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

looks like a little white pill. It must have rolled under there.” After snapping a picture, she pulled a bag out of her pocket and dropped it in. It might have been an over-the-counter painkiller but we’d need to get it checked. I eased the sofa back down as she straightened up again.

The sound of footsteps descending the stairs pulled our attention back to the doorway and sure enough, Debbie appeared, trailed by a bleary eyed, black haired little thing. The new girl was still wearing smudged eye makeup from the day before but she looked to be in much better physical condition than her housemate and she was certainly much cleaner. A male voice called something down the stairs.

“Go on back to bed, Brad,” Debbie called back up. “This is none of your business.” She glanced at me. “Just a friend of mine, Inspector. He doesn’t live here, and he didnae know Dominic. This here’s Sharon.”

“Aye, Sharon Watson,” her companion confirmed. “Sorry to keep you waiting but I’m working nights just now. I work at the twenty-four-hour Asda down by Fairways.” I gave her a friendly little smile.

“That’s quite a bus ride. It must take you nearly an hour to get home.”

“Aye, it would, but my pal gives me a lift, mostly. They give us the same shifts when they can.” She lifted a hand, stifling a yawn. “Debbie said Dominic had been murdered?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so, Miss Watson.”

“Poor devil. You’ll be wanting to know when we last saw him then? Do you mind if we move this to the kitchen? I could do with a coffee.”

The kitchen really was a mess. I found myself wondering if they waited until they ran out of crockery before they bothered to wash anything. Half a pan of rapidly drying mashed potato was still sitting on the cooker, and there was a rather smelly chicken carcass on a plate on the worktop. Neither looked anywhere near fresh.

Debbie and Phil went to sit at the table while Sharon put the kettle on. That table could do with a good scrubbing too, as could the worktops and the floor. This place was a real pigsty.

Debbie, upon being prompted, remembered seeing Dominic on the evening of Thursday the tenth when he’d got in from work. No, she hadn’t heard him get up for work the next morning and, as far as she knew, he hadn’t been back to the house since then. Sharon told us she’d heard him leave on the Friday morning, because she hadn’t got to sleep herself before he left.

“I was working from twelve ‘til six a.m. that week too and he usually headed out at about quarter to seven. I don’t think he did come back either, unless it was just to grab some things and go again, because he wasn’t around all Saturday. And Phil here came on the Sunday to let us know that he’d left. I can’t pretend we were sorry to hear it either.”

“Why was that?” I asked. “Did he cause you any trouble while he was here?”

“No,” she admitted reluctantly, “but it’s unnerving, sharing a place with a strange man… especially a foreigner like him.” She didn’t need to be more specific than that. It was quite obvious that they’d both objected to the colour of his skin. I tried not to let my disgust at their bigotry show. “We’d much rather have had another girl in.”

They both gave Phil a meaningful look, but he just shrugged. Not his problem. Tenants came and went. As long as they paid their rent and didn’t cause trouble, the rest of it was no concern of his.

“Did either of you get to know him at all, while he was here?” Caitlin asked.

They hadn’t. Apart from the odd ‘hello’ in passing they’d pretty much managed to ignore him and it sounded to me as if he’d had no interest in trying to make friends with either of them.

“He kept to himself and he was quiet,” Debbie reluctantly admitted. “Apart from the usual daily hassles about having to wait for the bathroom, or the cooker or washing machine, we all got along okay I suppose.”

“Did he ever have any friends over?” I asked. Two head shakes there.

“Not that we ever heard. He sometimes went out for a bit, on a Friday night, but he was usually back in under an hour.”

It seemed that we weren’t going to get much useful information out of these three. From the shifty glances the girls sent Phil’s way every couple of minutes, I was pretty sure that they’d looted Dominic’s room between them, but there wasn’t any way I could prove it. After reminding Phil McAvoy that I’d like copies of Dominic’s rental agreement and payments to be emailed to me and handing him my card, we collected the bin bags and got out of there into the clean, cold air as fast as we could.

“That place was rank!” Caitlin said disgustedly as we put the bags in the boot. “That chicken carcass must have been there a few days from the smell of it.” I closed the boot and climbed back in on the passenger side, reaching for my water bottle.

“Mmm,” I agreed after rinsing my mouth out. “I don’t envy anyone having to share a place with that Debbie girl. I’m guessing any cleaning that gets done is mainly Sharon’s doing, on her days off. If I were her, I’d have started looking for another place to live a long time ago.”

She nodded her silent agreement.

“Back to the station now?”

“Yes please. I want to get all this written up and let McKinnon know what we’ve managed to find.” At least we’d made some progress this morning. We had a name for our victim now, and Shay would be looking into him in earnest.

“What do you make of that text the landlord was sent?” Caitlin asked.

“Pretty much what I expect you did,” I told her as she got us moving. “If Dominic Chuol wrote