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

now. After nearly three years with Conall, the idea of working under anyone else had become so distasteful to me that a little extra responsibility had seemed by far the better option. He’d better not try to disappear on me any time soon now though or I’d bloody well strangle him!

Fourteen

By the morning of Tuesday the nineteenth of February, we were all feeling the strain. Everyone on Shay’s list had been vetted, and we were still no closer to finding Chris Arnold. Either our culprit wasn’t registered as a single occupant within our search area or the van they’d been driving wasn’t theirs.

Public appeals to anyone who may have passed the layby where our van had been parked up on the eleventh had resulted in three calls from drivers who remembered seeing a white van there that morning. None could supply us with any details of make, model, or number plate, and none had any recollection of seeing the driver. That hadn’t been surprising. If you asked me about the unremarkable parked vehicles I’d driven past on any given morning, I’d be about as much help as they’d been.

We hadn’t mentioned that we were looking for a white van, only that we were interested in anything and anyone that may have been seen there. I’d been in two minds about the usefulness of making that appeal myself. If our culprit remained unaware of our search for their van, they’d be less likely to switch to another vehicle, and the chances of anyone coming forward with new information had been low. Now, possibly, our culprit may be warily wondering how much information we’d received.

We all knew how hopeless our chances of stopping the killer tonight were, if they did intend to strike again. A crime scene within ten miles of the city centre would give us over three hundred square miles of ground to cover. Expand that radius to fifteen miles and you were looking at over seven hundred square miles to try to watch. Further than that and the numbers became exponentially worse. McKinnon would have every patrol car he could man out there throughout the night, but it would require an enormous helping of blind luck for any of our people to find themselves in the right place at the right time to intervene.

Replicating the homemade rope fuse that had been used to ignite the diesel and burn Dominic Chuol’s corpse had given us a burn time of roughly half an hour, given the length of the remnants. Even if they repeated the same process tonight, our culprit would be long gone from the scene before any fire was spotted. There was nothing to stop them from using a longer fuse either.

“Satellite footage probably won’t help much, but I’ll see if I can get all night sole access to one,” Shay had told me when I’d raised the subject last week. “Unless I have a specific location to target its attention on, my view will be too distant to bring up any potentially helpful detail, even on a continuous feed. Besides, we have no way of knowing that they won’t change tactics altogether this time. They know we’ve been investigating the death of Dominic Chuol and they know we’re looking into the disappearance of Chris Arnold. If I were them, I’d probably make my kill under cover this time… well, unless I had some set of unfathomable rules to follow that wouldn’t allow it.”

“Like needing to be out in the moonlight?” I suggested.

“Windows? Skylights? Besides, we don’t know if that’s an issue. What about cloudy nights? Just because we believe they’ve attached significance to the night of the full moon doesn’t mean they also believe they need to be outside to do whatever it is they think they’re doing.”

He was right, of course. The list of things we didn’t know seemed endless. With that in mind, the plan we’d cobbled together for tonight was the best we could manage.

People sometimes get odd ideas about the capabilities and powers of the police force. The truth is that most films and TV shows don’t make a great deal of effort to mirror reality. Forensic work is often far slower in producing results than people expect. CCTV cameras are a lot thinner on the ground than generally thought, especially outside built-up, commercial areas. Our search powers are strictly limited. We did not enjoy the kind of authority that would allow us to hunt through every house or flat in the area that happened to be the residence of a van owner and, even if we’d had the right to do that, we didn’t have the manpower to carry out such searches. Police drones? We had none in Inverness, although we were scheduled to be allotted one in May; a remotely piloted aircraft system, for use in missing persons searches over difficult terrain… and if we used it for anything else, we’d catch merry hell from the watchdogs. Recorded images would have to respect existing privacy laws, including General Data Protection Regulations.

Conspiracy theorists could babble all they liked, but the UK was far from being a police state, thank goodness. Most of the time, and in most places, Big Brother was definitely not watching.

Also, even though murder cases and kidnappings were always prioritised, and extra resources were diverted as required to cover those, there were limits to what could be done. Once you’d followed every possible lead and still come up empty handed, all you could do was wait for fresh evidence or for another crime to be committed that might provide such evidence. That was just an unfortunate fact of life. We had a man missing who we had good reason to believe might be killed tonight, and there wasn’t any further useful action we could take, that morning, to prevent it from happening.

It’s hard to focus on cases of petty theft, or minor drug infractions, or trivial misdemeanours with a prospect such as that dominating your thoughts but police departments