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

and carrying a fully grown man. Note any obvious disabilities or injuries but remember those can be faked. Request permission to have a look round the premises and check the GPS history on their vehicles if they say you may, but don’t push for it if they refuse. We’re especially interested in how strongly they react to those requests, so keep your eyes on them and note down your observations immediately. Understood? Apart from that, we want to know where they were on Monday morning between six thirty and eight, and whether anyone else can verify that.”

They all nodded solemnly.

“Leave cards and a request to call us back at the addresses where nobody’s in. Any questions?”

There weren’t.

“Bit of a long shot,” I commented quietly as they all scattered back to their desks. “How many people are being checked like this?”

“Altogether? Two hundred and seventeen.” Conall kept his own voice down too. “And yes, it’s a long shot, but we don’t have anything better to go on just now.” He didn’t need to add that if this was the Black Wood killer striking again, we only had five days left to find Mr Arnold. “Come on, get your coat. We’re heading out the furthest so we’d better get moving.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“West, out to Inchmore. We can work back towards town from there.”

As Conall took us over Friar’s bridge, I looked through our list. “Shay’s doing?” I asked.

“Yeah, but he thinks it’s a fifty per cent chance, at best, that our culprit will be on his list. McKinnon decided it was worth trying anyway and I have to agree. It’s not like there’s much else we can usefully do right now.”

I think we were all feeling the same growing frustration by then. This kind of case was our worst nightmare. No useful evidence left at the scene, no apparent connection to the victims. A needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe it. I’d never been involved in an investigation of this kind before and hoped never to be so again. I knew, from extensive reading, that the physical damage inflicted on Dominic Chuol before he died was minor, compared to the state that victims of other crazed killers had been found in in the past. It didn’t make me feel any better about it.

With my thoughts turning to past serial killers, I found myself thinking about the Angus Sinclair case. Sinclair had committed his first known offence at the age of sixteen, back in 1961. He’d sexually assaulted and strangled an eight-year-old girl, for which he served a mere six years in prison.

In 2007, he’d been acquitted of the rape and murder of two seventeen-year-old girls, an old. Cold case from 1977. Advances in DNA research had allowed fresh evidence to be presented and the Procurator Fiscal had green lighted the trial. The presiding judge, Lord Clarke, upheld the defence submission of ‘no case to answer,’ because of the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and it had looked like that was the end of it. When it was then revealed that Sinclair was already serving two life sentences after confessing to another eleven rapes, as well as another assault and murder, the public outcry had been vociferous. A result of that outcry had been The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 eventually being passed into law. Decisions like that, it had been decided, should not be left to the discretion of a single judge.

The change in the law had allowed a retrial for the double murder, this time resulting in Sinclair being found guilty. The bastard was now serving several life sentences with no possibility of parole. He would die in prison. It was suspected, but not proven, that he had also killed at least another four women.

The change in the Scottish law had been a welcome one because improved methods of testing DNA evidence allowed a lot of old, unsolved cases to be re-examined and sent to trial a second time. I doubt that it had done much to comfort the families of any of Sinclair’s victims. I think the reason that it was troubling me now was the fact that Sinclair had remained on the loose for another five years after killing those two girls, during which time he’d raped at least eleven more and killed again. Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ had also eluded capture for five years, killing thirteen victims. More recently, the Stephen Port case, so notoriously bungled by the Met in East London, had taken over a year to crack after the first victim’s body was discovered, during which time he’d managed to kill at least another three people.

Our killer wasn’t being careless enough to leave us any of their DNA, but the ritualistic manner of the killing and the staging of Dominic’s body had been disturbing enough without looking for any obvious sexual motivation for the crime. Besides, I knew of serial killers who got their gratification from the infliction of pain, the victim’s terror, and the act of killing itself.

“You seem rather lost in your thoughts,” Conall said, glancing over at me after driving in silence for a good ten minutes. “Let me guess, you’re worrying about how long so many of these killers remain uncaught?”

“It’s not an encouraging subject to contemplate, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. Still, we’ve been getting steadily better at catching them with each new development in the forensic sciences. Surveillance technology is already having a considerable impact too.”

“Even so, Conall, if the Black Wood killer has Chris Arnold, what do you think our chances of finding him in time are? Realistically?” I saw his hands tighten slightly on the wheel.

“Not great,” he admitted. “All we can do is follow every possible lead we have, which is what we’re doing now. It’s certainly better than doing nothing.” He didn’t seem particularly hopeful. “I asked Shay if it would be possible to track the killer down by looking for anyone who had bought all the items we know