a Ph.D.; you could see it as defining the ground on which you’re going to do your original research. You’ll have to ask Dr Meyer that; I’m afraid, I don’t recall her thesis title if I ever knew it, but her main academic interest is in analysis of whether there is a biological as well as a sociological determinant in becoming a criminal. Nature or nurture in a nutshell. Fascinating and a topic on which there are many opinions, not least of which is whether a socio-biological explanation smacks of eugenics and determinism. Lively debates. Marlon had no time at all for any biological explanation of criminality. Thought it was Hitlerian and said so on every possible occasion. Not that he favoured the ‘nurture’ explanations either. Context, poverty, childhood deprivation, lack of role models that sort of thing, from