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

had been planning to take. I didn’t need to phone him to ask him to do that.

Sunrise this morning hadn’t been until five to eight and there was plenty of tree cover in that area. Still, once I knew the route Chris Arnold had taken, it might be worth checking our security satellites to see what vehicle movements had been captured. Unless directed otherwise by an authorised operative, any images recorded by those would all be too distant to yield much information but traffic would have been light. I should at least be able to check for any vehicles in the immediate area. I fired off a text to Conall asking him to inform me of the route as soon as he knew it.

Meanwhile, it seemed to me that I might as well get on with running a background check on the Arnolds. If this was a false alarm and Chris was found, it wasn’t as if I’d have spent much time on the job by the time Conall was able to let me know about it. I could start with his service record.

Chris Arnold had served in The Highlanders Infantry Regiment, until they’d been incorporated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006 and become the fourth battalion of the new, combined force.

Showing early aptitude for the role, he’d undergone the tough, mandatory nine weeks’ sniper training course before being assigned to the battalion’s sniper platoon. He’d served two, six-month tours in Iraq, one in 2005-2006 and the other in 2008, as well as a six-month tour in Afghanistan in 2011. Having left the army with the rank of sergeant, after twenty-two years of service, Chris and his family had moved to Inverness, his childhood home. where he’d begun his new career as an electrical wind turbine technician. An old army pal had recommended him for the position and it seemed to have suited him.

His lump sum Early Departure Scheme Payment and his savings had allowed the family to put down a considerable deposit on their house in Leanach and with the EDP income stream from his army career, combined with his new salary, the family had been doing well for themselves. Angela worked part time working in Admin at a local care home and they were certainly better off than they had been during his army years. The couple had three children, two boys and a girl, aged sixteen, fourteen and eleven.

Chris had also been mentioned in an article in the Inverness Courier, back in 2011 when he’d made a confirmed kill of a Taliban leader from a distance of almost two kilometres, which was pretty impressive shooting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not a fan of the British Armed Forces but my personal grievance was with those higher in command. I even felt some sympathy for many of the grunts on the ground, who had to serve under the kind of ‘ends justifying the means’ arseholes that ordered strikes on civilian targets. That sympathy was limited though; after all, they were all serving by choice. The days of conscription, thank goodness, were long over. I’d have left the UK before my eighteenth birthday if they weren’t. I was violently allergic, psychologically speaking, to being given orders and did not react well to people placing limits on my personal freedoms.

Conall called me at two. They’d managed to follow Chris Arnold’s path from his home up to Culloden moor, along the road past the railway line and then into the woods to the north.

“I imagine he ran a few of his usual tracks in there, to make up his distance target, and then looped around and cut down back to the road further east for the run home. His wife told us where he always came out when he was doing a run up in the woods. There’s a handy layby at the end of the footpath with room for a few cars to park up when people head out that way for a walk.” I could tell from his tone that the news wasn’t good.

“No sign of him then?”

“None. We’ve conducted a thorough search. He’s long gone. Besides, we have a trampled, flattened area of growth right by the track, about a hundred metres from the road. It’s about the right size to be the result of someone falling, and the dogs are satisfied that he was there. Davie and his boys are going over it now.” I’d already pulled the map up.

“The spot about two miles from his house? I see your layby. What are you thinking?”

“If someone had been observing his movements for a while, they could have parked up there, selected an ambush point and waited for him to run by.”

“A fit man with military training wouldn’t be an easy target to subdue Con.”

“Unless they were taken completely by surprise. Who knows what the abductor might have had at their disposal. A tranquilliser gun? A taser?”

“I don’t think a tranquilliser would act quickly enough. Besides, you need a vet to write you a prescription for those darts. They’d be too easy to trace. A taser isn’t a bad thought though. They’re not that hard to get hold of, illegal or not, or they could even have made their own. Once the target was down, a quick chokehold would soon knock them out, as well as stop them from crying out. It would be easy enough to sedate them after that.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “and that’s if they didn’t simply whack him unconscious before he knew they were there.” True, but the abductor would need a certain level of knowledge and skill to manage that, especially if they wanted him alive. Randomly bashing people in the head could often prove fatal, intentionally or not.

“Risky to get that close to someone like Arnold. It’s more likely they’d want to keep out of his reach.” Conall went quiet for a few moments then.

“You think it’s our guy, don’t you? The person that killed Dominic Chuol.”

“I think it could