Death in the Black Wood by Oliver Davies (epub read online books .txt) 📕

Shay’s suggestion, I brought another fresh drone down from the cathedral and we spent a good twenty minutes sweeping the area manually without seeing anyone resembling our man. Searching to the north of the cemetery, I didn’t spot anyone walking around at all and Shay only found two individuals over on the east side, between the cemetery and the river. Neither of them were a match for our killer in height, build or attire.

The drones were almost out of battery life again after that so Shay sent them back to the cathedral to dock again. “I might as well bring them home while it’s still dark,” he decided. “There are enough patrol cars out there now to keep an eye on the cemetery and he’s probably hiding up indoors somewhere until morning, which means we’ve got no chance of finding him like this now. For all we know, he may even have a full change of clothes on him and we didn’t get a look at his face.”

Ballifeary Road, where the car had been left, was in an area liberally dotted with Bed & Breakfast guesthouses. Our man may even have booked a room in one of those, or an Airbnb, if he wasn’t simply sheltering inside a private house, garage or shed.

I didn’t think he’d have booked a room. He’d planned his every move in advance, with extreme cautiousness, and leaving a payment trail didn’t match up with that behaviour at all. As for the movements we’d been able to track, those spoke of a high level of paranoia. We’d seen him leave two cars behind and I suspected they’d turn out to be stolen too.

We’d both braced ourselves for the high probability of Chris Arnold’s body being discovered at some point in the next few days, but Shay had certainly been as shocked and surprised as I’d been by the sight of that severed head, mounted like a trophy for anyone walking by to discover. Neither of us had been prepared for our killer to change their tactics as drastically as that. In hindsight, it all made sense, in a very twisted way.

My cousin’s hunch had been dead on. Whatever changes he’d made in his methods, the killer was still matching his victims to places whose names he found appropriate. His grasp of Gaelic must be virtually non-existent though, to have taken the word ‘head’ so literally. Either that or it was his idea of a sick joke. Kinmylies had extended much further in the thirteenth century than it did now and the old name could be interpreted in several different ways. In modern English, ‘The Warriors’ Headland or Head’ was one acceptable interpretation, but the name had never referred to the head of a body.

Carrying a relatively small, five kilo burden without being spotted was certainly easier than trying to move around with a living captive or an entire corpse, but even if we had anticipated such a move, there really hadn’t been anything we could do about it.

“I’ve got a few little things to tie up before I call it a night but you should get your head down for a bit if you can Con,” Shay advised me. “You won’t be of any use to anyone if you don’t get some more sleep before you go to work.”

He was right. McKinnon had everything under control out there so there was no point in my driving into town to join him now. It was going to be an extremely busy day, and I’d need to be clear headed and better rested to get through it productively.

I couldn’t deny that the tension I’d been carrying around since the eleventh had already dissipated. There was no longer anything any of us could do to save Chris Arnold. No amount of racking our brains for ways to prevent his death was going to change anything now. Still, it wasn’t at all pleasant to discover that a part of me was relieved to find that it was finally over. Had we done everything humanly possible to find him? Given our limitations, I was confident that we had.

Even so, I was really glad that I wasn’t the person tasked with breaking the news to the Arnold family.

I slept for another three and a half hours before getting up again and felt much fresher after my morning shower. Shay must have taken himself off to bed at some point because there was no sign of him when I got downstairs. He had sent me some emails before doing that though, and McKinnon was copied in on all three of them. The first gave the details of the registered owners of the two cars our killer had used. The second had a file attached containing the relevant drone footage, and the third held the encryption key needed to unlock and view it. My cousin was following the rules for once. As a licensed civilian drone operator, he couldn’t hand us unencrypted surveillance footage without breaching data protection laws any more than a shop, club or other business could.

James must have viewed the footage by now, and I watched it myself on my phone while I waited for the Gaggia to heat up and deliver my morning coffee. Shay had clipped together all the relevant shots for us. He’d stayed on our suspect down at the Premier Inn for long enough to see him going in before moving his drone on. The man must have come out again shortly afterwards. That footage didn’t give us a better look at his face, both hood and scarf were in place, but at least we knew his height and build now and had seen enough glimpses of skin to know that he was white. I wondered if McKinnon had sent anyone round to speak to whoever was manning the night desk there yet. No, he didn’t need to. The patrollers he’d sent to keep an eye on the abandoned car would have been instructed to do that.

I