Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “More chance of being spotted by people out and about late or looking out of their windows, yes,” he’d agreed. “But also a lot more traffic to hide in. Any vehicle out in the middle of nowhere is far more likely to attract attention. McKinnon has people parked up at good vantage points all over the area. We can’t assume our culprit won’t have thought of that.”

  “None of which will matter if they stay indoors,” I told him, sitting down on the couch.

  He shrugged. “That’s out of our hands. Let’s just focus on what we can keep an eye on, shall we.” He dropped down at my side and pulled his tray in. “You’ve got drones four to six on your screens so we can take it in turns monitoring those in half hour shifts.”

  “And the satellite feed?”

  “I can zoom in anywhere when one of the patrol cars or helicopters calls in to report passing vehicles out on the quiet roads, or any movement around the houses we’re watching. There’s still quite a lot of traffic about so I’d wait until later to start on that.” His borrowed satellite could pick up GPS signals automatically, but anyone driving without one and not carrying an active phone would have to be tracked by eye. “Eleven until four seems our likeliest window of opportunity, with one ‘til four scoring highest, probability wise.” The hours when the vast majority of people were asleep, and the streets were at their quietest.

  We soon settled into the routine, chatting aimlessly to keep ourselves entertained and alert. I’d had a few good sessions with the drone controls on Saturday and Sunday, so I was comfortable taking manual control of the little things to take a closer look at anything they overflew. My cousin had set them all to stay up at a hundred feet unless we overrode their pre-programmed flight patterns. They were very quiet, small, and hard to spot, so I doubted anyone would notice them unless they got too close. You could easily rest one of them on the palm of your hand.

  Whenever Shay’s drones were up, he’d simply send them over to my screens when a call came in over the radio, freeing himself to zoom in with the satellite’s thermal imaging cameras to get a look at what was going on. We had a busy hour after the pubs closed, but things soon quietened down after that.

  “There are more people still wandering about than I’d expected on a Tuesday night,” he complained, just after half-past one.

  I glanced over at what his three screens were showing him. A few cars were still driving around, and odd clusters of people were walking home from clubs or friend’s houses.

  “Well, you’ve got people on odd shift patterns going to and from work and a lot of unemployed youngsters with nothing better to do than hang out with their pals ‘til all hours. I’d say it all looks pretty normal. It’s the loners we want to look out for, especially away from the houses and close to parks, playing fields and other empty areas.”

  It was a long, dull night and only the thought of what might be happening out there kept me focused enough to keep at it. Our first helicopter team finished their shift at two and were replaced by the second unit. Neither they nor any of the cars reported spotting any fires breaking out anywhere. Shay and I took it in turns to take our drones down to get a good look at lone foot travellers wandering the streets in our selected neighbourhoods and catch the number plates of the odd vehicle still moving around. No sign of anybody pulling or pushing anything big enough to hold a grown man and certainly nobody with a body slung over their shoulder. Whether that was true of every other part of the city remained to be seen.

  We saw a lot of people parking up and walking into nearby houses and blocks of flats. Just people getting home late. I was pretty sure I saw a couple of illegal transactions taking place too. A car would pull up, someone would come out and climb in and a minute later disappear indoors again as the car pulled away.

  “Wishing you were allowed to use this kind of surveillance all the time?” Shay asked when he noticed me watching one such transaction. I released my drone back into its programmed pattern.

  “Not really,” I decided. “If this is the future of police work, they can keep it. It’s a bit like being one of those poor security guards, with nothing to do but stare at a bunch of CCTV feeds all night. I wouldn’t last a week on a job like that.” I cracked another thermos and poured myself a generous coffee. “No offence, Shay. Your little drone setup is very impressive.”

  “It’s not bad,” he allowed. “But setting it all up was a lot more interesting than using it is turning out to be. You’re right about it being a dull job. Give it a few more years though. A smarter AI system could take over everything we’re doing manually tonight. Then it could just send anything ‘interesting’ through to the analysts.”

  “That’ll probably happen faster than any legislation that would allow its use.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  The radio crackled over his speakers. Another odd vehicle out in the middle of nowhere, south of Crerag this time, about fifteen miles west and south of the town centre. He passed his drone views over to me and got busy with his laptop, zooming in on a sedan car driving along yet another little single lane track running through yet another patch of woodland. We’d had quite a few of those already. It pulled into a driveway a couple of minutes later. Two people climbed out and went indoors. He sighed and zoomed out again.

  “Well, we knew this was a long shot. Plus we’d need a lot more drones and a lot more people watching them to do this effectively. I had to call in a ton of favours just to hog one satellite for the night. It’d cost a bloody fortune to run something like this properly all the time.”

  Once his half hour was up, he nipped off to the loo before coming back to pour himself a tea. “How did your lot seem today?” he asked.

  “Tired, a bit stressed, but doing their best not to let it get to them. They all got a reasonable amount of useful work done. Caitlin was giving me some funny looks though.”

  “Probably because you looked like shit. What did you sleep last night? Four hours?” I just shrugged.

  “I’ve caught up a bit again now, haven’t I? We can’t all switch off as easily as you do.”

  He made a dissatisfied little noise of acknowledgement. My drone four was moving up General Booth Road, near Kinmylies church just then. I caught a glimpse of a figure walking along a footpath off a little to the west of there and dipped down for a better look. Just a guy carrying a shoulder bag, probably heading off to work or coming home after a late shift. Shay glanced over to see what I was looking at.

  “That’s odd,” he told me. “I either saw that guy or someone dressed just like him getting out of a car at the Premier Inn down by the A82 less than half an hour ago. I’ll take drone five off you and nip over to check if the car’s still down there. Keep an eye on him, will you? See if you can get up ahead of him and settle somewhere so we can get a front view.”

  Drone five was just a little to the east in Ballifeary, less than a mile from the hotel in question. It would only take him two minutes to pull the drone over from there. I obligingly lifted higher and zoomed further along the footpath, looking for a decent spot to land temporarily. A handy tree branch would do just fine. Even better, the footpath ended after another hundred metres, coming out onto the closed end of a little cul-de-sac.

  I turned my drone around, dropped it onto the top of a wheelie bin, and rotated the camera up so that it was pointing towards where he would appear. For good measure, I also turned the motor off to silence its quiet, insectoid buzzing. Shay had done an amazing job fitting out these little machines.

  “The car’s still where he left it,” Shay told me. “You’d think that if he was making a late night call on a friend, he’d have driven up there. Well, unless he’s planning to drink or get wasted I suppose. I’m going to bring this one up the main road, following his route.”

  My figure appeared, walking straight towards my drone, but I couldn’t see much of his features even in the better light from the street lamps. His hood was up, his head was down and he had a scarf covering his lower face. Well,
it was a cold night. Plenty of the people we’d seen were well bundled up.

  “Are you sure it’s the same man?” I asked. “Only he’s getting into one of the cars parked up here.” He was wearing gloves too, I saw, now that he’d taken his hands out of his pockets, but again, that wasn’t anything unusual on a cold night.

  “Sure? No, but he’s got the same jacket, same trousers, same trainers and the same bag as the guy I saw. It’d be a bit of a coincidence if it wasn’t him.” Yes, it would. I knew better than to doubt Shay’s certainty about details like that. “Get the number plate as he pulls out. These drones can only manage thirty miles an hour at top speed. I’d suggest landing it on the roof of the car but it’s so light it’d blow straight off again once he got moving.”

  I did as he’d asked and lifted my drone as the car pulled out and set off heading north. This was probably nothing, but it was a bit more interesting than what we’d been doing up until then.

  “He’s looping back to the main road,” I told Shay after another minute. “Yeah, there he goes, southbound.”

  “Just keep him in sight if you can. I want to keep checking the route he walked for anything odd.” I flicked a glance at his screen. He was taking his time, flying low and panning around as he approached the church where he’d need to turn off to get to the near end of the footpath.

  “We’re out of luck at my end Shay. He’s just reached the forty miles an hour stretch and speeded up. I’ll go higher and keep after him but you might want to get him on the satellite view if you don’t want to lose him.” If nothing else, we were about to find out how well the system worked when we were trying to track a specific target together.

  While Shay set his drone to hover and switched his attention to the satellite, I kept following the car as my own drone climbed higher again. By the time our driver passed the Premier Inn and turned onto the A82, heading east, I was already far behind him. I told Shay of the turn and followed the car towards the canal, seeking a clear view of the roundabout ahead.

  “Okay, he’s heading up Glenurquhart Road.” He could just have easily gone south there instead.

  This might well be nothing, but Shay was right, it did seem odd. The man had apparently parked up at the hotel, walked a mile, climbed into a different car and driven off again. It was twenty to four in the morning and I couldn’t think of a rational explanation for those movements. This was the most suspicious activity we’d seen all night.

  “Okay, I’ve got the satellite view over there now. There are five different cars moving around past that roundabout, all close enough to be ours.” Shay told me as he studied the big screen. “Two on the main road and three on side streets… and there’s no guarantee that his car is actually one of them. It’s possible that he could even have parked up again for all we know. All I can do now is keep them in view and check for GPS signals. If I zoom in on one of them, I risk losing the others.” Which meant that we’d probably lost him. Well, at least we had the licence plate, and the model.

  At my cousin’s suggestion, I released drone four back to its pre-programmed flight pattern and took control of the hovering drone five while he was occupied with watching the traffic. Moving slowly and using Shay’s panning technique to get good views to both sides as I progressed, I was soon past the church and moving west on Kinmylies Way, approaching the near end of the footpath that I’d first spotted our man on. The sight that arrested my attention as I reached it was just to the right of the path. Maybe that metal pole had once held a sign, or a litter bin, but there was only one thing attached to it now.

  Chris Arnold’s severed head.

  Fifteen

  After I’d called McKinnon, who had insisted I wake him if any significant developments broke during the night, I found that Shay had located our car by flying a freshly recharged drone down from the nearby cathedral. The five moving vehicles he’d spotted with the satellite had all turned out to have GPS systems running and he’d thought it highly unlikely that any of them were being driven by the killer. Those were all still showing up as moving dots, crawling around a map he’d pulled up on his laptop screen.

  He’d found the abandoned car parked up near the bottom end of Ballifeary Road, a very handy spot if our man had intended to cut through the cemetery on foot. The trees came all the way down to the fence near there. A second call from me ensured that McKinnon would start pulling in patrol cars from the outlying areas to circle the cemetery. The crime scene itself would soon be safely cordoned off, and he’d already known to send someone to the Premier Inn. We didn’t want anyone touching either of those abandoned cars before our SOCO teams could get to them and their top priority would be the scene up in Kinmylies.

  “We’ll have a few cars in position around the cemetery soon, and McKinnon will send a search team in to sweep the hill once it gets light. Have you seen any sign of him moving around out there?” I asked Shay after making the second call.

  “None yet and he could have gone to ground anywhere around there if he didn’t hop the fence into the cemetery. We lost that car for a good seven minutes.”

  Either option seemed equally plausible. He could be in any of the houses or garages nearby and the tree cover on Tomnahurich was dense. The ‘Hill of the Yews,’ also frequently referred to as the ‘Fairy Hill,’ was a well-known landmark feature. Formed by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age, the hill stood in impressive solitude looking down on the surrounding plain. The views from the summit where the oldest graves were found was well worth the walk up there and it was a popular spot with locals and tourists alike. The heavily wooded hillsides were a good half a kilometre long, from north to south, with the flat, newer area of the cemetery circling the hill on all sides.

  If our man had gone through there, he could come out again anywhere around the extensive perimeter. Shay’s satellite couldn’t pick up something as small as a person moving around unless he zoomed in on a specific area. The drones gave us a much better chance of spotting our man, if he was out there on foot.

  Tomnahurich had plenty of old folk tales surrounding it. One claimed that Thomas the Rhymer was either buried beneath or still dwelt within the hill. Another old story told of two travelling fiddlers who’d entered there one night to perform for its faerie inhabitants, only to crumble to dust after emerging again because two hundred years had passed in the world outside during their night inside the hill. Ireland didn’t hold the monopoly on tales like that.

  Well, we certainly weren’t hunting for mythical elvish creatures tonight.

  At Shay’s suggestion, I brought another fresh drone down from the cathedral and we spent a good twenty minutes sweeping the area manually without seeing anyone resembling our man. Searching to the north of the cemetery, I didn’t spot anyone walking around at all and Shay only found two individuals over on the east side, between the cemetery and the river. Neither of them were a match for our killer in height, build or attire.

  The drones were almost out of battery life again after that so Shay sent them back to the cathedral to dock again. “I might as well bring them home while it’s still dark,” he decided. “There are enough patrol cars out there now to keep an eye on the cemetery and he’s probably hiding up indoors somewhere until morning, which means we’ve got no chance of finding him like this now. For all we know, he may even have a full change of clothes on him and we didn’t get a look at his face.”

  Ballifeary Road, where the car had been left, was in an area liberally dotted with Bed & Breakfast guesthouses. Our man may even have booked a room in one of those, or an Airbnb, if he wasn’t simply sheltering inside a private house, garage or shed.

  I didn’t think he’d have booked a room. He’d planned his every move in advance, with extreme cautiousness, and leaving a payment trail didn’t match up with that behaviour at all. As for the movements we’d been able to track, those spoke of a high level of paranoia. We’d seen him leave two cars behind and I suspected they’d turn out to be stolen too.
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  We’d both braced ourselves for the high probability of Chris Arnold’s body being discovered at some point in the next few days, but Shay had certainly been as shocked and surprised as I’d been by the sight of that severed head, mounted like a trophy for anyone walking by to discover. Neither of us had been prepared for our killer to change their tactics as drastically as that. In hindsight, it all made sense, in a very twisted way.

  My cousin’s hunch had been dead on. Whatever changes he’d made in his methods, the killer was still matching his victims to places whose names he found appropriate. His grasp of Gaelic must be virtually non-existent though, to have taken the word ‘head’ so literally. Either that or it was his idea of a sick joke. Kinmylies had extended much further in the thirteenth century than it did now and the old name could be interpreted in several different ways. In modern English, ‘The Warriors’ Headland or Head’ was one acceptable interpretation, but the name had never referred to the head of a body.

  Carrying a relatively small, five kilo burden without being spotted was certainly easier than trying to move around with a living captive or an entire corpse, but even if we had anticipated such a move, there really hadn’t been anything we could do about it.

  “I’ve got a few little things to tie up before I call it a night but you should get your head down for a bit if you can Con,” Shay advised me. “You won’t be of any use to anyone if you don’t get some more sleep before you go to work.”

  He was right. McKinnon had everything under control out there so there was no point in my driving into town to join him now. It was going to be an extremely busy day, and I’d need to be clear headed and better rested to get through it productively.

  I couldn’t deny that the tension I’d been carrying around since the eleventh had already dissipated. There was no longer anything any of us could do to save Chris Arnold. No amount of racking our brains for ways to prevent his death was going to change anything now. Still, it wasn’t at all pleasant to discover that a part of me was relieved to find that it was finally over. Had we done everything humanly possible to find him? Given our limitations, I was confident that we had.