Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

That Monday morning, staring at the place through a dismal fall of icy sleet, all I could see was that the house was run down and neglected. Judging by the bleak stretch of patchy grass out front, none of the current tenants seemed to care much for gardening. I guessed the landlord must pay someone to mow that occasionally even if they didn’t seem to have spent any other money on the upkeep of the place.

“Let’s wait for it to ease off a bit before we go knocking,” I suggested. “We’ll get soaked if we go out there now, especially if they take their time answering the door.”

The upstairs blinds were still closed but the downstairs front room window was just covered by the net curtains, letting in daylight but maintaining privacy from anyone walking past. It was still coming down heavily a few minutes later when Shay’s next text came in. He’d tracked down the owner/landlord for me and sent me their details. I called the given number.

“Mr Philip McAvoy? Good morning. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Keane and I’m calling about a tenant of yours, a Mister Atovura Dominic Chuol. I believe you rented him a room on Rosehaugh Road last November?”

“Dominic? Aye, Inspector, that’s right, I did, but he’s no a tenant of mine any more. The fella up and left a couple of weeks ago.”

“Would it be possible for you to meet us at the property, Sir? We’d like to talk to the other tenants and look at Dominic’s room, if we may. You see, I’m afraid Mr Chuol’s body was discovered last Thursday and we’re currently conducting a murder investigation.”

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence while he thought about that.

“The room’s already been packed up, ready for the next tenant,” he finally told me, “but aye, I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“That would be appreciated. Thank you, Mr McAvoy.” I hung up and looked at Caitlin. “He’ll be here in twenty minutes. Hot drink?” I fished my thermos and espresso machine out, and Caitlin reached for her own flask of tea.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said a while later as she blew at her cup before sipping carefully. “Either Dominic went missing between the Friday he last worked and the Monday he failed to show up, or something prompted him to quit and stop answering his phone.”

“If he went missing that weekend, that’s quite a gap between then and the time he was most likely killed in,” I argued, playing devil’s advocate. The same, uneasy thought had been preying on my mind too. “There’s at least a week to fill in there, because it didn’t rain between the time of the murder and the discovery of the body.” That last cold, dry snap had lasted from Saturday the nineteenth, through to yesterday, the twenty seventh. “Do you think that the killer might have been holding him somewhere for all that time?”

She shrugged. “I’m thinking that it’s a possibility. We’ll have to see what his housemates can tell us. Alternatively, he may just have decided he’d had enough of Inverness, or been ill, or off on a bender or any number of other things that we have no way of knowing yet.”

“Yeah, you’re right there. I don’t like the thought of it though. It’s one thing to grab someone, drive them out to the woods and kill them, but to hold them, for days, without being discovered… that takes a whole different level of planning.” I drank down my coffee and got a second one going. It was a pity this gadget couldn’t produce doubles, but that was a minor issue. I compulsively checked my emails again while I waited for it to start pumping out my second dose. Nothing in from forensics yet.

“You’d need a place of your own or somewhere you were sure nobody would go,” Caitlin mused aloud. “And you’d need to keep them quiet. So either gagged and totally restrained, or sedated, unless the place was soundproofed. That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing an unstable psychotic could pull off easily.”

“No, but a lot of psychopaths could. And some psychoses can be very specific. A lot of people manage to live with certain delusions, and even hallucinations, for years without anyone realising there’s anything wrong with them.” I drank down my second coffee and put everything away again. Five more minutes, if McAvoy arrived on time. The sleet was finally easing off a bit again too.

Sure enough, a couple of minutes later, a little white VW caddy van pulled in and parked in front of us. The man who climbed out of it was a heavyset, overweight man of around sixty with a beer belly to rival the one that Bill Rogerson had been sporting. His hair was almost white, shot through with streaks of grey, and the dome of his head was bald. We climbed out to greet him.

“Mr McAvoy? I’m Inspector Keane, and this is my colleague, Sergeant Murray. Thank you for coming, Sir.”

He eyed us coldly. Not a fan of the police in general then? Well, the feeling was mutual. He had a mean look about him, mainly in the narrowed eyes and pinched mouth. He was about five feet seven and had the reddened, bumpy nose and cheeks of a heavy drinker.

“Aye, well, I know how this sort of thing goes. If I didnae cooperate, it’d be warrants and investigations and God knows what sort of harassment and charges you’d be throwing at me… and murder is murder. If we’re paying for a police force, they might as well do something useful for a change.” I didn’t allow my neutral expression to change, but Caitlin’s scowl seemed to please him.

“Shall we get on in then?” I suggested mildly, and he grudgingly led us up the little path to the front door before knocking heavily three times. I could hear voices arguing upstairs and then the sound of footsteps coming towards the door.

A woman in her mid-twenties