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

coding club for further activity from ‘Brad MacRoberts.’ Whoever that really was, if they posted again, he’d have their IP address within minutes. He hadn’t sounded too optimistic about the prospect of them doing so.

“I wouldn’t use the same identity again if I were them and if it is our man. Besides, the link there might be purely coincidental. Do you know how many cases of online sexual crimes against minors I’ve looked into in the past few years? Not all those creeps go for the younger ones. A lot of them like adolescents.”

“True, but a coding club doesn’t seem like a very promising fishing ground for that kind of predator. Most of the members will be smart, educated kids and there are far easier, more vulnerable targets out there.”

“You’d be surprised. The Dawson girl is fourteen, her hormone levels are probably all over the place, messing with her brain. A persona like ‘Brad,’ once a certain level of trust had been developed, might easily talk her into sending them a few ‘harmless’ pictures and escalate things from there. I think you’re a bit out of touch on what things are really like in the cyberworld these days Con. For every case where some poor little primary school kid is made to believe their families will be killed if they don’t do what they’re told, you’ve got several more where some teenage boy or girl thinks they’re sending pictures to a romantic interest in their own age group.”

Thousands of kids in the UK were the victims of some form of online exploitation every year, but Shay was a lot more familiar with that kind of crime than I was, and we both knew it.

“As for the fingerprints, I haven’t found a match for them on any UK system or in any national databases within the EEA,” he’d gone on to tell me. The identity cards of citizens of countries within the European Economic Area now held biometric information, including fingerprints, on little electronic chips. You could travel between a lot of EU countries with such a card without the need for a passport. It was a pity we didn’t have a system like that here or everyone over the age of twelve would have their fingerprints on record. “I have wider, global searches still running, but it’s likely that our man is a UK citizen and has just never done anything that would put their prints into the system.”

Now that I’d been assigned as the senior investigating officer, the SIO, on the Arnold case, Shay had dropped everything else to focus his full attention on our murderer. I had no idea what else he might be looking into today but knew that he’d at least be eliminating false possibilities at a remarkable pace.

Waiting for forensic and pathology reports to start coming in was a frustrating game, but there were some lines of investigation we could be getting on with in the meantime. The footage captured by the Dawson’s neighbours had turned out to be useless to us. Their cameras had a partial view of the road leading to the Dawson place, but the stolen car hadn’t been captured as it drove away, not as far as we could tell. Even freezing the views of each vehicle that had passed by there since last Friday hadn’t been enough to tell us for certain, one way or the other. Not enough frames per second, or enough light during the hours of darkness, to give us a clear picture of many of them. On top of which, it may have been driven off in the other direction and not passed by there at all. No passing walkers or joggers were a match for our suspect, and there was no earlier footage to look through either. Both motion sensing security systems had limited storage and automatically wiped older footage to make room for new. If he’d driven past there in his van the week before, there was no evidence of it now.

Thinking through how our killer may have reached the two houses to steal those cars, it seemed to me that booking a taxi or an Uber to somewhere nearby might have been a good way to get there. The Dawsons lived to the south of town, east of Fairways golf course, in Milton of Leys. The Miller house was out in Culloden. Our killer may have booked any such ride under a false name, but the driver could still have got a much better look at them than we had. But how close would they have risked driving to either property before getting out to walk the rest of the way? A mile? Two? Even further? And at what time of day or night had they gone there, on any of the possible days?

No, I decided, pursuing that line of enquiry was futile. What if they’d walked the whole way, from wherever they’d started, or taken a bus, or used a bicycle? A folding bike could be stored in the boot and taken back with them once they had the car. Without any witnesses amongst the neighbours, we’d hit another dead end in our efforts to identify our suspect by looking at the scenes of the thefts. That they’d have avoided traffic cameras again was a given, but I’d run both plates through the NAS anyway, just to be sure.

I’d also watched the airport security clips that Mills and Bryce had put together without seeing anything of interest occurring. Nobody lurking around, in the terminal or the car park, nobody engaging the members of either family in conversation. Another dead end.

All five of my team were working their way through airport employees this morning. There were over six hundred of those, but the vast majority of them would not be possible matches for the man we were looking for. We were only interested in white males of the right height and build. Remembering Shay’s comments about the likelihood of our suspect working from