The Silent Girls: A gripping serial-killer thriller

by Dylan Young

  * * *

  They drove back to Bristol in the darkening afternoon, Anna unable to shake off the despondent mood that had settled over her. There was no denying it might be the Woodsman, but that didn’t immediately incriminate Cooper, and she desperately needed to investigate her other leads. What if the killer killed again?

  As she drove, Anna found herself hoping that Slack and Harris wouldn’t have shown Nia’s body to the parents in that state, although experience told her that someone must have made the identification since Nia’s Rupert the Bear pyjamas did not constitute enough in the way of confirmatory evidence. She assumed it would have been Chris Hopkins. How would he cope? How did anyone survive such a thing? You didn’t. But if you were lucky, if you had others you could care about, you endured.

  Thirteen

  Anna called the team together for a briefing on Monday morning. Rainsford joined them. It was a sombre affair. Since Nia’s body had been found, the Risman Case had taken on a new and sinister complexity; they had a potential serial killer on the loose and everyone looked pensive. But Anna could hear Shipwright’s words in her ear.

  Stick to your guns.

  She briefed the team on the similarities the crime scenes shared, asked Trisha to liaise with Gloucester and asked Khosa to chase up the whereabouts of Briggs and Wyngate. Her conversation with Shipwright was ringing in her ears as she waved a hand to the rogues’ gallery pinned on the whiteboard.

  When she’d finished, Rainsford led her into his office. ‘Tough weekend,’ he said. A statement not a question.

  ‘Not the best I’ve ever had, sir.’

  ‘There’s even more good news. Shaw wants to talk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know. Never rains but it pours. We can’t ignore it. You need to get up there tomorrow morning and hear what he has to say. I know you’re busy with Risman—’

  ‘No. I’m on it, sir. We’re heading up to Millend today. I’ll be free tomorrow.’

  ‘Millend?’

  ‘Where Emily Risman lived, sir.’

  ‘In the Forest of Dean?’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Then we both know that’s on the way to nowhere at all, but I’m grateful for your enthusiasm, Anna.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I don’t know what Shaw’s up to and I’m sure you could do without the distraction. If you think he’s going to be too much for you to handle, just say the word. I’ll get someone up there to see him and let you concentrate on Risman.’

  ‘No, sir. I’d like to see this thing with Shaw through.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that and I’m glad you did. Shaw says he wants to speak to you and you only. I was prepared to try with someone else, make your excuses if need be, but I think we’d lose his cooperation if we did that.’

  Anna nodded. Listening to Rainsford she could see how he’d got to where he was. He had his faults, didn’t everyone? But the ability to lead was not one of them. And neither was the ability to read ambition in other people.

  * * *

  Anna and Holder headed for Chepstow on a dull afternoon that seemed to leech the colour out of the landscape. By the time they reached Blakeney it had begun to rain in heavy downbursts, which had the wipers on overdrive and made the going slow on a winding road. The satnav made them take a left at Buckshaft and drive directly into the heart of the Forest of Dean. Within a couple of miles, traffic had all but disappeared and Anna stared out at unending acres of Forestry Commission land to both sides. Holder surprised her by supplying a stream of bland commentary, telling her that there were more deciduous broad-leafed trees, such as oak, ash and beech, in this forest than in any other in the UK. Though it seemed like another world, the map showed them to be only about ten miles from where Nia’s body had been found the day before.

  ‘These roads go on forever,’ Holder muttered. He was right. The only hope you had around here was with a car, and even then it seemed to take an age to get anywhere.

  They got to Millend just before one. It was a small village with a fenced in cricket green and two unpretentious pubs. The road climbed away from the village, and after a quarter of a mile, they were out into forest again. Holder was reading a map from the file he’d brought and asked Anna to slow down as they approached a sign that read ‘Miller’s Pike Lake picnic area’.

  ‘It’s around here somewhere,’ he said, peering through the blurry glass.

  Anna drove on slowly until he found the right spot, and then pulled over on to a gravelled lay-by, opposite a turning into a rutted lane guarded by a closed gate.

  ‘We’ll have to walk from here,’ Holder said, reaching into the seat behind for his coat.

  They both got out of the car and crossed the road, the rain mercifully slowing to a spattering drizzle.

  ‘What is this road?’ Anna asked.

  ‘This whole area is riddled with abandoned mills and old forges, apparently. They were mining here as far back as Roman times. Iron ore, coal, even quarrying for stone. There’re miles of abandoned railway. This lane could have led to anything, but historians think that the scowle a mile or so in points to surface mining.’

  ‘You’ve done your homework, Justin. Or did you pick up a tourist leaflet? What’s a scowle?’

  ‘Local term, ma’am. Shallow hollows. Evidence of cave systems or excavations.’ Holder gave her a lopsided grin, put his file in one hand so that he could hold on with the other, and climbed over the gate.

  Anna followed.

  The track wound around and upwards until they were out of sight and sound of the road. Holder’s map led them up a muddy path to a point where they could look down into a clearing in a natural dip in the ground. A bowl surrounded by tall oaks and chestnuts, interspersed with Scots pine and larch.

  ‘The Forest of Dean,’ said Holder.

  Anna didn’t say anything. There were no birds singing, only the solid plops of rain dripping from the leaves and branches onto the forest floor.

  ‘The village kids used to come here. There should be a picnic area just behind us.’ Holder pivoted towards the remains of some tables. ‘Yep, there it is.’

  ‘And no trace of tyre- or footmarks at the time?’

  Holder spread the file open under a plastic sheet on one of the tables. ‘It had been cold and dry for days,’ he said. ‘There were footprints but they were numerous and not particularly fresh.’

  ‘Where exactly did they find Emily Risman?’

  Holder handed her some black and white prints, rotating them this way and that in the thin drizzle before pointing to the east edge of the hollow under a large oak. ‘Looks like it was about there.’

  He walked across and Anna joined him. Eighteen years ago, someone committed murder on a gloomy February afternoon at this ancient spot, and the only witnesses were these towering trees. To the north, the land fell away. On a ridge above stood the forest; dark and silent and menacing, as if the trees were waiting to march back and reclaim what was rightly theirs.

  Some of them looked incalculably old; huge gnarled trunks suggesting centuries of growth. It was not difficult to imagine that this natural amphitheatre might have attracted people from the very beginning. Anna frowned, wondering from where such a thought might have sprung. The place had a definite pagan feel to it. Her mind filled with imagined horrors. Sacrificial groves, wicker men for burning, robed druids spouting arcane rites. She shook her head to clear it, but her thoughts had left her unsettled. She looked down, blinking away the dampness, and when she looked up again, she thought she saw something move on the horizon. A shape, fleeting and blurred, flitting between the trees.

  ‘There!’ She pointed.

  Holder followed her finger. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought I saw something move.’

  Holder peered. ‘How big?’

  ‘Difficult to say.’ She paused, analysing why his question sounded odd. ‘Why?’

  ‘There are wild boar here, ma’am. Sometimes there’s a cull if their number
s swell. They’ve been known to attack dogs and horses.’

  ‘Wow, there was a lot of information on that tourist leaflet.’ She tried using humour to deflect the disquiet that gripped her, but despite scanning it several times, nothing moved at the tree line now. The place smelled of earth and leaf mould, and Anna guessed it would even in summer. Hundreds of years’ worth of rot under her feet, the ground spongy and damp underfoot. For a moment, she feared she might sink into it and be swallowed up by the forest and its secrets.

  ‘Creepy spot here, isn’t it?’ Holder spoke for them both.

  ‘It all started here,’ she said. ‘“The evil that men do lives after them.”’

  ‘That sounds like something I should know,’ said Holder, with a nervous little laugh. ‘Is it Shakespeare?’

  ‘It is.’ Anna turned away as the rain escalated from drizzle to shower. She’d planned on asking Holder to go back to the car to wait for her, wanting time alone to let her mind roam over the landscape of Emily’s last minutes. Imagine the possible scenarios that could have led her to this lonely spot, alone with her killer. But now, even if Holder had gone and left her, she knew she wouldn’t feel alone in this place. The flash of movement in her peripheral vision had unnerved her, leaving her with the unpleasant and unshakable sensation of being watched.

  ‘Come on,’ she said after another moment’s contemplation, ‘let’s go and see Emily’s family.’

  * * *

  Holder drove back to Millend. A smattering of scattered dwellings were the heart of the village. The biggest building was another Forestry Commission property; a field centre for outdoor studies. They doubled back and Holder stopped opposite the cricket pitch and pointed across the road at a concrete post tilting at an angle just short of forty-five degrees, with a bus stop sign at the top.

  ‘That would be where Emily caught the bus to Coleford or Gloucester.’

  Anna looked up and down the road. No cars or houses to the north and south for fifty yards.

  ‘It’s not overlooked by anything,’ she stated.

  ‘No,’ Holder agreed.

  The Rismans lived in a bungalow a quarter of a mile outside the village, on the edge of an estate of 1930s-built semis. The bungalow was a low, dirty, cream building flanked by two rows of quick-growing leylandii hedges that had been someone’s bad idea some fifteen years before. A weed-strewn lawn and some bedraggled shrubs led the way to a paint-flecked front door. Holder knocked and introduced himself and Anna to a bespectacled, portly man in a tight-fitting knitted polo shirt that had once been canary yellow, but which now bore several stains that were a timeline of past meals. Bill Risman was balding and he pulled back his lips to reveal nothing but pink gums.

  ‘You must be the police. Been expecting you,’ he said cheerfully.

  Anna followed Bill and Holder down a narrow hallway to a clean but cluttered living room. A mock coal fire hissed quietly in one corner in the middle of a brass surround. A herd of china shire horses marched across the mantelpiece, and polished brasses and horseshoes hung at eye level on every vertical surface. Two faded, brown velour armchairs were pulled up around a big TV that glowed colourfully in one corner. Above it stood a glass-fronted cupboard full of framed photographs of Emily at different ages.

  The TV droned out a mid-afternoon chat show full of the sound of a sycophantic audience overeager to applaud everything mentioned by hawker guests and bland hosts.

  ‘Joan,’ Bill sang out. ‘The police are here.’

  The corpulent occupant of one of the armchairs turned an incongruously small round face towards them before levering herself up. She bobbed, favouring her right hip, and waved at them to enter.

  ‘Come in and sit down. Bill, go put the kettle on.’

  Bill scooped the open pages of a tabloid off the sofa and brushed away some crumbs with his hand.

  ‘Tea? I remember the police always liked a drop of tea.’

  ‘That’ll be fine, sir,’ Holder said, and waited while Anna seated herself. ‘We’re sorry to disturb you like this, Mr Risman,’ he continued.

  ‘S’all right, we’re used to it. We gets half a dozen or so people a year from newspapers and TV and such. More so now, o’course,’ Bill replied on his way to the kitchen. The accent wasn’t heavy, but the absence of teeth made Anna listen hard to understand.

  ‘They’ve always wanted to know about my Emily,’ Joan explained. ‘I can’t count the number of times we’ve had copies of her photos made. Newspapers are the worst, mind. Say they’ll send back pictures but they never do. So, I just charge them now. A tenner to cover our costs, innit, Bill?’

  ‘A tenner, yeah.’ Bill’s voice floated in from the kitchen.

  ‘Trouble is, pictures don’t give you the whole story, do they? Lovely nature when she was little, she had. A proper madam, mind, always wanting to sing or dance, the centre of attention. Did wonderful in school concerts and the like. Wasn’t too good at reading to begin with, but she’d caught up by the time she’d got to the comprehensive. I wasn’t surprised. I mean, no one in our family liked books, if you know what I mean. Except my sister Rita’s boy, Lyndon. He went to college in Southampton to do something deep. What was it that Lyndon, Rita’s boy did, Bill?’

  ‘Engineering, he did.’

  ‘There. I knew it was something. But not our Emily. Always a one for make-up and dresses. Natural that she should want to go into hairdressing. And she was good too – used to do all the street in her spare time. Charged them, mind. Though there’s no pleasing some people, but I told them, I said if you was going over to Coleford, you’d be paying three times as much and the bus. If they didn’t like it they could always go somewhere else, couldn’t they? And she could cut beautifully. Course, here they wanted perms mostly—’

  ‘Mrs Risman’ – Anna cut across Joan’s outpouring – ‘you’ll have heard about Neville Cooper’s release?’

  The grin slid off Joan’s face. ‘Why they letting him go? Can you tell me why they’re letting that monster out?’

  Holder kept his gaze steady. ‘Because it looks like he didn’t do it, Mrs Risman.’

  ‘Of course he did it. They said so in the court, didn’t they?’

  ‘They may have made a mistake,’ Anna said.

  Joan’s small eyes glared at her without understanding. ‘How could they make a mistake about something like that? All those lawyers and policemen and specialists? How could they make a mistake?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘It is difficult to believe, isn’t it, but the fact is that they did. The police had evidence that showed that Neville Cooper was somewhere else, but they chose not to disclose it. Witnesses saw Cooper at an amusement arcade the afternoon of Emily’s death and at a cinema that evening.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they say so at the time? Why wait all these years?’

  ‘Because…’ Holder said, but faltered.

  Anna glanced at him and then smiled at Mrs Risman. ‘What did you think of the investigative team?’

  The woman’s eyes glazed over momentarily in something akin to rapture.

  ‘Mr Briggs, he was in charge. Wonderful man. But Mr Wyngate, he was special. They both promised us the first time they walked in through the door that they would find the man who killed our Emily and put him away. And he did that for us did Mr Wyngate. He had that look in his eye, a determined look. Spent hours here, he did.’

  ‘Not Maddox?’

  ‘Not so much. Not one for conversation over a cup o’tea and a biscuit was Sergeant Maddox. Stern, you know?’

  Any thought that Anna harboured of pointing out Wyngate’s failings evaporated at that point. She didn’t want to make an enemy of this woman.

  ‘Have you met Mr Wyngate since that time?’

  ‘Only at the trial.’

  ‘Not since?’

  ‘We’ve seen him on TV. We’ve watched him put a lot of villains away. A great man, Mr Wyngate.’

  An electronic chirping suddenly burst from Holder’s jacket. Mumbling an apol
ogy, he stood and flipped open a mobile phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  Anna watched him move out of earshot into the relative privacy of the hallway. She turned back to Joan. ‘Can I ask you about the day Emily died? Did she say anything to you about what she had planned for that day?’

  Joan looked up at the glass cabinet as if seeking permission to speak. Her daughter smiled back at her approvingly.

  ‘She left for work on the Thursday morning as usual. She’d walked around with wet hair for half an hour, eaten half a piece of toast, and wouldn’t listen to me telling her to wear something other than the sloppy T-shirt she slept in.’ Joan shook her head. ‘She wasn’t a bad girl, mind you. Terrible one for boys, but then so was I in my day, wasn’t I, Bill?’ The last three words were delivered at a higher volume and aimed out towards the kitchen. It received an incoherent mumble from that direction in reply.

  ‘That Thursday, she left for work at eight. She caught the bus to Coleford. Thursday was her half-day. Sometimes she went in to Gloucester, but sometimes she didn’t. That day, she didn’t. She left work at one and never came home again. Someone met her that afternoon, I’m certain of it.’

  ‘There was no other way for her get to Millend from Coleford except by bus?’

  ‘We didn’t have a car, if that’s what you mean. She must have come back on the bus.’

  ‘But no one remembered seeing her get off here?’

  ‘There was someone,’ Joan protested.

  ‘Someone said they saw her on the bus, but no one saw her get off here, did they?’

  ‘No. No one said they did, but you don’t, do you? You sit on a bus and think about your shopping. Leastways, I do.’

  ‘Did she talk to you about her boyfriends?’

  Joan shook her head. ‘It was just a game for her. There was no one she was really sweet on. She didn’t talk much about it.’

  ‘What about Richard Osbourne?’

  ‘Oh yes, we knew about Rick. Mad for him at one time she was. Wrote his name all over her school satchel.’