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

be, but it’s far too soon to rule out the possibility of this being an unconnected abduction Con. Chris Arnold may have had personal enemies with scores to settle. You know he was an army sniper?”

“Yes, his wife told us. You think one of his targets’ relatives or comrades might have tracked him down?”

“Possibly. My gut says not but like I said, we can’t rule it out. Not yet anyway. It would have been far easier to just kill him when he was further from the road if they didn’t want him alive, but you know how the fundamentalists like making execution videos. I’ll see if I can spot the vehicle on any of the satellite footage from this morning. You’re asking the neighbours if they’ve noticed any strange vehicles or people hanging around lately?”

“McKinnon’s got a dozen uniforms going door to door, yes.”

“Alright then. I should be able to send you something within the hour.” My hopes were low but every possible lead needed to be explored, however remote the chances of them producing useful results might be. The countdown clock was ticking and the night of the next full moon would be a week tomorrow.

Eleven

Shay’s satellite check did not prove to be as helpful as we’d have liked. He’d confided to me once that the system he’d been given access to could be refocused to give a five-centimetre resolution on demand. However, unless it was directed by an authorised operative to alter its focus, it would remain fixed at twenty-five centimetres, which wasn’t much of an improvement on the images available on Google Maps. Currently, commercial satellites were not permitted, by law, to use resolutions higher than thirty centimetres but national defence systems were exempt from that ruling.

Four pixels per square metre might be better than two or three, but such an image still didn’t give you much detail. If people were worried about being spied on, drones were a much greater threat than the rapidly burgeoning satellite network. Most satellites weren’t equipped for surveillance purposes, anyway. The bulk of them were there for communications, entertainment, GPS navigation, and scientific research.

Still, thanks to the images Shay had been able to provide us with, we now knew that Chris Arnold’s abductor had been driving a large white van approximately three point four metres long and one point seven metres wide. There were several competing models on the market matching those specs. With the images only being taken at fifteen-minute intervals, once our vehicle had reached the busier area approaching the town centre, it had become impossible to track it further. There was no shortage of vans like that driving around.

Enquiries in and around Leanach had not been fruitful either. Yes, people had seen white vans passing through, but that was such an ordinary, everyday occurrence that both van and driver may as well have been invisible. Our culprit had been careful not to hang around in one place for long enough to arouse any suspicions. Even if the same van drove through the village regularly, why would anyone notice?

Our van had parked up in the layby between seven and seven fifteen on Monday morning and left again before seven forty five. With little traffic about in the immediate area, we were satisfied that we were looking at the same vehicle that had driven past the Arnolds’ house between six forty five and seven before turning east onto the B9006. If it was, the driver would certainly have spotted Chris heading for Culloden Moor. If they’d been at all familiar with his regular running routes, that would have been enough to tell them that he’d chosen the woods for his exercise that morning. From the images Shay had pieced together, we believed the van had continued on to Croy before circling back to the layby.

Enquiries in Croy had been no more fruitful than those in Leanach. Nobody had paid the van any attention, although several thought they may have seen it pass by that morning, and none of the locals had security cameras that could provide us with an image of it. We had nothing but the size and colour of the van and the time of the abduction. Our culprit must have turned off Chris’s phone immediately and removed the SIM card from it. He could have tossed it anywhere at any point after that. Heading straight for the town centre after the abduction had been a well calculated move too.

One useful result of obtaining those satellite images was that it had drastically cut down Philips’ list. Anyone without access to a matching vehicle could be safely eliminated from the suspect pool. I didn’t derive any comfort from that. Shay’s conviction that the list of local residents on antipsychotic prescriptions would prove to be a dead end had infected me too thoroughly to be shaken off.

“Still, maybe now it’s worth checking single occupancy dwellings against van owners.” He’d told me on Monday afternoon, when he called me after sending the images over. “That shouldn’t give us an excessively long list.”

“How long will that take you?”

“Less than a couple of days, hopefully. Once I have the addresses, I can just feed them into the DVLA then sort the results for matches. I should warn you that it might not help though. Just because we think they’re living alone doesn’t mean any existing records won’t still list additional residents. Plus, this could be someone who’s living here temporarily, house sitting for absent relatives wintering abroad, for example, or who bought the van before moving here. In that case, their registration won’t even be in this area.” I knew he felt obliged to spell out every possibility, but I really didn’t like hearing that.

Good as his word, his lists came through just after lunch on Wednesday afternoon. Fifty three names and fifty three addresses for white vans and another hundred and sixty four for vans of other colours because ‘it’s not hard to respray if you know what you’re doing.’

McKinnon dropped