“Back to the station now?”
“Yes please. I want to get all this written up and let McKinnon know what we’ve managed to find.” At least we’d made some progress this morning. We had a name for our victim now, and Shay would be looking into him in earnest.
“What do you make of that text the landlord was sent?” Caitlin asked.
“Pretty much what I expect you did,” I told her as she got us moving. “If Dominic Chuol wrote that, I’d be very surprised to hear it. Alan said his English wasn’t very good and let’s face it, even most native speakers get the apostrophes wrong, if they bother to use them at all in a text.” It had been sent from his phone though. The number had been the same as the one on the paperwork Rogerson had given us.
Had our murderer written that text?
Nine
I waited a few minutes after emailing my report to James McKinnon before I called him. From the sound of his voice, at least he was happy to hear that we now knew who our victim was.
“It’s a start, Conall, even though it doesn’t look like we’ve got anything that will help us find out how he ran into his killer, or vice versa. From reading through this, it doesn’t sound like he had much of a social life here yet.”
“There’s still far too much that we don’t know, James,” I agreed. “Did he know his killer? If not, was it a crime of opportunity or was he selected and stalked?”
“Aye, lots of questions and not enough answers. You’re right about that message being suspect too. And if our culprit had Mr Chuol in his grasp as early as the eleventh or twelfth, there’s the whole issue of where he was kept until he was taken to the woods to think about too.” I could hear the sound of him drumming his fingers distractedly on his desk. “I’ll send Philips round to talk to that Eric guy. He might have something useful to say. Apart from that, I think we’re stuck again until we get the pathology results in and your cousin finishes digging around. I’ll send Philips round to Citizens’ Advice too. Maybe the person who helped with the benefit application might remember something. You sent that pill you found over to the lab?”
“Yes, we did, and what was left of Dominic Chuol’s personal belongings too. I thought I’d leave it up to you to decide if you thought it was worth trying for a search warrant to locate the missing laptop or anything else that might have been purloined. Personally, I doubt there’d be anything to gain from trying that.”
He made a low noise of agreement. “Aye, I expect that anything they did take will be long gone by now. Rogerson told you that Mr Chuol was on prescription painkillers, right? I don’t think your Shay will have much trouble discovering who the last doctor to treat him was, so we should soon know if it was legit or something he bought on the black market.”
“I would expect so. He’ll be looking into everyone at the Community Centre, the construction site, and the house too.”
“Alright, Conall, thanks for the updates. I’ll let you get back to your own cases for now, but if you think of anything else we could be doing, please call me.” So, McKinnon was keeping this one under his own aegis for now. Well, that made sense, given the relative size of our teams. I wouldn’t be at all pleased to be named OIC on the Chuol case at this point.
After he rang off, I tried to put Dominic’s murder out of my mind again. Walker and Mills hadn’t had any luck with their door-to-door enquiries on Friday. Only one farmer mentioned being woken up by his dogs barking during the night last week but he’d also said that it was quite a frequent occurrence. They’d quietened down again quickly enough, and he’d soon dropped off to sleep again. Prowling foxes often set the farm dogs off, he’d told them. No, he hadn’t checked the time. Remembering Shay’s comments about the full moon, maybe I was reading too much into the fact that their farmer had told them that the disturbance had occurred on Monday night.
I decided to pop out to see how my team was getting on before settling down to another session on the National ANPR Service. I’d got quite a bit more work done with my searches over the weekend, but I’d need to put a few more hours in before I was ready to start filtering and sorting the information. I really hoped I’d been right to choose an early morning time slot, because I’d need to start all over again if I didn’t get any promising results from this first attempt.
Out in the main office, I found that Caitlin had put Mills and Bryce onto a fresh B&E case and they’d gone out to interview the victims. Collins showed me the cleaned up stills from the video footage he’d been looking through on Friday evening, and I suggested he pull another fifty or so from old case files and then ask our mugging victim to look through them to see if he could pick anyone out.
“Just remember to black out the time and date stamps first, okay?” I reminded him. “Let him assume that they’re all from the night he was attacked.”
“Yessir!” he agreed enthusiastically.
I think Collins was rather enjoying himself taking the lead on that one. He’d suffered a similar attack himself, in his mid-teens, which had shaken him up quite badly at the time. There had been four of them, on that occasion, all older and bigger than he was. They’d taken his phone and his wallet and he’d suspected that they might have been planning to rough him up a little too before a passing group of students had scared them off. I’m not surprised the incident had shaken the poor boy up. Collins had grown up in a nice neighbourhood, and that had been the first time he’d found himself in a potentially dangerous situation like that.
I found Caitlin and Mary Walker proactively running national searches on car thefts over the whole of the past two years. Caitlin unapologetically explained that they were looking for patterns similar to the one that was ongoing, here in Inverness, and those from Perth and Stirling last November.
“I figured that if you strike gold with your NAS searches, then it might be a good idea to have more data amassed ready for earlier checks too. You’ll be sending the whole thing to Anderson if that happens, right?”
“I will, yes. If we’re right, and at least some of these sprees are being run by the same organisation, it’s too big a case for one area, or even one district to handle. Anderson can request some research assistance and get more searches run in a fraction of the time it’s taking me.” I approved of their initiative wholeheartedly and told them so. “Just don’t spend more than a couple of hours on it for now. We still don’t know if we’re all wasting our time on a dead end or not yet.”
They both just smiled at me knowingly, as if they thought I knew something they didn’t.
“Seriously,” I added firmly. “It’s just a hunch and we all know how many times those fail to pan out.”
“Ours, or yours?” Caitlin asked innocently. “Because those seem to be two entirely different sets of odds from where I’m sitting, Conall.” I just shook my head at her and went to fill up my water bottle before heading back to settle in at my desk until lunchtime.
Our preliminary pathology report on Dominic Chuol came in just before three. A thorough examination of tissue samples from internal organs had given the pathologist a total body decomposition score that pointed to the victim being killed, most probably, at some point during Monday night. It had not been possible to corroborate this finding by other methods as there was no evidence of insect activity, and the other available means of estimating time of death were of no use by the time the body was discovered.
Carbon monoxide levels in the blood and the percentage of serum carboxyhaemoglobin both indicated that death had occurred prior to burning. The lack of digestive material in the stomach and intestines indicated that the victim had been starved for at least a week prior to death. He was also severely dehydrated. Preliminary drug tests had been inconclusive but further samples of plasma and bone tissue were undergoing analysis. That didn’t surprise me. Opiate based prescription painkillers, such as hydrocodone, were no longer detectable in urine after two to four days and left the blood even more quickly than that.
Death had been due to exsanguinat
ion although deep damage to the brain tissue caused by the piercing of both orbital sockets had probably happened simultaneously during Dominic’s last moments alive. There were no identifying prosthetics within the body, which had been dressed in only a pair of track suit trousers made of a common polyester/cotton blend. The remaining pieces of material from the weapons inserted through the eyes had been identified as Diospyros crassiflora, West African ebony.
The report went on to state that the victim had suffered several injuries during their childhood years, and the pathologist concluded, from old bone damage, that he had been severely beaten on more than one occasion. Dominic had also had a couple of close calls between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Damage to the skull area beneath the scar on his forehead was consistent with a grazing hit from a bullet, as was the more serious damage to the upper left femur and surrounding muscle tissue, which might explain the limp. Those two injuries may have occurred almost simultaneously, eight or nine years ago. He’d also received a deep, slashing cut to his left humerus, about halfway between the shoulder and elbow about a year before that. There was no indication of any recent sexual assault. Deep abrasions into the tissues of the wrists and ankles indicated that he had been restrained for at least several days and material fragments from in and around the mouth area were most likely from internal and external gagging. Cloth and duct tape, respectively.
Christ! Our victim had not had an easy time of it growing up or, given what we knew of his time in the UK, since then either. No wonder the poor devil had needed painkillers. I looked through the x-rays and PMCT scans attached to the report. Old, repeated fractures to the ribs were highlighted with close ups of the damaged areas of bone. The scarring of the old bullet wound to the femur was circular, indicating a direct impact, whereas the skull wound appeared to have been more of a keyhole fracture, not as deep. As the report had said, a glancing blow. A few inches difference and that shot would certainly have killed the boy.
The minimum intensity PMCT projection of the chest area that Davie had promised to ask for was startlingly clear. The cuts that had been made had been deep enough for the tissue beneath the burned skin to yield a clear, recognisable pattern to them. The cuts ran in three vertical columns, each one with a clear top-to-bottom cut intersected by shorter horizontal and diagonal lines, some branching out only to the left or right from the central cuts and others transecting them.
I’d seen enough Ogham inscriptions on old stones in Ireland to make those markings look very familiar. Was this actual Ogham script or just a random approximation of it? Well, Shay could answer that question for me quickly enough. He’d known that alphabet since Uncle Diarmuid had first shown it to him when he was seven. I sent him two emails, the first with only the image of the cuts attached and the second with the full report. He called me almost immediately.
“This first email,” he said, “you’re right, it is Ogham script.”
“What does it say?”
“Bottom to top, our three columns read ‘first moon, black heart, black wood,’ in Irish.”
“So our killer knows Irish and knows the Ogham alphabet?” That was good to know. It should certainly cut our suspect list down considerably, but my premature hopefulness was very short lived.
“Not necessarily, Con. There are all sorts of free online translators that can do that kind of thing for you these days. So maybe they do, or maybe they just want us to think they do, or maybe they don’t care what we think but decided it was a necessary part of whatever batshit ritual they believed they were performing.” Damn! So much for following that thread then.
“Are you reading through the pathology report yet?”
“Yeah, I’m just starting on that now. Give me a minute, will you? By the way, did you know that the old Gaelic name for Dores translates as ‘Black Wood?’ Oh, I see the pathologist’s given Monday night as the likeliest time of death.” He went silent for a couple of minutes whilst he finished reading.
“I don’t like that ‘first moon’ line at all, Cuz. Yes, last Monday was the first full moon this year but they could just as easily have written ‘full moon’ if they didn’t want to imply there might be more following.”
“So they might be planning a monthly repetition?”
“Or an annual one, I suppose. Both seem possible. It depends on why they were stressing the word ‘first’ really. Does it always have to be the first full moon of the year or is it the first in a series, first moon, second moon, third moon and so on? They doubled up on ‘black wood’ too, in case you hadn’t noticed. Apart from taking the victim to the ‘Black Wood’ they also used West African ebony as a weapon to stab through the orbital sockets into his brain. That’s the blackest wood on the planet. I wonder what they made those needles out of? Maybe hair sticks? A pair of those could be sharpened up easily enough and a lot of them are basically bodkins to start with. You should ask forensics to see if they can tell you more about the remaining pieces.”
“I will,” I promised him. I was used to Shay in full flow so wasn’t fazed by the rapid information bombardment. “What do you make of Dominic Chuol’s older injuries?”
“Well, I haven’t finished digging yet, but I already know what he went through before he came over to Europe. He was abducted from his village by a unit of the Sudan People's Liberation Army when he was nine and he wasn’t rescued for over five years. How much do you know about child soldiers in that region?”
“Not as much as I will once I get your report, but enough to know that most of them go through hell and that we’re talking about thousands of kids just in South Sudan alone, let alone worldwide.”
“Right. Well, Dominic was rescued when he was fourteen and spent the next three years in UNICEF’s reintegration programme getting support, and some form of education. They try to get the released kids home again when that’s possible. In Dominic’s case, it wasn’t. His entire family was wiped out by another group two years after he was taken.”
“Christ! The poor sod just couldn’t catch a break could he?” I was trying not to think about the things that the unfortunate child might have been forced to do, and witness, during his time with the SPLA. “So what happened after that?”
“I haven’t got all the pieces, but it looks like he managed to get himself shipped over to Germany on a dodgy work contract. He must have made his way over to the UK once he managed to get away from whatever that was. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill in the gaps there. We’re talking about the undocumented, illegal use of immigrant workers as pretty much slave labour in cases like his. More recently, I do know that he was working for a construction company in Birmingham up until mid-October last year, so it looks like he made his way up here sometime during the two weeks after that.”
“Any idea why he decided to leave Birmingham?”
“No, but something must have made him feel unsafe there. Maybe he was being shaken down and got fed up with handing his wages over to a gang of local thugs or something. You know how often vulnerable immigrants find themselves being exploited, Con. Easier to move on, put a good distance between you and the threat, and start again.”
Sadly, I could only agree with him there.
“Any thoughts about that middle column of the script? Do you think ‘black heart’ might indicate the killer was aware of some of the things Dominic may have done as a child soldier?”
“That sound you can’t hear is me shrugging, Cuz. Who knows? It’s possible. It’s also possible that it was just a racist slur or that the killer had some weird delusion about our guy that had nothing to do with his past.”
Fair enough. I found it useful to bounce questions like that off Shay because he tended to be both quick and thorough in outlining the range of possibilities.
“Right. Any other thoughts for now?”
“Only one. I’d keep an eye on new missing persons reports from now on. Our killer kept Dominic Chuol captive for over a week without food and with little or no water. If that’s par
t of whatever ritual they think they’re performing, we might find that process repeating itself if they strike again.”
I glanced at my desktop calendar. The next full moon night would be three weeks tomorrow.
“I’ll pass that on to McKinnon too,” I assured him. “If there is a next victim, and they are reported missing, that will at least give us a few days to try to find them in.”
“It will. But whether or not that will help is another matter entirely. This guy might be crazy but he’s careful too Con. To be honest, I don’t fancy our chances of catching him making a mistake any time soon.”
After we’d ended the call, I sat staring blankly at my screen for a while. The thought of hunting in vain for a missing victim for an entire week, or longer, only for them to turn up dead after the next full moon turned my stomach.
It was possible that the ‘first moon’ line of Ogham script did mean that we had nothing to worry about until next January, but I wouldn’t have wanted to place any kind of bet on the chances of that being the case.
Ten
Shay
I wasted most of a week chasing up every possible connection to Atovura Dominic Chuol, both in his past life and during his brief sojourn here in Inverness. Eventually, I had to resign myself to the fact that the entire exercise had been a complete waste of time. It was bloody frustrating, to say the least.
I was pretty sure, by the following Sunday, that none of the people we were aware of had been involved with Dominic’s disappearance and murder. Looking into his co-workers, his housemates, his landlord and everyone else we knew he’d interacted with had won me absolutely nothing, nada, zip, diddly squat. I can’t pretend that all those negative results particularly surprised me either. I’d thought, before I even started, that getting anything useful that way was a long shot, at best.
“He could have been stalked beforehand by anyone watching his movements,” I told Conall after dinner on Sunday evening. “Apart from travelling to work and back and visits to local shops, he doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere except for those brief trips out on Friday evenings.” Conall was standing at the sink washing up, fair division of labour and all that. Con had no objection to leaving the cooking to me when Uncle Danny was away. “Any luck with locating the dealer who was supplying him with those painkillers yet?”
Death in the Black Wood Page 8