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

to be and I had no intention of allowing our little arrangement to get in the way of something more serious. “I’ll have to remind her that da won’t be around to feed them though.”

“Like you won’t have tons of good stuff piled up in the freezer she can steal if you two go on strike. Nobody ever goes hungry visiting you lot, Con.”

“Yeah, following the old hospitality laws does seem a little old fashioned, now that I think about it.” Shay grinned. “Maybe we should just stop feeding them all, Cuz? It is the twenty-first century after all. ”

“Oh piss off!” Liam snorted. “You Keanes put on ridiculous spreads at the slightest excuse, just so you can stuff your own greedy faces without feeling guilty about it. Besides, I’d just make up a rude song about the shamefully tight-fisted descendants of the Ó Catháin Uí Fiachrach and we’d all keep bombarding you with it until you gave in.”

It made me laugh, which is what he’d been angling for.

“Speaking of feeding our greedy, Keane faces…” Da put in cheerfully, “I’m serving up in half an hour son, so if you still want to shower first you’d better get moving son.”

Right. I gave Liam a little wave and left Shay to torture him with a detailed description of what he and da had been cooking up for our farewell dinner.

I’d be driving da out to the airport tomorrow afternoon because he was planning to spend the night with friends in Manchester before taking his nine hour flight over to Orlando on Sunday. I didn’t envy him the long trip but the idea of spending the next couple of months somewhere nice and warm was making me feel a bit jealous. He’d probably come back as tanned as Shay always looked and I’d be all pale and sun-starved in comparison to the two of them if I didn’t grab a week away somewhere nice myself before then. Maybe we could squeeze something in at the end of March?

After dinner, we all settled down in the living room, and I decided that I might as well keep going with my NAS search. Shay glanced over to see what I was doing but refrained from commenting as he popped his earbuds in to listen to music while he worked on his own stuff. Da seemed engrossed with his own laptop so we all worked away peacefully for a while, sort of. It was driving Shay nuts, I could tell, the way I was going about things. He didn’t even last half an hour, glancing over at me more and more frequently with an increasingly disbelieving look on his face.

“For fuck’s sake, Con!” he finally snapped, pulling his earbuds back out in pure exasperation. “What the hell do you think you’re doing there?”

“This? Just collecting a list of number plates from the camera just below Tomatin.”

“I can see that! What I don’t understand is why you’re doing it all by hand. Why don’t you just set it to copy everything within your search parameters over automatically? Just because it’s a passive data generating system doesn’t mean researchers and analysts haven’t been given some time saving shortcuts for that kind of job. Look, see.” He logged himself in on his own laptop and clicked through a few menus to a page I’d never seen before. “You can add in all your dates, times and locations on this little programme here and it’ll generate your spreadsheets for you automatically.”

Seriously? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like such a clueless idiot. As a registered SIO, I’d had access to this system for a long time but I’d never tried to run such a large search on it before. Face flushing, I tried to copy his movements but found myself blocked at the third of the menus he’d gone through. The option he’d taken from there just wasn’t displayed. Some kind of back door access? Shay blinked.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Sorry, Cuz, I guess it needs a higher priority clearance. That kind of sucks.”

I found myself taking a relieved breath. He’d had me really worried for a minute there. I usually did everything I could to keep up to date on training with the systems I was allowed to use.

“Tell you what though, I’ve got a spare login you can have,” he offered, patting my shoulder apologetically. “How often do you even use the NAS, anyway? It’s not like you’re going to flood it with requests and if you needed the data urgently, for a serious crime case, it could make a huge difference.” As apologies went, that was a biggie.

“That would be nice to have, in case it was ever needed, thanks.” I didn’t need to promise that I wouldn’t use it for cases like this one. We both knew I wouldn’t betray his trust like that. I went back to my methodical plodding. I’d already considered putting in a research request and dismissed the idea. I didn’t want to waste their valuable time on a hunch that might not yield any results.

“Any chance of one of your peppermint blends, Shay?” Da asked, smiling over at us from his chair.

“Sure.” My cousin shoved his tray out of the way and bounced up. “Same for you Con?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He knew I liked the one with ginger and lemon in too. Once he’d gone, da sniffed conspicuously.

“That boy’s been a bit distracted all day. It’s not like him to overlook a possibility like that. I think all the crap he was digging up for you yesterday has thrown him off his game a bit.”

“He’s fine, and he’ll get it properly archived again soon enough Da. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about there. You know how obsessive he is about maintaining maximum system efficiency.” I got a wry smile for putting it in Shay’s terminology like that.

“Alright then. Just remember, if you need me to come home early, for any reason at all, I’ll be on the