Death in the Black Wood Read online

  The pleasure built and built as he carved the carefully memorised odd markings into the creature’s chest. It made some muffled noises as he did that as if it could feel pain, which it most certainly couldn’t. Things like this one could turn nerve signals on and off at will once they’d properly established themselves in a new host body. He thought that it really might be afraid now, though. Once he’d finished his work, it wouldn’t be able to escape and jump to another person when its current stolen body died. It had probably realised by then that it was actually going to perish here tonight.

  The Companion kept quiet as he worked, but he knew he was doing well because it just kept pouring more and more rewarding feelings of pleasure through every nerve in his body. The sensation was as wonderful as their punishments were terrible. His dick had hardened so rigidly that even the brush of his underwear against his skin as he moved was a delicious torment. He spasmed, moaning, as he struggled to focus on his task and finish the last marking.

  The Companion just chuckled indulgently. He knew that it found the human reproductive system grotesque, but it did like to test that his still worked properly sometimes. They would want to breed him with some carefully selected, promising females after he’d proved himself sufficiently. The Companions had high hopes for the progeny he himself might produce. He wasn’t too sure how he felt about that, but it wasn’t as if he’d have any choice in the matter. Besides, his Companion would make sure that he enjoyed the experiences, whether the chosen candidates were attractive or not.

  “Have the needles ready.” Another reminder. Yes, he’d forgotten, for a moment, that he’d need to be quick with those. They mustn’t let this thing get away to kill again. He fished the pouch out of his pocket and carefully unwrapped the two ebony sticks with their needle-sharp points. He put the blunt ends between his teeth to secure them and began to cut down the creature’s left forearm from elbow to wrist. After he’d done that a few times, the radial and ulnar arteries were thoroughly sliced open, and he started on the other arm. His reward, this time, was even greater than before, a sensation almost too intense to bear, and it just went on and on as he stood back to watch the black streams of blood pouring down and the light fading from those disconcertingly human-looking eyes. Almost, almost… now! He took a dart in each hand and rammed them as hard as he could into the eyeballs, blocking off the alien’s last means of escape as its stolen body expired.

  “Perfect!” He had to steady himself by resting his gloves on the body’s shoulders as another series of orgasmic spasms shook him. The Companion was very, very pleased. That filthy black aura had ceased its agitated writhing and winked out the moment the final blow had been dealt. He’d done everything right! It had worked!

  After that, the rest was easy. He poured diesel all over the body and emptied the rest of the can into a shallow wooden bowl at the foot of the tree. The length of rope he’d prepared by soaking it in olive oil and coating it with beeswax would buy him a good twenty minutes before the flame reached the bowl. By then, he’d be miles away. The fire wouldn’t burn for long anyway and might not even be noticed. Who would see it out here?

  Still, he’d been told to be careful. The Companion wouldn’t be able to free him if he was captured by well-intentioned but ignorant human agents, and it would be very angry with him if he let that happen. There was so much work for them still to do! The area around Inverness had become infested with hostile aliens lately. That was because of all the new tech companies that had set up here in recent years, or so he’d been told. The further humans managed to advance, the higher the risk was of them discovering what was happening.

  He packed the empty fuel can away before lighting his fuse. Only high winds or very heavy rain could extinguish the flame that began to burn along the rope, and there was no danger of either of those tonight.

  Nobody would understand, he knew. It was sad that he had to work in secret like this and that the media would report nothing but horrible, ignorant lies about him. It would have been nice to be given the recognition and the gratitude he deserved. After all, he and only a handful of others like him were all the protection the Companions could offer this backward, isolated planet. He heard a low, amused laugh and smiled abashedly. The Companion was right. Most humans weren’t advanced enough to be ready for the truth. They weren’t like him.

  “The enemy will be on their guard after this,” he was told as he made his way back to the van, “We’ll need to be even more careful next time.” The warning didn’t particularly worry him. All he had to do was keep following the instructions he was given, and everything would go as smoothly as this first mission had. He would have many more nights like this to look forward to. The thought was exhilarating.

  Two

  Caitlin and I were driving back up the A82 from Fort Augustus when McKinnon called me on that Thursday afternoon in mid-January. That call was the beginning of the case that would give us both occasional nightmares for years to come, although neither of us knew it then.

  We’d driven down to Fort Augustus to check up on a possible lead on a series of car thefts that had been sweeping the area since before Christmas. That had turned out to be a dead-end, as Caitlin and I had both half expected it to be. Our potential ‘chop shop’ had turned out to be an amateur enthusiast lovingly restoring a couple of vintage cars they’d picked up cheap at auctions. All of their documentation had been in impeccable order too.

  The number of vehicles stolen annually in Scotland might be a lot lower than it had been ten years earlier, but more than half of the thefts were never solved. It would certainly help if people were more vigilant and if fewer of them left their damned electronic keys near the front door. Yes, a shelf or a hook in the hall was a handy spot to leave your keys to grab on your way out, but it was also a gift to the current generation of tech-savvy car thieves.

  A pair of them, working together, could easily take a car with a keyless system installed from a driveway or a kerbside parking spot in the middle of the night; one standing near the car with a device to boost the signal meant for the key and their partner, near the house, to relay the signal to the key itself. As easily as that, the doors opened at a touch, and they could drive their prize away. A lot of the thieves were working as part of organised gangs these days, and a stolen car could soon be stripped for valuable parts or moved on very quickly. It was an easy, low risk and very profitable business, especially if they mainly targeted the more expensive models.

  And really, how hard was it to take a few extra, sensible precautions, not that I’d expect anyone to go as far as my cousin tended to do when he wanted to ‘secure’ anything. I’d like to see anyone try a trick like that at our place!

  Maybe, when Shay had finished tinkering with his new toys, he might even agree to help us out with our car thieves. He’d been talking about how it should be possible to link his little drones to an AI system and teach it how to get them to follow a specific person or vehicle around. Setting up a few potential cars as irresistible targets might be a good test run for his system once he’d got it up and running.

  No, I admitted to myself reluctantly, it wouldn’t be fair to even ask him to try that. Shay’s attitude to non-violent property theft of this kind was that as the entire social system was rigged to favour the wealthy, it was none of his business. Why should he care if someone’s insurance premium went up? If they could splash out forty grand or more on a stupid bloody car, they weren’t exactly going to starve or anything. Maybe they’d even learn to be a bit more careful in the future.

  I’d driven us down to Fort Augustus earlier, so Caitlin had taken the wheel for the drive back. I think she loved our new ride even more than I did. I’d put in a request for an unmarked CID car back at the beginning of the previous June, after spending what seemed like hours filling in the ridiculous paperwork required to do that. My new, assigned car had been handed over to me three weeks later.

  I’d never seen such a huge smile on Caitlin’s face as the one
she cracked when she first tried our nifty new Peugeot 308 out. I hadn’t realised, before then, how much she’d disliked riding around in our faithful old Astra. It wasn’t the car’s fault it had POLICE painted all over it. When I asked her why she hadn’t said something sooner, she’d just shrugged and told me that as I hadn’t seemed to mind, she didn’t think it was her place to comment. Oddly, the rest of my team had all seemed to take a bit of an approving ‘about time too’ attitude to the change as well. Anyone would think they’d all been a bit embarrassed about what I’d been ‘putting up with.’

  Caitlin reached out to automatically turn the radio off when my phone rang. We’d both shucked our coats off when we got back into the car, so it took me a few seconds to fish it out of my pocket. It might be a crisp, chilly three degrees above zero outside, but the inside of the car warmed up very quickly.

  I glanced at the caller ID and mouthed ‘McKinnon’ at her before answering. He didn’t wait for a greeting.

  “Conall? Where are you?”

  “On our way back from Fort Augustus, about fifteen minutes out.”

  “East or west bank?”

  “West. We took the A82.” He made an unhappy noise.

  “Alright then. Listen, a new homicide case has come up, and from what Davie Baird’s telling me from the scene, it’s a really nasty one. He’s down near Dores, in the woods a couple of miles east of your place. Can you cut through town and head straight there if I send you the location?” I didn’t like the sound of his voice at all, and if James said ‘really nasty,’ then it would certainly be something very unpleasant.

  “Of course,” I assured him. “What can you tell me?”

  “Not much, which is why I want your eyes on the situation as soon as possible. A forest ranger stumbled across a body out there less than an hour ago. Davie and his boys have been there for about fifteen minutes. He says there’s absolutely no doubt that we’re looking at a premeditated killing. He’s already informed our procurator fiscal, and a police surgeon should be heading that way soon. Davie’s not too hopeful about getting anything from the scene to help identify the perpetrators either. The body was set on fire afterwards, and the skin, hair and clothing are a charred, melted mess. Plus, he thinks it’s been there a few days.”

  “We’ll get there as quickly as we can,” I told him.

  “Good. Come straight to me once you’re done there, will you?”

  “We’ll do that.” I couldn’t remember hearing James McKinnon sounding so rattled before. I had a feeling that Davie might have said a little more to him than he’d chosen to pass on to me. Still, if James wanted me to hear Davie Baird’s opinions first hand, after examining the scene myself, I had no argument with that. I checked my emails and fed the location into our satnav.

  “Trouble?” Caitlin had activated our dashboard light and the siren the second I hung up.

  “New case. A murder.”

  She glanced quickly at the satnav as we sped up. “That’s not far from your place by the looks of it.”

  It wasn’t. It was less than two miles from our house. I didn’t like the thought of an undiscovered corpse lying so close by for days, either.

  Once across the river again, we sped through town with traffic obligingly pulling out of our way as we passed through Lochardil and Culduthel and left Inverness on the Essich Road, heading south. It was the shortest route, a little quicker than driving down past Dores before cutting east and north again. The single-lane road that went through those woods, splitting the eastern and western halves, was just like the ones I’d seen on Lewis and Harris the previous spring, with little passing places signposted at regular intervals. It didn’t usually see a great deal of traffic, and we didn’t meet any other cars on our way down there. When we reached our turning onto a sparsely gravelled dirt track to our right, I hopped out to open the gate so that Caitlin could drive through. Entering the western half of the woods, we followed the track through the trees for about half a mile north east after that until we spied Davie’s van parked up and Dougie, standing beside it, waiting to guide us from there on foot.

  “Inspector Keane, Sergeant Murray.” He nodded to us as we climbed out and pulled our coats on. Dougie was looking a little green around the gills, not a good sign in someone as hardened to the job as he surely was. “The crime scene’s about three hundred metres down this way.” We set off after him through the trees. “The good news,” he told us over his shoulder, “is that our body doesn’t smell too bad, all things considered because the cold, dry weather has kept it pretty fresh. Davie thinks it’s partially frozen and thawed again a few times too. It’s no a pretty sight, I’m afraid.”

  We soon found out what he meant.

  Our corpse was lying face down at the foot of an oak tree at the bottom of a hollow, and I could immediately see why Davie had said he thought it must have been there for a few days. The scavengers had been at it, and sections of the buttocks and thighs had been gnawed away, as well as part of the upper, exposed side of the face.

  “Foxes, crows and possibly a pine marten too,” Davie informed me as I went to stand near where he was crouching, photographing bite marks on the right calf. “The crows have been pecking at the exposed eye socket, but there’s a good chance the other one hasn’t been touched. We’ll see when we turn him over.”

  Dougie had been right about the lack of a rotting smell. I could pick up a fading, acrid scent of burnt petrol and a faint whiff of raw meat, but little else. The body was charred from head to foot, but the upper back was the least damaged visible area. Our victim had been very dark-skinned, and it seemed likely he’d been of African descent.

  “It looks like he was brought out here in nothing but a pair of trousers, and those mostly burned away,” Davie elaborated. I could see that. There were a few scraps of charred material glued to the skin of the legs, but nothing more than that. “If you look at the scorch marks on the tree there, you can see where the fire-resistant rope that was used to tie him to the trunk held out until the flames had mainly died down. We got a few good pieces of that to examine from round the other side.”

  Jamie, meanwhile, was busily collecting more samples from around the blackened ground at the foot of the tree, and Dougie had gone to help him.

  “Can you tell if he was dead when they lit the fire?” I asked.

  “I’d say he was,” Davie said cautiously. “He’s too bled out to have been conscious by then anyway, and look.” He pointed at the exposed, empty eye socket, and I crouched down myself for a better look. Something dark and hard was sticking out of the middle of it. “It looks like something was pushed through his right eye and into the brain. He wouldn’t have survived that, and I don’t think anyone would have tried to push that in once he was on fire.” The outer part of whatever it was must have burned away. Wood perhaps? We’d have to wait for the forensics report to know for sure. Davie pointed out a strip of charred ground approaching the tree. “They set some kind of fuse too. They could have lit that and left long before the fire started. We’ve got some samples of the residue to analyse as well.”

  I straightened up again and stepped back to where Caitlin was standing so that Davie’s team could get on with their job. “Christ!” she murmured, looking a little pale herself. “Somebody certainly wanted to make sure he was dead. Talk about overkill!”

  I nodded absently as I got my phone out and switched the map to a satellite view of the immediate area. Our killer, or killers, had either left the narrow road in the same place we had, or they’d driven into the woods further north before looping west and then south to reach this area by track. Unless, that is, they’d carried their victim further than seemed likely on foot. Either way, they’d certainly have been able to avoid notice once they were off the quiet little road, especially if they’d come at night, which seemed extremely likely. Smoke from a petrol or diesel fire in daylight would have drawn immediate attention. It was absolutely forbidden to light a fire in this area.

  I
didn’t think that a little petrol-driven blaze would have lasted long. It had certainly done no more than scorch the oak tree that the victim had been tied to. Nobody had been trying to set the woods on fire here. The intent had clearly been to destroy any physical evidence they may have left on the body. I moved further away and pressed a foot as hard as I could against the semi-frozen ground. It barely left a mark.

  Davie must have noticed what I was doing. “Aye, we’ll no get a print, Conall. Dougie, show him where we think they came in here.”

  Dougie obligingly led us back into the trees about twenty feet away from the route he’d brought us here by.

  “Just to our left there, see? I’ve managed to find a few spots that showed signs of recent passage, but the only thing I can say for sure is that one person definitely came that way carrying something heavy. But look,” he pointed to a very slight shapeless indentation in the earth, “They tied something padded over their feet to make absolutely sure they wouldn’t leave a clear print. We can’t even tell what size shoe or boot they were wearing.”

  “What about tyre marks, up on the track?” I asked. He just shook his head.

  “Nothing clear enough to be useful. The weather’s against us on this one, Inspector. We’ve got faint treads all over the place, overlapping old marks from the forestry vehicles. Which reminds me,” he fished a card out and handed it to me, “the ranger who found the body left his office and mobile numbers for you. He figured you might want to talk to him.” I looked at the card. Our ranger was called Mike Nash. “He seemed like a nice guy, poor devil. At least he had the sense to get a good distance away before he threw up. It would have freaked me out, too, stumbling across something like this out here.”

  “You’ve got all of this photographed already, Dougie?” I asked, waving at the unhelpful ghost of a trail.