Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “Almost non-existent.” He didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second before replying. “You said in your email that Eric told you the scar was smooth and pale. A burn deep enough to leave a permanent mark like that takes a long time to heal that well. He could have had it for years and if it was domestic abuse, or parental negligence, from when he was a kid, I doubt the person responsible would have taken him to A&E. It would be a hell of a job to find such a record, anyway. It’s not worth pursuing.”

  “So you’re going to see what you can do with our composite then?” I asked, anticipating the obvious.

  “Yeah. I’ll build a virtual 3D head from it and use that to produce fake ID photos to run through the DVLA, see how many possible matches they throw up. I’ll need to keep tweaking it and trying again, so don’t hold your breath, Con.”

  Leaving him to get on with that, I called McKinnon. As I’d expected, Shay’s worries bothered James too, but not enough to prevent him from deciding to go public again.

  “I think we have to release it now, Conall. Once we know where to find him, our suspect won’t have much chance to strike again before we bring him in.” I wasn’t sure if he was saying that to reassure himself, me or both of us.

  “Once we know,” I agreed, “but it might not be that simple. He may have grown a full beard by now, dyed his hair or grown or shaved it, taken to wearing sunglasses… and you saw the scarf in the footage from Tuesday night. Nobody would blink if he kept using something like that, with the weather being so cold just now.”

  “Aye, and we don’t know how long he’s been living wherever he is either. I’m aware of all that Conall. I still don’t see how we can justify keeping that sketch to ourselves. The more people who see it, the better our chances of identifying him are.”

  Every police officer in Inverness would be looking out for that face as soon as James sent an all departments email out. He’d pass it on to every Divisional Commander in Scotland to circulate too, and perhaps even over the border as well. As far as it went, that was all well and good, but a public alert vastly multiplied our chances of a genuine sighting.

  Apart from the television broadcasts and the newspaper exposure, that sketch would be in every consumer outlet in the area within the next twenty-four hours too, as Shay had known it would. We didn’t have our suspect’s fingerprints on record, which meant we probably didn’t have his DNA either. When we finally did get the results we were waiting for from forensics, their only use may be to strengthen our case for the Procurator Fiscal’s office once our man was in custody.

  Maybe the lab boys might find some rare residue on the clothing we’d recovered, or in the grips on the soles of those trainers that would help us but, apart from that, there wasn’t much else left to hope for from that source.

  Our sketch and latest appeal was shown on Thursday evening and McKinnon’s people were manning the phone lines and typing up the transcripts all through the evening and the following day. Reading through those as they were added in, I had a rough idea by lunchtime on Friday of how successful that appeal had been so far. Crank calls aside, very few people were claiming to have seen our man and those we could take seriously were all from staff at different supermarkets and mini markets widely scattered around Inverness. I thought most of those calls were probably genuine, and they all had one thing in common, a repeating refrain of, ‘I can’t be sure, because he had a scarf over his lower face, but from what I did see, he could have been the man you’re looking for.’

  Even when doing no more than going food shopping, our suspect was being careful. The very fact that he seemed to be visiting so many different places was another indication of how cautious he was being. He didn’t even have a preferred local store where he shopped regularly. On the contrary, he seemed prepared to drive miles out of his way to avoid creating any kind of a pattern. I just hoped that those calls would continue to come in as new possible sightings were reported in the same way. Like that, we had a chance of sending the nearest car to whichever supermarket he was in and catching him that way. The fact that we’d heard nothing from anyone claiming to be a friend, colleague or neighbour spoke volumes. His neighbours either didn’t know him well enough to recognise him or they hadn’t seen our appeal. As for friends and relatives, as Shay had warned us, he may have none here.

  My cousin hadn’t been kidding when he’d told me not to hold my breath, but he finally sent me the results of his DVLA searches early on Friday afternoon. He’d made fractional changes to the width and length of the facial bone structure, the placement of the cheekbones and the size of the eyes, nose and mouth, running over thirty slightly altered versions of our composite through the system. After doing all of that, he’d found nine possible matches. Six supposedly living in England, one in Northern Ireland, and two in Scotland, both over a hundred miles from Inverness. Three of the nine had a mole in roughly the right place. The other six all had beards, so it was impossible to know if they did or not.

  Thorough as ever, next to the driving licence photo for each one, he’d provided an altered version with the same hair and clean-shaven features as the original sketch. You could see, looking at those, what he’d meant about the measurements being a key factor for successful biometric scanning. If he hadn’t made any changes to his virtual model, I doubted he’d have found any of them. Even at a glance, similar or not, you could see that these were nine different people.

  ‘Can you show these to Eric McAndrew?’ he asked in the accompanying email. ‘Even if he’s not satisfied that any of them are the man he saw, knowing which ones are closest will help guide my next set of alterations to try again with. I’m looking into this batch, for now, but we might not have the right man yet. Just to give you an idea of why I’m doing it this way, I ran a test search with a filter allowing for a five per cent variation on every key measurement. That came back with over six thousand results.’

  Christ! Yes, that gave me a good idea of the scope of the problem alright. Five per cent? What was five per cent of the width of a forehead or cheekbones or jawline? Or a millimetre here or there in the spacing of the eyes or the length of a nose? Not much. But even that had brought up over six thousand ‘possibles?’ Slow or not, manually altering each feature, one by one, as Shay was doing, was a far more efficient way of going about things.

  Caitlin and I went straight back to Friar’s Street after I received that email, but we were out of luck this time. Eric was not at home. I buzzed the other flats in turn until I got one of his neighbours on the intercom and told him who we were. At least that got us inside and allowed me to push a note under the door of Eric’s flat. If the old man owned a phone, this would all have been a lot easier. I texted Shay to advise him of the delay, and we went back to Old Perth Road with nothing accomplished. Maybe Reic McAndrew would be home again in time for us to catch him later in the afternoon. The neighbour had said he’d go down there, if he heard Eric come in, and even told us he’d lend him his phone to call me on.

  Back at the office, I went back to reading through the transcripts of the phone calls, making a note of the details that each caller had been able to provide to add to a rapidly expanding list. If it had been our man in each of these possible sightings, he owned a hell of a lot of jackets and scarves.

  I only broke off from that to check new emails as they came in. The forensic pathologist wasn’t ready to offer us a full report on their study of Chris Arnold’s head yet but had sent us a brief on a few points of interest. The implements that had pierced Arnold’s eyes had been the sawn-off tips of two WW1 British army socket bayonets. The victim had lost enough blood to cause death before decapitation had occurred. Whether our killer had used the same technique to do that this time as he had with Dominic Chuol was something we couldn’t determine, not without the rest of the remains to examine. The piercing of the brain by the bayonet tips thrust through the orbital sockets had probably occurred within moments of actual death. There was also another minimum intensity PMCT projecti
on attached too. As before, Ogham script had been carved into the victim’s flesh, on the forehead this time. The characters were smaller, of necessity, but the cuts were as precise and legible as before.

  ‘Second moon, fallen warrior, Warriors’ Head.’ Shay’s reply to the email I sent him came back quickly ‘In Irish again. I wonder what he meant by ‘fallen’ there?’ Well, a fallen warrior usually implied a dead one, and Chris Arnold was certainly dead. I’d have to ask my cousin later why he thought it might have some other significance.

  Eric McAndrew didn’t call us before I left the office that evening, or answer our buzzing when Caitlin and I popped round there again before I dropped her off at home.

  “Maybe he’s having dinner at a friend’s house, or with that niece he mentioned? The one who was looking after his books for him,” Caitlin suggested.

  It seemed likely. It was going up to seven by then.

  “Let’s just hope he calls me later, or tomorrow. I don’t mind coming back in again to show him these photos. The sooner the better.”

  As things turned out, neither of us saw Eric McAndrew alive again

  Twenty-One

  The Ally

  This was all wrong, very, very wrong. Things had gone so well on Tuesday, even better than last time. I hadn’t felt as nervous, for one thing, and I’d remembered everything all by myself without needing to be reminded of any of it. The Companion had been delighted with me and made sure I knew it. It had been the best night of my life.

  Then they’d shown that photograph on the news on Wednesday night. What? Where the hell had that come from? That was me! Me! I knew where too. That was my second car, on the edge of the shot in the foreground. I’d only left the head on that pole a couple of minutes before reaching there, just as I’d been told to. Who had taken that picture? And from where? There hadn’t been anyone around and I hadn’t seen any lighted windows either. Had they been hiding in a darkened room, or in a nearby car? How far away could you zoom in from to get a picture like that, anyway?

  I had no idea.

  Apart from wondering about that, what really concerned me was the question of why anyone would want to take that shot in the first place. Why photograph a random guy of no possible interest to anyone walking home late? Something wasn’t right.

  ‘Calm down. This isn’t your fault. I should have anticipated they’d try something like this.’ They? It took me a second to realise what it meant.

  “Your enemies?”

  ‘Our enemies. What? You don’t think one of your own kind could have found us, do you?’

  No, I really didn’t. I hadn’t shown my face anywhere for months, and the Companion had been super careful this time. We’d both known that the police were trying to find me, not that they possibly could. Did the aliens know where I was now? Were they watching the house?

  ‘No and no.’ It sounded almost amused, totally unconcerned. ‘They must have taken someone living nearby as soon as they located the head. They must have implanted a device that would only activate when their agent expired. Clever of them to think of that. Nobody followed us from there though. They lost you again as soon as we drove away… and they still haven’t seen your face.’

  Reassuring as it was to hear that, I still didn’t like it.

  “But if they’re putting devices like that into the people they’ve taken now, how can we keep going? They’ll be watching for us next time and there might be a lot more of them waiting to catch us by then.”

  ‘True, but they’ve been foolish, revealing their hand like this. They shouldn’t have given that picture to the human authorities. Now that we know what they’re up to, I can take steps to prevent it from happening again. Trust me. Have I ever failed you yet?’

  No, it hadn’t, but it wasn’t the one in danger here. It could leave me whenever it wanted to, if the situation became too dangerous for it to stay. I wasn’t its first human agent, it had told me that.

  ‘I do not abandon my charges! Your predecessors expired naturally and were duly mourned.’ Now, I’d made it angry. I flinched, waiting for the first stab of pain to strike, but nothing happened. I heard a quiet sigh. ‘I am not angry with you, I am saddened, by my memories, and by your mistrust of me. You are afraid, but I need you to listen to me. Everything will be fine, do you understand? This changes nothing. We must complete our task.’

  Eventually, I calmed down enough to see reason. It was right. All that had happened was that the hostiles had gained an advantage and then foolishly thrown it away again. I didn’t even have any of those clothes or that bag, any more. Those had been left in that empty house. It would probably be weeks before they were found, and they wouldn’t lead anyone to me, anyway.

  I’d thought that the whole business of stealing the two cars to use and finding a ‘safe’ house had all been a bit elaborate until the Companion had told me about how much orbiting satellites could see of what went on down here. Then there were the police to worry about too. They couldn’t be everywhere but they might have got lucky, especially if we’d been less cautious. The Companion was right, I needed to trust its knowledge and experience. The work we were doing was too important to let my stupidity mess things up.

  ‘I’ve been analysing my records of everyone who saw you before I told you to start growing that beard three months ago, when we started watching our first target. There was a man, an old one. He saw you three times, at that place where destitute humans went for free food and clothing… and you were wearing the jacket we used yesterday too.’

  “The old junkie? Eric?” The other bums asking me for cigs when I hung around there had told me about him. Cigarettes tasted foul, and it had taken me a while to be able to smoke one without coughing, but it had been a good way of striking up little conversations and picking up information. I’d kept track of him since then too. “The police went to talk to him last month. He wouldn’t have had anything to tell them.”

  “Not then, no, but they will go again now. They’ll show that picture to everyone they spoke with last time.”

  “He won’t remember me. That was three months ago, and I was just a guy smoking a fag that he happened to run into in the same place a couple of times.”

  “Some humans have better memories than others. He is the only risk I have discovered after going over everything. We should eliminate him.” That startled me. The Companion had never asked me to kill a person before. I didn’t think I was capable of doing something like that. “Don’t be ridiculous. He is old and sick and will die soon, anyway. Better him than millions of others. You can give him some of those pills he likes so much and make it peaceful and enjoyable for him. It will be a kindness, really.” Sensing my continuing reluctance, it relented. “Very well. We will go there tomorrow. If you find that you cannot kill him, then I will do it for you.”

  I felt much better about that idea. I’d rather lose time while my Companion did that than kill a harmless old man myself.

  Soft, useless human! I was so tired of nursing this pathetic, gullible specimen along. I could hardly wait until the whole, vile species was wiped off the surface of this stupid planet.

  The worthless old man did not live alone in his residence, but I could move stealthily. It was easy enough to open up my chosen window at the rear of the building and slip into the rooms allotted to him. I liked wearing this body, controlling its every move. It felt strong, healthy and powerful. After hours of sitting watching the house, it was good to be moving again.

  The thought of killing was also physically arousing the body, and that was pleasant too. It would have been even better if I could have done to my current target what I’d made my pet human do to those other two. Their fear and pain had been delicious.

  The target was sleeping and did not stir as I entered. He only woke up when he felt my weight fall on him, my hand clamped firmly over his mouth and nose as the needle went into a throbbing vein in his neck. Lots and lots of those little white pills we’d taken from the first target, all in a
deadly little solution, rushing through his bloodstream. Oh yes, there was the fear, and the recognition too.

  Well, I’d already known he’d remembered this face. I’d watched through borrowed eyes when the police car brought him home yesterday afternoon. I’d directed my stupid human to take us back to his own house again after that. We’d seen what we needed to see by then and I knew how we could get into that flat. Seeing that sketch on the Thursday evening news had been a shock. It had certainly sent my pet into a wild panic. I’d had to knock him out when I couldn’t calm him down. Pathetic creature! It wasn’t as if anyone would recognise him now, even if they saw him. I’d made him darken his hair, and it was longer now too. No more scarves from now on though, they’d served their purpose, and the beard had grown well. He’d need to cover his eyes in public, to be safe, but that was easy enough.

  I moved my hand a little so the ‘Eric’ creature could breathe through his nose, but I wasn’t about to let him cry out. This body was heavy, and I pressed it against him as he died, making it even more of a struggle for him to suck in any air. I must say, humans had one good thing going for them. Their reproductive systems generated some really nice sensations. Maybe I should let myself have some real fun tonight, but not here. No, I had a much better idea of what to do while I was in control of this body. I’d had my human watch some of the police detectives over the past few weeks. I knew where a lot of them lived. Once I’d finished here, maybe I should pay one of them a visit. It wouldn’t do any harm to let them all know that I didn’t appreciate their efforts to interfere with my work.

  It took the old man a while to die but he lost consciousness quite quickly. After that it was very dull, just waiting for his breathing to finally stop. I’d been too late getting to him to prevent the one thing I’d wanted to. That picture was already out there now. Still, that had made me want to kill him even more than before, the interfering old fool. It wasn’t very satisfying either. His death had been far too quick and easy. Call it an appetiser then.