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

Even when doing no more than going food shopping, our suspect was being careful. The very fact that he seemed to be visiting so many different places was another indication of how cautious he was being. He didn’t even have a preferred local store where he shopped regularly. On the contrary, he seemed prepared to drive miles out of his way to avoid creating any kind of a pattern. I just hoped that those calls would continue to come in as new possible sightings were reported in the same way. Like that, we had a chance of sending the nearest car to whichever supermarket he was in and catching him that way. The fact that we’d heard nothing from anyone claiming to be a friend, colleague or neighbour spoke volumes. His neighbours either didn’t know him well enough to recognise him or they hadn’t seen our appeal. As for friends and relatives, as Shay had warned us, he may have none here.

My cousin hadn’t been kidding when he’d told me not to hold my breath, but he finally sent me the results of his DVLA searches early on Friday afternoon. He’d made fractional changes to the width and length of the facial bone structure, the placement of the cheekbones and the size of the eyes, nose and mouth, running over thirty slightly altered versions of our composite through the system. After doing all of that, he’d found nine possible matches. Six supposedly living in England, one in Northern Ireland, and two in Scotland, both over a hundred miles from Inverness. Three of the nine had a mole in roughly the right place. The other six all had beards, so it was impossible to know if they did or not.

Thorough as ever, next to the driving licence photo for each one, he’d provided an altered version with the same hair and clean-shaven features as the original sketch. You could see, looking at those, what he’d meant about the measurements being a key factor for successful biometric scanning. If he hadn’t made any changes to his virtual model, I doubted he’d have found any of them. Even at a glance, similar or not, you could see that these were nine different people.

‘Can you show these to Eric McAndrew?’ he asked in the accompanying email. ‘Even if he’s not satisfied that any of them are the man he saw, knowing which ones are closest will help guide my next set of alterations to try again with. I’m looking into this batch, for now, but we might not have the right man yet. Just to give you an idea of why I’m doing it this way, I ran a test search with a filter allowing for a five per cent variation on every key measurement. That came back with over six thousand results.’

Christ! Yes, that gave me a good idea of the scope of the problem alright. Five per cent? What was five per cent of the width of a forehead or cheekbones or jawline? Or a millimetre here or there in the spacing of the eyes or the length of a nose? Not much. But even that had brought up over six thousand ‘possibles?’ Slow or not, manually altering each feature, one by one, as Shay was doing, was a far more efficient way of going about things.

Caitlin and I went straight back to Friar’s Street after I received that email, but we were out of luck this time. Eric was not at home. I buzzed the other flats in turn until I got one of his neighbours on the intercom and told him who we were. At least that got us inside and allowed me to push a note under the door of Eric’s flat. If the old man owned a phone, this would all have been a lot easier. I texted Shay to advise him of the delay, and we went back to Old Perth Road with nothing accomplished. Maybe Reic McAndrew would be home again in time for us to catch him later in the afternoon. The neighbour had said he’d go down there, if he heard Eric come in, and even told us he’d lend him his phone to call me on.

Back at the office, I went back to reading through the transcripts of the phone calls, making a note of the details that each caller had been able to provide to add to a rapidly expanding list. If it had been our man in each of these possible sightings, he owned a hell of a lot of jackets and scarves.

I only broke off from that to check new emails as they came in. The forensic pathologist wasn’t ready to offer us a full report on their study of Chris Arnold’s head yet but had sent us a brief on a few points of interest. The implements that had pierced Arnold’s eyes had been the sawn-off tips of two WW1 British army socket bayonets. The victim had lost enough blood to cause death before decapitation had occurred. Whether our killer had used the same technique to do that this time as he had with Dominic Chuol was something we couldn’t determine, not without the rest of the remains to examine. The piercing of the brain by the bayonet tips thrust through the orbital sockets had probably occurred within moments of actual death. There was also another minimum intensity PMCT projection attached too. As before, Ogham script had been carved into the victim’s flesh, on the forehead this time. The characters were smaller, of necessity, but the cuts were as precise and legible as before.

‘Second moon, fallen warrior, Warriors’ Head.’ Shay’s reply to the email I sent him came back quickly ‘In Irish again. I wonder what he meant by ‘fallen’ there?’ Well, a fallen warrior usually implied a dead one, and Chris Arnold was certainly dead. I’d have to ask my cousin later why