Death in the Black Wood by Oliver Davies (epub read online books .txt) 📕

and send a couple of your DCs to knock on doors. You know the drill as well as I do, Conall.”

Have you seen or heard anything suspicious, especially during the night, over the past week? Do you recall any passing traffic that seemed unusual to you? For example, anyone driving without lights or with darkened windows? James was right, it was the longest of long shots. If our killer hadn’t driven down past Essich, as Caitlin and I had done today, then they could only have reached our crime scene from the B862, either by driving down past Dores or by driving up from the south, before turning off onto the bottom end of the single lane road running through the woods. Doing so quietly, at a time when everyone was probably asleep, they could easily have avoided any notice at all. Those woods were under the control of the Highland Council, and there wasn’t a house within a mile of where we’d parked up near the scene.

James made a low, frustrated grunting noise.

“Until we get that facial image out to the public and receive the post mortem report, we’re pretty much stalled on this one. So yes, get the door-to-door enquiries out of the way and your cousin working on the facial image. Once he has that, he might even be able to find out who our victim was himself. Apart from that, I think you should just focus on your other cases for now, at least until we have some leads we can actually follow. Meanwhile, I’ll call this Mike Nash guy in to give a statement, and I think I’ll give DI Philips a bigger team to start compiling a list of people resident in the area who have received treatment for the kind of psychiatric disorders that are ringing our internal alarm bells. If our instincts are right on this one, there’s a decent chance our killer may be among them.”

That made good sense, and McKinnon had a far larger staff at his disposal for that kind of time consuming work than I did. Yes, it was possible that our victim had been driven in from outside the area but the chances of this being a local crime were far greater. The further you travelled with an abductee, or a body, the higher the risk of getting caught became. Petrol stops, breakdowns, accidents, any one of those could result in unwanted scrutiny. Neither of us wanted to voice what else we were both thinking. If we were dealing with a total nut job, then the likelihood of a repeat performance, if we didn’t catch them first, was alarmingly high. I’d have to make sure to do some digging into cold cases too, to see if anything caught my attention. Just because this was the first victim we’d come across, that didn’t mean our killer couldn’t have struck elsewhere in the past. Unless, of course, the staging of the whole scene had been nothing but an elaborate ploy to throw us off the scent. God! I hated this one already.

Leaving James to get on with his side of things, I collected Caitlin, and we headed back to Old Perth Road. It was getting a bit late to send anyone out to knock on doors today so I set Walker and Collins to searching through the NCA’s UK wide missing persons database, leaving Mills and Bryce to keep on with the routine jobs they’d all been doing before I got back. Caitlin could write up the results of our little trip down to Fort Augustus, whilst I got on with my new, more urgent little task list.

Back at my own desk, I called the pathologist’s office and put in my priority request for a full, 3D laser scan of the victim’s head. I was assured that I’d have it before lunchtime tomorrow. I then pulled up a detailed map of the area around the crime scene and looked for houses and farms close enough to our possible routes to be worth making enquiries at. There weren’t many. Once I’d completed my list, I emailed it over to Walker. She could take one of the others with her and get onto that first thing in the morning. As I’d be heading home in an hour myself, I decided to wait until I could talk to Shay at the house, rather than call him from the office.

For now, I decided it was worth spending a little time checking through the PND for unsolved murders that bore any resemblance to what we’d come across today. Even there, again, my lack of information was limiting my search parameters far too much for my liking. I still didn’t know what those markings carved into the chest might have been. The piercing of the eyes seemed significant somehow, but there was no guarantee that our killer, if they had struck before, hadn’t used entirely different methods. I certainly didn’t find any cases where the victim had been blinded in that manner, although there were quite a few where the body had been set on fire to destroy evidence. If any of those had been connected with our new case, the link wasn’t apparent.

James had been right. Until we had more to go on, there was nothing useful left to do. I decided to call it a day and head for home. With any luck, Shay would at least be able to give me some valuable tips on what kind of deranged mentality we might be dealing with.

Four

I found Shay working in the little electronics lab he’d set up in the northern section of what had once been a huge dining room, back in the days when our place had been operating as a large, functioning B&B. He’d decided to make two separate rooms out of that, when he’d been planning the layout of the place, reserving the larger section for our home gym.

He was fiddling about with one of his half dozen prototype