Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  Shay listened silently, golden eyes focused on an invisible point behind me as he sipped calmly at his own tea while he absorbed the data. When I’d finished bringing him up to date, he switched his attention back to me.

  “Sure, I can handle the facial reconstruction once you send me the scans tomorrow, no problem. The missing features should be easy enough to reconstruct accurately once I’ve calculated the original soft tissue depth from the remains.” He put his empty cup down. “And it seems almost certain that your killer is suffering from a severe mental disorder, from what you’ve just described,” he added confidently. “I’d say you can forget about anyone setting a scene like that up as a red herring. Why would they need one? Your body hasn’t been missed by anyone yet, so it’s a good bet he doesn’t have any family in the area, or any close friends for that matter. If Davie says he’s been dead for at least three days, and perhaps longer, not being missed is pretty unusual,” he shrugged, “so he was probably both single and living alone. The killer could have finished the victim off and dumped him somewhere he was unlikely to be found with much less risk involved.” He got up to switch the kettle back on, and the coffee machine too this time. “We’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report to get a time of death, but I think there’s a statistically significant chance that he might even have been killed on Monday night.”

  “Why then?” I asked as he rinsed out our cups and selected another tea for himself.

  “Because it was the full moon,” he said matter-of-factly. “Studies on emergency department admissions around the times of full moons seem to be both contradictory and inconclusive, but what stands out from them is that there’s a significant increase in admissions of those with personality disorders, and the triage codes for those tend to be more severe than your average psychiatric admission. One oddity there is that people with paranoid schizophrenia are more likely to be admitted at the time of the full moon than at any other period. Alright, we’re talking about little more than a ten per cent increase on the average figures, but that’s still far too high, mathematically speaking, to be purely coincidental.”

  “I thought most schizophrenics with paranoia weren’t usually particularly violent.”

  “Most might not be, most of the time, and certainly not if they’re on the right medication. Second-generation antipsychotics are very effective, once the correct prescription and dosage is being followed.” He shrugged. “But without medication? The delusions and hallucinations can be utterly overwhelming. You should read Karl Friston’s notes from his time at the Littlemore mental health facility in Oxford. One of his female patients decapitated her neighbour with a kitchen knife. Apparently he’d turned into an evil, human-sized cow, so, right, obviously he needed to be dealt with.”

  Friston? Why did that name ring a bell? Ah, I remembered. Shay had been going on last year about the man’s Free Energy Principle being a better model for programming an AI system than reinforcement learning was. The goal, Shay said, was to minimise prediction error, not just create a system that could perform well in a stable, rule-bound environment. The man was one of those eccentric super geniuses of the kind that seemed to fascinate my cousin. Shay certainly never gave me the impression that he felt deprived of peers who could provide him with intellectual stimulation. How he’d have fared in an earlier age, without the world at his fingertips, was another matter entirely.

  “I’m not surprised the pierced eyeballs were bothering you either,” Shay remarked as he put a freshly brewed double espresso down in front of me. It was probably a decaf, knowing him, but I didn’t mind; it tasted a hell of a lot better than the tea had. “It’s not quite the same thing as enucleation, which is the technical term for gouging the eyes out, but it seems significant.” He sat down again with his own fresh drink. “That’s a relatively rare form of assault documented in psychotic patients, and some psychopaths too. I can dig up a study on the subject I came across a few years back for you if you like, but it’s not pleasant reading. A lot of the cases included in it involved various other forms of physical mutilation as well, and a considerable number of them were committed during, or after, sexual assaults too.”

  A faint but pleasant scent of cardamom wafted my way as he sipped in satisfaction at his favourite masala chai blend. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been impressed by the new tea.

  “And then there were the religious delusions,” he continued. “Gouging out the eyeballs to exorcise the devil... actually quite a few of those involved patients doing it to themselves rather than to somebody else. More encouragingly, once the right medication was hit upon, most of their symptoms disappeared. The hallucinations and delusions all stopped and the formerly violent patients became quite docile and manageable again and even expressed remorse for their earlier actions. Mind you, that study’s eighteen years old now. I wonder if I can find anything more recent?”

  Christ! He might as well have been discussing something as mundane as a broken washing machine, rather than mental illnesses that were the stuff of nightmares.

  “So you believe our killer is probably schizophrenic, possibly also psychopathic, off their meds and totally delusional?”

  “Well, not exactly,” he disagreed. “For one thing, they may not ever have been prescribed medication for their condition. We might be dealing with someone who hasn’t been diagnosed yet. And I really don’t like fixing labels on undefined mental disorders like that. Let’s just say that it’s highly likely that our culprit is suffering from a psychotic disorder, either naturally occurring, due to genetic factors or physical damage to the brain, or, alternatively, substance induced. A lot of drugs can mess with your NMDA receptors enough to induce psychosis. Whether that manifests as religious, grandiose, persecution or mixed delusions is something we can’t know, at this point. But yeah, I’d say that they were definitely suffering from some form of neuromodulatory failure of postsynaptic excitability.”

  I decided not to ask. Psychotic was close enough, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t need to understand the mechanics of it, thank goodness.

  “You say McKinnon’s getting that DI Philips guy and his team to look into local patients who’ve been prescribed antipsychotics?” Shay asked thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea, but what if we’re dealing with someone who only moved here recently or who isn’t registered with a doctor?”

  I finished off my coffee and shrugged unhappily. “Then we’re pretty much screwed when it comes to tracking them down that way. Unless you know an easy way of checking the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of people from all over the UK easily.” Shay seemed to be considering the suggestion seriously.

  “No.” he finally decided, “Even if I found them all, someone would still need to check their registered addresses to see if they’d moved or not. And what if they’re not even listed? It would be a total waste of time and manpower, sorry.”

  My mouth quirked at the reflexive little apology there. It certainly wasn’t Shay’s fault that some things were beyond even his ability to resolve easily. He seemed to be ruminating on something else by then though.

  “I doubt your killer had any accomplices,” Shay said, his gaze seemingly focused inwardly again. “Shared psychoses are very rare, although there is a very small chance that we’re dealing with some kind of cult scenario where a dominant personality type is influencing a susceptible follower, or followers, in a ‘folie a deux’ or ‘folie communiquee,’ spreading their own delusions to others. I suppose that’s possible, but you said Dougie could only confirm that one person had walked in and out of the crime scene. How much would you estimate the victim weighed?”

  “Hard to say. He was about five foot seven and skinny. Between sixty and sixty five kilos, maybe?”

  Shay nodded thoughtfully. “That’s still quite an awkward burden to carry. So we’re looking for someone fit enough to manage it. And, whatever delusions they may be suffering from, they’re mentally competent enough to both plan elaborately and drive withou
t behaving erratically or drawing attention. That should cut the numbers down a bit. On the other hand, it might also mean that they’re very good at concealing their condition, which isn’t good news for us.”

  No, it wasn’t. A psychotic capable of appearing perfectly normal, especially if they were undiagnosed, would be a lot harder to find. Maybe it was time to just switch off and try to relax a bit. I’d already got what I needed from Shay. If my cousin was convinced our killer was a nut job, that was good enough for me. There was nothing to be gained from repeatedly going over and over the little information available to us at this point.

  “What’s the dinner situation?” I asked, getting up to take our cups to wash again.

  “There’s soup that just needs heating up and your da is bringing some fresh rolls back so you two can fill up on bifanas after. I’ve got the pork steaks for those seasoned and marinating in white wine ready to go.”

  That sounded great. I hadn’t had a good bifana, an amazing hot pork sandwich, for quite some time. I lifted the lid off the soup pan to see what he’d made and a lovely aroma rose from the still warm contents inside. That looked like a really hearty, old-fashioned Iberian peasant dish; beans, winter collard greens and chopped spaghetti in a thickish gloop of pureed potatoes, carrots, onions and plenty of garlic. My stomach growled impatiently, and I decided to help myself to a small bowl to keep me going. This stuff was one of the few things that tasted better warm than it did hot.

  Shay watched me slurp it down with a pleased little smile. “You do know where the spoons are, right?” he asked as I tipped the bowl up to get the last of it.

  “Why make extra washing up?” I asked and ladled myself another serving. He’d outdone himself with this one, the stuff was moreishly delicious and just the thing on a cold, winter evening. Besides, what did it matter if I had my soup now and my sandwiches later? That was probably a better idea than trying to eat everything in one sitting, anyway.

  I finished off my third little bowl and headed upstairs to shower and change. It was funny how little things like coming home to find good food ready and waiting for you could perk you up again after a really shitty day.

  Five

  The laser imaging scans I’d been promised came through before ten o’clock the next morning. I sent them straight over to my cousin before turning my attention back to a case that I could actually get on with. McKinnon hadn’t actually assigned the new murder to me and I wasn’t sure that he would or even should. The kind of investigation we were probably looking at with that one was far beyond the scope of what my little team could manage. Shay had thrown a few statistics at me later yesterday evening and seemed certain that Philips was going to end up with a list of over six hundred patients to check out in the Greater Inverness area. McKinnon was going to need to throw a lot more manpower into that little job if he wanted to see results any time soon.

  Meanwhile, our car thieves had struck again last night, twice. They’d taken an Audi from outside a surgeon’s house in Culloden, and a BMW belonging to a company director in Castlehill. Both of the stolen cars were executive class, pricey saloon models.

  Caitlin and I drove out to visit both addresses, neither of which had any security cameras installed. Nor, unfortunately, did their neighbours have any set up that gave a view of the road outside their properties. Nobody had been woken up by odd noises in the night at either address, so we didn’t even know what time the thefts may have occurred. Even more annoyingly, our thieves seemed to know where the few traffic cameras in operation were placed and had managed to avoid them all, yet again. On top of that, naturally, the first thing they’d done, once they’d removed the vehicles, had been to immediately disable their GPS systems.

  Driving back to town from Culloden after our second visit, I found myself wondering how much longer the gang would risk sticking around in our area before moving their operation elsewhere. Waves of organised thefts like this didn’t usually last longer than two or three months before everything went quiet again. Maybe it was time to look into the national pattern more thoroughly, instead of focusing too narrowly on what was happening on our turf.

  “You know, I think we might be wasting our time looking for a local site for them to strip the cars down,” I told Caitlin as we drove back from Culloden.

  “You think they’re just shipping them elsewhere in one piece as soon as they take them?” she asked, interested. “They’d need covered car transporters for that.”

  “True, but if they’re moving around quite frequently, as I’m starting to think they might be, that’s probably a smaller and safer investment than renting a new place to work from every time they set up in a new city. I want some figures and dates checked when we get back to the station.” I was keeping my eye on the road, but I saw her looking over at me out of the corner of my eye.

  “They’d have to use the A9 or the A82, right?” she said, following my own train of thought. “So you’re thinking that maybe we might be able to cross-check the records and see if any particular vehicles kept turning up at the right times in the right places?”

  “Unless they exchange their trucks too regularly to prevent it, yeah.” It was certainly worth spending some time to look into properly. “They may even have a little fleet, for all we know. We’ve lost what, fourteen cars in the same way in the last five weeks? That’s some serious money being driven away in the night.”

  Despite the fact that both of the A roads out of Inverness were infamously dangerous in terms of accidents, I thought that the potential rewards would be well worth the risks to a large scale operation, especially as they would be using professional, careful drivers and not the kind of idiots who were likely to break the speed limit or drive recklessly. The A9 seemed like our likeliest shot at finding something too. Extra traffic cams had been added all along the road between Perth and Inverness a few years back.

  Checking the National ANPR Data Centre records on the NAS system was looking more and more like a logical move to make. Nobody below the rank of inspector could access the automatic number-plate recognition records, except for real time footage, because too much of that kind of usage would slow the entire system down so much it would become effectively unusable. However, as a DCI, I could look through the last three months myself without needing to ask superintendent Anderson to formally request a longer check. After all, I’d certainly class this as a ‘Priority and Volume’ case. We weren’t dealing with an isolated instance of motor vehicle theft with this one. It had organised crime stamped all over it.

  “We can get started on figuring out where the last spikes in this type of theft were as soon as we get in,” I told Caitlin. “If we can work out where our gang was operating in November, that will give us two separate sets of camera locations to focus on for the dates we’re interested in.”

  “It’s worth a go,” Caitlin conceded, “but you might just end up getting swamped with a ridiculous amount of data to wade through.” The thought had occurred to me too.

  “I can narrow that down a bit, I think. For one thing, I think they’d play safe by parking up overnight and only setting off in the early morning, when there was more traffic to hide in. So, I can just pick a busyish, pre rush hour time slot on the mornings after the thefts occurred to start with and see if anything stands out.” I think she was beginning to become a little more enthusiastic about the idea by then.

  “I doubt they’d go for a forty foot container, those would be too conspicuous. So we could focus on the twenty footers. They could be moving the cars individually or have a racking system fitted to carry two at a time.” I was rather hoping for the former myself, because that would double the amount of trips our thieves had to make, and therefore double our statistical chances of finding them.

  Back at Old Perth Road I found that Walker and Collins were still out making door-to-door enquiries on the new murder case, so I asked Caitlin to get Mills and Bryce to help her start compiling data on reported car thefts in Scotland throughout l
ast November while I settled back into my office and logged in to the National ANPR Service (NAS). I pulled up a list of the dates for our recent thefts and got cracking.

  As usual, I lost track of time a bit as I sank into the almost trancelike level of focus required for this kind of job, adding lorry after lorry to my rapidly growing spreadsheet. If Shay hadn’t buzzed me when he did and snapped me out of it, I might have ended up skipping lunch altogether.

  “Hey, Con, I’ve just sent you the facial reconstructions you asked for.” he told me when I answered my phone. I glanced at the time. It was nearly two o’clock, already! “Sorry it took so long, but I wanted to make them as accurate as possible.” I smiled to myself as I leant back and nudged my chair into a short swing.

  “Shockingly slow!” I told him, “I sent you the scans almost four hours ago, you lazy sod.” Shay had a funny idea of what the word ‘slow’ meant. “Hang on, I want to have a look and see what you’ve come up with this time.”

  I opened up his email and clicked on the first attachment. Oh, that was good! The man I was looking at appeared to be in his early twenties. He had a dark-skinned and unremarkable face, except for the sunken cheeks and some patches of dry, scaly skin. He also had a small scar, less than two inches long, on the right side of his forehead. The eyes were a little bloodshot too. Shay had added his eyebrows back in, presumably from matching the burned out follicles, but he’d left the scalp bald. Thorough as usual, he’d also created a further five images with varying lengths of black, kinky hair and different lengths of facial stubble all the way up to a full beard, all on a plain white background. I had no doubt that the restored nose, lips and other features would be an excellent approximation of what our victim must have looked like. The mouth was closed and the face muscles relaxed. Shay hadn’t been tempted to artistically try for any particular expression.

  “Why the dry skin?” I asked curiously.