The Silent Girls: A gripping serial-killer thriller

by Dylan Young

  Contrary to what many thought, his secondment to unsolved crimes was not a pre-retirement doss, but Rainsford’s attempt to add teeth to what might so easily have become a paper tiger. Shipwright and his squad had proved this in the first six months by solving two murders, and an abduction that had languished for over fifteen years. Mostly, Anna had been amazed and impressed by his doggedness. Once Ted Shipwright’s teeth were sunk into something he never let go, no matter how bad it tasted. He’d taught Anna never to back down if you thought you were right. And even more so if you didn’t, so long as you thought you would be right eventually. And she was an apt pupil, he’d admitted that.

  ‘You’re like me, Anna. Mrs Shipwright insists I was a mule in a previous life,’ he’d said. ‘Notice I didn’t say ass’ – he’d paused before adding –‘that’s what I am now, apparently.’

  He was right there. Stubborn as they come and with connections across almost every region in the country, Shipwright was an invaluable tool in investigating historical crime because, in most cases, witnesses and suspects had spread their wings and flown a long way from where the crime had been committed. It meant long days and literally thousands of miles.

  Yet Anna harboured no regrets. Police banter naturally referenced the cold cases, and Shipwright had variously been nicknamed Captain Birdseye or, more commonly, the lollipop man – though never to his face, of course. Anna liked it. The idea that Shipwright was cool and calculating, just as she was, only made her feel they were a better team. Plus, in a gently derogatory tilt at his age, she, like the other officers, grasped the irony and tried to imagine him in a yellow, hi-vis full-length coat, waving a Stop sign outside a school – though they’d probably have to change the school hours to accommodate his fag habit. It made her smile. His team had naturally become ‘lollipop boys’ and, in her case, ‘lollipop lady’. She wore it like a badge, mainly because of its association with Shipwright, even though it was only a short hop and a skip from that to ‘Anna the Ice Queen’, which she’d also heard as a locker-room whisper.

  Now, heading south on the M5, with the cruise control set at seventy-five, she pondered why the thought of being labelled a frosty bitch didn’t bother her one little bit. Perhaps it was because in all the books she’d read, ice queens were powerful and usually got their way. She could drink to that.

  * * *

  Forty minutes after the coffee stop, she nudged Shipwright awake. ‘On the M32, sir. We’ll be at the CPS in fifteen minutes.’

  Shipwright rubbed his eyes and then let the backrest up, put his glasses on and peered at his watch. ‘Christ, Anna, twenty minutes from Worcester to Bristol? Can this thing fly?’

  ‘I may have lost track of time, sir. You know, meditating.’

  ‘Sarcasm can be a very unattractive trait, Sergeant.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Their caseworker at the Crown Prosecution Service kept them waiting for half an hour. Someone made them more coffee. Anna found it undrinkable, Shipwright smacked his lips as he sipped from a steaming mug.

  ‘This is what I call coffee, Sergeant. Undissolved granules floating on the top and no bloody froth with a leaf drawn in it.’

  She was prepared to forgive him. He was a lifelong smoker, after all, and probably had few functioning taste buds left. But she kept her thoughts to herself, fetched a plastic cup of cold water from a cooler, and read an uninspiring gardening magazine while Shipwright went over Shaw’s charge with a prosecutor.

  * * *

  They got back to HQ at Portishead a little after five. The MCRTF was housed on the second floor of the sprawling site. White walls, ash-effect desks, open plan for most. As they entered, DC Holder looked up from his desk in the room they all shared.

  ‘Good day?’ he asked, grinning. Mid-twenties, no tie, he wore his dark hair close cropped, and even with glasses still managed to look no older than fifteen.

  Shipwright sat down on the edge of a desk that creaked in protest. ‘A good day indeed, Justin. About to be ruined, I understand, by an urgent meeting with Superintendent Rainsford?’

  ‘He had to go to a different meeting, sir. And Trisha’s gone home, too, but the super got her to prepare these for us. Called it homework.’ Holder made an apologetic face and handed round three large sealed envelopes. ‘And he wants us in by eight tomorrow morning.’

  Inside each envelope was a cardboard file holder containing a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip. Trisha had written the word ‘Emily Risman’ on the cardboard cover. Inside were case notes and clippings from newspapers, along with copied typed-up sheets.

  Shipwright let out a low whistle and muttered, ‘Neville Cooper.’

  ‘Who?’ Holder asked.

  Shipwright looked up. ‘Come on, Justin. Last year’s shit storm? I’ll give you a clue. One more Central Counties Regional Crime cock-up and press feeding frenzy.’

  When Holder continued to look blank, Shipwright added, ‘The Woodsman?’

  Holder’s eyes lit up behind his glasses. ‘He’s the bloke who was wrongfully imprisoned.’

  ‘The cigar is yours.’ Shipwright nodded.

  Anna peered at the papers, her memory of the case flooding back. Of all the miscarriages of justice perpetrated by the notorious CCRC squad, the wrongful imprisonment of Neville Cooper for the murder of Emily Risman was one of the most despicable. Cooper’s walk to freedom on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice had taken place in a blaze of public and press indignation some eight months before, his guilty verdict deemed unsafe on the basis of a catalogue of prosecution gaffs and undisclosed evidence.

  ‘Why the Woodsman?’ Holder asked.

  Shipwright answered, ‘Body was found on the edge of the Forest of Dean. The killer had half hidden it under an arrangement of leaves, branches and sticks over a shallow depression. The team suspected the killer had been meaning to set a bonfire, but may have been disturbed. The press, ever ready for a catchy headline, nicknamed the killer the Woodsman.’

  Holder nodded, his mouth forming the ghost of a sanguine smile.

  Anna continued to read the file. At the time of Cooper’s release, he’d served seventeen years.

  ‘They made up his confession, withheld evidence, locked him up and threw away the key,’ Shipwright muttered, scanning the papers.

  ‘What’s that got to do with us, sir?’ Holder asked. ‘We’re not anti-corruption.’

  ‘We’re not,’ Anna said. ‘But this is also a cold case.’

  Holder frowned behind his glasses.

  ‘Cooper’s conviction was deemed unsafe,’ Anna explained. ‘By definition that opens up the possibility that someone else must have carried out the crime he was wrongfully prosecuted for.’

  ‘Right.’ Holder nodded.

  ‘I thought West Mercia were making a big fuss about reopening the case?’ Anna said, still scanning the papers.

  ‘Indeed.’ Shipwright got to his feet. He hadn’t bothered taking off his coat and now he put the papers back into the file before tucking it under his arm. ‘Up until three weeks ago when the CPS, bless ’em, decided that they had enough evidence for a retrial. According to the Guardian article I read, Cooper is going back into the dock some time in the New Year. God knows why Rainsford is giving us this. I daresay we’ll find out in the morning. Go home, children. Come back ten minutes early in the morning, bright-eyed and full of background information. You can fill me in over coffee and a croissant. My treat. Now, I have a concert to attend.’ He moved off and started humming ‘Old Macdonald’, but turned back at the door. ‘How do you spell unmitigated enjoyment, Justin?’

  ‘Umm, u, n—’

  ‘Wrong. It’s E-I-E-I-O. Tomorrow.’ He waved a hand.

  Bemused, Holder turned to Anna.

  She shrugged. ‘Married-life humour.’

  Holder blinked.

  ‘Definitely an acquired taste.’

  * * *

  Anna made the 6.30 p.m. kettlebell class at a gym off the Gloucester Road. One of the half-doze
n franchises that had opened in Bristol. She trained or ran whenever the chance arose. In a job that held no warnings for what lurked around each corner, it paid to be as hard and trim as possible. After an appropriate hour of sweating, she called in at a Sainsbury’s Local for some essentials before returning to her flat. Whenever she passed by, it was her custom to glance in at the estate agent’s window beside Sainsbury’s, as a depressing reminder of how unlikely it was that she would ever be able to afford her own place. Horfield had not escaped the property-price madness. Two-bedroomed terraced houses on the Hughenden Road were going for £250k plus.

  Well, good luck with that, she always thought. A deposit and a mortgage would wipe her out. As things stood, her bloody student loan was still eating into her pay packet. Student loan. Christ, at almost thirty, Anna reminded herself.

  She arrived at her flat and unlocked the door. The one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment with kitchen and living room in an Edwardian terrace had been a find. Especially as it bordered a park as well. Though close to the city, in the summer she could be running out of her front door and over Horfield Common within a minute. Now, on the downward slope to winter, and with the hour turned back, she missed the light at six in the morning and only ever saw the park trees in daylight at the weekends.

  By 8 p.m., she was showered and fed. She hung up her dark suit and threw her white blouse into the laundry basket, poured herself a glass of wine from a bottle in the fridge and took it to her desk in the living room. As she waited for the computer to boot up, she sipped the bargain Riesling from Aldi. One glass only. She’d convinced herself that the wine helped her sleep, though Sunday magazines espoused as many views on that as there were bottles in an off-licence.

  The Woodsman file lay open on her desk. Background stuff that she needed to research. Carole King’s ‘A Natural Woman’ came to an end, and Anna went over to adjust the volume. The equipment was modern – an Akai direct drive with Bluetooth links to speakers on a shelf – but the vinyls were old and had once belonged to her father. Anna and her sister had ended up splitting the collection, because her mother had shown no interest in it. She had even threatened to throw the records out during one of her ‘clear-outs’. Anna’s sister, Kate, younger by a year and a bit, kept her half in the box room of her nice little house twenty miles north of Cardiff, but Anna liked listening, imagining her father doing the exact same thing in his teens. Somehow it helped keep his memory alive, and it felt like much more than simply a homage to the man who had died before he’d seen her graduate and make her career choice. Sharing his music made a connection she cherished.

  ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ kicked in and she returned to her desk and the computer. She scanned Facebook and looked up some of her old college mates. She considered adding a line or two of comments but then dismissed the thought, shut it down and punched in ‘Ellison Institute’. Professor Jane Markham was still listed under ‘faculty’ and, conveniently, possessed an email address. Anna spent ten minutes drafting a paragraph, not wanting to come across as sycophantic, but genuinely believing that Markham would be interested in anything Shaw-related. At draft five she told herself she was being stupid and pressed ‘send’.

  When she typed in ‘Neville Cooper’ the search engine came up with 110,000 hits, most with the Woodsman sobriquet added to the line, the first twenty from newspapers. She opened a few, simply to get a feeling for what had taken place.

  The Court of Appeal had ruled that a vital piece of evidence corroborating Cooper’s alibi, which placed him at an amusement arcade on the afternoon of the murder, had been suppressed deliberately in order to secure a conviction. The reports recounted the systemic victimisation of Cooper and made her blood run cold. The wine was gradually losing its chill in the glass as she turned away from the screen to the file Trisha had prepared.

  Emily Risman was eighteen years old when she was murdered. A posed black and white photograph of her at sixteen, in a school uniform, showed a pretty girl with the remnants of puppy fat filling her cheeks and lessening the definition of what were unspectacular but well-defined bones. Her smile looked perky and knowingly defiant; the grin of a teenager with no academic pretensions. Emily left school shortly after the photograph was taken and went to work as a hairdresser, escaping the environment that shackled her and earning, for the first time, money to spend on herself. Emily knotted her tie a good eight inches below her chin, over a deliberately unbuttoned blouse. Her teachers were kind in their guarded obituaries, not wishing to speak ill of the dead. Emily had not been a troublemaker, but though she’d been a girl whose interests lay outside the curriculum, they were as shocked as everyone to learn that their ex-pupil was three months pregnant when she was killed.

  In the middle of February 1998, Emily went missing on her half-day, a Thursday afternoon. Her parents reported her absence on the Friday morning on discovering her empty bed, having not stayed up for her return on Thursday night. The attraction of a neighbouring town’s football club dance meant that they had not expected her home much before midnight—

  Anna’s personal mobile rang. The display showed the caller as her sister Kate. She let the answerphone kick in. Now was not the time for chit-chat.

  —They found Emily on the Saturday in a densely wooded area less than two miles from her home in Millend, Gloucestershire. A woman out walking her dog spotted an arm sticking up out of the sodden leaves and dirt, the wigwam of sticks covering her having collapsed. Disturbed, in all probability, by a fox attracted by the smell of the body.

  In stark contrast to Emily’s pretty school snap, the scene-of-crime photos made unpleasant and ugly viewing. The body had been dumped in a shallow depression and left with only a hurried and half-hearted attempt at concealment by the killer. Her lower half remained covered by decaying leaves, but the February winds had blown much of her torso clean. The impression it gave in two of the photographs was an oddly disturbing one. From twenty feet, it looked as if Emily was struggling upwards out of the ground, as if the earth was attempting to swallow her. She lay on her stomach, face turned to one side, mouth open, eyes staring beseechingly, with lustreless corneas, at the surrounding trees. Her left arm was raised and resting on a log, as if she were signalling or calling for help. Blood had stained her clothes black. Her jeans lay rucked around her ankles, sweater yanked up to expose her back. Many of the thirty or so fatal stab wounds looked like flecks of dirt. Some had trails of blood caking the skin like cracked lacquer. Anna knew that the stab wounds without bloodied snail tracks had been inflicted after death.

  The pathologist’s report gave the cause of death as multiple stab wounds to the neck, chest and abdomen. Marks on her neck implied attempted strangulation. The post-mortem examination had also been the first indication to anyone that Emily had been pregnant. The estimation came in at eleven plus weeks. She had been dead for at least thirty-six hours.

  The forensic work-up, though extensive, yielded little in the way of hard evidence. No fingerprints on the victim’s skin, but also no ligature marks. The suggestion was that the killer had worn gloves. The weapon used had a four-inch blade, but a careful and painstaking search of the surrounding area had not brought anything to light. There was clear evidence of sexual activity, but no semen; vaginal bruising suggested that the sexual activity had been forced. Traces of lubricant indicated condom use. Fingernail swabs yielded nothing useful. Emily’s blood contained enough alcohol for the police to surmise that she had been drinking on Thursday afternoon or evening. Since no one came forward to advise them otherwise, they assumed that she’d been drinking with the killer. The most significant forensic findings came in the analysis of Emily’s sweater, which threw up several foreign fibres. But, paradoxically, it was the absence of an item of clothing that led, finally, to an arrest. And it was Emily’s mother who had complained to the police on receiving her daughter’s clothes, following extensive analysis, that her pants were missing.

  Investigating officers’ reports made up the bulk of th
e photocopies that filled the file. Initially, things ran relatively smoothly. Emily’s pregnancy had been a key feature and provided a motive for her murder. But it also provided the loose thread, which, on pulling began to unravel the fabric of Emily Risman’s far-from-innocent life. An only child and kept on a tight rein for years by a hard-working and respectable father, Emily rebelled at school. As a teenager, she’d become a good-time girl in the truest sense.

  The hair and fibres found on her sweater matched that of two local youths, both of whom had been spotted with her at the football club on the Wednesday evening prior to her murder. Both were from the same village of Millend as Emily, and both were taken in for questioning. One, Roger Willis, had DNA typing consistent with being the father of Emily’s child. Willis broke down and admitted that Emily and he were lovers, but he vehemently denied murdering her and the police were hamstrung. Willis had a solid alibi for the whole of Thursday and Friday morning, with twenty or more witnesses at a hospital appointment and, later, at a local pub attesting to his presence. More importantly, at eighteen, Willis showed symptoms of the early stages of an inherited disease called retinitis pigmentosa. Theirs was the rarest type in terms of genetic transmission being X-linked. Willis’s mother bore the defective gene and also suffered from the disease in a mild form. Medical evidence showed that he displayed a classic symptom of the disease, namely severe night blindness. In the dim and dark environment of the Forest of Dean on a February afternoon, his vision would have been severely impaired.