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

me the tape and latent print cards again please.” I lifted a dozen good clean samples, numbering them before handing them to Conall to slip between protective slides and slot into the case.

Now, for the contents.

The scarf was on top so I lifted that out carefully first. “We’ve got a few hairs stuck to this.” I laid it out and snapped some close ups. “Tweezers and small bags, please.”

Once I was done with it, I bagged up the scarf with the smaller bags containing the samples tucked in with it and turned my attention to the jacket. It was a common Go Outdoor brand coat, not some rarely found obscure label or high end expensive piece of gear. I plucked another three hairs from the fleecy lining of the hood. We had quite a few fully intact ones now. Our man kept his hair quite short.

I checked all the pockets, but those had been emptied. There was a small hole in the corner of the right hand main pocket, though, and I turned the jacket over to pat at the lining beneath it. Yep, a couple of little things had slipped through. I widened the hole a little and fished them out. One small white pill and one crumpled piece of thin paper. Conall held a bag for me to drop the pill into, and I unfolded the paper. A supermarket receipt, somewhat faded. Well, my camera filters could make that easier to read.

“The Tesco Metro on Tomnahurich Street at three twenty two on the afternoon of November the seventeenth. Looks like he popped in to pick up cigarettes. He’s a Marlboro man, unless they were for someone else.”

“That’s close to the Sally Army that Dominic Chuol was visiting back then.”

“Less than two minutes on foot, yeah. Have we got a bag big enough to take this jacket?”

“No, I’m afraid not. We’ll have to put it back in the sports bag when you’ve finished going through it.”

The trousers were next, black denim jeans, and I went through the same process with those, turning them inside out once I’d checked the outside.

“I’ve got some small stains around the front, up by the waistband. Hand me the LED light source, will you?” I set a 450nm wavelength and ran the light over the cloth. As I’d thought, those splotches were glowing far too brightly to be drips of urine. Our killer had come in his pants, and recently too. I didn’t need to tell Conall and Caitlin that. They knew what those brightly glowing spots were as well as I did. We weren’t assuming anything, but we were all thinking the same thing.

Did the act of killing get our guy off?

I took more photographs while Conall held the light for me and then bagged the trousers up. The trainers had some blood spatter on them, and I scraped some of that into a tube after photographing them from various angles. That left one other thing in the bag, a large, transparent zip-lock garment bag with another one tucked inside it. From what we could see it wasn’t hard to guess what those had carried. Apart from the dark, pooling blood at the bottom of the inner bag and the streaks of blood and hairs stuck to the sides, there were some bits of tissue and bone in there too, probably from around the bottom of the neck area. I ran a light around the inside of the sports bag to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. It was empty. The bags hadn’t leaked at all. I folded the jacket and put it back in.

We were done here. Once everything was packed up, we went back out to the cars and Conall packed everything away in his boot.

“Are you heading home now?” he asked me as I tore the detestable, sweaty latex gloves off and stuffed them into a pocket of the kit bag.

“Actually no,” I told him as I wiped my hands on the cloth he offered me. “I should follow you back to Old Perth Road and print off these photos to pack up with the samples before you send them over to the lab.”

“You sure?” he asked. “I can do that if you send them to me.”

“That’d just be a waste of time. I’ve got all the sample numbers to match them with stored in here.” I tapped my head. “Why? Is there some reason you don’t want your DCs to see me?”

“Not at all! In fact I’d be delighted to finally introduce you to the daft buggers.”

“What have they been saying?” I stared at him suspiciously. “Is this because they know I was flying the drones last night?”

“They were speculating on the chances of you being some kind of covert agent earlier,” Caitlin admitted, “and Conall caught them at it. Well, not Mills, he pretty much told them that even if you were, it was none of their idiot, nosy business.”

“Did he?” Conall said, sounding pleased. “Good for him.”

“So I only need to feel offended by the other three, then?”

“How are they to know that you detest those guys? Or why?” I supposed he had a point there. “Be nice,” my cousin warned me.

“Aren’t I always?” I said innocently and stalked off to get into Uncle Danny’s Toyota. I could play nicely, but I didn’t have to mean it. How would you like it if you found out that people you’d never met already thought you might be a total dick?

Eighteen

“Do you want me to call ahead and ask them to set up a desk for him?” Caitlin asked me as I pulled out and we set off back towards the station with Shay on our tail.

“No, don’t bother. He’ll be using his laptop anyway and he can send all his files to a printer wirelessly.” We had a couple of unused spare desks in the main office. He could take his pick, which meant he’d probably choose the one we’d shoved into the back corner out of