After last time, I could hardly wait to feel such intense pleasure again.
Thirteen
Caitlin
A little after Area Commander James McKinnon had left, Conall came out of his office and called us all together.
“Alright, people, we have a new priority job on the Chris Arnold case. Walker, you’re teaming up with Mills. Collins, you take Bryce. Caitlin’s with me. Here are your lists.” He handed out sheets to Walker and Collins. I thought I’d heard his printer running a few minutes ago. “You’ve got electronic copies in your inboxes too. The lists detail the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the van owners whose vehicles match the dimensions of the one seen at the scene of Chris Arnold’s disappearance on Monday morning. They are all single occupancy dwellings, and we need to speak with every one of those occupants face-to-face. The addresses have been divided geographically, to minimise travel time between calls.”
He perched on the edge of my desk and gave us all a long, hard look. “When you speak to these people, be on the alert for any sign of strange behaviour. You’ve all had training in spotting signs of mental illness so make sure you’re still familiar with what to look out for. Brush up on that before you head out if you need to. Assess their physical fitness as best you can and bear in mind that our culprit needs to be capable of lifting and carrying a fully grown man. Note any obvious disabilities or injuries but remember those can be faked. Request permission to have a look round the premises and check the GPS history on their vehicles if they say you may, but don’t push for it if they refuse. We’re especially interested in how strongly they react to those requests, so keep your eyes on them and note down your observations immediately. Understood? Apart from that, we want to know where they were on Monday morning between six thirty and eight, and whether anyone else can verify that.”
They all nodded solemnly.
“Leave cards and a request to call us back at the addresses where nobody’s in. Any questions?”
There weren’t.
“Bit of a long shot,” I commented quietly as they all scattered back to their desks. “How many people are being checked like this?”
“Altogether? Two hundred and seventeen.” Conall kept his own voice down too. “And yes, it’s a long shot, but we don’t have anything better to go on just now.” He didn’t need to add that if this was the Black Wood killer striking again, we only had five days left to find Mr Arnold. “Come on, get your coat. We’re heading out the furthest so we’d better get moving.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“West, out to Inchmore. We can work back towards town from there.”
As Conall took us over Friar’s bridge, I looked through our list. “Shay’s doing?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he thinks it’s a fifty per cent chance, at best, that our culprit will be on his list. McKinnon decided it was worth trying anyway and I have to agree. It’s not like there’s much else we can usefully do right now.”
I think we were all feeling the same growing frustration by then. This kind of case was our worst nightmare. No useful evidence left at the scene, no apparent connection to the victims. A needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe it. I’d never been involved in an investigation of this kind before and hoped never to be so again. I knew, from extensive reading, that the physical damage inflicted on Dominic Chuol before he died was minor, compared to the state that victims of other crazed killers had been found in in the past. It didn’t make me feel any better about it.
With my thoughts turning to past serial killers, I found myself thinking about the Angus Sinclair case. Sinclair had committed his first known offence at the age of sixteen, back in 1961. He’d sexually assaulted and strangled an eight-year-old girl, for which he served a mere six years in prison.
In 2007, he’d been acquitted of the rape and murder of two seventeen-year-old girls, an old. Cold case from 1977. Advances in DNA research had allowed fresh evidence to be presented and the Procurator Fiscal had green lighted the trial. The presiding judge, Lord Clarke, upheld the defence submission of ‘no case to answer,’ because of the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and it had looked like that was the end of it. When it was then revealed that Sinclair was already serving two life sentences after confessing to another eleven rapes, as well as another assault and murder, the public outcry had been vociferous. A result of that outcry had been The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 eventually being passed into law. Decisions like that, it had been decided, should not be left to the discretion of a single judge.
The change in the law had allowed a retrial for the double murder, this time resulting in Sinclair being found guilty. The bastard was now serving several life sentences with no possibility of parole. He would die in prison. It was suspected, but not proven, that he had also killed at least another four women.
The change in the Scottish law had been a welcome one because improved methods of testing DNA evidence allowed a lot of old, unsolved cases to be re-examined and sent to trial a second time. I doubt that it had done much to comfort the families of any of Sinclair’s victims. I think the reason that it was troubling me now was the fact that Sinclair had remained on the loose for another five years after killing those two girls, during which time he’d raped at least eleven more and killed again. Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ had also eluded capture for five years, killing thirteen victims. More recently, the Stephen Port case, so notoriously bungled by the Met in East London, had taken over a year to crack after the first victim’s body was discovered, during which time he’d managed to kill at least another three people.
Our killer wasn’t being careless enough to leave us any of their DNA, but the ritualistic manner of the killing and the staging of Dominic’s body had been disturbing enough without looking for any obvious sexual motivation for the crime. Besides, I knew of serial killers who got their gratification from the infliction of pain, the victim’s terror, and the act of killing itself.
“You seem rather lost in your thoughts,” Conall said, glancing over at me after driving in silence for a good ten minutes. “Let me guess, you’re worrying about how long so many of these killers remain uncaught?”
“It’s not an encouraging subject to contemplate, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. Still, we’ve been getting steadily better at catching them with each new development in the forensic sciences. Surveillance technology is already having a considerable impact too.”
“Even so, Conall, if the Black Wood killer has Chris Arnold, what do you think our chances of finding him in time are? Realistically?” I saw his hands tighten slightly on the wheel.
“Not great,” he admitted. “All we can do is follow every possible lead we have, which is what we’re doing now. It’s certainly better than doing nothing.” He didn’t seem particularly hopeful. “I asked Shay if it would be possible to track the killer down by looking for anyone who had bought all the items we know the killer possessed, but he said not. We’ve got two types of rope, a generic kitchen knife, beeswax, olive oil, diesel and a set of ebony hair sticks. Even if all of those were bought online and left a payment record we’re talking about millions of transactions in the UK alone to go through, even if we only look at the last few months… and our killer could have bought them all years ago for all we know. They may also have bought, or built, a taser but the least common items were most likely cash purchases. Shay hasn’t been able to find any possible link between Dominic Chuol and Chris Arnold either. No locations they both visited, or events they both attended, so that’s another dead end.”
“Chris was wounded twice during his time in the military, wasn’t he? Was he prescribed painkillers at those times?”
“He was. Once in Iraq and once in Afghanistan. But he was off pain medication pretty quickly both times, and we have no reason to believe he was using. I think anything like that would certainly have been noticed, at home and at work. No, the only connection seems to be that they both
killed people while serving in military forces and you can’t really compare their experiences there either. Whatever Dominic Chuol did in South Sudan, he was a child being abused and threatened at the time, not an adult volunteer.”
“Still, if our culprit didn’t know their histories, it’s quite a coincidence that he’d pick those two people. Arnold would have been easy to discover, because of the newspaper article about him, but Chuol? How would anyone here know about his past unless they heard him, or someone else, talking about it? Or already knew him?”
“Yeah, that one’s been bothering us too. Shay spent some time going through all the paperwork on Chuol’s amnesty appeal and hearing, looking at the names of everyone who knew about his past.”
“Nothing yet then, I presume?” I asked, and he just shook his head. “And McKinnon’s lot have run a blank on van rentals and thefts too, which at least eliminates that possibility.”
“Not quite. We can’t be absolutely certain that our culprit owns the van they used. Risky or not, they could still be using a stolen vehicle with false plates. On top of that, for all we know, they may have other vehicles they could use too.”
We were driving through the little village of Inchmore by then, and our GPS indicated that we should turn off onto the Old Telephone Exchange. Our first address was an isolated little place over a kilometre south of the village down the single lane road.
“Christ! The number of houses like this we have scattered around the area! It’s a bloody nightmare.”
“Tell me about it! Then add in all holiday cottages that are empty for months at a time. There’s certainly no shortage of good hiding places for our killer to hole up in with their captives.”
The first person on our list, a Mister Alastair Reynolds, was in. He turned out to be a forty-seven-year-old gentleman with emphysema, a lung disease that severely limited his physical movements. No, he didn’t have any objection to us looking around and he hoped we’d excuse the mess. He had a lady who came in to clean twice a week, because he couldn’t manage by himself. He had prescription inhalers and an emergency oxygen supply and it was clear that he couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs without becoming out of breath. The idea of him carrying another person about was patently absurd and, apart from the restrictions imposed by his medical condition, there was nothing in the least bit strange about his behaviour.
Having duly looked around and checked the van’s GPS history, we refused an offer of tea and were done there in under twenty minutes. Back in the car, Conall waited while I finished writing up my notes before getting us moving again.
“I think we can safely rule Mr Reynolds out once we’ve verified his condition,” he commented as we headed back to the main road.
“I’d say so,” I agreed. “You know, it might have saved us all a bit of time if your cousin had checked medical records for these people while he was at it.”
“You do know what his real job is, Caitlin?” He shot me an exasperated look. “Do you think his employers would be happy to hear he’d spent over a day hacking into local medical practice records just to save us a bit of time? And without much hope of it proving to be of any use?”
“Sorry, I guess not.” It was easy to forget that Shay Keane single-handedly helped to crack major cybercrime cases at an unprecedented rate. He was such a self-effacing oddball. “I expect he’s missing your da’s company, with the house to himself all day.”
“He’s used to spending a lot of time alone,” he told me dismissively. “Besides, Shay’s always got plenty of things to keep him busy. His assignments and his projects, the endless self-assigned chores around the house, at least two hours in the gym a day… he’s not exactly at a loose end. Those two don’t often sit around chatting during the day, anyway. They’re both far too busy for that.”
“Mmm,” I agreed. Daniel, in his own, very different way, certainly didn’t have any difficulty finding ways to keep himself actively occupied and entertained either.
I’d often found myself wondering about Conall’s mother, but as she was never mentioned by any of the Keane men, I was reluctant to broach the subject. I knew that Daniel had only been twenty-one when Conall had been born and had already earned his BSc by then. His nephew wasn’t the first, or only, member of the family to be fast-tracked into higher education.
I also knew that Daniel’s brother Diarmuid and his wife had stepped in to help with the new addition to the clan, while Daniel completed his MSc and then went on to gain his PhD too. Had Conall’s mother died? Or had she left her infant son to his father’s sole custody while she went off to focus on her own career, unencumbered by an unwanted child?
I had no idea. Whatever had happened there, Daniel had remained committedly single ever since. The entire subject, if not taboo, certainly wasn’t discussed in company.
The arrival of cousin Shay, eighteen months after Conall, didn’t seem to have changed the adult family dynamic at all. The boys had been a package deal throughout most of their childhoods, whichever relatives they happened to be staying with. Shay had chosen not to attend school, and if he’d missed out on the chance to develop his social skills by opting for an elective home education, he’d more than made up for it in time not wasted. There wasn’t a local authority in existence that could argue that Shay hadn’t received the finest education possible, even if it had been self-regulated. There had never been any question of a School Attendance Order being issued. After all, the boy had passed a barrage of GCSE examinations by the time he was ten, which had certainly ‘served its purpose and kept them off our backs’ as Conall chose to phrase it. Conall’s own school years, although often interrupted by travel, had been far more conventional. Despite regular periods of absence, I gathered that he’d consistently managed to achieve high marks with little apparent effort.
“I suppose I must have missed between three and four years of school over the years,” he’d admitted once, with a deprecatory shrug, “which just goes to show what a total waste of time a lot of it is.” I don’t think any of the Keanes realised how much an average student struggled and sweated to get by, or the kind of pressure we’d all felt subjected to as examinations loomed.
Conall certainly didn’t seem to think he was anything out of the ordinary. Above average, yes, but nothing special. Once you realised the standards he’d spent his whole life measuring himself by, that attitude began to make some kind of sense.
By five fifteen, we’d visited every house on our list, finding thirteen of the people we wished to speak with at home and seven out. We’d left calling cards for those. Eight had willingly given us permission to look around and we were satisfied that none of those were viable suspects. Of the other five, three remained of interest. All of those had been healthy, fit men between the ages of twenty five and forty and one of them had displayed noticeable uncontrolled muscle spasms or ‘nervous tics’ as well as restless eye movements. Like the other four people who’d refused us entry, he’d merely informed us that he’d willingly comply with a search warrant but did not welcome our presence on his property. He’d spoken quite calmly, despite the outward signs of agitation.
“He was probably just highly strung. Police officers make a lot of people uncomfortable at the best of times,” Conall commented as we drove back towards our station. “Some because they break the odd little law themselves now and then and others because they’re worried we might decide to try to frame them for something.”
“Well we can’t pretend that never happens. We’ve got our share of bad apples, just like every other profession.”
“Less, I’d hope, although our screening processes could do with some improvement.”
I couldn’t disagree with that statement.
“What do you think McKinnon will do once he’s got all the results from these visits?”
“I imagine he’ll run some background checks on the people who wouldn’t allow a search and then maybe send out an officer with a mental health nurse next time to get their profe
ssional assessment. Hopefully, the list will be a lot shorter by then. Eight out of thirteen isn’t a bad success rate, let’s just hope everyone else has done at least as well.”
No doubt the shortened list would go back to Shay too. And we’d certainly be keeping an eye on those properties if we hadn’t found Chris Arnold before next Tuesday. Unless we caught a lucky break, somehow, our chances of doing that weren’t looking good.
“Are you going to head home or write this lot up first?” I asked as we parked up at Old Perth Road.
“I think I’ll do that at home. I’m just going to pop in and see how the others got on first. If you want to grab your stuff and hang on, I can drop you off at your place after. I’ll only be a few minutes.” It wasn’t raining particularly hard, but it was cold, windy and already dark. A lift would be welcome.
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Inside, we discovered that Walker and Mills hadn’t had quite as uneventful an afternoon of it as the rest of us. They were both fine and seemed to be in good spirits but someone had managed to bruise Darren’s jaw and cut his lip for him.
“Our fifteenth stop,” DC Walker explained. “Our man was rather the worse for drink when we arrived and so were the two pals he had with him.”
“They were trying to get a barbecue going under the carport when we pulled up, the daft buggers,” Darren added. “We showed them our warrant cards and started asking our questions, but it was clear that they weren’t in a cooperative mood. We were invited to piss off several times.”
“Did the owner of the house clearly request that you remove yourselves from the property, or allow you ample time to do so?” Conall asked. Withdrawal of consent to remain was a perfectly legitimate right that anyone could exercise if we entered their property without a warrant, or without good reason to believe that a crime was being committed on the premises.
Death in the Black Wood Page 11