Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  By ten o’clock, I was all caught up on the later updates that had been added to the case folder. I’d read the transcripts of the calls made to the owners of the stolen cars and the report put in by the patrollers who’d spoken to the night porter at the Premier Inn. The watch on the cemetery had not resulted in any sightings of anyone leaving there and an early morning sweep of Tomnahurich on foot hadn’t found anything. Having finished with all of that I got up to go and put the kettle on. We might as well all have a hot drink before leaving. Those door-to-door enquiries would take a few hours to get through. Our four constables drifted into the break room to join me as they too finished reading.

  “That cousin of the boss’s seems to crop up in all sorts of odd situations,” Mary Walker commented once we were all standing around with full mugs. “First the Ramsay case, then that business over in Stornoway last year and now this.”

  “Well, he is a qualified specialist consultant,” Collins reminded her, “so it’s not that surprising, really. I bet he gets called in on all sorts of cases. That bit in his statement about linking Kinmylies to Arnold’s military past was a good hunch to follow too, as things turned out. And that drone of his was more effective than two dozen of us on the ground would have been.”

  “That’s all true enough, but specialist consultants don’t usually disarm suspects, climb cliffs, perform emergency first aid, and get SOCO training, all on top of whatever their areas of expertise are. And now he’s a fully certified drone operator too?” Walker turned to eye me curiously. “You’ve met the man quite a few times, Sarge. What do you make of him?”

  “Shay Keane? He’s ridiculously smart.” I sipped at my tea while I thought of something innocuous enough to throw out. “He comes across as a little eccentric, like a lot of those super brainy types do, but I know that Chief Superintendent Anderson and James McKinnon both think very highly of his work.”

  “But he’s also a civilian, right? Doesn’t it strike you as a little odd that he can do all those things?”

  I just shrugged.

  “If you’re that curious about him, just ask the boss,” I suggested. “I’m sure he’d be delighted to illuminate you.” They all had their backs to the door, so they hadn’t seen Conall standing there yet and I was carefully not looking that way. Collins snorted.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk about his family, or his personal life. If his dad didn’t pop in occasionally, we wouldn’t even know he had one.”

  “Do you think his cousin might be some kind of covert agent?” Bryce asked. “That would actually make a lot of sense. Like Mary said, the man seems to have some serious skills… and there are a lot of files in the Ramsay case that we don’t have the clearance to access.”

  “Which couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the boys from the Box hijacking the case to hunt for Pete Ferguson?” Conall’s quiet voice interjected derisively. They all turned, startled, to find him standing in the doorway. “I must say, I’m a little disappointed that you can’t think of anything more productive to talk about. I thought you’d be tossing some useful ideas around by now. My mistake. Is there any water left in that kettle, Caitlin?” He had his portable coffee maker in one hand.

  “More than enough for that little thing.” I moved out of the way so he could fill it up.

  “I gather you’re all caught up on your reading at least,” he said once he’d set his machine up and turned around to face us all. “So, idle and irrelevant speculations apart, you know where we stand. Our suspect is a white male. He’s about my height but perhaps a little bulkier. It’s hard to tell from the footage we have because we don’t know how many layers he may have been wearing under that jacket. We still don’t know his age, but he’s probably under forty. The night porter at the Premier Inn also thought the eyes may have been brown but couldn’t be sure of it. You see a lot of people coming and going in a job like that, and it’s easy for your memory to mix up little details.”

  We could all agree with that statement. If I had a quid for every time different witnesses had supplied contradictory information over things like that, I could go on a nice little holiday with the money.

  “It will probably be at least a couple of days before we get a report on any physical evidence left in the cars, or a pathology report on the partial remains left at the scene,” Conall continued in the same cool, businesslike tone. “Meanwhile, to start with, this morning, we’re going to focus our efforts on trying to find out where our suspect went to ground after abandoning that second car last night. After locating the vehicle, my cousin spent another twenty minutes checking the area for any sign of the suspect moving around on foot. As there was no sign of him, there’s a good chance he may have taken cover in a nearby building. Don’t forget to ask about checking any peripheral structures such as garages and sheds. Caitlin has maps and address lists ready, so partner up once you’ve finished your break and we’ll get going.” He plucked his cup from under the machine and drank his piping hot mouthful down before rinsing it out under the tap. “Five minutes,” he cautioned them curtly and left us to it.

  Our four DCs exchanged unhappy glances.

  “Was that message clear enough for you?” Mills asked the others after glancing out to make sure Conall had gone back into his own office. “Shit, guys, you should all know better than to talk about stuff like that when he’s around. Besides, even if Shay Keane is some kind of agent, that’s way above our pay grade. ‘Need to Know’ and all that. I wish you’d stop to think before opening your idiot mouths sometimes.” He drank off his tea and went to get his things together.

  I really liked Darren. He wasn’t just sharp, he was also blessed with a generous helping of good, old fashioned common sense.

  We found the place where our killer had taken shelter just over two hours later. It was a detached bungalow, less than three hundred metres from the abandoned car, and there was a For Sale sign out on the front lawn. When no one answered the doorbell, Walker and Collins, who’d been working that section, called the number on the sign. The estate agent told them the place was empty and agreed to send someone around with keys so they could check it. They’d kept on working their way down the street for the next twenty minutes until the woman showed up and let them in.

  Conall and I were a few minutes from there when Walker called him. I waited, wondering if they had something as he listened to her report. “Alright,” he finally said. “Let Mills know too, please. We’ll be there in a few minutes.” He hung up.

  “Do they have something?”

  “They’ve found the bag,” he told me. “Tucked into the cupboard under the kitchen sink in an empty house. No sign of our man.”

  “Any signs of forced entry?”

  “Nothing obvious.” I kept pace with him as we turned around and set off back the way we’d come. “We’ll have to see if we can figure out how he got in once we get there.”

  “Doesn’t it all seem very peculiar to you?” I asked. “I mean our guy must have scouted out the place in advance as a possible bolt hole, but it’s nowhere near where he left Chris Arnold’s head. And what made him decide to take cover?”

  “Are you asking me to guess what goes through the mind of a total nutjob? Who knows? Maybe he heard Shay’s drone, although I very much doubt that. Those little things don’t make much more noise than a wasp buzzing about and didn’t get close to him. Maybe he had a feeling he was being watched, or he’s got some imaginary voice giving him instructions. Compared to kidnapping and murdering people, this kind of dodging about doesn’t seem very high on the ‘odd behaviour’ list. It’s a pity we couldn’t put enough boots on the ground to check everyone moving around once the rush hour got going or we might have been able to catch him leaving.”

  Too many possible places and people to watch at once. Had our man had yet another car or van nearby to switch to once the neighbourhood had woken up enough and people began to head off to work? Not even Shay, with his drone, could have effectively
tracked so much movement.

  We saw Mills and Bryce coming in from the other direction as we all converged on the bungalow. The woman from the estate agency was standing outside. Conall showed her his warrant card as we came up to her.

  “Thank you for coming down here to let my people in this morning, Mrs MacCabe.”

  “Not at all, Inspector. My firm is always happy to assist the police in any way we can. Your colleagues asked me not to touch anything, and I thought it wiser to wait for you out here.”

  “Quite right. I’m afraid we’re going to need to bring a team in to go over the house thoroughly, now that we know our suspect was here. ”

  “Of course.” She handed him a business card and a little ring with two keys on it. “If you could have someone drop those keys back into our office for us once you’re done with the place, we’d be very grateful.”

  “I’ll make sure to do that. Would it also be possible for you to send me a list of the viewings that have taken place since this house went onto the market?” He handed her a card of his own. “We may wish to check everyone who came to see it.” That request made her pause.

  “I’ll look into it,” she promised, “but I’m not sure we can legally supply that information unless you get a warrant to check through our records. I’d be happy to contact them all and ask if they object to us giving you their information if you’d like?”

  He just smiled nicely.

  “Thank you, but no, please don’t. We’ll see about a warrant if we decide it’s necessary to speak with them ourselves.” He signed the proffered receipt for the keys, and we watched her walk to her car, climb in and drive away.

  The front door was ajar, so once we’d all gloved up, he gave it a little push and we went in. Collins beckoned from the end of the hall.

  “We’re in the kitchen here, Sir.” Collins had gone back to their car and driven it over here before we’d arrived. Some plastic sheeting from their boot was now spread out on the floor. The bag they’d found was sitting, unzipped, on top of it. “It was open when we found it. We haven’t touched the zipper or the strap, Sir.” They must have lifted it from underneath, in order to avoid the areas most likely to hold fingerprints.

  “Any idea of how he got in yet?” Conall asked as he crouched down. It was a blue and black Puma sports bag, an exact match for the one we’d all seen in the footage.

  “We think he came in through the rear garden and used the sliding patio doors in the living room.”

  “Not locked?”

  “Not when we arrived.” Conall pulled a pen out of his pocket and asked me for mine. Using those, he eased the opening wider. Yeah, that was the right scarf and the right jacket. He straightened up again, looking thoughtful.

  “Davie and his boys are all tied up, and I want an expert to process this and the house as quickly as possible.” He pulled out his phone and fired off a quick text. “Alright, Collins, Walker, you two head back to the station and get your report written up. Once you’ve done that, get onto the taxi company that drove the Miller family to the airport. We want to talk to the driver and whoever took that booking. See if the call was recorded too, if they didn’t just book it using an app. Get every detail you can.”

  His phone pinged, an answering text coming in.

  “You two,” he turned to Mills and Bryce after reading it, “get yourselves out to the airport. I want all the CCTV footage they have covering the times both families were there on their departure days. Don’t forget the long stay car park either. The Dawsons left a car there.” Our second holidaying family owned two cars. “Take your lunch breaks whenever you think best and let me know when you’re done if I’m not back myself before then.”

  After they’d all cleared out, I gave Conall a questioning look.

  “Shay’s coming?”

  “He is. He should be here in about twenty minutes. Can you nip out and bring the car over while I call McKinnon? There’s a fully stocked kit bag in the boot and we’ll need that. I’ve got some sandwiches in my pack too. We could eat while we’re waiting.”

  My rumbling stomach liked the sound of that. I went off to get the car.

  Seventeen

  Shay

  After Conall went off to bed, I just sat there, doing absolutely nothing for a good fifteen minutes.

  Hindsight told me that I should have started moving drone one down from the cathedral as soon as Conall told me our guy had turned onto the A82. Yes, if I’d done that and he’d gone south at the roundabout or simply kept driving, we’d have probably lost him, anyway. Even at that time of night there had been too much traffic about to know which cars to try to track with the satellite if I’d taken my eyes off it at that point. By the time I’d got a lock on the GPS systems of all our possible moving targets, the man had already abandoned his car and vanished. But if drone one had been down there a few minutes earlier?

  There was no doubt about it. With so few people on foot around the bottom end of Ballifeary Road, we’d have spotted him easily.

  I ran those few vital minutes over and over again in my head as I stared blankly at my useless screens. Had I done the right thing? I eventually had to conclude that the answer was a clear yes. The mathematical laws of probability assured me that the satellite had been our best option, by far, and I had succeeded in tracking all five of the cars that could have been the one we were interested in. Hindsight could go fuck itself. Sometimes, you just had to accept that even taking the best possible actions wasn’t going to be enough to guarantee success.

  We’d been unexpectedly, shockingly lucky tonight. If the killer had only used that first car, driven straight to Kinmylies, rammed Chris Arnold’s head onto that pole, and left again, we wouldn’t have seen anything odd enough to draw our attention.

  I hadn’t thought much of it at first, when I realised Conall was looking at the same guy I’d seen down at the Premier Inn. There were plenty of possible reasons for him to be out walking. A late-night visit to a friend for a few drinks that would make driving back inadvisable, heading towards an extramarital assignation where a car pulling up would draw unwanted attention, going to meet a dealer or even just wanting to innocently walk off some energy because they couldn’t sleep, to name only a few. It was only when Conall told me the man was getting into a different car that he’d really aroused my suspicions.

  What we’d seen of our killer’s movements were consistent with someone who suspected they were being watched. By the police? Or by someone else? The answer to that question depended on what form his paranoia had taken and what delusions he was suffering from. We couldn’t assume those would have any bearing whatsoever on reality.

  Mulling that over, I fed our two number plates into the DVLA database and got to work on clipping together the relevant bits of footage.

  My mothership drone had been back for a while, with its six passengers all safely docked on board, so once I’d finished with that little job I went out to the back door to carry it in. It was supposed to start raining again sometime soon. I dropped it off in the electronics lab to recharge and went back through to the living room.

  I’d have to look into the possibility of fitting my mini drones with something that would allow them to cling to the roof of a moving vehicle, but weight and size were a big issue. Even a small, suction cup base would be too heavy for them. I’d have to see if some magnetic tape would be enough to do the trick. I could try a few different strengths and see if any of them would do the job. It would need to be strong enough to hold a drone in place but weak enough to allow it to pull off again when I wanted to lift it. Most vehicles still had some ferromagnetic steel content in the bodywork, even if they were mainly aluminium or carbon fibre constructions. It might work.

  The thought of what might have happened if Conall could have latched his drone onto the roof of that car up in Kinmylies was impossible to dismiss. We could have had our suspect in custody by now. Well, that was what test runs were for: to find out what improvements could be made.
It was a bloody pity I hadn’t thought of it sooner though. Everything the killer managed to do out there from this night onwards could only happen because the system I’d managed to cobble together hadn’t been good enough to keep track of him.

  Alright, you could equally argue that we’d be even worse off if we hadn’t tried it out at all, but that really wasn’t making me feel any better.

  Looking into the owners of the two cars our killer had used soon told me they were both out of the country on family holidays. I sent off my emails to Conall and McKinnon and set a few searches running. I was absolutely sure that when he emerged again, our man would be wearing different clothes and carrying a different bag, or no bag at all. I had no chance of spotting him amongst the early morning commuters, even if I did send the drones out again later. It would be a total waste of time to do that and the risk of him, or anyone else, spotting one of them wasn’t worth taking. I might as well catch a few hours sleep myself while those searches were running.

  I had no doubt that McKinnon, and Conall, would think to look into the airport connection for those car owners but what about the parents’ places of work and the kids’ schools? People often talked about upcoming holidays with their co-workers. Then there were the social media accounts too. Hopefully, my searches might throw up a connection there somewhere.

  After a good four hours sleep, I woke up from a horrible dream where the head on the pole had been Conall’s. When I’d turned away from the sight of it, there’d been another one there too, Uncle Danny’s. My heart was pounding madly as I jerked upright and I was covered in a slick of sweat. It’s all very well to rationalise dreams as part of the memory sorting process when you’re awake but I hadn’t figured out a way to ignore them while they were happening. There’s nothing like a dose of fully immersive emotional overload to really shock you awake in a state of absolute panic. I bloody well hated having nightmares. Machine intelligences didn’t have to deal with shit like that.