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

feeding a psychotic ego instructions on who to kill and how to do it. Then, when their picture was shown on the news, it got so angry that it took over the body and went looking for one of us to kill.”

“That’s exactly what he seems to be saying, yes.”

“How would all that affect a plea Insanity in court?”

“I’m not sure. There’s still a lot of controversy surrounding the authenticity of patients presenting as DID. It’s certainly one of the most disputed areas of mental illness when it comes to criminal cases. Even if Shay’s right, I doubt it will make any difference. The Defence will most likely base their argument on the fact that their client is psychotic, rather than risk muddying the waters with something less provable. No, the point of most interest in this document is that whole ‘apparently normal’ ANP bit. It doesn’t matter how many egos are in that body. As long as the ANP is in control of it, he probably never does or says anything strange enough in front of other people to give them any suspicion that he’s mentally ill.”

“With the invisible monster hiding within, secretly pulling the strings.” She nodded. “Shay might be right, but I don’t see how any of it helps us. And I’m sorry, but I honestly can’t make myself care about what may have happened to our killer when he was a child. I’m only interested in stopping the thing they became. We put mad, vicious dogs down for a reason, Conall. They rip one person apart and that’s it, game over.”

“We do,” I agreed, staring calmly back at her. I’d meant what I’d said to her earlier, but I wasn’t about to expand on the subject.

Where we saw monsters, doctors saw sick people in need of treatment. Sometimes they decided that they had cured such patients, and even eventually arranged for their release. Sometimes, when they did that, other people paid the price for their mistakes. A recent example of this had occurred in 2017, in Russia. A paranoid schizophrenic adult male was released from a high security psychiatric hospital in Astrakhan, six years after being committed for murder. After his release, he stabbed his niece in the abdomen and decapitated her daughter, a toddler of only eighteen months. Worse, the child’s mother had pleaded for the culprit to be kept in custody because she believed he posed a very real danger.

Here in the UK, murderers sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 and held in secure institutions such as Broadmoor and Rampton Hospitals were sometimes conditionally released too, with psychiatric treatment continuing afterwards. When that happened, their anonymity was protected. If one was living next door to you, you wouldn’t be informed. They were also sometimes transferred to less secure institutions instead. Did that make any kind of sense to people like me and Caitlin? No, it really didn’t. As officers of the law, it was our duty to respect and uphold such decisions. As ordinary citizens, we could only deplore them.

People died in custody all the time, over three hundred every year, recently, in the UK. Some of those deaths were tragic, avoidable and undeserved. Others were not.

My phone buzzed, and I checked the caller ID. Darren Mills.

“Yes, Mills?” I said as I answered it, “Have you located Mr McAndrew?”

“We have, Sir. He was at his niece’s house yesterday. She dropped him off at nine thirty last night. She’s here with us now. Once we told her he wasn’t answering his door, she came round with a spare key to let us in.” His tone was enough to tell me what was coming next. “I’m afraid he’s dead, Sir. There’s an empty pill bottle by the bed, and it looks like an overdose, only there’s a small puncture wound to a vein in his neck. Possibly from a needle.”

“Have you called for a SOCO team?”

“We have, Sir, and we’re being careful not to disturb anything.”

“Any sign of forced entry?”

“No, but the living room window isn’t completely closed.”

Hell and damnation! An overdose? Eric McAndrew had been clean again. That puncture mark was very suspect too. What were the odds that the pathologist would find no ingested substances in the stomach but plenty of them in the blood? If my immediate suspicions were correct, it didn’t look like our visit to Old Eric on Thursday had turned out at all well for him. Had our killer struck twice last night? First Eric, then Jackie?

“Alright, hang on there until they’re done please. I want to know what they make of it. We won’t get a report on the pathologist’s findings in a hurry so any ‘guess’ they care to make about cause and time of death will be welcome.” After I’d rung off, I told Caitlin what Mills had said.

“So we got the poor man killed, more than likely,” she said tiredly, rubbing her face.

“Let’s just say there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have been targeted if we’d decided not to do our job, shall we?” I fired off a quick text to Shay and put my phone down to turn to her. “What are we supposed to do, Caitlin? Stop looking? Stop following leads? Sit on our hands doing nothing because we’re scared of provoking him?”

“No. You’re right. We can’t do that. But Christ, Conall! Even with our killer’s face in our hands, we’re no closer to finding him than we were last week.”

“We will be,” I told her. “It just might take a little longer than any of us would like.”

We needed a lucky break. Maybe my cousin would produce one or maybe we’d get a fresh call that would lead us straight to our killer. We didn’t get one that day.

Walker and Collins came back empty handed. Neither Debbie nor Sharon remembered seeing that face, and the men working on Dominic’s old construction site didn’t recall him either. They’d left a copy with the duty foreman and had been assured it would be shown