Death in the Black Wood

by Oliver Davies

  “Just a sec. I’m going to nip in there first.” He disappeared into the loo, and I went to see how my DCs had been getting on. They gave me their instant, combined attention.

  “As you may have guessed, Mr Baird and his boys are all rather busy today so Mr Keane kindly came to process our latest scene for us. He’s here to finish preparing the collected evidence ready to be taken over to forensics. Please don’t disturb him while he’s working. If he needs anything he’ll let you know.”

  “Sir.” They acknowledged in almost perfect unison.

  “Updates? You first, Walker.”

  “The taxi that drove the Millers to the airport last Tuesday was booked by app so there was no phone call to listen to. The driver is coming in to see us at four o’clock. As you requested when I called, we’ve been phoning around the neighbours that weren’t in when McKinnon’s people went to see them earlier. Not much luck with that so far, but we do have two people with security cameras living near the Dawsons who are happy to let us look to see if they caught anything.” That was better than nothing.

  “Alright, keep going with the calls for now and let me know when you’re done.” Shay reappeared and wandered over at that point. “Shay, meet DCs Walker, Collins, Mills and Bryce.” I gestured round at them all as I said their names. “Team, this is our Specialist Consultant, Mr Keane.” My cousin lifted his head and met each of their startled looks through his big, blue-tinted glasses and flopping fringe.

  “Hi,” he offered disinterestedly. “Which printer can I have, Con?”

  “Take printer three. Everybody else keep off it for now please.”

  “Cool.” He made a little waving gesture and slouched off again to set up his laptop and get cracking

  “Mills?” I asked. Darren was staring after my cousin with a bemused little smile, mouth partly open. “Updates?”

  “Uh, yes, Sir.” He snapped back into focus. “We have all the relevant footage from the airport security cameras covering two hours on each of the departure dates. I’m dealing with the Millers and Bryce has the Dawsons. We’re copying every clip we find with any of the family members in view.” That should keep those two gainfully occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

  “Email me to let me know when those files are ready please. I’ll want to look them over as soon as they are.” I left them all to get on with it and beckoned for Caitlin to follow me into my office. She shut the door and leaned against it with a highly amused expression on her face.

  “Your cousin doesn’t come across as a very likely covert agent, does he?” she said in a low voice, trying not to laugh.

  “Not really.” I sat down and pushed the button to start booting up my PC again. “Then again, that would defeat the idea of being covert if he was. I don’t think he was quite what they were expecting after your ‘eccentric, super brainy’ comments either.

  “Well, he is wearing glasses, at least. They were probably imagining a pale, nerdy looking egghead, though. Darren seemed to think it was funny, but the other three looked a bit shell shocked for a minute there.”

  “Mmm.” I agreed. She’d had her moment of fun, but we had work to do and I didn’t want her to stretch it out. I fished the keys to the bungalow out of my pocket and dropped them into an envelope before handing it to her. “I want you to go out again. Take Walker with you, Collins can finish making those calls on his own. You can drop the keys in at the estate agent’s if you happen to pass there, but there’s no rush on that. They have another set, and they’re already aware of the broken lock.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Those neighbours with security cameras. Let’s get on that straight away. They might have caught something. Look out for any passing vans scoping the area out before the departure days, if they have footage going back that far, and for passing foot traffic since then.”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “Warn Collins to let you know immediately if he gets anything else from further calls. Apart from that no, not just now.”

  “On it,” she agreed cheerfully and let herself out. Once she’d gone, I checked the case folder for updates. No new developments there, just routine reports on tasks completed without further results. I’d better call James to let him know what we’d found before I started writing it all up.

  Half an hour later, I went out to see how Shay was getting on.

  “How’s it going?” I perched on the end of his desk.

  “Nearly done. I’ve copied all my shots into ordered folders on a thumb drive for Forensics but they’re getting the print outs and the lists too, with priority requests on the bag and its contents.” Printer three was busily churning out colour sheets at spaced intervals, but my cousin had taken a lot of photographs so that wasn’t surprising. “None of the fingerprints on the doors or anywhere else match the ones on the sports bag, so I’ve added a ‘no action currently required’ note for all the earlier slides.”

  “Good idea. We don’t want them jammed up doing pointless fingerprint searches. What about the set that we are interested in?”

  “No match for them in the PND. I’ll run some more checks on them when I get home.” Where there was no chance of anyone seeing which systems he was poking around in.

  “Ready to stop for lunch soon? What do you fancy? Noodles?”

  “No thanks. I’m still good. I’ll eat when I get home. Do you want to grab those sheets from the printer for me?” I did so and placed them on the desk for him.

  “Give me one of your teabags then, I’m going to stick the kettle on.” He fished one out of the side pocket of his pack, and I left him to finish packing everything up.

  After popping into the break room to fill the kettle, I went back out and asked Bryce to nip out and find me a couple of uniforms to run the bags over to forensics for me before grabbing my lunch bag from my office. Shay was just about done by then.

  “Want to bring that to the break room?” I asked him, nodding to his laptop.

  Once we were settled at the table in there, Shay pulled up his stills to show me. Wow! Those might as well have been taken in full daylight. They were far better than I’d been expecting.

  “It’s amazing what the right filtering can do with a decent photo and those little cameras on the drones aren’t too shabby,” he allowed as he sipped his tea. Our man’s face was almost entirely obscured between the scarf pulled up over the nose and the hood shielding his eyes, but the detail on everything he was wearing and the bag over his shoulder was excellent. “Think they’ll be of any use?”

  “Definitely. Can you email those to me and McKinnon please? I’ve already got a few people in mind from the Black Wood case that I’d like to show them to. McKinnon might want to release them to the media too. Another public appeal… did anyone see this man on Tuesday night?”

  Shay frowned. “Is that advisable? Do we want to tip him off to the fact that he was spotted? And where?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. All three of those stills were from the footage my drone had taken while it was sitting on that wheelie bin up in Kinmylies. Out of all of our locations that one had been the best lit. “But he’s the OIOC, it will be his call whether to do that or not.”

  “I just hope he weighs up the possible pros and cons first.” Shay didn’t like the idea, that much was clear. I took another bite while I waited for him to spell those out. “Possible gains. We may get enough calls in from sightings earlier last night to give some idea of where he’d been before we spotted him. We may even get a call from someone who’s seen our man wearing some of those clothes before, maybe even a neighbour. None of those items we found were new. They were all quite well worn.”

  “And the cons?” I prompted.

  “A flood of misinformation from mistaken callers for starters. Chasing all those down could eat up a lot of man hours, as well as confuse things enough to make the whole exercise pointless. More worrying is the thought of how our killer may react if he sees a televised appeal like that.
I wouldn’t like to try to predict what he might do, but there is a possibility that it might cause him to lash out against the police. Nobody likes to feel hunted or threatened and we’re not dealing with a mentally stable person here. Myself, I’d prefer to wait until we had all the forensic reports in before doing anything that drastic.”

  “By then, people’s memories of last night won’t be as clear, Shay. We could miss out on a tip that would lead us right to him, or close enough to find him.”

  “I know. It’s a risk either way.” He drank off the rest of his tea. “Anyway, I’d better get back. I found one connection between the Dawsons and the Millers before your text came in that I want to follow up on. And I want to run those prints through some more databases too.” He wouldn’t want to discuss whatever he’d been snooping into here, where we could be overheard, so I didn’t ask. He’d call me as soon as he had anything solid, if I wasn’t home myself by then. I drank off the coffee that my machine had finished pumping out and we both got up.

  My cousin would be operating in top gear for the foreseeable future. I had a suspicion that he felt that he’d failed us, in some way, last night, unlikely as that may seem. Christ! Without Shay we’d have nothing but those partial remains to go on today. Still, I knew the impossible standards he could sometimes set himself, given the right motivation. Chris Arnold hadn’t just left a wife behind, and their youngest boy was only eleven.

  By the time I’d followed him out, Shay already had his jacket on and his laptop bag slung over his shoulder.

  “See you later then, Cuz. Buzz me if you decide to work late. Otherwise, dinner at eight?”

  “Sounds good. See you later, Shay.”

  He didn’t bother to say goodbye to my remaining DCs before he left, but he did send a vague wave in their direction. Maybe, in a few months, he might even soften towards them enough to agree to take on another student. Bryce had surprised the hell out of me. That lad had taken to unarmed combat like a duck to water, and he was already far more advanced than the other three.

  “Sir?” Collins ventured as I headed back to my office. “I just wanted to apologise for earlier.” I stopped to look down at him.

  “Earlier?” I knew damned well what he meant.

  “When we were discussing Mr Keane, the possibility of him not being a civilian after all.”

  “Oh, that. Listen Mike, what you choose to talk about among yourselves on your own time is none of my business. Still, as you've brought it up, I’d appreciate it if any further gossiping about my family only happened when I wasn’t here, especially if it’s offensive in nature.”

  “Of course, Sir,” he said uncertainly, a little puzzled by that last bit. Right, these kids hadn’t had any dealings with the kind of people they’d been talking about. They probably still thought covert agents were really cool, the ‘good guys,’ knights in shining armour.

  Well, far be it from me to destroy their illusions.

  I went back to my office to print out a few copies of those stills. Had I ever seen our world in such black and white terms? If I had, I must have been too young to remember it now.

  Nineteen

  James McKinnon decided to go ahead and air that appeal on Wednesday night. One of Shay’s stills, a full body front view of our suspect, was shown on successive newscasts that evening. As my cousin had predicted, the lines were pretty busy as people who thought they’d seen him called in. Positions and estimated times of sightings were duly listed.

  Marked up on a map, they appeared to be a jumble of confusing, contradictory nonsense. McKinnon put two of his analysts on the task of trying to discover which chains of sightings were plausible and which were not. If the suspect was at such-and-such a location between five past twelve and quarter past, could he also have been there, or there, or there, at twelve thirty, either on foot or in a car? With over a hundred reported sightings of ‘possible’ matches wandering around on Tuesday night, there were thousands of possible paths taken to calculate.

  I sent it all to Shay on Thursday morning. If he decided it was worthwhile, he might even write a little programme to crunch the data for him. He could probably make sense of that mess, if there was any to be found, faster than any of our people could.

  The fake Facebook account he’d told me about last night sounded promising, and I knew he was monitoring both that and the coding club for further activity from ‘Brad MacRoberts.’ Whoever that really was, if they posted again, he’d have their IP address within minutes. He hadn’t sounded too optimistic about the prospect of them doing so.

  “I wouldn’t use the same identity again if I were them and if it is our man. Besides, the link there might be purely coincidental. Do you know how many cases of online sexual crimes against minors I’ve looked into in the past few years? Not all those creeps go for the younger ones. A lot of them like adolescents.”

  “True, but a coding club doesn’t seem like a very promising fishing ground for that kind of predator. Most of the members will be smart, educated kids and there are far easier, more vulnerable targets out there.”

  “You’d be surprised. The Dawson girl is fourteen, her hormone levels are probably all over the place, messing with her brain. A persona like ‘Brad,’ once a certain level of trust had been developed, might easily talk her into sending them a few ‘harmless’ pictures and escalate things from there. I think you’re a bit out of touch on what things are really like in the cyberworld these days Con. For every case where some poor little primary school kid is made to believe their families will be killed if they don’t do what they’re told, you’ve got several more where some teenage boy or girl thinks they’re sending pictures to a romantic interest in their own age group.”

  Thousands of kids in the UK were the victims of some form of online exploitation every year, but Shay was a lot more familiar with that kind of crime than I was, and we both knew it.

  “As for the fingerprints, I haven’t found a match for them on any UK system or in any national databases within the EEA,” he’d gone on to tell me. The identity cards of citizens of countries within the European Economic Area now held biometric information, including fingerprints, on little electronic chips. You could travel between a lot of EU countries with such a card without the need for a passport. It was a pity we didn’t have a system like that here or everyone over the age of twelve would have their fingerprints on record. “I have wider, global searches still running, but it’s likely that our man is a UK citizen and has just never done anything that would put their prints into the system.”

  Now that I’d been assigned as the senior investigating officer, the SIO, on the Arnold case, Shay had dropped everything else to focus his full attention on our murderer. I had no idea what else he might be looking into today but knew that he’d at least be eliminating false possibilities at a remarkable pace.

  Waiting for forensic and pathology reports to start coming in was a frustrating game, but there were some lines of investigation we could be getting on with in the meantime. The footage captured by the Dawson’s neighbours had turned out to be useless to us. Their cameras had a partial view of the road leading to the Dawson place, but the stolen car hadn’t been captured as it drove away, not as far as we could tell. Even freezing the views of each vehicle that had passed by there since last Friday hadn’t been enough to tell us for certain, one way or the other. Not enough frames per second, or enough light during the hours of darkness, to give us a clear picture of many of them. On top of which, it may have been driven off in the other direction and not passed by there at all. No passing walkers or joggers were a match for our suspect, and there was no earlier footage to look through either. Both motion sensing security systems had limited storage and automatically wiped older footage to make room for new. If he’d driven past there in his van the week before, there was no evidence of it now.

  Thinking through how our killer may have reached the two houses to steal those cars, it seemed to me that booking a taxi or an Uber to somewhere
nearby might have been a good way to get there. The Dawsons lived to the south of town, east of Fairways golf course, in Milton of Leys. The Miller house was out in Culloden. Our killer may have booked any such ride under a false name, but the driver could still have got a much better look at them than we had. But how close would they have risked driving to either property before getting out to walk the rest of the way? A mile? Two? Even further? And at what time of day or night had they gone there, on any of the possible days?

  No, I decided, pursuing that line of enquiry was futile. What if they’d walked the whole way, from wherever they’d started, or taken a bus, or used a bicycle? A folding bike could be stored in the boot and taken back with them once they had the car. Without any witnesses amongst the neighbours, we’d hit another dead end in our efforts to identify our suspect by looking at the scenes of the thefts. That they’d have avoided traffic cameras again was a given, but I’d run both plates through the NAS anyway, just to be sure.

  I’d also watched the airport security clips that Mills and Bryce had put together without seeing anything of interest occurring. Nobody lurking around, in the terminal or the car park, nobody engaging the members of either family in conversation. Another dead end.

  All five of my team were working their way through airport employees this morning. There were over six hundred of those, but the vast majority of them would not be possible matches for the man we were looking for. We were only interested in white males of the right height and build. Remembering Shay’s comments about the likelihood of our suspect working from home, or not working at all, I doubted we’d find him there either. It was necessary to check though. As both holidays had been booked online, at least we didn’t need to look into local travel agencies as well. That was something to be thankful for. Available man hours were our most valuable currency, and the supply was not without spending limits.