Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “Not yet, no, but McKinnon has people working on it.”

  The pill from under Dominic’s sofa had not been any standard prescription pain relief. It had been black market oxycodone spiked with a synthetic fentanyl boost. Highly dangerous. As the body’s tolerance to opiates grew, ever higher doses were required to achieve the same, desired effect. The risk of respiratory failure and ensuing death from hypoxia increased in line with growing consumption and fentanyl, even in very small quantities, was extremely powerful stuff. Dominic Chuol probably hadn’t even realised what he was taking. His medical records from England showed that he had been put on a methadone prescription after being diagnosed as a chronic pain sufferer. He may have left Birmingham with a month’s supply of that, but he hadn’t registered with a new GP in Inverness.

  It was likely that his recent usage would soon have spiralled lethally out of control, no matter how well he’d been managing it… and he’d been doing pretty well with that by the looks of it. His boss had said that he was a good and reliable worker. I suspected that Dominic had been hoarding his methadone for working hours and his new purchases for his evenings and weekends. Unlike methadone, which was strictly for pain management, the oxy/fentanyl mix would also have been giving him quite a euphoric high. That would have been noticeable in a place like a construction site.

  If his abductor had cut him off during his last few days, Dominic must have had one hell of a final week of it going through withdrawal before the night he was murdered.

  Conall put the last pan in the rack to drain and dried his hands. “Fancy a coffee?”

  “No, thanks, but stick the kettle on for me will you?” I was rarely in the mood for coffee. “Debbie said that when Dominic went out on Fridays, he was usually gone for less than an hour. If she was right about that, then his dealer either lived conveniently close by or came to meet him somewhere in the neighbourhood. Dominic didn’t use his bus pass on those evenings and none of the local taxi companies took him anywhere.”

  “Mmm. Not very helpful if the dealer came to meet him. Which tea do you want?”

  “Just a plain peppermint, thanks.”

  I was trying to visualise Dominic’s last week alive. If he’d been gagged and restrained during the worst of his withdrawal period, the risk of him choking to death on his own vomit would surely have been too high for his killer to risk leaving him alone for long periods of time. He wouldn’t have been left on his back because the chances were that his gag reflex may not have been intact and even liquid could have choked him to death. So they must have taken measures to prevent that from happening. I could envision several ways of doing that, but all of them required a secure holding location with no risk of any suspicious noises being overheard. The blood and urine samples had failed to yield any results on the standard gamut of drug tests, so we knew that Dominic hadn’t been given anything during at least his last few days in captivity.

  “Our killer must have the use of a secure property, probably with a soundproofed room, or rooms, inside.”

  “That seems very likely,” Conall agreed. “A garage with indoor access into the main building would be preferable too, even if he took Dominic in and out at night. Like that, there’d be zero risk of anyone seeing anything.”

  “Depending on how careful, or paranoid, they were being. It still leaves far too many possible locations in the area for comfort. How’s Philips getting on with his list?” Conall leaned against the counter and stared over at me, arms crossed.

  “He and DS Gibson have already checked over a hundred people without finding any likely suspects among them. You’d already said that it’s unlikely our culprit would be on that list, anyway. They’re highly functional, capable of carrying out a premeditated plan of action, and in possession of the financial means to have secured both a suitable vehicle and a suitable holding location. The chances of them being undiagnosed are high. You’ve also stated that you don’t think they’d risk renting either the vehicle or the property they’re using.”

  “It’s more probable that they own them, considering how careful they’ve been about everything else, but it’s not certain.”

  There was a click as the kettle boiled and turned itself off. Conall filled my cup for me before bringing it over. His old Italian Gaggia machine had heated up by then so he set his coffee going.

  “You don’t believe they’re working, though?” he asked as he filled himself a glass of water from the tap. I prodded my teabag, and a waft of peppermint scented steam rose up.

  “I don’t think they’re working away from wherever they live,” I corrected him. “But that’s based on the premise that they live alone, which is probable but not proven yet. They might still have a job they can do from home, in whatever hours suit them. Then again, they may have inherited money, or come by it some other way.”

  He frowned as he came to sit down with his cup and glass.

  “Alright, so either not working or working from home, self-employed or otherwise. What else have you got left to follow up on?”

  “Not much. The samples of rope from the scene can be bought from dozens of online suppliers and so can ebony hair sticks.” Forensics had agreed that the fragments recovered were most likely from a pair of those. “And that’s without considering all the shops that supply things like that. The same goes for soundproofing materials. Also, the cuts into the chest could have been made by any one of dozens of easily obtainable straight bladed knives. I’m sorry Cuz but unless identifying Chuol’s dealer gives us a lead, we’ve got nothing much to go on at this point.” I’d already sent him the records from Dominic’s mobile phone and we hadn’t found any useful links there either. He might even have had a second phone we didn’t know about. Well, however many phones had gone missing, those had most likely been disposed of by the killer almost immediately. “I could check council tax records for the Greater Inverness area and make up a list of single occupancy dwellings that might fit the bill, but I’m not sure how useful that would be. It’s not as if you can go around and search them all.”

  “Not without probable cause, no. And there’d be far too many to cover, anyway. Besides, our killer may not live alone.” I doubted they had an accomplice, but Conall was right, we couldn’t make assumptions like that. Thinking about what I might do in their place, it also occurred to me that if you didn’t mind losing your single occupancy discount and paying the extra council tax, it wouldn’t be hard to declare a second, non-existent occupant anyway.

  We stared at each other bleakly, the same thoughts going through both our minds. With no trail left to follow, there was nothing more either of us could do.

  Eight days later, on Monday the eleventh of February, Chris Arnold was reported missing. Although I’d put the Chuol case on a back burner and spent the intervening week dividing my attention between my assignments for the Ids and my drone project, I hadn’t forgotten about it and I’d made sure that my cousin had an alert set on that list for two weeks. None of the new reports had set any of our internal alarm bells ringing and sure enough, all our missing locals, so far, had turned up within twenty-four hours. This particular disappearance immediately stood out as more suspicious. Rather than being a partner storming out after an argument, a friend or relative going on a bender, or a kid playing truant or ‘running away’ after a telling off, Chris Arnold had gone out for his regular morning run and hadn’t come home.

  It was just after eleven in the morning when Conall’s email came in and alerted me to the disappearance.

  ‘New missing persons report for a Mister Christopher Arnold. The report was phoned in by the wife at nine thirty.’ Conall’s email informed me. ‘I’ve attached the recording and transcript and I’m heading out there now with a uniformed search team. Call me if you think of anything you think we should ask Mrs Arnold.’ I opened up the transcript and read through it.

  Chris Arnold went out for a morning run several times a week, usually choosing a ten mile route, and had done so ever since le
aving the army five years before. He was forty five and in great shape. The couple and their three children lived in Leanach, less than a mile east of the Culloden battlefield. On the mornings he planned to run, Chris left the house at around half-past six and was always home again by eight, eight fifteen at the latest. His wife, Angela, had become concerned when she returned to their house after dropping the kids off at school and found that he wasn’t home yet. Angela had tried to call her husband at that point but his phone was off. She’d then called the hospital, worried that he may have been in an accident or suffered some kind of medical emergency. Having no luck there, she’d called the police. Time of disappearance, according to that information, was between six thirty and eight.

  The night of the next full moon was only eight days away so yes, there was every reason to be concerned about the timing of Chris Arnold’s disappearance. If he’d just collapsed, off the road somewhere along his route, we’d know soon enough. It was probably too late, already, for any search dogs to pick up a scent trail. Even on grass, any trail over two hours old was patchy. Still, I expected McKinnon would have called a dog team out. If any objects had been discarded along Chris’s route, there was a good chance that they, at least, would be discovered.

  A ten-mile run meant that Chris Arnold would have remained within five miles of the house at every possible point but that still gave us a considerable area to look at. Well, Conall would certainly ask Angela if she knew what route her husband had been planning to take. I didn’t need to phone him to ask him to do that.

  Sunrise this morning hadn’t been until five to eight and there was plenty of tree cover in that area. Still, once I knew the route Chris Arnold had taken, it might be worth checking our security satellites to see what vehicle movements had been captured. Unless directed otherwise by an authorised operative, any images recorded by those would all be too distant to yield much information but traffic would have been light. I should at least be able to check for any vehicles in the immediate area. I fired off a text to Conall asking him to inform me of the route as soon as he knew it.

  Meanwhile, it seemed to me that I might as well get on with running a background check on the Arnolds. If this was a false alarm and Chris was found, it wasn’t as if I’d have spent much time on the job by the time Conall was able to let me know about it. I could start with his service record.

  Chris Arnold had served in The Highlanders Infantry Regiment, until they’d been incorporated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006 and become the fourth battalion of the new, combined force.

  Showing early aptitude for the role, he’d undergone the tough, mandatory nine weeks’ sniper training course before being assigned to the battalion’s sniper platoon. He’d served two, six-month tours in Iraq, one in 2005-2006 and the other in 2008, as well as a six-month tour in Afghanistan in 2011. Having left the army with the rank of sergeant, after twenty-two years of service, Chris and his family had moved to Inverness, his childhood home. where he’d begun his new career as an electrical wind turbine technician. An old army pal had recommended him for the position and it seemed to have suited him.

  His lump sum Early Departure Scheme Payment and his savings had allowed the family to put down a considerable deposit on their house in Leanach and with the EDP income stream from his army career, combined with his new salary, the family had been doing well for themselves. Angela worked part time working in Admin at a local care home and they were certainly better off than they had been during his army years. The couple had three children, two boys and a girl, aged sixteen, fourteen and eleven.

  Chris had also been mentioned in an article in the Inverness Courier, back in 2011 when he’d made a confirmed kill of a Taliban leader from a distance of almost two kilometres, which was pretty impressive shooting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not a fan of the British Armed Forces but my personal grievance was with those higher in command. I even felt some sympathy for many of the grunts on the ground, who had to serve under the kind of ‘ends justifying the means’ arseholes that ordered strikes on civilian targets. That sympathy was limited though; after all, they were all serving by choice. The days of conscription, thank goodness, were long over. I’d have left the UK before my eighteenth birthday if they weren’t. I was violently allergic, psychologically speaking, to being given orders and did not react well to people placing limits on my personal freedoms.

  Conall called me at two. They’d managed to follow Chris Arnold’s path from his home up to Culloden moor, along the road past the railway line and then into the woods to the north.

  “I imagine he ran a few of his usual tracks in there, to make up his distance target, and then looped around and cut down back to the road further east for the run home. His wife told us where he always came out when he was doing a run up in the woods. There’s a handy layby at the end of the footpath with room for a few cars to park up when people head out that way for a walk.” I could tell from his tone that the news wasn’t good.

  “No sign of him then?”

  “None. We’ve conducted a thorough search. He’s long gone. Besides, we have a trampled, flattened area of growth right by the track, about a hundred metres from the road. It’s about the right size to be the result of someone falling, and the dogs are satisfied that he was there. Davie and his boys are going over it now.” I’d already pulled the map up.

  “The spot about two miles from his house? I see your layby. What are you thinking?”

  “If someone had been observing his movements for a while, they could have parked up there, selected an ambush point and waited for him to run by.”

  “A fit man with military training wouldn’t be an easy target to subdue Con.”

  “Unless they were taken completely by surprise. Who knows what the abductor might have had at their disposal. A tranquilliser gun? A taser?”

  “I don’t think a tranquilliser would act quickly enough. Besides, you need a vet to write you a prescription for those darts. They’d be too easy to trace. A taser isn’t a bad thought though. They’re not that hard to get hold of, illegal or not, or they could even have made their own. Once the target was down, a quick chokehold would soon knock them out, as well as stop them from crying out. It would be easy enough to sedate them after that.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “and that’s if they didn’t simply whack him unconscious before he knew they were there.” True, but the abductor would need a certain level of knowledge and skill to manage that, especially if they wanted him alive. Randomly bashing people in the head could often prove fatal, intentionally or not.

  “Risky to get that close to someone like Arnold. It’s more likely they’d want to keep out of his reach.” Conall went quiet for a few moments then.

  “You think it’s our guy, don’t you? The person that killed Dominic Chuol.”

  “I think it could be, but it’s far too soon to rule out the possibility of this being an unconnected abduction Con. Chris Arnold may have had personal enemies with scores to settle. You know he was an army sniper?”

  “Yes, his wife told us. You think one of his targets’ relatives or comrades might have tracked him down?”

  “Possibly. My gut says not but like I said, we can’t rule it out. Not yet anyway. It would have been far easier to just kill him when he was further from the road if they didn’t want him alive, but you know how the fundamentalists like making execution videos. I’ll see if I can spot the vehicle on any of the satellite footage from this morning. You’re asking the neighbours if they’ve noticed any strange vehicles or people hanging around lately?”

  “McKinnon’s got a dozen uniforms going door to door, yes.”

  “Alright then. I should be able to send you something within the hour.” My hopes were low but every possible lead needed to be explored, however remote the chances of them producing useful results might be. The countdown clock was ticking and the night of the next full moon would be a week tomorrow.

  Eleven

  Shay’s sat
ellite check did not prove to be as helpful as we’d have liked. He’d confided to me once that the system he’d been given access to could be refocused to give a five-centimetre resolution on demand. However, unless it was directed by an authorised operative to alter its focus, it would remain fixed at twenty-five centimetres, which wasn’t much of an improvement on the images available on Google Maps. Currently, commercial satellites were not permitted, by law, to use resolutions higher than thirty centimetres but national defence systems were exempt from that ruling.

  Four pixels per square metre might be better than two or three, but such an image still didn’t give you much detail. If people were worried about being spied on, drones were a much greater threat than the rapidly burgeoning satellite network. Most satellites weren’t equipped for surveillance purposes, anyway. The bulk of them were there for communications, entertainment, GPS navigation, and scientific research.

  Still, thanks to the images Shay had been able to provide us with, we now knew that Chris Arnold’s abductor had been driving a large white van approximately three point four metres long and one point seven metres wide. There were several competing models on the market matching those specs. With the images only being taken at fifteen-minute intervals, once our vehicle had reached the busier area approaching the town centre, it had become impossible to track it further. There was no shortage of vans like that driving around.

  Enquiries in and around Leanach had not been fruitful either. Yes, people had seen white vans passing through, but that was such an ordinary, everyday occurrence that both van and driver may as well have been invisible. Our culprit had been careful not to hang around in one place for long enough to arouse any suspicions. Even if the same van drove through the village regularly, why would anyone notice?