“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
