Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “He did not, Sir,” Walker assured him. “As I said, they were all very drunk. Then one of them decided that it might be funny to attempt to engage with me in an inappropriate manner so I put him on the ground and restrained him. I’m afraid the other two took objection to that and decided to throw themselves at Mills. I think they thought it would be easier to deal with me if they put him out of action first.”

  That seemed likely. Darren was a big lad and didn’t look like the sort who could think or move quickly. Appearances could be very deceptive.

  “I’m afraid I overestimated their coordination,” Mills chimed in helpfully. “They were staggering about all over the place, and I caught an accidental knock from one of them flailing around while I dealt with them, Sir. DC Walker called for a couple of patrol cars to come and take them off our hands and they’re all in lock up now, hopefully sleeping it off.”

  All four of our DCs had been enjoying some extra training sessions with Conall since last summer. They’d known that he’d been helping me and had been dying to get in on it ever since they’d heard me describe how he’d handled our three assailants last March. They’d certainly all benefitted from the extra workouts.

  “Mmm.” Conall’s mouth was twitching as he pictured the farcical scene. “No doubt they’ll be sorry once they’ve sobered up, especially when we inform them of the fines they’re probably going to have to pay. So,” he asked, “unexpected scuffles aside, how did you all get on?”

  Between us all, we’d managed to speak with forty three of the sixty people on our lists, not counting the one in lock up. Twenty three of those had willingly agreed to let us look around, as well as check their GPS history. Not bad for a first run. The last sixteen would get another visit tomorrow, but hopefully, they’d phone in first so we weren’t wasting time going to empty houses next time.

  I took the opportunity to nip off to the loo while they were all talking. Conall glanced over when I reappeared before turning back to his little group.

  “Well, it’s up to you four if you want to finish writing up your reports tonight but I’m packing up and heading home, and so is Sergeant Murray.” He went off to get his things together and lock up his office.

  “The boss mentioned fines?” Bryce asked me as I came up to them again. “But they could potentially get up to six months, right?”

  “If they’d been sober, some time would be more likely.” I told him, “but we can’t send every drunk who does something stupid off to prison. It’ll be a few hundred quid each and a dose of community service more than likely.”

  “Aye, that’ll do nicely,” Darren agreed. “That should be enough to make them think twice before trying anything like that again in a hurry, no matter how pissed they get.”

  “Of course, if either of us had been seriously injured it would be another matter, drunk or not,” Walker added. “Depending on who’s on the bench, the magistrates usually show some common sense when deciding what’s appropriate. Our reports have influence too. In fact, in this case, pointing that out to our man tomorrow might make him more inclined to be cooperative.”

  “I’m sure it will,” I told her cheerfully. Conall was ready to go by then so we left them to shut down and lock up.

  “You didn’t seem too concerned about Walker and Mills’ little brush up,” I commented as we climbed into the car and he handed me his bag to put on the floor. I got my notebook out and popped it into the front pocket. He’d want to borrow that if he was planning to write up our results tonight.

  “Thanks.” He buckled up and waited for me to do the same. “Those two are quite capable of looking after a trio like that. Besides, you don’t have to be in the police force for some drunken idiot to decide they want to take a swing at you. How many brawls were you called in on when you were in the uniforms?” He pulled us out of our parking spot and out onto the road.

  “I expect I got my fair share. A few pub fights and a lot more domestic disturbances. How about you?”

  “I think we could all say the same. If either of them had really been hurt, it would be different, but it doesn’t do any good to overreact to incidents like that. They know that as well as we do.”

  He was right, of course. Assaulting a constable in the execution of their duty was classed as aggravated assault but there was a growing tendency, in some areas, to come down excessively hard on people who’d done no more than give one of us a little shove. It was one thing to discourage that kind of behaviour but quite another to pursue such cases to the full extent of the law.

  “It doesn’t seem very likely that their house owner could be the man we’re looking for.”

  “Not behaving like that, no. And if he’s got any sense at all and wants to keep his fine low, he’ll give consent for us to check his place out thoroughly tomorrow.”

  It was only a few minutes’ drive to my place, and he didn’t hang around once he saw I had my door open. I picked up my mail and dropped it off in the kitchen before heading upstairs to change.

  It was only when I went downstairs again and got the kettle on that I looked through the day’s offerings. One envelope grabbed my attention immediately.

  Christ! Conall hadn’t wasted any time after our conversation last month. The letter made it official. I was to attend a promotion ceremony down at Tulliallen in May, along with a group of other officers getting their bumps. He must have been working on the competency based assessment for months, to get it pushed through so quickly. All he’d needed was my agreement before asking Superintendent Anderson to set the wheels in motion.

  Well, at least the threat of a transfer was firmly off the table now. After nearly three years with Conall, the idea of working under anyone else had become so distasteful to me that a little extra responsibility had seemed by far the better option. He’d better not try to disappear on me any time soon now though or I’d bloody well strangle him!

  Fourteen

  By the morning of Tuesday the nineteenth of February, we were all feeling the strain. Everyone on Shay’s list had been vetted, and we were still no closer to finding Chris Arnold. Either our culprit wasn’t registered as a single occupant within our search area or the van they’d been driving wasn’t theirs.

  Public appeals to anyone who may have passed the layby where our van had been parked up on the eleventh had resulted in three calls from drivers who remembered seeing a white van there that morning. None could supply us with any details of make, model, or number plate, and none had any recollection of seeing the driver. That hadn’t been surprising. If you asked me about the unremarkable parked vehicles I’d driven past on any given morning, I’d be about as much help as they’d been.

  We hadn’t mentioned that we were looking for a white van, only that we were interested in anything and anyone that may have been seen there. I’d been in two minds about the usefulness of making that appeal myself. If our culprit remained unaware of our search for their van, they’d be less likely to switch to another vehicle, and the chances of anyone coming forward with new information had been low. Now, possibly, our culprit may be warily wondering how much information we’d received.

  We all knew how hopeless our chances of stopping the killer tonight were, if they did intend to strike again. A crime scene within ten miles of the city centre would give us over three hundred square miles of ground to cover. Expand that radius to fifteen miles and you were looking at over seven hundred square miles to try to watch. Further than that and the numbers became exponentially worse. McKinnon would have every patrol car he could man out there throughout the night, but it would require an enormous helping of blind luck for any of our people to find themselves in the right place at the right time to intervene.

  Replicating the homemade rope fuse that had been used to ignite the diesel and burn Dominic Chuol’s corpse had given us a burn time of roughly half an hour, given the length of the remnants. Even if they repeated the same process tonight, our culprit would be long gone from the scene before any fire was spot
ted. There was nothing to stop them from using a longer fuse either.

  “Satellite footage probably won’t help much, but I’ll see if I can get all night sole access to one,” Shay had told me when I’d raised the subject last week. “Unless I have a specific location to target its attention on, my view will be too distant to bring up any potentially helpful detail, even on a continuous feed. Besides, we have no way of knowing that they won’t change tactics altogether this time. They know we’ve been investigating the death of Dominic Chuol and they know we’re looking into the disappearance of Chris Arnold. If I were them, I’d probably make my kill under cover this time… well, unless I had some set of unfathomable rules to follow that wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Like needing to be out in the moonlight?” I suggested.

  “Windows? Skylights? Besides, we don’t know if that’s an issue. What about cloudy nights? Just because we believe they’ve attached significance to the night of the full moon doesn’t mean they also believe they need to be outside to do whatever it is they think they’re doing.”

  He was right, of course. The list of things we didn’t know seemed endless. With that in mind, the plan we’d cobbled together for tonight was the best we could manage.

  People sometimes get odd ideas about the capabilities and powers of the police force. The truth is that most films and TV shows don’t make a great deal of effort to mirror reality. Forensic work is often far slower in producing results than people expect. CCTV cameras are a lot thinner on the ground than generally thought, especially outside built-up, commercial areas. Our search powers are strictly limited. We did not enjoy the kind of authority that would allow us to hunt through every house or flat in the area that happened to be the residence of a van owner and, even if we’d had the right to do that, we didn’t have the manpower to carry out such searches. Police drones? We had none in Inverness, although we were scheduled to be allotted one in May; a remotely piloted aircraft system, for use in missing persons searches over difficult terrain… and if we used it for anything else, we’d catch merry hell from the watchdogs. Recorded images would have to respect existing privacy laws, including General Data Protection Regulations.

  Conspiracy theorists could babble all they liked, but the UK was far from being a police state, thank goodness. Most of the time, and in most places, Big Brother was definitely not watching.

  Also, even though murder cases and kidnappings were always prioritised, and extra resources were diverted as required to cover those, there were limits to what could be done. Once you’d followed every possible lead and still come up empty handed, all you could do was wait for fresh evidence or for another crime to be committed that might provide such evidence. That was just an unfortunate fact of life. We had a man missing who we had good reason to believe might be killed tonight, and there wasn’t any further useful action we could take, that morning, to prevent it from happening.

  It’s hard to focus on cases of petty theft, or minor drug infractions, or trivial misdemeanours with a prospect such as that dominating your thoughts but police departments can’t afford to grind to a halt. If you’re stalled on one case, you’re expected to work on another, pure and simple.

  I’d been at my desk for less than three hours when a knock on my door announced Caitlin a little before eleven.

  “Another file for your In tray,” she told me, waving a slim folder in one hand. “And Walker and Bryce just got back from the Off Licence in Dalneigh that was broken into last night.”

  “Did they have any luck?” I asked, gesturing for her to sit down. The thieves had made off with a decent haul of tobacco products and spirits.

  “They did.” Her cheerfulness at that news seemed a little forced. “They sprayed the CCTV camera but there was a second concealed device running that caught them all with their masks off. The owner even recognised two of the thieves, both local lads, and only fifteen or sixteen the daft little idiots. Their mums pop in there regularly and have done for years. We have first and last names for both boys. The third guy was older, maybe mid-twenties.” He was probably both the organiser and the driver then.

  “Was the second camera up to regulations?”

  “It was. All the collected data was encrypted properly. No problem there.” On a normal day news like that would have made me smile.

  “Maybe Collins could process some stills for them while they’re checking family and friends connections,” I suggested. “He’s getting pretty good at that job and I’m guessing they’d rather have those quickly.” The sooner they could get an identification on the unknown man the better. We’d want to hit all three addresses at the same time once we had them, and we’d want search warrants before moving too. “What’s the file?”

  “Just the print out of Mike’s final report on his street robbery case.”

  Right. I’d need to check through that. I was confident that Collins would have made a decent job of it but there was still room for improvement in his write ups. Nothing my team did went through to the Procurator Fiscal’s office until I’d made sure it was ready. I’d get round to that when I’d finished going over the report I was working on and then we could go over it together after lunch. He was making a lot fewer mistakes and omissions than he had when I’d first got here but he wasn’t quite there yet.

  Caitlin was studying my face worriedly.

  “How about a coffee break?” she finally ventured, having wisely decided to keep whatever she’d been about to say to herself. “You look like you could use one.”

  “Sure.” That sounded like a very good idea. “If you get the kettle on, I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.” After she’d gone, I got up to stretch again. I’d been staring at my screen for too long and that was never a good idea. Another restless night hadn’t helped either, my eyes were starting to get that dry, sandy feel again. I opened up a drawer and gave them a couple of drops each from the little bottle I’d brought in the week before. It was going to be a long day and an even longer night.

  I left the office punctually, at five, an almost unheard of occurrence. I hadn’t thought Shay’s plan of stuffing an early dinner into me so I could get my head down for a couple of hours would work but it did. When he woke me again at nine, with coffee to hand, I was feeling a lot fresher.

  “Moon rise was about fifteen minutes ago so we’ve got less than eight hours to get through before it sets again.”

  “How’s the sky?”

  “Partially cloudy, as predicted. Hopefully, they’ll be right about it clearing later too. I’ll see you downstairs in a few.”

  I drank down the coffee and went to freshen up in my bathroom before pulling on some comfortable trousers and going down to join him in our temporarily transformed living room.

  “You’ve been busy in here,” I told him, taking in his set up approvingly. His satellite feed was on display on our big screen against the wall facing the couch. To either side of that and nearer the couch, he’d pulled in low tables from all over the house and set up another three monitors each for us. Trays in position over the couch itself held our laptops, and he’d even stocked the coffee table with an array of thermoses and snacks. We wouldn’t need to take our eyes off things except for quick trips to the loo.

  “Where did you decide to park your big drone in the end?”

  “On top of one of the cathedral towers. It’s a nice central spot, and it’s tucked away out of sight up there.”

  Despite his best efforts, my cousin hadn’t been able to find a way of keeping his mini drones in the air for more than thirty minutes at a time but his larger drone could carry a two kilo payload and had provided him with a partial solution to the problem. He’d rigged that with adapted power banks and could now keep three of his six drones in the air at all times while the others recharged at their docking stations.

  “Drones one and four will take it in turns to run my pre-programmed patterns over Kinmylies, two and five over Ballifeary and three and six over Drummond. Everything’s set
to record all the footage, including the satellite feed.”

  Our pre-planned vigil was yet another long shot. but as we’d intended to stay up to monitor the satellite feed anyway, we’d both thought it was worth pursuing. Private drone operators had their own regulations, permissions and certifications to deal with, but Shay had made sure to deal with all of that. He was fully licensed to fly his newest toys, and nobody needed to know that he was operating so many of them.

  Neither of us expected our drone test tonight to amount to anything, but it had seemed like a better option than merely manning the satellite controls or driving aimlessly around. If nothing else, it was a good opportunity to test how his new system performed over several hours of constant use.

  The old name for Dores had translated as ‘Black Wood,’ a snippet of information that our killer had known. One of the things that Shay had looked into was a list of old names for other locations around Inverness and he’d found quite a lot of them. Dominic Chuol had been African. He’d also been a child soldier. Whether ‘black heart’ was a reference to the war crimes that Dominic had been forced to commit during those years or a reference to the colour of his skin, his killer had gone to some trouble to create a link between his victim and the scene of his death. Would he do the same for Chris Arnold?

  Limited by the number of drones he could fly, Shay had pored over that list of names before making his selections. Drummond, ‘The Specials Ridge,’ Ballifeary, ‘The Guard’s Farm/place/village or ‘Lookout Point’ and Kinmylies, “The Head (or Place) of the Warriors.’ Those three, out of all the options he had discovered, seemed to have more of a tenuous connection to Arnold’s military past than any of the other place names he’d found. They also had the advantage of being within easy flying distance of the town centre, and each other. I wasn’t too sure about any of those neighbourhoods being likely spots myself. Those were all busy residential areas and quite central.