Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

set up in a new city. I want some figures and dates checked when we get back to the station.” I was keeping my eye on the road, but I saw her looking over at me out of the corner of my eye.

“They’d have to use the A9 or the A82, right?” she said, following my own train of thought. “So you’re thinking that maybe we might be able to cross-check the records and see if any particular vehicles kept turning up at the right times in the right places?”

“Unless they exchange their trucks too regularly to prevent it, yeah.” It was certainly worth spending some time to look into properly. “They may even have a little fleet, for all we know. We’ve lost what, fourteen cars in the same way in the last five weeks? That’s some serious money being driven away in the night.”

Despite the fact that both of the A roads out of Inverness were infamously dangerous in terms of accidents, I thought that the potential rewards would be well worth the risks to a large scale operation, especially as they would be using professional, careful drivers and not the kind of idiots who were likely to break the speed limit or drive recklessly. The A9 seemed like our likeliest shot at finding something too. Extra traffic cams had been added all along the road between Perth and Inverness a few years back.

Checking the National ANPR Data Centre records on the NAS system was looking more and more like a logical move to make. Nobody below the rank of inspector could access the automatic number-plate recognition records, except for real time footage, because too much of that kind of usage would slow the entire system down so much it would become effectively unusable. However, as a DCI, I could look through the last three months myself without needing to ask superintendent Anderson to formally request a longer check. After all, I’d certainly class this as a ‘Priority and Volume’ case. We weren’t dealing with an isolated instance of motor vehicle theft with this one. It had organised crime stamped all over it.

“We can get started on figuring out where the last spikes in this type of theft were as soon as we get in,” I told Caitlin. “If we can work out where our gang was operating in November, that will give us two separate sets of camera locations to focus on for the dates we’re interested in.”

“It’s worth a go,” Caitlin conceded, “but you might just end up getting swamped with a ridiculous amount of data to wade through.” The thought had occurred to me too.

“I can narrow that down a bit, I think. For one thing, I think they’d play safe by parking up overnight and only setting off in the early morning, when there was more traffic to hide in. So, I can just pick a busyish, pre rush hour time slot on the mornings after the thefts occurred to start with and see if anything stands out.” I think she was beginning to become a little more enthusiastic about the idea by then.

“I doubt they’d go for a forty foot container, those would be too conspicuous. So we could focus on the twenty footers. They could be moving the cars individually or have a racking system fitted to carry two at a time.” I was rather hoping for the former myself, because that would double the amount of trips our thieves had to make, and therefore double our statistical chances of finding them.

Back at Old Perth Road I found that Walker and Collins were still out making door-to-door enquiries on the new murder case, so I asked Caitlin to get Mills and Bryce to help her start compiling data on reported car thefts in Scotland throughout last November while I settled back into my office and logged in to the National ANPR Service (NAS). I pulled up a list of the dates for our recent thefts and got cracking.

As usual, I lost track of time a bit as I sank into the almost trancelike level of focus required for this kind of job, adding lorry after lorry to my rapidly growing spreadsheet. If Shay hadn’t buzzed me when he did and snapped me out of it, I might have ended up skipping lunch altogether.

“Hey, Con, I’ve just sent you the facial reconstructions you asked for.” he told me when I answered my phone. I glanced at the time. It was nearly two o’clock, already! “Sorry it took so long, but I wanted to make them as accurate as possible.” I smiled to myself as I leant back and nudged my chair into a short swing.

“Shockingly slow!” I told him, “I sent you the scans almost four hours ago, you lazy sod.” Shay had a funny idea of what the word ‘slow’ meant. “Hang on, I want to have a look and see what you’ve come up with this time.”

I opened up his email and clicked on the first attachment. Oh, that was good! The man I was looking at appeared to be in his early twenties. He had a dark-skinned and unremarkable face, except for the sunken cheeks and some patches of dry, scaly skin. He also had a small scar, less than two inches long, on the right side of his forehead. The eyes were a little bloodshot too. Shay had added his eyebrows back in, presumably from matching the burned out follicles, but he’d left the scalp bald. Thorough as usual, he’d also created a further five images with varying lengths of black, kinky hair and different lengths of facial stubble all the way up to a full beard, all on a plain white background. I had no doubt that the restored nose, lips and other features would be an excellent approximation of what our victim must have looked like. The mouth was closed and the face muscles relaxed. Shay hadn’t been tempted to artistically try for any particular expression.

“Why the