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

It was possible that the ‘first moon’ line of Ogham script did mean that we had nothing to worry about until next January, but I wouldn’t have wanted to place any kind of bet on the chances of that being the case.

Ten

Shay

I wasted most of a week chasing up every possible connection to Atovura Dominic Chuol, both in his past life and during his brief sojourn here in Inverness. Eventually, I had to resign myself to the fact that the entire exercise had been a complete waste of time. It was bloody frustrating, to say the least.

I was pretty sure, by the following Sunday, that none of the people we were aware of had been involved with Dominic’s disappearance and murder. Looking into his co-workers, his housemates, his landlord and everyone else we knew he’d interacted with had won me absolutely nothing, nada, zip, diddly squat. I can’t pretend that all those negative results particularly surprised me either. I’d thought, before I even started, that getting anything useful that way was a long shot, at best.

“He could have been stalked beforehand by anyone watching his movements,” I told Conall after dinner on Sunday evening. “Apart from travelling to work and back and visits to local shops, he doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere except for those brief trips out on Friday evenings.” Conall was standing at the sink washing up, fair division of labour and all that. Con had no objection to leaving the cooking to me when Uncle Danny was away. “Any luck with locating the dealer who was supplying him with those painkillers yet?”

“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