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

to reach this area by track. Unless, that is, they’d carried their victim further than seemed likely on foot. Either way, they’d certainly have been able to avoid notice once they were off the quiet little road, especially if they’d come at night, which seemed extremely likely. Smoke from a petrol or diesel fire in daylight would have drawn immediate attention. It was absolutely forbidden to light a fire in this area.

I didn’t think that a little petrol-driven blaze would have lasted long. It had certainly done no more than scorch the oak tree that the victim had been tied to. Nobody had been trying to set the woods on fire here. The intent had clearly been to destroy any physical evidence they may have left on the body. I moved further away and pressed a foot as hard as I could against the semi-frozen ground. It barely left a mark.

Davie must have noticed what I was doing. “Aye, we’ll no get a print, Conall. Dougie, show him where we think they came in here.”

Dougie obligingly led us back into the trees about twenty feet away from the route he’d brought us here by.

“Just to our left there, see? I’ve managed to find a few spots that showed signs of recent passage, but the only thing I can say for sure is that one person definitely came that way carrying something heavy. But look,” he pointed to a very slight shapeless indentation in the earth, “They tied something padded over their feet to make absolutely sure they wouldn’t leave a clear print. We can’t even tell what size shoe or boot they were wearing.”

“What about tyre marks, up on the track?” I asked. He just shook his head.

“Nothing clear enough to be useful. The weather’s against us on this one, Inspector. We’ve got faint treads all over the place, overlapping old marks from the forestry vehicles. Which reminds me,” he fished a card out and handed it to me, “the ranger who found the body left his office and mobile numbers for you. He figured you might want to talk to him.” I looked at the card. Our ranger was called Mike Nash. “He seemed like a nice guy, poor devil. At least he had the sense to get a good distance away before he threw up. It would have freaked me out, too, stumbling across something like this out here.”

“You’ve got all of this photographed already, Dougie?” I asked, waving at the unhelpful ghost of a trail.

“Aye, we have.” There didn’t seem to be anything more to see there, so we headed back to the crime scene. Davie waved Dougie over as soon as we came back into view. He and Jamie had finished processing the ground to the side of the corpse and were ready to roll it over onto the opened-up body bag they’d spread out ready.

“Gently now, nice and easy,” Davie warned his boys, waiting across from them to take some of the weight as they rolled the body over so he could ease it down as gently as possible.

The decedent’s front had taken much more damage from the fire than his back had, and there was a horrible quiet crackle of charred skin cracking as they rolled him. Christ! Even with all the burning, I could now see how thoroughly his forearms had been sliced open. Davie had been correct about the left eye too. It was still there, sort of. The heat of the fire had boiled the fluids in the eyeball away, leaving a sunken punctured, burnt remnant behind. I could also see a matching black stump of something still stuck in there. The left eye had also been pierced by something slender and sharp. The eyelids had been destroyed in the fire, as had the shrunken blackened remains of the man’s nose, lips and ears, as well as any hair he may have had. Added to the damage caused by the scavengers, the body certainly wasn’t a pretty sight. Davie was studying him carefully.

“Late teens or early twenties at a best guess, but I could be wrong there.”

“How long do you think he’s been dead for?” Davie scowled up at me.

“In these conditions? I wouldn’t like to guess... at least three days, probably. Still, the lab can run some tests to see how far decomposition has progressed and cross-checked that against the ambient temperatures over the past week. They might be able to give an accurate estimate. If you want to ask the Forestry people if they can catch you some of the scavengers, we might get lucky examining the contents of their intestines too, but the chances are very slim there.” No, I didn’t think a long shot like that would be worth the man-hours. There were hundreds of crows in these woods and who knew how many foxes. A job like that could tie the forensics lab up for days.

I stared down at the victim. “Those lines to either side of the mouth… do you think that’s where a gag burned away?”

“Aye, most likely. But look at the chest, Conall, the way the skin’s burned in separate ridges all over here, and here. Like scored pork, wouldn’t you say?” He was right. Someone had carefully made a series of elaborate cuts there before setting their fire.

“Is there a way to get a clear image of those cuts if they extend below the charred skin?”

“Aye, mayhap. I’ll make sure to ask the radiologist to run a PMCT minimum intensity projection on that area.”

“PMCT?”

“Post-mortem computed tomography.” Jamie chimed in helpfully. “They can run a series of scans at different frequencies too, to check for old bone damage and other possible injuries... and search for medical implants or other foreign objects.”

God, yes! Finding an orthopaedic implant on an old bone injury, for example, would be very helpful because it might just allow us to identify our victim. Right now, all we had was a John Doe with no fingerprints left and only a