After a shower and a breakfast smoothie I settled down at my laptop with a nice cup of my favourite tea and started checking through my search results. None of the four parents even worked for the same company, let alone in the same building, and the kids’ schools were a negative too. Not even a substitute teacher in common over the past few months. There was one item of interest though. The Millers’ eldest son and the Dawsons’ middle kid, a daughter, were both members of an under sixteen online coding club. They’d been teamed up with four other kids developing a game together for the past two months.
Everyone has a right to their privacy, and I didn’t like to snoop but I couldn’t ignore a link like that once it had come to my attention. I hacked their chat history.
For a bunch of fourteen-year-olds they weren’t doing too badly, but I didn’t see any aspiring stars of the coding world among them. The stuff they were working on was pretty basic beginner’s stuff, coded in Python for use on different platforms. They’d all friended each other on Facebook, so I hacked those accounts too.
Yeah, they’d talked about their holiday plans and how great it was to be getting some extra time off school during term time. Monday and yesterday had been school holidays in Inverness, anyway. The Miller boy would miss five days of school and the Dawson girl only three. Her family was only away for a week. They’d left on Friday evening, the Millers had flown off to America three days earlier.
I went back to the club website and found links to a forum where anyone running into problems with their projects could ask for advice. You wouldn’t need to be even half as good as I was to hack into the site, gather IP addresses and send out feelers to the kids who posted questions on there. Did I think our killer had the coding skills to do that? Or that, if he did, he’d be careless enough to use them this way? Well, the odds against him having the skills were quite high to begin with, apart from which, if he did possess them, it would make more sense to hack into booking sites and look for airline and hotel reservations.
Right, scrap that. I was looking for complex solutions when I should be looking for simple ones. I returned my attention to the Facebook accounts and pulled both kids’ friends list to cross check. Apart from the other four coders working on their game, they only had one other ‘friend’ in common.
According to the information on that person’s page, Brad MacRoberts was a fifteen-year-old amateur coder living in Dundee. Well, that was easily checked. I soon discovered that there was nobody of that age with that name living there. All the information on the account was fake. Well, there were plenty like that out there, some set up by different law enforcement agencies and others by even less scrupulous people.
My phone beeped at that point. Conall’s team had found the house our killer had holed up in last night. Could I come down and do my SOCO thing? Everyone else was busy. I fired off a quick reply, packed up my laptop and got moving. This could wait and that job couldn’t. The sooner we got everything to forensics, the sooner we might get some answers.
Conall and Caitlin were in his car when I pulled up behind them in Uncle Danny’s Toyota. I climbed out and walked over to his window. “Stuffing your faces again?” I asked as he opened the door.
“Late breakfast, courtesy of my thoughtful cousin.” He popped a last bite into his mouth and climbed out as I moved back to give him room. “I’ll eat the rest for lunch after we’re done here. Did you get some sleep?”
“Enough for now.” Caitlin was climbing out too. “Hello, Sergeant Murray.”
“Good afternoon, Mr Keane.”
“Are you two ever going to get tired of that?” Conall complained.
“Not on the job,” I told him, “even when it’s just us. Once you fall into a habit like that, it’s too easy to slip. How’s the leg, Sergeant?” I didn’t mind helping Caitlin with her training, in private, while Conall worked with his less advanced DCs down at the gym, but I’d warned her before we started that she’d probably take a few bruises. Caitlin was a good sport, and she knew it was for her own good. I wasn’t going to break any of her bones or anything, but she had to feel a blow landing to know how badly she’d failed to protect herself. We didn’t want some scumbag getting the better of her in a real fight.
“The leg is absolutely fine.” She scowled at me for reminding her of the mistake that had allowed me to land that particular kick last week. I hadn’t even been moving that quickly either. I played fair. “We believe our suspect entered the house from the rear garden, and there’s a kit bag waiting inside for you.”
We all gloved up, ugh, and went in.
Even though I was certain it would be a waste of time, I checked both the front door and the patio doors for prints. Doubtless the few I collected belonged either to the owners or to the estate agency staff, but it had to be done. The same went for the cupboard where the bag had been left and various other likely surfaces. I thought the bathroom might be more promising. If you were going to take your gloves off anywhere it would surely be in there. He must have at least taken a piss while he’d been hiding in here.
The toilet bowl was filled with blue water, with streaks of the cleaning liquid still showing above the surface, running down from the rim. I lifted the seat. No little curly hairs hiding under there either. The place was clean. The bottle of toilet cleaner was in the cupboard under the washbasin, and I checked that for prints too. Conall followed me around with the bag, passing me things and holding my phone while I lifted prints.
After I’d got my shots of the inside of the patio doors in the living room and lifted prints from the handle, I slid that open so we could check it from the outside. I pulled up the magnifier on my phone camera and got a really good look at the outside of the lock.
“It’s a little scratched up. Whatever tool he used to force it probably made those little marks. Usually you’d only expect to see scratches on the inside of a garden door like this one.” People often fumbled their keys a little. Most locks had some scratches around the keyhole. The little rear garden was fully enclosed so people would only use this door to access the garden. There was no gate in the back wall which was only about eight feet high. Easy enough to get over.
We were standing on a flagged patio area that ran the length of the rear of the bungalow. Most of the garden beyond that was lawned, with flower borders on the other three sides. The grass on the lawn was short, but I could still see patches that had been flattened by passing feet. Conall was eyeing them too.
“Let's see if we can spot where he came over the wall,” he suggested. That turned out to be easy. All the soil on the back border apart from one small patch was topped by a loosely crumbled layer. The patch that wasn’t was pressed flat. “Looks like he took the trouble to stamp it all down after he landed.”
“No clear footprints,” I agreed. “Yet another little display of excessive caution. He can’t have expected anyone to be checking this place out today, not after all the dodging about he did last night.” Once I’d photographed the ground there, we hoisted ourselves up to get a look at the other side of the wall. There was a narrow, tarmacked lane running along the back of the houses. Nothing there for us. “Come on, let’s see what that key you were given does in that lock.”
“Busted,” he decided after turning it back and forth a few times to no effect. “I’ll let the estate agents know. Is it worth removing?”
I shook my head. “Even if we took it apart, we wouldn’t be able to identify what he used on it. Come on, let’s have a look at that bag shall we.”
Caitlin had soon become fed up of trailing around after us and had retreated to the car to grab a tea from her thermos. Conall had promised to call her when we were ready to start on the bag, so he went to fetch her while I spread out another plastic sheet beside the first one. This was our very best chance of lifting a fingerprint belonging to our suspect and of collecting a sample of their DNA. The fact that he’d left this bag behind might indicate that he didn’t care if we found it, which could mean that he
knew he wasn’t on any records, or it might not. The bag may only have been found weeks or months from now, and even then, why would anyone link it to our murder investigation? Why would anyone connect this bungalow to a crime that had been committed two miles away in a different neighbourhood?
There were prints on the strap and on parts of the outside of the bag, as if someone had grabbed it by the body at some point when it was empty.
“All the same set? One person?” Conall asked as I flicked through the photographs I’d just taken.
“One person,” I confirmed. “Hand me the tape and latent print cards again please.” I lifted a dozen good clean samples, numbering them before handing them to Conall to slip between protective slides and slot into the case.
Now, for the contents.
The scarf was on top so I lifted that out carefully first. “We’ve got a few hairs stuck to this.” I laid it out and snapped some close ups. “Tweezers and small bags, please.”
Once I was done with it, I bagged up the scarf with the smaller bags containing the samples tucked in with it and turned my attention to the jacket. It was a common Go Outdoor brand coat, not some rarely found obscure label or high end expensive piece of gear. I plucked another three hairs from the fleecy lining of the hood. We had quite a few fully intact ones now. Our man kept his hair quite short.
I checked all the pockets, but those had been emptied. There was a small hole in the corner of the right hand main pocket, though, and I turned the jacket over to pat at the lining beneath it. Yep, a couple of little things had slipped through. I widened the hole a little and fished them out. One small white pill and one crumpled piece of thin paper. Conall held a bag for me to drop the pill into, and I unfolded the paper. A supermarket receipt, somewhat faded. Well, my camera filters could make that easier to read.
“The Tesco Metro on Tomnahurich Street at three twenty two on the afternoon of November the seventeenth. Looks like he popped in to pick up cigarettes. He’s a Marlboro man, unless they were for someone else.”
“That’s close to the Sally Army that Dominic Chuol was visiting back then.”
“Less than two minutes on foot, yeah. Have we got a bag big enough to take this jacket?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We’ll have to put it back in the sports bag when you’ve finished going through it.”
The trousers were next, black denim jeans, and I went through the same process with those, turning them inside out once I’d checked the outside.
“I’ve got some small stains around the front, up by the waistband. Hand me the LED light source, will you?” I set a 450nm wavelength and ran the light over the cloth. As I’d thought, those splotches were glowing far too brightly to be drips of urine. Our killer had come in his pants, and recently too. I didn’t need to tell Conall and Caitlin that. They knew what those brightly glowing spots were as well as I did. We weren’t assuming anything, but we were all thinking the same thing.
Did the act of killing get our guy off?
I took more photographs while Conall held the light for me and then bagged the trousers up. The trainers had some blood spatter on them, and I scraped some of that into a tube after photographing them from various angles. That left one other thing in the bag, a large, transparent zip-lock garment bag with another one tucked inside it. From what we could see it wasn’t hard to guess what those had carried. Apart from the dark, pooling blood at the bottom of the inner bag and the streaks of blood and hairs stuck to the sides, there were some bits of tissue and bone in there too, probably from around the bottom of the neck area. I ran a light around the inside of the sports bag to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. It was empty. The bags hadn’t leaked at all. I folded the jacket and put it back in.
We were done here. Once everything was packed up, we went back out to the cars and Conall packed everything away in his boot.
“Are you heading home now?” he asked me as I tore the detestable, sweaty latex gloves off and stuffed them into a pocket of the kit bag.
“Actually no,” I told him as I wiped my hands on the cloth he offered me. “I should follow you back to Old Perth Road and print off these photos to pack up with the samples before you send them over to the lab.”
“You sure?” he asked. “I can do that if you send them to me.”
“That’d just be a waste of time. I’ve got all the sample numbers to match them with stored in here.” I tapped my head. “Why? Is there some reason you don’t want your DCs to see me?”
“Not at all! In fact I’d be delighted to finally introduce you to the daft buggers.”
“What have they been saying?” I stared at him suspiciously. “Is this because they know I was flying the drones last night?”
“They were speculating on the chances of you being some kind of covert agent earlier,” Caitlin admitted, “and Conall caught them at it. Well, not Mills, he pretty much told them that even if you were, it was none of their idiot, nosy business.”
“Did he?” Conall said, sounding pleased. “Good for him.”
“So I only need to feel offended by the other three, then?”
“How are they to know that you detest those guys? Or why?” I supposed he had a point there. “Be nice,” my cousin warned me.
“Aren’t I always?” I said innocently and stalked off to get into Uncle Danny’s Toyota. I could play nicely, but I didn’t have to mean it. How would you like it if you found out that people you’d never met already thought you might be a total dick?
Eighteen
“Do you want me to call ahead and ask them to set up a desk for him?” Caitlin asked me as I pulled out and we set off back towards the station with Shay on our tail.
“No, don’t bother. He’ll be using his laptop anyway and he can send all his files to a printer wirelessly.” We had a couple of unused spare desks in the main office. He could take his pick, which meant he’d probably choose the one we’d shoved into the back corner out of the way.
It was only ten minutes’ drive back to the station, and we were soon across The Ness Bridge and heading down Castle Road. The River Ness was a modest waterway, less than a hundred metres wide as it ran through town, except for down by The Ness Islands where it widened a little. You could cross between those islands using a series of Victorian footbridges, and there was even a miniature railway that carried tourists and trippers up and down the pretty little park that split the river. The Highland Hospice people ran that and all the proceeds went into keeping their palliative care facilities running.
“Tesco only keep their CCTV footage for a month so we won’t get anything from there,” I commented. “Still it’s useful to know our man was hanging around there back then. I think we should probably pay the Sally Army another call with some stills from last night, once Shay’s cleaned up a couple of the best ones for us. One of them may recognise that jacket or those trainers. We should go and talk to that Eric guy who first took Dominic there too. We might get more out of him than Philips did last month.”
“Before or after we know what that pill Shay found in the jacket is?”
“Let’s wait until we have the results on that. From what Philips said in his report, the old guy’s a habitual user. Maybe he even introduced Dominic to his supplier?” As the new man in town, it was likely that Dominic had been looking for a reliable connection from the moment he arrived in Inverness. He might have been working up to approaching Eric on the night he’d saved him from getting beaten up by those young thugs. We knew that Dominic hadn’t been sleeping rough before he’d rented that room up in Merkinch. He’d been paying for a bunk in a succession of cheap hostels. The likeliest reason for him to be out late that night was that he’d been spending some hours during the daytime checking out the street beggars for likely people to approach.
Once we’d parked, Shay came over and stared at our extensive building complex while I got the kit bag and the bag with his samples out of the boot.
“Is Anderson in here today?” he asked.
<
br /> “No idea.” I handed him the bag of samples, and he slung it on his free shoulder. “He comes and goes a lot and I never just bump into him, anyway. The Divisional HQ main offices are over at that end. Different entrance.”
Our Chief Superintendent’s other five areas only had Area Commanders in residence but Divisional HQ was in Inverness, the capital of the Highlands. McKinnon controlled his area from Burnett Road while Anderson supervised all six from this place. Like I’d told Shay, I never saw Anderson, well not unless he summoned me. We might as well have been in different stations, miles apart. My little office suite was tucked away on the far side of the complex to the main administrative block. Shay followed us to our entrance and past the desk and down the hallway, head ducked in his habitual public manner.
“Have you managed to clean up any stills from last night yet?” I asked him.
“I’ve got three processing. They should be ready by the time I’m done here.” I opened our door, and we went in. Mills and Bryce were back from the airport and all four of my DCs looked suitably busy. Good. “They’d already be ready if I hadn’t shut my laptop down to come into town. So this is where you spend your days, huh?” He took in the room with a single sweeping glance. “I think I prefer my office.”
“Yes, well, we can’t all work from the comfort of home. Which desk do you want?”
“I’ll take that one.” The back corner, as expected. He went over to dump his bags, and I trailed after him.
“Toilets, break room, my office.” I pointed to the doors. “Have you eaten today yet?”
“A smoothie earlier.” He took his jacket off and slung it over the back of the chair. “Why? Are you offering me lunch? I didn’t pack you anything I’d want to eat.”
“We can order in for you if you like. I wouldn’t want you to faint after all your exertions on our behalf. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team.” They’d all been sitting with their ears pricked since we’d walked in, trying not to look our way too often or too obviously.
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