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

that, I’d be very surprised to hear it. Alan said his English wasn’t very good and let’s face it, even most native speakers get the apostrophes wrong, if they bother to use them at all in a text.” It had been sent from his phone though. The number had been the same as the one on the paperwork Rogerson had given us.

Had our murderer written that text?

Nine

I waited a few minutes after emailing my report to James McKinnon before I called him. From the sound of his voice, at least he was happy to hear that we now knew who our victim was.

“It’s a start, Conall, even though it doesn’t look like we’ve got anything that will help us find out how he ran into his killer, or vice versa. From reading through this, it doesn’t sound like he had much of a social life here yet.”

“There’s still far too much that we don’t know, James,” I agreed. “Did he know his killer? If not, was it a crime of opportunity or was he selected and stalked?”

“Aye, lots of questions and not enough answers. You’re right about that message being suspect too. And if our culprit had Mr Chuol in his grasp as early as the eleventh or twelfth, there’s the whole issue of where he was kept until he was taken to the woods to think about too.” I could hear the sound of him drumming his fingers distractedly on his desk. “I’ll send Philips round to talk to that Eric guy. He might have something useful to say. Apart from that, I think we’re stuck again until we get the pathology results in and your cousin finishes digging around. I’ll send Philips round to Citizens’ Advice too. Maybe the person who helped with the benefit application might remember something. You sent that pill you found over to the lab?”

“Yes, we did, and what was left of Dominic Chuol’s personal belongings too. I thought I’d leave it up to you to decide if you thought it was worth trying for a search warrant to locate the missing laptop or anything else that might have been purloined. Personally, I doubt there’d be anything to gain from trying that.”

He made a low noise of agreement. “Aye, I expect that anything they did take will be long gone by now. Rogerson told you that Mr Chuol was on prescription painkillers, right? I don’t think your Shay will have much trouble discovering who the last doctor to treat him was, so we should soon know if it was legit or something he bought on the black market.”

“I would expect so. He’ll be looking into everyone at the Community Centre, the construction site, and the house too.”

“Alright, Conall, thanks for the updates. I’ll let you get back to your own cases for now, but if you think of anything else we could be doing, please call me.” So, McKinnon was keeping this one under his own aegis for now. Well, that made sense, given the relative size of our teams. I wouldn’t be at all pleased to be named OIC on the Chuol case at this point.

After he rang off, I tried to put Dominic’s murder out of my mind again. Walker and Mills hadn’t had any luck with their door-to-door enquiries on Friday. Only one farmer mentioned being woken up by his dogs barking during the night last week but he’d also said that it was quite a frequent occurrence. They’d quietened down again quickly enough, and he’d soon dropped off to sleep again. Prowling foxes often set the farm dogs off, he’d told them. No, he hadn’t checked the time. Remembering Shay’s comments about the full moon, maybe I was reading too much into the fact that their farmer had told them that the disturbance had occurred on Monday night.

I decided to pop out to see how my team was getting on before settling down to another session on the National ANPR Service. I’d got quite a bit more work done with my searches over the weekend, but I’d need to put a few more hours in before I was ready to start filtering and sorting the information. I really hoped I’d been right to choose an early morning time slot, because I’d need to start all over again if I didn’t get any promising results from this first attempt.

Out in the main office, I found that Caitlin had put Mills and Bryce onto a fresh B&E case and they’d gone out to interview the victims. Collins showed me the cleaned up stills from the video footage he’d been looking through on Friday evening, and I suggested he pull another fifty or so from old case files and then ask our mugging victim to look through them to see if he could pick anyone out.

“Just remember to black out the time and date stamps first, okay?” I reminded him. “Let him assume that they’re all from the night he was attacked.”

“Yessir!” he agreed enthusiastically.

I think Collins was rather enjoying himself taking the lead on that one. He’d suffered a similar attack himself, in his mid-teens, which had shaken him up quite badly at the time. There had been four of them, on that occasion, all older and bigger than he was. They’d taken his phone and his wallet and he’d suspected that they might have been planning to rough him up a little too before a passing group of students had scared them off. I’m not surprised the incident had shaken the poor boy up. Collins had grown up in a nice neighbourhood, and that had been the first time he’d found himself in a potentially dangerous situation like that.

I found Caitlin and Mary Walker proactively running national searches on car thefts over the whole of the past two years. Caitlin unapologetically explained that they were looking for patterns similar to the one that was ongoing, here in Inverness, and those from Perth and Stirling last November.

“I figured that if you