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

earlier email, Eric was right about that cuff strap, and his memory seemed unusually clear.”

“You mean he has a decent data retrieval system.” Idiosyncratic corrections like that, from my cousin, seemed to be an automatic reflex with him. “Well, accurate or not, the bad news is that a biometric search might not be as helpful as we’d like. I’d have to allow too much leeway on all the measurements to hope for only a handful of possible matches. I suppose McKinnon will want to go public with the composite?”

“Definitely.”

“No chance he’d be willing to send it out to every shop in the area as a first step, before going to the media and the press with it?”

“I doubt it. Time is of the essence here, Shay. If anyone out there has had a good enough look at our suspect to recognise him, the sooner we know the when and where of it the better.” His unhappy little noise in reply to that told me he was feeling even more opposed to the idea of putting that sketch out there than he’d been with the stills yesterday. “You’re worried it might provoke a reaction from our suspect that we won’t like?”

“Aren’t you? We can’t predict what he might do but judging by historical cases, the chances of it throwing him off his pattern are high.” Which might result in him striking again far sooner than four weeks from now, at the next full moon. Shay wasn’t done yet though. “If he’s living alone, reclusively, even his nearest neighbours may never have taken a good look at him. You think he has friends or relatives here? I don’t. I think the shops are our best bet, anyway.”

“I’ll advise McKinnon of your concerns, but I think he’ll go ahead and release it, anyway. Right now, it really is our best chance of finding our man.” My cousin didn’t choose to deny it, he just waited to hear whatever I was going to ask next. “What are the odds on you managing to locate a medical record for treatment of that burn on his hand?”

“Almost non-existent.” He didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second before replying. “You said in your email that Eric told you the scar was smooth and pale. A burn deep enough to leave a permanent mark like that takes a long time to heal that well. He could have had it for years and if it was domestic abuse, or parental negligence, from when he was a kid, I doubt the person responsible would have taken him to A&E. It would be a hell of a job to find such a record, anyway. It’s not worth pursuing.”

“So you’re going to see what you can do with our composite then?” I asked, anticipating the obvious.

“Yeah. I’ll build a virtual 3D head from it and use that to produce fake ID photos to run through the DVLA, see how many possible matches they throw up. I’ll need to keep tweaking it and trying again, so don’t hold your breath, Con.”

Leaving him to get on with that, I called McKinnon. As I’d expected, Shay’s worries bothered James too, but not enough to prevent him from deciding to go public again.

“I think we have to release it now, Conall. Once we know where to find him, our suspect won’t have much chance to strike again before we bring him in.” I wasn’t sure if he was saying that to reassure himself, me or both of us.

“Once we know,” I agreed, “but it might not be that simple. He may have grown a full beard by now, dyed his hair or grown or shaved it, taken to wearing sunglasses… and you saw the scarf in the footage from Tuesday night. Nobody would blink if he kept using something like that, with the weather being so cold just now.”

“Aye, and we don’t know how long he’s been living wherever he is either. I’m aware of all that Conall. I still don’t see how we can justify keeping that sketch to ourselves. The more people who see it, the better our chances of identifying him are.”

Every police officer in Inverness would be looking out for that face as soon as James sent an all departments email out. He’d pass it on to every Divisional Commander in Scotland to circulate too, and perhaps even over the border as well. As far as it went, that was all well and good, but a public alert vastly multiplied our chances of a genuine sighting.

Apart from the television broadcasts and the newspaper exposure, that sketch would be in every consumer outlet in the area within the next twenty-four hours too, as Shay had known it would. We didn’t have our suspect’s fingerprints on record, which meant we probably didn’t have his DNA either. When we finally did get the results we were waiting for from forensics, their only use may be to strengthen our case for the Procurator Fiscal’s office once our man was in custody.

Maybe the lab boys might find some rare residue on the clothing we’d recovered, or in the grips on the soles of those trainers that would help us but, apart from that, there wasn’t much else left to hope for from that source.

Our sketch and latest appeal was shown on Thursday evening and McKinnon’s people were manning the phone lines and typing up the transcripts all through the evening and the following day. Reading through those as they were added in, I had a rough idea by lunchtime on Friday of how successful that appeal had been so far. Crank calls aside, very few people were claiming to have seen our man and those we could take seriously were all from staff at different supermarkets and mini markets widely scattered around Inverness. I thought most of those calls were probably genuine, and they all had one thing in common, a repeating refrain of, ‘I can’t be sure, because he had a scarf over his lower