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

slim hope of finding a matching dental record for what looked to be a healthy set of teeth. After talking to McKinnon, my next task would be to set my team searching through missing persons reports for a possible match.

There didn’t seem to be anything else I could learn at the scene after that, so I left Davie and his boys to finish up whilst they waited for the police surgeon to arrive and Caitlin and I headed back to the car.

I knew why James had sounded so rattled now. This case didn’t strike me as an ordinary murder, not in any way, and it seemed far too elaborate to be a mere hate crime. The victim had been subdued and restrained before being brought here. Our perpetrator, or perpetrators, could have killed and dumped him anywhere far more quickly and easily than this. The damage done to the victim smacked of some bizarre, ritualistic killing, with the results left proudly on display for anyone to find.

I could see from Caitlin’s worried expression that she was thinking the same thing. Did we have a deranged psychotic or a homicidal psychopath on our hands?

Three

Over twenty thousand people were reported missing in Scotland every year, but the overwhelming majority of those turned up within days. Only about one in a thousand went missing for longer than a month, and a very small number of those remained untraced even decades later.

Less than six per cent of Scotland's missing persons reports were submitted in the Highlands and Islands District, about twenty-five a week on average, spread out across all six of Chief Superintendent Anderson’s areas.

Of course, if nobody reported that a person had gone missing, then they weren’t included in any of those figures. When we checked for our John Doe in the National Missing Persons Database, we found that nobody had become concerned enough about his disappearance to bother reporting it to the police yet.

Currently, we had three young men of African ethnicity still flagged as missing on the Scottish database. Two of them were students from Glasgow and St Andrews universities, respectively, and the third was a warehouse worker from Dundee. Only one of the three was close enough in height to be a possible match for our victim, but a quick call through to Davie Baird, from McKinnon’s office, soon ruled him out too. Our man still had a full set of teeth, and the missing student did not. Two of his had been extracted.

I’d told Caitlin to take a tea break when we got to Burnett Road so that I could confer with James McKinnon in private. She and her friend, DS Jackie Gibson, had gone off to the break room for a chat, so now only James and I sat on opposite sides of his cluttered desk, alone in his office with our shared uneasiness.

“I’ll get my team to run searches covering the rest of the UK too,” I told him. “At least like that, we’ll have a list of potential matches waiting when the forensics report comes in.”

“Aye,” he agreed unhappily, “I don’t see how we can make much progress with this one until we know who the poor devil was. We’ll need to get a computerised facial reconstruction done to distribute to the local media, too. Someone might come forward if they recognise him.” If our man was an itinerant or an illegal immigrant, it was possible that anyone who did know him had just assumed that he’d moved on.

“I’ll ask Shay to deal with that for us,” I offered. “He’s very good at that kind of work, and fast too.” My cousin would need the results of a laser imaging scan of the head to feed into his software, but I could call the pathologist and request that as a priority. James looked mildly surprised to hear that Shay was familiar with that kind of job.

“That’s a bit of an odd field for him to have dabbled in, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Shay still keeps in occasional touch with some of his parents’ old colleagues, and a couple of our childhood friends are pursuing careers in archaeology too. He’s run a few reconstructions on old remains for them. His 3D graphics software packages are better than anything we have easy access to.”

“You’d think that lad never slept, the amount of learning and experience he’s already managed to acquire.” James shook his head. “I can’t help wondering what it must be like, to have a memory like that.” It was only natural that most people, myself included, did that from time to time. “It must be a bit like having a powerful computer in your head.”

“We’ve all got powerful computers in our heads, according to him,” I told him, “although he can get pretty snarky about the drawbacks of an organically based system.” Shay could sometimes become rather resentful about the far from perfect systems we were all stuck with, especially when it came to the endless amount of potential malfunctions any one of us could suffer from.

I’d need to find out what my cousin’s initial thoughts on the methods used to kill our victim were. I wouldn’t exactly call it a hobby, but Shay’s lifelong fascination with organic intelligence had led him to do extensive research on the subject of the human brain, and he kept himself well up to date on developments in the fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry. He might have some useful insights to offer.

“What do you want to do about canvassing the area, James?” I asked. “Do we wait until we have a more accurate time of death or go ahead with that now? We’ve got three possible routes that our suspects could have used to reach those woods, and no traffic cams within miles of any of them.”

McKinnon leaned back, fiddling absently with his pen. “Honestly, I don’t think it will do much good, but I suppose we have to exhaust every possibility, however slim. Mark your likely addresses out