Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “It’ll be on his laptop.”

  “Yes, it will. Which means it might as well be locked in the best safe ever built, on board an unmanned ship on its way to Mars. That thing’s totally inaccessible. The best hackers the government has at their disposal have been trying to get into his system for years without success.”

  “So we just keep working as usual?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what you do.”

  She frowned. “That reply excluded you, Conall.”

  “I’m glad you noticed. I can’t be here, Caitlin, I just can’t, and I’m not fit to be either. I’m going home once I’ve done those two things. Consider me to be on sick leave until Friday. It’s not as if my being here or not being here will change anything now. Don’t worry, McKinnon can’t spare anyone to send over to sub for me and you’re as good as DI already. It’s just not official yet.”

  “Alright, looking at you right now, I approve. It’s the sensible thing to do. I’m just not sure you should be alone, to be honest.”

  “Company won’t help, in fact it would be unbearable. And my da will be back tomorrow.”

  I was halfway home before I realised I hadn’t even arranged myself an escort. Not that it mattered. Brady O’Hara was otherwise engaged.

  Da had spoken calmly and booked himself a flight while I was still on the phone. He wasn’t calm. He’d never underestimated my cousin, but he was equally pragmatic, and he trusted those numbers. If Shay said he had a 50/50 chance, then that was what he had.

  Of course, from the moment my cousin had turned up at that house, that probability would have begun to change, in one direction or the other. We both knew that.

  McKinnon rang my doorbell half an hour after I got home. He didn’t look as bad as I’d expected, under the circumstances. Simon Philips was standing at his shoulder. Right. That ‘nobody travels alone’ rule.

  “Conall. May we come in?” James asked. I stood aside to let them in and walked them through to the kitchen.

  “Tea? Coffee?” I offered as they seated themselves at the table.

  “Thank you, no. We’re not planning on staying.” He waited until I’d pulled out a chair to sit across from him before asking me his first question. “Shay’s message, when did you get it?”

  “Noon, on the dot. He’d programmed his laptop to send it at exactly that time.”

  “You saw him last night? He gave you no clue what he was planning?”

  “I did. He didn’t.” I shrugged tiredly. “He knew I wouldn’t be able to let him go alone.”

  “The man’s a damned fool!” Philips said hotly. “He had the damned address, and he kept it from us! We could have had a team there last night and got Jimmy out before O’Hara knew what was happening.”

  “Could we?” I asked, resisting the urge to punch him in his stupid, ignorant face. “And you know this how, Inspector Philips? Please enlighten me. What kind of security measures does Brady O’Hara have in place? How near the house can you go without triggering any alarms? Do any exterior doors or windows allow quick access or are they all reinforced? Could we get in before Brady got to Jimmy if we set off an alarm? Is Jimmy being held in a room that we could enter before O’Hara could kill him?”

  Philips just stared at me, unable to answer any of those questions and struggling to find a suitable response to offer. McKinnon gestured for him to keep quiet.

  “Aye, I read your cousin’s assessment, Conall. The man certainly had the time and the money to do that kind of work. He may not have though. Shay tends to err on the side of caution when it comes to that kind of thing.”

  “At least we can go in fully prepared on Friday now, in case he did. Shay’s told us what we should take with us.” Formality be damned, Philips or no Philips. “James, you should know that he asked me last night what I thought we’d do once we had the address. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, it was a reasonable question, given the conversation we were having. I told him Anderson would probably have us wait two or three days, see if O’Hara left the place at all, before we swooped in. That was enough, I think, to make him decide to try it his way.”

  “Because he knew that otherwise we were going to get my grandson killed, if he wasn’t already dead by then. I know what kind of psycho we’re dealing with as well as you do, Conall. Don’t you think I’d already convinced myself the boy was as good as dead until you sent me that email? Now I have some hope again… and twice as many hostages to fear for.”

  “Sir,” Philips protested, “We have to seize Mr Keane’s laptop and have our tech team look through it. We could at least watch the place like that.”

  McKinnon shook his head. “No, we don’t. And we won’t. If O’Hara notices any surveillance activity, he’ll kill them both.”

  “With all due respect, Sir, I think that decision should be left to Superintendent Anderson. He is the OIOC now, after all.” So McKinnon had been supplanted. That had been inevitable, I supposed, given the fact that it was his own grandson who’d been taken yesterday.

  On a good day, I could handle an irritation like Simon Philips easily without losing my temper. Today was not one of those days.

  “Apparently, we’re too emotionally involved to be fit to decide anything ourselves, James,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Go ahead, make the call.” I’d copied Anderson in on my email so he should be fully up to date on the situation by now.

  McKinnon had his boss on speed dial.

  “James,” Anderson picked up quickly. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m with Conall and DI Philips. and we have you on speaker, Sir. DI Philips thinks the final decision on an issue he’s raised should be yours, not ours.”

  “Given the circumstances, I can understand why he might feel that way. What is it, Philips?”

  “I suggest we seize Special Consultant Keane’s laptop in order to search it for O’Hara’s location, Sir.”

  “Absolutely not,” Anderson said firmly. “If anyone so much as tries to touch that thing, the consequences will be career ending. Is that clear? Anything else?”

  “No, Sir, that was all.” Philips looked both very subdued and very thoughtful after Anderson abruptly hung up. James stood up again, so we did too.

  “If there’s anything I can do for you, Conall, well, you know how to reach me.”

  “I do. If we don’t hear anything before then, I’ll see you at Burnett Road on Friday. At two thirty?” That should allow plenty of time for the pre-operation briefing and final preparations.

  “Aye. Fine. You’ve called Daniel? He’s coming home?”

  “He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Good, good.” At least we understood each other properly. McKinnon was a strangely comforting kindred spirit, down here in the dark with me.

  I dragged my way through the rest of Wednesday like a zombie, trying not to think and unable to eat. I put myself to bed early, with a sleeping pill, and mercifully didn’t recall any dreams when I finally did wake up. Thursday dragged by with no word from Shay but it was good to have da home again. We didn’t try to talk to each other about my cousin, but the reinforcement provided by da’s presence was immense.

  Shay called me at eleven twenty two on Friday, but not from his own phone. He wiped all records of that call afterwards, and neither of us ever mentioned it to anyone else, except da. I was at Brady O’Hara’s house before twelve.

  My cousin was sitting on the doorstep waiting when I arrived. He stood up as I climbed out of the car and didn’t resist or protest when I threw my arms around him and clutched him like a drowning man clinging to a slippery rock.

  “It was smart of you to wait until you were sure I wouldn’t kill you myself,” I told him, when I’d got that little crisis out of my system. I let him go and wiped my eyes so I could get a good look at him. He seemed to be in pretty decent shape but that didn’t mean anything. At least he wasn’t visibly bleeding anywhere, no broken bones either. “One of these days you’re going to give me a blo
ody heart attack you know.”

  “Sorry, Con.” He ducked his head down, “It seemed like the only real choice, you know?”

  “I know, Shay. You did what you thought you had to. Jimmy? O’Hara?”

  “I think Jimmy’s okay. O’Hara shocked him a couple of times but didn’t do anything else to hurt him that I know of. He was feeding him and I think he was lacing the food, or the water, with sedatives. The kid was pretty much ignored after I got here. He kept very quiet whenever Brady was down there but I could hear him crying, sometimes, when it was just the two of us.”

  “O’Hara?” I repeated.

  “Still alive. We need to decide what to do about that.” Oh? One of those situations?

  “Alright. Come and sit in the car and tell me everything.” Best not to disturb the scene until I knew the whole story.

  Sitting in da’s car, which I’d borrowed to come here, I listened to him describe everything, the shocks, the sedative, the things he’d heard Brady and his alter ego discussing. He talked about it all as if it had been nothing to worry about, no big deal.

  “That alter ego of Brady’s really is a monster. He’s got a very effective carrot and stick routine for keeping Brady in line. Blinding headaches that make him pass out if he acts up and orgasmic rushes for doing well.”

  “It’s all one person, Shay.”

  “One brain, one body, two distinct, separate egos. Anyway, so then he decided to see what a dose of LSD would do to me. Maybe the Alter thought it would make me give myself away if I was faking it? It seemed likely. You know that hallucinogenic substances don’t bother me much, Con.” Shat shrugged. “As Aldous Huxley said, it’s not a bad thing to open those doors every so often and I’ve trained myself to handle the effects. Brady bought everything I did as if of course I must be some alien creature. What else could I be? He thought he was working for a ‘good’ alien, saving the fucking world from the ‘bad’ ones. Anyway, that’s when he decided to see if the torc did anything. He put it on me when he came back down last night.”

  “And?”

  “And, suddenly, hey presto, I could both understand and speak English. That didn’t even make him blink. Neither of them seemed very happy with what I had to say though. I told Brady his pal shouldn’t be here.” Shay fixed me with a serious look. “That Alter is totally psychotic. It hates the entire human species so much that it’s convinced itself it really is an alien. Anyway, I played to that delusion. I told them that this was our world, and nobody else was supposed to come near it. I fed them a real load of nonsense about how their full moon rituals in ‘our’ places were making our ‘gates’ here go on the fritz, and that I’d been sent to find them to warn his friend to pack it in and piss off back to wherever it came from. We’d deal with any other aliens that came here, like we always had.”

  He tilted his head. “Brady lapped it all up, no problem, but it pissed his Alter off no end. He kept insisting I was a lying little snake and made Brady keep zapping me with that fucking taser gun and a nasty stinging cattle prod he had too. I just kept pretending it didn’t hurt, and as I wasn’t showing any fear, I didn’t trigger anything worse than that. Once it was clear I wasn’t going to change my tune, the Alter made Brady take the torc off me, and they went off for the night.”

  That had been last night. “What did you do then?”

  “Once my muscles finally stopped quivering? I opened up the armband and got my little lockpick set out.”

  The armband, like the torc, was an ingenious bit of decoration for hiding things in. You had to press on various parts simultaneously with different fingers to spring the catches that opened them up. The inside of the armband had recesses in it that the picks could clip into.

  “I’d practised on the manacle and the cell door the night before so I was pretty quick with them by then. Brady had left both the torc and his taser gun on the table out in the main cellar. I retrieved my little wrapped up bundle of tools from the torc and dismantled his taser gun.”

  Last time he’d used it, the torc had a tracker wired into it. They’d been bulkier back then. I could still remember the look on McGill’s face when we broke the door in.

  “By the time I’d done meddling with the voltage amplifier circuit and put the thing back together, I knew I could get the better of him the next time he came into that cell. I just hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Would it make the same noise or would it be quieter? Would he notice?”

  “And if he had?”

  Shay just shrugged. “I was chained up in a locked cell. Maybe he’d decide that it had just malfunctioned. He’d been using it a lot. I reckoned he’d figure he’d worn a part out. In that case, I’d just wait until he came down again, with the locks already picked, and try to get to him before he realised what I was up to. It was a good job he’d never thought of fitting any cameras down there though,” he added thoughtfully.

  “So when he came in this morning? What happened?”

  “He’d decided to try the torc again. I expect he’d thought of a lot more questions to ask me by then. He shot me with the taser, I did my fall over twitching routine and when he bent down to put it on me I hit him with a vagus nerve strike. Not hard enough to kill him but he dropped like a rock. He’s locked in my cell now.” He looked over at me anxiously. “What do you want us to do with him, Con?”

  I didn’t have to think it over.

  “We need to put him down,” I told him. Brady O’Hara had an illness that wasn’t his fault and might even be curable. I knew that, rationally, but it wasn’t enough to make me hesitate. Not after what he’d done and might still do again if we didn’t end this. Even locked up, he might still manage to kill a doctor, a nurse or another patient. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

  “Alright then.” He sounded relieved that I thought so. “We might as well go and get it over with.”

  We went down to the cellar, and Shay unlocked the cell. Now that I could see it all for myself I was having an even harder time understanding how anyone who’d been locked in here, knowing what O’Hara was capable of, could just shrug it all off as calmly as Shay seemed to be doing.

  Brady was tied up, but in a way that wouldn’t leave any marks. Those knots couldn’t be loosened but they wouldn’t tighten up either and his clothes padded the bonds, protecting the skin of his arms and legs. His hair was longer and dyed a darker colour than before and he had a full beard now too. I doubted anyone would have recognised him on sight from the picture we’d put out.

  “Unconscious,” my cousin said, staring down at him. “Another of those blackout headaches, perhaps? Get behind him and sit him up please. Hold his head still. I need to hit exactly the same spot again.” Shay kept his voice to a whisper. Was Jimmy awake in his own cell, behind that other door? Was he listening? We didn’t know. It was better to be cautious.

  I did as Shay asked. My cousin’s arm moved in a blur, the heel of his hand striking deeply into the neck below the angle of the jaw. The vagus nerve regulated both the heartbeat and the breathing. This was not a technique that anyone ever used against another person in practise. You trained for that move on a dummy, and only ever on a dummy. This time Shay delivered a lethal blow. Brain death would be almost instantaneous.

  “What’s the official story?” I asked him quietly as we removed the ropes.

  “The truth, mainly. The taser wore off more quickly than he expected and I struck at his neck. I didn’t realise I’d hit him hard enough to kill him but that won’t surprise anyone after what I’ve been through. Plus he’d shot me full of acid again so I was hallucinating at the time too.”

  “You’re going to give yourself another dose, then?” I followed him out and put the ropes back in the pile on the shelf. We moved as quietly as we could, still whispering.

  “Half of what he gave me before should be enough for the blood tests. He gave me way too much. You know, he’s got just about everything in th
at cabinet, even Clozapine, but that’s the only pill bottle in there that hasn’t been opened. His Alter wouldn’t let him take antipsychotics.” He was screwing his little tool set together to take the taser apart again to restore it to its former condition. “I’ll lose the shirt again later. I want them to see some of the burns. It will help us sell our version of events and so will my behaviour. You managed to coax me into my jacket and trainers after you got here, alright? Right now, you take Uncle Danny’s car home. I’ll call you again in a little while and then you drive back here in your own car. I’ll wipe all records of the earlier call later. Actually, can you pick up my phone and the drones on your way home? They’re not far away.” He told me where to find them. “Bring my phone and its card with you when you come back here please. If you take me out to sit in the car, I can wipe those records while we’re in there, before anyone gets a look at O’Hara’s phone. I’ll bring these things in my pockets and leave them in the car too.” The torc and armband.

  “And Jimmy?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we get him out of here now?”

  He gave me an unhappy little look.

  “He’s safe, that will have to be enough for a little while longer. I don’t like it either, but we have to watch our backs here, Cuz. Legally, we just conspired to commit murder.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. It was true, technically. In reality, a sick, dangerous animal had been offered an instant and humane release.

  The real crime would have been to let Brady O’Hara live.

  Epilogue

  Bernard Anderson finished reading the final report on the Black Wood killer, Brady O’Hara, and closed the folder. He preferred to read printed copies of lengthy documents when he could. He looked across his desk at the silently waiting figure of James McKinnon, who’d been occupying himself by dunking biscuits into his tea and eating them for the past ten minutes.

  It had been almost two weeks since the Friday when their suspect had died in that cellar in Balloch. Jimmy Stewart, he knew, was currently receiving psychiatric support and would be, for some months. The boy had been deeply traumatised and would need time to recover from his ordeal. He was jumpy and suffering from recurring nightmares, but that was only to be expected at this stage. Give him time and the psychological scars would fade, even if they never completely vanished. Things could certainly have gone a lot worse for the poor child.