Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “Aye, we have.” There didn’t seem to be anything more to see there, so we headed back to the crime scene. Davie waved Dougie over as soon as we came back into view. He and Jamie had finished processing the ground to the side of the corpse and were ready to roll it over onto the opened-up body bag they’d spread out ready.

  “Gently now, nice and easy,” Davie warned his boys, waiting across from them to take some of the weight as they rolled the body over so he could ease it down as gently as possible.

  The decedent’s front had taken much more damage from the fire than his back had, and there was a horrible quiet crackle of charred skin cracking as they rolled him. Christ! Even with all the burning, I could now see how thoroughly his forearms had been sliced open. Davie had been correct about the left eye too. It was still there, sort of. The heat of the fire had boiled the fluids in the eyeball away, leaving a sunken punctured, burnt remnant behind. I could also see a matching black stump of something still stuck in there. The left eye had also been pierced by something slender and sharp. The eyelids had been destroyed in the fire, as had the shrunken blackened remains of the man’s nose, lips and ears, as well as any hair he may have had. Added to the damage caused by the scavengers, the body certainly wasn’t a pretty sight. Davie was studying him carefully.

  “Late teens or early twenties at a best guess, but I could be wrong there.”

  “How long do you think he’s been dead for?” Davie scowled up at me.

  “In these conditions? I wouldn’t like to guess... at least three days, probably. Still, the lab can run some tests to see how far decomposition has progressed and cross-checked that against the ambient temperatures over the past week. They might be able to give an accurate estimate. If you want to ask the Forestry people if they can catch you some of the scavengers, we might get lucky examining the contents of their intestines too, but the chances are very slim there.” No, I didn’t think a long shot like that would be worth the man-hours. There were hundreds of crows in these woods and who knew how many foxes. A job like that could tie the forensics lab up for days.

  I stared down at the victim. “Those lines to either side of the mouth… do you think that’s where a gag burned away?”

  “Aye, most likely. But look at the chest, Conall, the way the skin’s burned in separate ridges all over here, and here. Like scored pork, wouldn’t you say?” He was right. Someone had carefully made a series of elaborate cuts there before setting their fire.

  “Is there a way to get a clear image of those cuts if they extend below the charred skin?”

  “Aye, mayhap. I’ll make sure to ask the radiologist to run a PMCT minimum intensity projection on that area.”

  “PMCT?”

  “Post-mortem computed tomography.” Jamie chimed in helpfully. “They can run a series of scans at different frequencies too, to check for old bone damage and other possible injuries... and search for medical implants or other foreign objects.”

  God, yes! Finding an orthopaedic implant on an old bone injury, for example, would be very helpful because it might just allow us to identify our victim. Right now, all we had was a John Doe with no fingerprints left and only a slim hope of finding a matching dental record for what looked to be a healthy set of teeth. After talking to McKinnon, my next task would be to set my team searching through missing persons reports for a possible match.

  There didn’t seem to be anything else I could learn at the scene after that, so I left Davie and his boys to finish up whilst they waited for the police surgeon to arrive and Caitlin and I headed back to the car.

  I knew why James had sounded so rattled now. This case didn’t strike me as an ordinary murder, not in any way, and it seemed far too elaborate to be a mere hate crime. The victim had been subdued and restrained before being brought here. Our perpetrator, or perpetrators, could have killed and dumped him anywhere far more quickly and easily than this. The damage done to the victim smacked of some bizarre, ritualistic killing, with the results left proudly on display for anyone to find.

  I could see from Caitlin’s worried expression that she was thinking the same thing. Did we have a deranged psychotic or a homicidal psychopath on our hands?

  Three

  Over twenty thousand people were reported missing in Scotland every year, but the overwhelming majority of those turned up within days. Only about one in a thousand went missing for longer than a month, and a very small number of those remained untraced even decades later.

  Less than six per cent of Scotland's missing persons reports were submitted in the Highlands and Islands District, about twenty-five a week on average, spread out across all six of Chief Superintendent Anderson’s areas.

  Of course, if nobody reported that a person had gone missing, then they weren’t included in any of those figures. When we checked for our John Doe in the National Missing Persons Database, we found that nobody had become concerned enough about his disappearance to bother reporting it to the police yet.

  Currently, we had three young men of African ethnicity still flagged as missing on the Scottish database. Two of them were students from Glasgow and St Andrews universities, respectively, and the third was a warehouse worker from Dundee. Only one of the three was close enough in height to be a possible match for our victim, but a quick call through to Davie Baird, from McKinnon’s office, soon ruled him out too. Our man still had a full set of teeth, and the missing student did not. Two of his had been extracted.

  I’d told Caitlin to take a tea break when we got to Burnett Road so that I could confer with James McKinnon in private. She and her friend, DS Jackie Gibson, had gone off to the break room for a chat, so now only James and I sat on opposite sides of his cluttered desk, alone in his office with our shared uneasiness.

  “I’ll get my team to run searches covering the rest of the UK too,” I told him. “At least like that, we’ll have a list of potential matches waiting when the forensics report comes in.”

  “Aye,” he agreed unhappily, “I don’t see how we can make much progress with this one until we know who the poor devil was. We’ll need to get a computerised facial reconstruction done to distribute to the local media, too. Someone might come forward if they recognise him.” If our man was an itinerant or an illegal immigrant, it was possible that anyone who did know him had just assumed that he’d moved on.

  “I’ll ask Shay to deal with that for us,” I offered. “He’s very good at that kind of work, and fast too.” My cousin would need the results of a laser imaging scan of the head to feed into his software, but I could call the pathologist and request that as a priority. James looked mildly surprised to hear that Shay was familiar with that kind of job.

  “That’s a bit of an odd field for him to have dabbled in, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. Shay still keeps in occasional touch with some of his parents’ old colleagues, and a couple of our childhood friends are pursuing careers in archaeology too. He’s run a few reconstructions on old remains for them. His 3D graphics software packages are better than anything we have easy access to.”

  “You’d think that lad never slept, the amount of learning and experience he’s already managed to acquire.” James shook his head. “I can’t help wondering what it must be like, to have a memory like that.” It was only natural that most people, myself included, did that from time to time. “It must be a bit like having a powerful computer in your head.”

  “We’ve all got powerful computers in our heads, according to him,” I told him, “although he can get pretty snarky about the drawbacks of an organically based system.” Shay could sometimes become rather resentful about the far from perfect systems we were all stuck with, especially when it came to the endless amount of potential malfunctions any one of us could suffer from.

  I’d need to find out what my cousin’s initial thoughts on the methods used to kill our victim were. I wouldn’t exactly call it a hobby, but Shay’s lifelong fascination with organic intelligence had led him to do extensive resear
ch on the subject of the human brain, and he kept himself well up to date on developments in the fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry. He might have some useful insights to offer.

  “What do you want to do about canvassing the area, James?” I asked. “Do we wait until we have a more accurate time of death or go ahead with that now? We’ve got three possible routes that our suspects could have used to reach those woods, and no traffic cams within miles of any of them.”

  McKinnon leaned back, fiddling absently with his pen. “Honestly, I don’t think it will do much good, but I suppose we have to exhaust every possibility, however slim. Mark your likely addresses out and send a couple of your DCs to knock on doors. You know the drill as well as I do, Conall.”

  Have you seen or heard anything suspicious, especially during the night, over the past week? Do you recall any passing traffic that seemed unusual to you? For example, anyone driving without lights or with darkened windows? James was right, it was the longest of long shots. If our killer hadn’t driven down past Essich, as Caitlin and I had done today, then they could only have reached our crime scene from the B862, either by driving down past Dores or by driving up from the south, before turning off onto the bottom end of the single lane road running through the woods. Doing so quietly, at a time when everyone was probably asleep, they could easily have avoided any notice at all. Those woods were under the control of the Highland Council, and there wasn’t a house within a mile of where we’d parked up near the scene.

  James made a low, frustrated grunting noise.

  “Until we get that facial image out to the public and receive the post mortem report, we’re pretty much stalled on this one. So yes, get the door-to-door enquiries out of the way and your cousin working on the facial image. Once he has that, he might even be able to find out who our victim was himself. Apart from that, I think you should just focus on your other cases for now, at least until we have some leads we can actually follow. Meanwhile, I’ll call this Mike Nash guy in to give a statement, and I think I’ll give DI Philips a bigger team to start compiling a list of people resident in the area who have received treatment for the kind of psychiatric disorders that are ringing our internal alarm bells. If our instincts are right on this one, there’s a decent chance our killer may be among them.”

  That made good sense, and McKinnon had a far larger staff at his disposal for that kind of time consuming work than I did. Yes, it was possible that our victim had been driven in from outside the area but the chances of this being a local crime were far greater. The further you travelled with an abductee, or a body, the higher the risk of getting caught became. Petrol stops, breakdowns, accidents, any one of those could result in unwanted scrutiny. Neither of us wanted to voice what else we were both thinking. If we were dealing with a total nut job, then the likelihood of a repeat performance, if we didn’t catch them first, was alarmingly high. I’d have to make sure to do some digging into cold cases too, to see if anything caught my attention. Just because this was the first victim we’d come across, that didn’t mean our killer couldn’t have struck elsewhere in the past. Unless, of course, the staging of the whole scene had been nothing but an elaborate ploy to throw us off the scent. God! I hated this one already.

  Leaving James to get on with his side of things, I collected Caitlin, and we headed back to Old Perth Road. It was getting a bit late to send anyone out to knock on doors today so I set Walker and Collins to searching through the NCA’s UK wide missing persons database, leaving Mills and Bryce to keep on with the routine jobs they’d all been doing before I got back. Caitlin could write up the results of our little trip down to Fort Augustus, whilst I got on with my new, more urgent little task list.

  Back at my own desk, I called the pathologist’s office and put in my priority request for a full, 3D laser scan of the victim’s head. I was assured that I’d have it before lunchtime tomorrow. I then pulled up a detailed map of the area around the crime scene and looked for houses and farms close enough to our possible routes to be worth making enquiries at. There weren’t many. Once I’d completed my list, I emailed it over to Walker. She could take one of the others with her and get onto that first thing in the morning. As I’d be heading home in an hour myself, I decided to wait until I could talk to Shay at the house, rather than call him from the office.

  For now, I decided it was worth spending a little time checking through the PND for unsolved murders that bore any resemblance to what we’d come across today. Even there, again, my lack of information was limiting my search parameters far too much for my liking. I still didn’t know what those markings carved into the chest might have been. The piercing of the eyes seemed significant somehow, but there was no guarantee that our killer, if they had struck before, hadn’t used entirely different methods. I certainly didn’t find any cases where the victim had been blinded in that manner, although there were quite a few where the body had been set on fire to destroy evidence. If any of those had been connected with our new case, the link wasn’t apparent.

  James had been right. Until we had more to go on, there was nothing useful left to do. I decided to call it a day and head for home. With any luck, Shay would at least be able to give me some valuable tips on what kind of deranged mentality we might be dealing with.

  Four

  I found Shay working in the little electronics lab he’d set up in the northern section of what had once been a huge dining room, back in the days when our place had been operating as a large, functioning B&B. He’d decided to make two separate rooms out of that, when he’d been planning the layout of the place, reserving the larger section for our home gym.

  He was fiddling about with one of his half dozen prototype mini drones when I walked in, swapping out a tiny little two millimetre microchip with the aid of his homemade movement scaling controllers and the magnifying headset he’d splashed out on.

  “Just a sec, Con,” he apologised absently. “These are tricky little buggers to handle.” I perched against a nearby cluttered bench while he finished fitting the replacement chip.

  “What was wrong with the originals?” I asked curiously.

  “Too high a power consumption rate. The things wouldn’t fly for more than twenty minutes at a time with those in. The replacement MCUs I ordered are much more power efficient.” Exchange completed, he released the controllers and lifted his headset off. “They’re still very limited, pretty rubbish really, but I can’t wait to see what we’ll have to work with a few years from now. They’re doing some very promising research at MIT.” He spun his chair around to face me and frowned. “What’s up?” Then, before I could say anything, he figured it out for himself. “Oh, a new case? A bad one, huh?” He got up. “Come on then, I could do with a tea, anyway. You can tell me all about it in the kitchen.” He pressed a few buttons to turn some active equipment off and gestured for me to precede him out into the hallway before closing the door behind us.

  “Where’s da?” I asked as we walked past the gym and turned off into the kitchen. “I didn’t see his car outside when I came in.”

  “Oh, he popped into town to meet a friend. Some guy from the engineering faculty at the UHI campus who wanted to pick his brains. I guess they don’t get to meet many PhDs who can add FRAeS after their names around here.”

  Well, no, or anywhere else really. The Royal Aeronautical Society didn’t hand out fellowships to just anyone. Da had received his gold medal from them over a decade ago, but he’d had to wait a bit longer before being awarded his fellowship. Not that he paid much attention to such things. Still, he’d probably have felt slighted if he’d been overlooked.

  “I doubt they’ll be able to talk him into giving a guest lecture,” I commented as Shay put the kettle on. “He’s a little bit out of their league.”

  “Yeah, just a bit.” He grinned. “Imagine all the politely blank faces once he got going… and so, to determine something as simple as the shape of the trajectory taken by a spacecraft using a constant-thrust ion m
otor, using differential and integral calculus for arc length,” he snickered delightedly, “or using the parametric equation to determine speed and acceleration during a launch and orbital insertion...” I couldn’t help but smile back at his perfect imitation of da in full flow as I pictured a lecture hall full of utterly lost undergraduate students whispering worriedly to each other. ‘Is this stuff covered by the ‘mathematics for engineering 2’ course module?’

  Besides, da was flying off to Florida at the weekend and wouldn’t be back for a couple of months. SpaceX, through NASA, had requested his physical presence, and he’d agreed to the rather lucrative consulting offer. He’d be in his element over there and was rather looking forward to getting down to Texas to check out the Boca Chica launch facility in person.

  Shay handed me my tea, and we both sat down. “So, tell me about the new case, Con,” he prompted. “It’s obviously got you on edge already.” Obvious to him, perhaps. I doubted anyone else would have picked up on my inner tension so quickly. My cousin and I were unusually attuned to each other’s moods and tended to read each other unthinkingly when we met up again after being apart. From my own experience, I knew that when something was bothering Shay, the sensation when I walked into a room he was in was as strong as a physical twang from a struck nerve.

  I sampled my tea experimentally. This was a new one to me. I could definitely taste both chamomile and cinnamon in there, as well as something floral. I wasn’t too sure about the taste but I figured my cousin had opted for a blend whose purpose was to reduce stress and aid relaxation. I’d drink it, but he’d already noted my reaction to the flavour. He wouldn’t offer me this one again. I fetched myself a glass of water to wash it down with and began to tell him everything I’d seen when I’d visited the crime scene with Caitlin.