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

My cousin lifted his head and met each of their startled looks through his big, blue-tinted glasses and flopping fringe.

“Hi,” he offered disinterestedly. “Which printer can I have, Con?”

“Take printer three. Everybody else keep off it for now please.”

“Cool.” He made a little waving gesture and slouched off again to set up his laptop and get cracking

“Mills?” I asked. Darren was staring after my cousin with a bemused little smile, mouth partly open. “Updates?”

“Uh, yes, Sir.” He snapped back into focus. “We have all the relevant footage from the airport security cameras covering two hours on each of the departure dates. I’m dealing with the Millers and Bryce has the Dawsons. We’re copying every clip we find with any of the family members in view.” That should keep those two gainfully occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

“Email me to let me know when those files are ready please. I’ll want to look them over as soon as they are.” I left them all to get on with it and beckoned for Caitlin to follow me into my office. She shut the door and leaned against it with a highly amused expression on her face.

“Your cousin doesn’t come across as a very likely covert agent, does he?” she said in a low voice, trying not to laugh.

“Not really.” I sat down and pushed the button to start booting up my PC again. “Then again, that would defeat the idea of being covert if he was. I don’t think he was quite what they were expecting after your ‘eccentric, super brainy’ comments either.

“Well, he is wearing glasses, at least. They were probably imagining a pale, nerdy looking egghead, though. Darren seemed to think it was funny, but the other three looked a bit shell shocked for a minute there.”

“Mmm.” I agreed. She’d had her moment of fun, but we had work to do and I didn’t want her to stretch it out. I fished the keys to the bungalow out of my pocket and dropped them into an envelope before handing it to her. “I want you to go out again. Take Walker with you, Collins can finish making those calls on his own. You can drop the keys in at the estate agent’s if you happen to pass there, but there’s no rush on that. They have another set, and they’re already aware of the broken lock.”

“Where am I going?”

“Those neighbours with security cameras. Let’s get on that straight away. They might have caught something. Look out for any passing vans scoping the area out before the departure days, if they have footage going back that far, and for passing foot traffic since then.”

“Right. Anything else?”

“Warn Collins to let you know immediately if he gets anything else from further calls. Apart from that no, not just now.”

“On it,” she agreed cheerfully and let herself out. Once she’d gone, I checked the case folder for updates. No new developments there, just routine reports on tasks completed without further results. I’d better call James to let him know what we’d found before I started writing it all up.

Half an hour later, I went out to see how Shay was getting on.

“How’s it going?” I perched on the end of his desk.

“Nearly done. I’ve copied all my shots into ordered folders on a thumb drive for Forensics but they’re getting the print outs and the lists too, with priority requests on the bag and its contents.” Printer three was busily churning out colour sheets at spaced intervals, but my cousin had taken a lot of photographs so that wasn’t surprising. “None of the fingerprints on the doors or anywhere else match the ones on the sports bag, so I’ve added a ‘no action currently required’ note for all the earlier slides.”

“Good idea. We don’t want them jammed up doing pointless fingerprint searches. What about the set that we are interested in?”

“No match for them in the PND. I’ll run some more checks on them when I get home.” Where there was no chance of anyone seeing which systems he was poking around in.

“Ready to stop for lunch soon? What do you fancy? Noodles?”

“No thanks. I’m still good. I’ll eat when I get home. Do you want to grab those sheets from the printer for me?” I did so and placed them on the desk for him.

“Give me one of your teabags then, I’m going to stick the kettle on.” He fished one out of the side pocket of his pack, and I left him to finish packing everything up.

After popping into the break room to fill the kettle, I went back out and asked Bryce to nip out and find me a couple of uniforms to run the bags over to forensics for me before grabbing my lunch bag from my office. Shay was just about done by then.

“Want to bring that to the break room?” I asked him, nodding to his laptop.

Once we were settled at the table in there, Shay pulled up his stills to show me. Wow! Those might as well have been taken in full daylight. They were far better than I’d been expecting.

“It’s amazing what the right filtering can do with a decent photo and those little cameras on the drones aren’t too shabby,” he allowed as he sipped his tea. Our man’s face was almost entirely obscured between the scarf pulled up over the nose and the hood shielding his eyes, but the detail on everything he was wearing and the bag over his shoulder was excellent. “Think they’ll be of any use?”

“Definitely. Can you email those to me and McKinnon please? I’ve already got a few people in mind from the Black Wood case that I’d like to show them to. McKinnon might want to release them to the media too. Another public appeal… did anyone see this man on Tuesday night?”

Shay frowned. “Is that advisable? Do we want to tip him off to the fact that he was spotted? And where?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.