Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  Even so, I was really glad that I wasn’t the person tasked with breaking the news to the Arnold family.

  I slept for another three and a half hours before getting up again and felt much fresher after my morning shower. Shay must have taken himself off to bed at some point because there was no sign of him when I got downstairs. He had sent me some emails before doing that though, and McKinnon was copied in on all three of them. The first gave the details of the registered owners of the two cars our killer had used. The second had a file attached containing the relevant drone footage, and the third held the encryption key needed to unlock and view it. My cousin was following the rules for once. As a licensed civilian drone operator, he couldn’t hand us unencrypted surveillance footage without breaching data protection laws any more than a shop, club or other business could.

  James must have viewed the footage by now, and I watched it myself on my phone while I waited for the Gaggia to heat up and deliver my morning coffee. Shay had clipped together all the relevant shots for us. He’d stayed on our suspect down at the Premier Inn for long enough to see him going in before moving his drone on. The man must have come out again shortly afterwards. That footage didn’t give us a better look at his face, both hood and scarf were in place, but at least we knew his height and build now and had seen enough glimpses of skin to know that he was white. I wondered if McKinnon had sent anyone round to speak to whoever was manning the night desk there yet. No, he didn’t need to. The patrollers he’d sent to keep an eye on the abandoned car would have been instructed to do that.

  I drank my coffee down, grabbed my laptop case and the lunch bag my cousin had thoughtfully packed up for me, and got moving.

  It was nearly nine by the time I reached Burnett Road and knocked on the door of James’ office.

  “Oh good,” McKinnon said when I opened the door. “It’s you, Conall. I wasn’t sure you’d be in this early. You know DI Philips, of course?”

  I did, although I’d only spoken to the man a couple of times. He’d been supervising my team for me, for the second time, during my week off in early January. That little break in Avoriaz seemed like a lifetime ago already.

  DI Philips was a fair haired, brown eyed fellow a year and a half older than I was, which meant he’d turn thirty five in May. I hadn’t really taken to him, although I had no reason to dislike him either. He seemed to be good at his job but nothing exceptional. I’d got the impression that he had an undeservedly high opinion of his own professional capabilities. A slender five foot nine, I suppose he was conventionally handsome by most people’s standards. He had a pleasant enough face. To be fair, I think he’d just rubbed me up the wrong way by making a few ‘helpful suggestions’ about some ideas he’d had that could ‘really bring my team along.’ All I’d gathered from that little conversation was that Philips had no idea how to get the best out of them and seemed totally oblivious to the fact that they hadn’t appreciated his efforts to make ‘a few little changes’ to the way I liked things done.

  “Of course,” I said. “Hello again, Simon.”

  He stood up to shake my hand. “Good morning, Sir. I’d like to congratulate you on your fine work last night.”

  “Please don’t. That was all my cousin’s doing, and neither of us view last night’s events as any cause for congratulation. Quite the contrary in fact.”

  “Aye.” James gestured for us both to sit down. “That’s twice the crazy bastard has got away with murder, let’s not give him the opportunity to go for a third.”

  “The cars?” I asked, jumping straight to business with the one lead we may already have made some progress with. “Has anyone managed to interview the owners yet?”

  “Only by phone. They’re both on holiday with their families, one in the States and the other in Italy. They were both very surprised to hear the cars weren’t safely tucked away in their garages.” Stolen then, as I’d expected them to be. James nodded glumly at my expression. “He’s not giving himself away that easily. Let’s just hope Davie and his boys can get us something useful there. From the footage Shay sent over, I’d say our man didn’t spend any time trying to clean them up before he abandoned them. We could have done without the gloves though.”

  “What about the owners’ neighbours?”

  “I’ve got people heading out to talk to them now. But I’ve looked at those addresses on a map and they’re both detached places, well screened from nearby houses. If he went at night, the odds that anyone noticed anything are low.”

  I found myself wondering how our suspect had known the families were both away.

  “Most people book their holidays online these days…” I said, thinking aloud. “The airport? He wouldn’t necessarily even need to work there.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” James agreed. “He’d just need to find a way to get talking to people or hear and see enough to tell him what he needed.”

  “And that’s if he doesn’t have a way to gather all the information he needs without leaving home.” I didn’t like that thought at all but we couldn’t rule it out. Just because we thought our killer was psychotic didn’t mean he always had been or that he didn’t possess some unexpected skills in any number of possible fields. Then there was the phone cloning system Shay had brought to my attention last May. That would be an easy way to pick up someone’s information at an airport.

  “Travel agents and taxi companies?” Philips suggested hesitantly.

  “We’ll have to check those too,” I told him agreeably. It wouldn’t do to mention that those had been too obvious to be worth mentioning. James merely grunted.

  “Can I leave all that with you, Conall?” he asked. Meaning ‘will Shay look into all of that for us?’

  “Of course. Can you make sure I’m sent the transcripts for those phone calls as soon as possible? Were they asked how they travelled to the airport? Or if they had more than one car? Or how they booked their holidays?”

  “Philips?” McKinnon asked, turning his attention to the man at my side.

  “No, Sir, they weren’t. We know when they left and when they’re due to return but we don’t have those details yet. I’ll have them called back.”

  “Aye, do. Anything else you want from them, Conall?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask if anyone engaged them in conversation at the airport or seemed to be hanging around them suspiciously. Descriptions would be helpful if they did. What else do you want my team working on?”

  “Door to door enquiries, this morning, if you don’t mind a bit of grunt work. That car was only out of sight for a few minutes, which didn’t give our suspect time to get far on foot. We need to check every building within five hundred metres of where he left the car, to be safe. If he didn’t go into the cemetery, that’s about as far as he could have gone before the drone would have spotted him.”

  “That sounds about right, and the Bught Park Pitches cut a whole quadrant off the southeast end of that patch. He’d have been totally exposed out there if he’d gone that way. We should be able to cover that many houses between us.” About eighty or so each, at a rough guess, if we split into three teams. There was something else I’d wanted to ask about while I was here though. “Do you have a report from the Premier Inn yet?”

  From the unhappy expression on James’ face, I gathered that he had, and that it wasn’t very helpful.

  “Our man went in to inquire about room prices, didn’t like what he was quoted and left again. He was only in there for three or four minutes. The night porter manning the desk said that he sounded local but he could have been faking the accent. They didn’t get a good look at his face either because he didn’t remove his scarf or put his hood down. I’ve opened up a new case folder and linked it to the ‘Black Wood’ case. You’ll find all their reports in there.” He leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “Now that we have two connected murders I’ll have to run them as OIOC, so Philips will take over as the new SIO on the earlier murder and you’ll be the ap
pointed SIO on this one Conall.”

  I just nodded. It made sense for James to become the Officer in Overall Command of the investigations now that we had two separate murders linked to the same killer, and it also made sense to give me, the most senior available officer, the fresher case.

  “I’ve granted you both Administrator access to both case files so you can generate permissions for your teams,” James continued. “As there doesn’t seem to be much else we can learn from the Chuol case at this point, Philips’ team will be first in line to handle any tasks you need extra manpower for from now on. Just copy me in on any requests you make Conall, so I know if they’re tied up or not, alright?”

  “I will,” I assured him as I stood up again. “We’ll get cracking on those door-to-doors as soon as I’ve brought my team up to speed. I’ll call you if we stumble across anything.”

  I left them to finish whatever business I’d interrupted. My team should all be in by now and would doubtless have already heard about Chris Arnold. Once they were all caught up on developments, we could head out and start knocking on some doors.

  Sixteen

  Caitlin

  The desk sergeant told me the news as soon as I got in on Wednesday morning, and I could see from the look on Mike and Mary’s faces when I walked into our office that they’d both been informed too. Chris Arnold’s death was a terrible thing to have happened, but we’d been waiting for that particular hammer to fall for the past few days without being able to do a damned thing to prevent it. You had to numb yourself to a certain extent, or at least maintain a good degree of detachment from cases like this one if you wanted to perform your job effectively. To be honest, it was actually something of a relief to have the ghastly business over with, awful as that may sound. Not that the poor man’s family could possibly feel that way.

  If someone I loved had been in Chris Arnold’s place, I couldn’t even imagine the state I’d be in right now.

  Angela Arnold had finally been informed of our suspicions last Friday. James McKinnon had gone to speak with her in person and he wouldn’t have compromised himself by making any empty promises. I was sure that he’d have held back a lot of the details surrounding Dominic Chuol’s murder, but that couldn’t have been an easy or a pleasant conversation to have. Knowing that we were doing everything possible to find her husband would have been little consolation to Mrs Arnold once McKinnon had made the situation absolutely clear to her.

  How would you even start with breaking news like that to a woman whose husband had been missing for four and a half days? ‘We believe there is a strong possibility that your husband is being held captive by a mentally ill person who intends to kill him next Tuesday night. His captor, if our suspicions are correct, has already killed at least once and we have no idea who, or where, they are.’ No, it wouldn’t have been anything like that, but however you phrased the information, those facts did sum up the situation pretty accurately.

  Darren Mills and Colum Bryce joined us a little before nine, but there was still no sign of Conall. He was probably up at Area HQ getting briefed. I didn’t know any details of the second killing yet, only that Chris Arnold’s severed head had been found mounted on display somewhere in Kinmylies.

  Both of the facts in that little snippet had surprised me. We’d all thought it likely that our culprit would strike in another remote spot outside of town and go through a similar ritual to the one he’d used with Dominic Chuol. The change in tactics, carrying no more than a severed head out into the open after making his kill, and then leaving it in a heavily populated residential area, was disturbing in many ways. It had increased the killer’s mobility, allowing him to move around easily on foot if he chose to. It had reduced our already low chances of being able to catch him in the act, and it also indicated that he was far less predictable than we’d thought.

  What else could he change? The dates he chose to strike on? The time intervals between the abductions and the murders?

  Conall came in at nine twenty, and we all stopped what we were doing to look up at him the moment he came through the door.

  “You’ve all heard about last night’s murder then.” It wasn’t a question, he could see it in our expressions easily enough. “Alright, for now, please keep working on whatever you have open. We’ll all be going out to knock on some doors in a little while but I’ll be sending you an update email before then. Caitlin, can you give me ten minutes and then come in to see me please?”

  Well, at least he looked a little better than he had yesterday. The dark shadows were still there, under his eyes, although nowhere near as noticeably today, but the biggest change was the return of his usual air of purposefulness. He’d lost that when the last of our leads had played out towards the end of last week. Since then, he’d been going through the motions and keeping on top of things with his usual efficiency, but the underlying drive that we were all so used to seeing had been absent.

  Well, it was back now. McKinnon must have supplied him with some new leads to follow. I really hoped we had something more concrete to go on this time.

  Once Conall’s ten minutes had passed, I tapped on his office door and let myself in.

  “Bang on time.” His mouth twitched slightly as he looked up at me and his printer simultaneously spat out a few sheets. Yeah, I’d been watching the clock. He swivelled to pluck them from the tray and extended them in my direction. I took them off him and looked through them. Identical maps, outlined with a thick red border.

  “Ballifeary Road?”

  “Yes. That green dot is where our killer abandoned the car they were last seen driving. Every house within five hundred metres of there is within the border I drew in. Can you split the addresses into three groups and add address lists for us to check off please?”

  “Sure.” My curiosity was aroused by that little titbit he’d so casually thrown out. “They were actually seen? Driving a car?” Had someone witnessed them placing Arnold’s head on display and called it in?

  “A stolen car, yes. I’ll send you all that promised email soon, but could you please deal with the map thing before you dive into it?”

  “Of course.” He was already focused on his screen again by then and the message was clear: This was not a good time for questions.

  Back at my desk, it didn’t take me long to count up the properties we needed to visit, divide them into three clusters, and add a printout of address lists for each of them. Synchronised bleeps from all our computers announced the arrival of Conall’s promised email a couple of minutes after I’d finished with that.

  It was brief and to the point, which was very much his style. Would we please use the link provided to add the new, shared, case folder to our desktops and review its contents before ten fifteen? With pleasure! I was dying to find out what had happened last night.

  I opened up the video file first and tapped in the key to set it playing. From the markers on the play bar it looked like there were several clips strung together. The first one began with a view from maybe fifty feet up, tracking a car as it pulled into a car park. I recognised that place. It was the Premier Inn, west. The time and date stamp in the bottom left corner gave the time as just after three fifteen this morning. A man climbed out of the car, walked to the main entrance and went in. The view lifted and began to move up General Booth Road. This must be footage from some type of drone.

  On the next clip, the timestamp read three forty, and the drone was higher up than before. I caught a glimpse of movement over to the left of the view and whoever had been operating the drone must have spotted it too because it dropped down for a better look. There wasn’t much light to see by, but I was pretty sure that was the same man I’d just seen entering the hotel. The camera lifted again and moved ahead of him, past the end of the footpath, coming out onto a decently lit street. It did a one eighty and dropped onto something. Our man appeared, walking towards it and got into one of the cars parked up there. Same man, different car.

  I watched th
e drone follow him back past the Premier Inn and east towards the canal, falling behind as he speeded up. The next clip jumped ahead a few minutes. The drone was very close to the ground this time, approaching what must have been the beginning of that footpath. I know I jumped in my seat as it panned right and showed me Chris Arnold’s head mounted on that pole. A little LED light on the drone activated, bathing the dim scene in a wash of light. Behind me, I heard Collins swear softly under his breath. We must all have hit the play button within seconds of each other.

  “It looks like there’s something sticking out of his eyes,” Bryce said. It did, although it was hard to see much detail. The forehead and upper face were a mask of caked, dried blood. There was one more clip to follow. Another few minutes had passed, but the drone had located the car which was empty. No, wait, if that was Ballifeary Road, it couldn’t possibly be the same drone. It hadn’t had time to get that far. There must have been two of them out there.

  “Who the hell shot all this?” Mary Walker wanted to know. I thought I could guess the answer to that question.

  I closed the video player and began to read through the reports that had already been added to the folder. There wasn’t much in there to get through just yet. McKinnon’s action plan for last night had been added in, but I’d already seen that. We’d had a lot of people pulling overtime in extra patrol cars last night. Our Area Commander had also written up a report on the actions that he had taken after DCI Conall Keane had called him with ‘fresh information supplied by our civilian consultant, Mr Shay Keane.’

  Well, that confirmed my hunch. Shay had attached a brief statement with his footage, along with copies of the comprehensive collection of licences and certifications he’d acquired, permitting him to operate drones in both urban and rural areas.