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

in to my office to speak with me face to face after I’d sent the new list on to him, along with Shay’s cautionary note about its potential usefulness and limitations.

“Our family liaison officer at the Arnolds reports that there still haven’t been any ransom demands or contact attempts from the kidnapper,” he told me as he dropped into a chair.

I met his piercing stare with equal anxiety. It was getting a little late for that to have been likely but we’d been nursing a thread of hope that this might still turn out to be a financially motivated crime.

“If it’s our killer and if they mean to strike again on the night of the full moon, we’ve only got six days left to find them in James.”

He nodded glumly as I swung my chair in a tight little arc.

“Aye, we’re all well aware of that Conall. Here,” he pushed a sheet across my desk at me, “I’ve split the lists up. Those sixty are for your team to crack on with. None of them match up with Philips’ lot, so I’ve pulled his team off that for now and given him another dozen uniforms to help him get through the rest of them.”

“Alright. And what, precisely, are we to do when we visit these people? Are you hoping to obtain search warrants to cover them all?” He shook his head.

“We can’t go that far, not yet. We don’t have enough evidence to argue probable cause and the Magistrates’ Court wouldn’t issue them. What we can do is speak to the occupants face to face, see if they’re physically capable of being responsible for the abductions, observe whether they display any odd behaviour or speech patterns and request permission to look around. We’ll evaluate the situation and see where we stand once they’ve all been checked.”

It wasn’t ideal, but the existing restrictions on our search powers were there for a very good reason. It went without saying that if we hadn’t found Chris Arnold before Tuesday, we’d pull in every man and woman we could spare to keep an eye on all the unsearched locations still on the list.

“What’s your cousin focusing his attention on next?” James asked.

“He did consider checking for vehicle movements leaving and returning to the properties he listed but he decided against it. If our culprit is being cautious, they may have anticipated that and stayed elsewhere overnight, as well as taking their time returning home. If he found nothing, he’d have used all of our time up on a wild goose chase. Plus, he thinks that the chances of our culprit being on those lists is perhaps fifty per cent, at best.”

“Aye, I read his notes, but Christ, Conall, we’ve got several thousand vans like that in Inverness. There has to be some way of cutting those numbers down.”

“Given time, yes. But we’d need a couple of dozen analysts of my cousin’s calibre to run that many background checks in under a month.” I didn’t need to add that we had no chance of finding such people, or of co-opting them if we did. “Nothing useful from the material Davie and the boys collected up at the abduction scene yet?”

Another head shake. “Not so much as a hair that wasn’t Chris Arnold’s. And our man used his shoe cover trick again too. He’s being cautious and clever, however crazy he might be.”

“Or she,” I corrected him. “I know the chances of that are low but we can’t ignore the possibility.” Chris Arnold was taller and heavier than Dominic Chuol had been, but a small percentage of women would be capable of lifting him without injuring themselves.

“Aye, there’s that too. So what is your cousin doing?”

“He says he has other work he can get on with until we can feed him more information and that none of the searches he could run in time would be any help as things currently stand. I’m sorry, James, but he knows what he’s talking about. If there was anything Shay could usefully do, he’d be doing it.” McKinnon nodded gloomily and gave me an acknowledging grunt.

“I don’t doubt it. The lad’s bloody good, but we can’t expect miracles.” He pushed himself up again and stood looking down at me. “Chief Anderson had some very nice things to say about your report on our car thieves by the way. That was quite a gamble you took there, Conall, putting in that many hours on a hunch.”

I shrugged. “He’ll have checked the NAS logs, no doubt. I did a lot of it on my own time, evenings and weekends.”

“He did check. ‘Commendable tenacity,’ I believe was the phrase he used.”

After my first set of searches had failed to produce any results, I’d repeated the whole process to cover the next four hours, from nine until one on each of my dates of interest and been luckier the second time around than I’d been on my first attempt. I’d found two likely licence plates turning up with significant frequency. The NAS had then given me a list of every time either vehicle had been registered passing an ANPR camera in the last ninety days, creating a very interesting pattern on the map. Not only had they driven between Inverness and Glasgow on the right days to be carrying stolen vehicles away, they’d also been busily shuttling back and forth between Glasgow and Stirling and Glasgow and Perth back in November. I’d sent my detailed report to Chief Superintendent Anderson as soon as I’d completed it on Friday evening.

“He’s got a team of analysts working on looking further back and he also sent your report on down to your old Chief in Glasgow,” James told me. “I doubt it will take them long to track our gang back to their base now they’ve got an alert out on those plates.”

“That’s gratifying to hear,” I told him unenthusiastically. “If we had ANPR cameras in more locations, it would certainly help with cases like our