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

want an expert to process this and the house as quickly as possible.” He pulled out his phone and fired off a quick text. “Alright, Collins, Walker, you two head back to the station and get your report written up. Once you’ve done that, get onto the taxi company that drove the Miller family to the airport. We want to talk to the driver and whoever took that booking. See if the call was recorded too, if they didn’t just book it using an app. Get every detail you can.”

His phone pinged, an answering text coming in.

“You two,” he turned to Mills and Bryce after reading it, “get yourselves out to the airport. I want all the CCTV footage they have covering the times both families were there on their departure days. Don’t forget the long stay car park either. The Dawsons left a car there.” Our second holidaying family owned two cars. “Take your lunch breaks whenever you think best and let me know when you’re done if I’m not back myself before then.”

After they’d all cleared out, I gave Conall a questioning look.

“Shay’s coming?”

“He is. He should be here in about twenty minutes. Can you nip out and bring the car over while I call McKinnon? There’s a fully stocked kit bag in the boot and we’ll need that. I’ve got some sandwiches in my pack too. We could eat while we’re waiting.”

My rumbling stomach liked the sound of that. I went off to get the car.

Seventeen

Shay

After Conall went off to bed, I just sat there, doing absolutely nothing for a good fifteen minutes.

Hindsight told me that I should have started moving drone one down from the cathedral as soon as Conall told me our guy had turned onto the A82. Yes, if I’d done that and he’d gone south at the roundabout or simply kept driving, we’d have probably lost him, anyway. Even at that time of night there had been too much traffic about to know which cars to try to track with the satellite if I’d taken my eyes off it at that point. By the time I’d got a lock on the GPS systems of all our possible moving targets, the man had already abandoned his car and vanished. But if drone one had been down there a few minutes earlier?

There was no doubt about it. With so few people on foot around the bottom end of Ballifeary Road, we’d have spotted him easily.

I ran those few vital minutes over and over again in my head as I stared blankly at my useless screens. Had I done the right thing? I eventually had to conclude that the answer was a clear yes. The mathematical laws of probability assured me that the satellite had been our best option, by far, and I had succeeded in tracking all five of the cars that could have been the one we were interested in. Hindsight could go fuck itself. Sometimes, you just had to accept that even taking the best possible actions wasn’t going to be enough to guarantee success.

We’d been unexpectedly, shockingly lucky tonight. If the killer had only used that first car, driven straight to Kinmylies, rammed Chris Arnold’s head onto that pole, and left again, we wouldn’t have seen anything odd enough to draw our attention.

I hadn’t thought much of it at first, when I realised Conall was looking at the same guy I’d seen down at the Premier Inn. There were plenty of possible reasons for him to be out walking. A late-night visit to a friend for a few drinks that would make driving back inadvisable, heading towards an extramarital assignation where a car pulling up would draw unwanted attention, going to meet a dealer or even just wanting to innocently walk off some energy because they couldn’t sleep, to name only a few. It was only when Conall told me the man was getting into a different car that he’d really aroused my suspicions.

What we’d seen of our killer’s movements were consistent with someone who suspected they were being watched. By the police? Or by someone else? The answer to that question depended on what form his paranoia had taken and what delusions he was suffering from. We couldn’t assume those would have any bearing whatsoever on reality.

Mulling that over, I fed our two number plates into the DVLA database and got to work on clipping together the relevant bits of footage.

My mothership drone had been back for a while, with its six passengers all safely docked on board, so once I’d finished with that little job I went out to the back door to carry it in. It was supposed to start raining again sometime soon. I dropped it off in the electronics lab to recharge and went back through to the living room.

I’d have to look into the possibility of fitting my mini drones with something that would allow them to cling to the roof of a moving vehicle, but weight and size were a big issue. Even a small, suction cup base would be too heavy for them. I’d have to see if some magnetic tape would be enough to do the trick. I could try a few different strengths and see if any of them would do the job. It would need to be strong enough to hold a drone in place but weak enough to allow it to pull off again when I wanted to lift it. Most vehicles still had some ferromagnetic steel content in the bodywork, even if they were mainly aluminium or carbon fibre constructions. It might work.

The thought of what might have happened if Conall could have latched his drone onto the roof of that car up in Kinmylies was impossible to dismiss. We could have had our suspect in custody by now. Well, that was what test runs were for: to find out what improvements could be made. It was a bloody pity I hadn’t thought of it sooner though.