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

of the busiest times of the day. I can tell you that it’s the same size the white van he used then was. It may even be the same one, resprayed.”

“Alright. Listen, Shay, I don’t know how long I’m going to be out here. I want to see McKinnon before I come back there. If I’m held up and you want to get home, ask Walker to arrange a lift for you with the uniforms, okay? I want all four of my DCs to keep checking through those house sales until they quit for the day.”

“I will,” he promised and hung up. I turned my attention to Philips.

“Have the officers going door to door been asking about security cameras as they go?”

“They have,” he told me, “and we’re extending those enquiries along the whole length of the street, and to businesses on the main roads at either end too. If anyone caught that number plate, we’ll soon know about it.”

That made me think of something.

“There was a little bank on the corner, opposite the end of this street, wasn’t there, Caitlin?”

“There was.” Her eyes widened slightly. “Do you think their security camera may have caught him if he drove out that way?”

“It’s certainly worth checking. Come on. Let’s get back there and see who we need to talk to about accessing that footage. Maybe they haven’t all left for the day yet.”

They hadn’t. The branch was closed, but the manager and a couple of her staff were still there. They opened up for us after examining our warrant cards through the glass door. They must have noticed the unusual amount of police activity going on out there, with the street across from them cordoned off like that.

We got our number plate, but when we ran a check on it, we found that it was out of circulation. It had been stripped from a scrapped vehicle. We could put out an alert on it and did immediately, but the likelihood of it ever being seen on the road again was close to zero. We had no way of knowing how many such plates Brady O’Hara may have acquired.

Once again, our killer had left no useful trail for us to follow.

Twenty-Five

Shay

I kept working, the same as before, after Conall’s call despite the cold hard knot that it had left in my stomach. It was no good letting my mind turn to thoughts of what Jimmy Stewart might be going through.

The bank that Brady first moved his money to had been a tough nut to crack, but I’d managed to find my way into their system by then. Again, he’d left a token minimum deposit behind, just a few thousand, before bouncing the rest of his money elsewhere. While my carefully coded packages began to look for cracks in the next set of walls they needed to sneak past, I went back to looking through the O’Hara family history.

I knew what his parents had left Brady, but had there been any earlier inheritances, from other relatives, that I was not yet aware of? Brady had not been a wealthy young man up until last summer. He’d been working for Edinburgh City Council, an office job with a take home pay of a little over fifteen hundred a month. That was a better income than many low-paid workers could claim, but it certainly didn’t allow him the same standard of living that he’d been accustomed to as a child. I doubted he missed his family home, despite its affluence. If I was right about him, he’d suffered some mind shattering traumas in that house.

I found what I was looking for in the fourth will that I checked, the one for Brady’s maternal grandmother. She’d owned several properties when she died, and she’d left one of them, a farmhouse outside Balloch, to her grandson. There hadn’t been any direct debit payments to The Highland Council in his old bank account or I’d have seen them straight away, but he could have been pulling cash and making Council Tax payments on the place at a Post Office. Had he transferred the house into the name of whatever identity he was using now, or a different one? And if so, when? How long ago?

Well, questions like that could wait.

I pulled the property up on a satellite feed. It looked like exactly the sort of place we’d been expecting him to be using. Most of the original farmland had been sold off by the grandmother years before, but there were a couple of acres left. A private access track ran to the house from the nearest road, a few hundred yards away. There were plenty of mature trees providing screening and no near neighbours. Brady could have been working on the place for a long time before moving last year, or he could have made any alterations and improvements he wanted since then. It didn’t make any sense to spend time poking into any of those possibilities right now. The most urgent task was to figure out if he was actually living there.

A few hours ago, this discovery would probably have been enough to get me straight on the phone to Conall, but the situation had changed drastically since then. If Brady O’Hara was in that house and had Jimmy Stewart in there with him, then any sign of police activity nearby would probably be enough of a trigger to make him kill the boy. I needed to think this through before I did anything that could not be undone.

I sent all my mini drones back to their docking stations and lifted their carrier drone from where it had been hiding in a garden shed on Drumossie Avenue that had lost its window glass, just over the car park wall from the station. Then I packed up my things and went to arrange the lift that Conall had suggested so I could follow it home. Half an hour on fast charge back at the house and