The Silent Girls: A gripping serial-killer thriller

by Dylan Young

  Anna noted that the Isuzu was missing, though the Astra was parked in front of the garages. Three milk bottles stood on the step inside the porch, together with half a dozen eggs in an open, torn, cardboard egg carton. Most of the eggs were covered in feathers and dark material, which could, in Anna’s opinion, have been almost anything.

  It’s called the countryside, Anna, she reminded herself.

  She rang the bell and stared down at the eggs with a grimace. When no reply came with the third ring, she followed some crazy paving around to the rear, impressed again by the neat garden. She knocked firmly on the back door. It made the latch rattle. After three knocks, she put her hand on the handle and opened the door. Silence, dense and complete, was all that met her straining ears.

  At first, all she did was to lean in and sing out, ‘Hello? Is there anybody home?’

  When no one answered, Anna stepped into the narrow hall, mentally preparing a little apology for when Willis or his wife would appear.

  From the hall, she could see into the kitchen at an acute angle. She caught sight of a small spill of flour on the surface of the butcher’s console. Spilled flour wasn’t something you left lying around unless you were in the middle of baking.

  She sang out another greeting. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

  A waft of breeze from the open door behind her caught the flour and sent a powdery spiral into the air. Anna took a step forward into the kitchen with her hand outstretched as if to try to catch the plume. A sizeable mound had spilled and accumulated on the floor beneath the block. Her eyes followed more abandoned things; a broken plate, an overturned knife block, something dark on the wooden floor. It looked like spattered liquid. Oil, perhaps. Not much, but Anna stepped over it, her awareness ratcheting up. The door leading out to the workshop and back garden stood open and she stepped through.

  The workshop door was slightly ajar. She crossed to it, poked it open with her foot and froze. The room had been trashed. Shards of pottery littered the floor, shelves had been ripped down, Gail Willis’s delicate creations now nothing more than rubble and dust. But it did not look like anything systematic. More as if some awful violent storm had visited this space and left a trail of mayhem.

  Anna stepped quickly back out into the garden. Outside, all was quiet except for the noise of her heart hammering in her own ears.

  An overwhelming sense of foreboding overtook her. She needed to call this in. Get some uniforms over and…

  She saw it then. At the end of the garden, where it led to open fields. A patch of lawn and beyond that a bed that in the spring might harbour flowers, but now showed only the desiccated yellow stalks of sedums, and… something beyond… incongruous, blue, extending out of the black earth to a point where it was covered by an arrangement of branches and sticks.

  Anna took some quick steps along the edge of a sodden path, signs of something heavy dragged along the ground evident in the flattening of the grass. She got to within six feet and stopped. He hadn’t tried too hard to hide the body, but he had done enough to leave his trademark arrangement. The clumsy tent of sticks and branches, which she’d seen in the SOC photos old and new, bore no relationship to the careful and elaborate arrangement that sat on the earth. The whole thing was held together by a woven circlet of long twigs. It looked symbolic and arcane. She had no idea what it meant and guessed that its true meaning might only be known to one mind. One very disturbed mind. Trembling, she let her eyes drop through the gaps in the wooden totem to the horror beneath.

  Gail Willis lay on her front, half out of the shallow grave he’d dug for her, one hand resting on the earth. Just like Emily Risman and Nia Hopkins.

  All the air escaped from Anna’s lungs in a rush. She turned away, retching drily, tears of horror and rage springing to her eyes and coursing down her face. The dull roar of a transatlantic jet high overhead was the only sound. Even the birds were quiet. Anna looked up, acutely aware that she was alone in this garden but convinced all of a sudden that she was not. The Woodsman had been to this cottage and he could still be here, watching, waiting. She sucked in oxygen, her mind incapable of coherent thought, as the instinct to run as far away as possible kicked in.

  She turned, stepping madly to one side, not wanting to contaminate the crime scene any more than she had already. She walked around the outside of the cottage, heading for her car, unable to wash out the stench of slurry that clung to her nostrils, that she would now always associate with violent death. Yanking open the car door, she clambered in and rang Holder.

  It was then that she thought of Charles Willis. She’d run away without even finding out if he was still alive, or perhaps injured. The dreaded prospect of having to go back and search the house brought out, to her consternation, an involuntary moan of denial. But what if the Woodsman was still there? Stalking her, waiting for his chance. Sense, that rarest of commodities, finally took charge. She was alone and unarmed at a murder scene with the real possibility that the killer was still in the vicinity. It would be foolhardy to put herself in danger.

  Shipwright’s voice echoed in her head. Do not fly solo, Anna.

  She found a foothold on that treacherous slope of shock she’d been sliding down, put the car in gear and drove out, retracing the two miles to the turning off the main road where she parked on the verge. A part of her knew that her reaction, as weak as it seemed, was normal and human and the correct thing to do. And this iota of insight provided a crumb of comfort. But fear still prickled the hair on her scalp and made her glance in the rear-view mirror every couple of seconds, hissing like white noise in her head.

  When, several minutes later, blue lights danced on the distant horizon and the strident siren’s wail reached her, relief washed over her like a warm bath. Anna flagged down the patrol car, flashed her warrant card and led them back to Beacon Cottage.

  * * *

  Holder and Khosa came later, after the local uniforms and local CID, and Anna let them take the weight until Harris arrived with his posse of serious crime officers to take over. After watching the white-clad CSI team crawling over the place like white-suited ants, Anna called her squad together. It was getting dark now and the temperature was plummeting. They sat in her car and she switched on the engine to try to get some heat working, but in the light from the harsh xenon lamps that lit up the house like an airport runway, their breath plumed out like word balloons as they spoke.

  ‘There is no sign of Charles Willis, ma’am,’ Khosa said.

  Anna sighed. ‘I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Is it possible he got away?’

  Holder shrugged. ‘The Isuzu is missing and the workshop is a complete mess. But there’s also blood in Willis’s office.’

  ‘When I let myself imagine what went on there… Charles Willis is almost blind.’ Anna shook her head. ‘He can’t have taken the jeep. Are there signs of forced entry?’

  ‘No,’ Khosa said.

  ‘So, who rang me last night?’

  Khosa shrugged. ‘Yours was the latest entry on the electronic phone book on his PC. Your number was still up on the screen. Perhaps he got through in desperation and was then caught.’

  Anna shivered.

  ‘And there’s one more thing, ma’am,’ Holder said. ‘It seems Osbourne didn’t go home last night.’

  ‘Osbourne?’ Anna looked from Khosa to Holder. Neither of them offered an explanation and so her imagination filled in the blanks. ‘We should have been more careful. We should have played this another way.’

  ‘How could we have, ma’am?’ Khosa asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But if Osbourne’s involved… why take Willis?’

  ‘That’s one on a list of a dozen questions I’ve got, ma’am,’ Khosa replied.

  Holder stared at them. ‘Hang on, are you saying that Osbourne did this?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps whoever did do it has taken Roger Willis and Osbourne, too. But I think our priority has to be finding Osbourne, and quickly.’

 
Khosa shook her head. ‘But why did he have to do that to Gail Willis?’

  That was a better question. One that Anna considered carefully before answering.

  ‘Who knows. Perhaps he can’t help himself now. Killing Nia to re-implicate Cooper had a kind of twisted logic to it. Thanks to Gloucester’s heavy- handedness Cooper’s in hospital, but he’s no longer in custody. That’s not helping because it means our killer’s plan isn’t working and he may be getting desperate. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to apply logic here.’

  Holder shrugged. ‘It’s as if he wants us to know he’s out there.’

  Anna nodded.

  Holder banged his hand down on the dash. ‘How the hell did they miss this bastard the first time around?’

  Anna didn’t answer but she risked a glance at Harris outside in the harsh lights, his gaze anchored firmly on the cottage. He’d not spoken to her since he’d arrived, preferring to use Slack as his go-between. She knew why. He was fearful of being ridiculed, of her crowing, ‘I told you so.’

  She didn’t pretend that it hadn’t crossed her mind, but she’d dismissed it instantly. A woman had died here. Anna had no appetite for one-upmanship or copper banter. But Harris was a different breed.

  ‘Are we any further forward with anything else?’ she asked.

  Khosa answered. ‘Trisha is still trying to trace the van driver, uh… Stanton. We’ve tracked him to two addresses but he’s moved on. I’ll get on to it again tomorrow.’

  ‘There is one other thing. I think it would be wise to liaise with the rape team. I think we may have found their serial attacker.’

  Holder and Khosa both snapped their heads up.

  ‘I know how this is going to sound, but it’s possible we may be looking at the reverse of the usual pattern. Let’s go with Osbourne for now. If it is him, we know he killed Emily in a rage. She’d been having intercourse with him from a young age. If she said no to him, for whatever reason – the pregnancy maybe – he could have lost it and killed her. He got lucky, Cooper was an easy scapegoat, but Osbourne’s pattern of behaviour might have been set in that one incident with Emily. Perhaps he thinks he’s lucky, is being protected by a higher power, who bloody knows what’s going on in his head. But he’s been attacking women since that time. And instead of letting it escalate, he’s controlled himself, avoided killing until he really had to.’

  ‘But how does that explain Gail Willis?’ Khosa looked confused.

  Anna sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s finally lost control. Whatever the reason, he’s out in the open now. And we need to stop him before he does this again.’

  ‘We should try to correlate the rapes with Osbourne’s known movements,’ Holder suggested.

  ‘I’ll see to it. I’ll get an APW out for Osbourne nationwide,’ Khosa said.

  ‘So, Emily Risman’s pregnancy…?’ Holder let his words trickle out as a question.

  ‘Might have been the final insult to Osbourne,’ Khosa muttered.

  Holder thought about it and then nodded slowly. ‘That would fit. But it still doesn’t tell us why he’s taken Willis.’

  ‘That one I can’t begin to answer. Possibly he’s doing it because of something Willis knows, or even some sort of distorted revenge for what his brother did.’

  ‘Should we be concentrating on airports, docks, that sort of thing?’

  ‘We shouldn’t ignore them, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced, ma’am?’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she said. Holder was right. There was something else here that she was missing, but it was so far out of reach there was no point articulating that niggle. Not yet.

  ‘What are the chances of us finding Willis alive, ma’am?’ Khosa asked.

  ‘There is still a chance.’ Anna tried to put a positive spin on it. She needed to convince herself as much as anyone else. ‘The very fact that he wasn’t killed in the cottage is in our favour. And there won’t be a sexual motive there, but then again, who knows what’s going through this bloke’s mind.’

  Slack’s face appeared at the car window, his nose and ears purple from the cold. ‘Thought you ought to know that Cooper’s condition is stabilising. It looks like he might be OK.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s been any sign of Wyngate?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Is someone looking?’

  Slack shrugged. ‘Been so many other things going on.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I’m uncomfortable with him out there, not knowing what he’s up to, because I’m sure he’s up to something.’

  Slack glowered. ‘If it’s any consolation, I think DCI Harris would set the dogs on John Wyngate if he turned up, that’s for sure. What a total bloody balls-up.’

  Twenty-Two

  From high in the hide, he’d watched her arrive. The good-looking one with ice in her eyes. Through the binoculars he’d seen her enter the cottage, step out into the garden and find the body. All nicely laid out for her. Her reaction impressed him. She hadn’t run, though she’d moved pretty quickly once she’d realised what he’d left for her. He’d laughed at that. His Bushnell binoculars were fitted with a camera and he’d look at the photographs later.

  Now the cottage was swarming with police and he needed to move. He had another one in the van who was trying to attract attention by kicking at the panels. He still had some of the vet’s drugs. He’d use some to shut them up. But he didn’t want to use it all. He needed to keep some for later.

  He put the binoculars away and climbed down from the tree.

  He realised now how everything had changed once the detective started poking her bloody nose in. He knew it was over. His carefully constructed life. There was nothing he could do to change things back. But he’d leave his mark before he went. He wanted to show her. Wanted her to feel his power and know that he was better than her. Fucking arrogant bitch that she was.

  Time to go to ground.

  She had no chance.

  Twenty-Three

  The dream was vivid and all the worse for her stark and recent experiences. She was in a dark, damp place, with moisture dripping off the leaves of gnarled trees in a strange woodland, on a sunless winter’s afternoon. Hurrying, vaguely aware of something in pursuit. Whenever she stopped and looked behind her, there was nothing to see except an impenetrable gloom between the endless trees, and nothing to hear except the echoing cawing of rooks perched high in the branches. She was alone and filled with dread, because there were things in the woods that she didn’t want to look at. She kept her head down, not wanting to confront, not wanting to see. But the voice, when it came, made her look up.

  ‘Take your time, look around.’

  It was Gail Willis’s voice, calm and untroubled, floating down in the stillness. But there was something very wrong with the placid calmness in that voice, something wrong with the way the words emerged as if through gritted teeth. Anna stared up and understood. Stared up into Gail’s swollen, blackened face and bulging eyes, as they peered down at her from forty feet above, dangling by the neck from a tall branch. There were more bodies, all hanging from the trees above, black blood dripping from their swaying feet. Waiting, like dreadful fruit, to fall or be picked at by the circling rooks.

  ‘Take your time, look around.’

  Words from their first meeting in Gail’s workshop, now tinged with some other meaning that Anna couldn’t fathom. Behind her, a twig snapped before another rook cawed, and Gail began her automaton message again.

  Anna slipped on a wet leaf, her knee meeting with the soggy earth, her hands sinking in to the ground that should have been hard but had the springy consistency of flesh.

  ‘No, no, not now.’ Her own voice in the dream. A voice full of dread. Ahead of her stretched a path that wound upwards on a rise towards a lighter sky. She dragged herself upright, her head pivoting around to the noise of yet another twig snapping and the unmistakable rustling of dry le
aves spared the dampness of the rain of blood. Some movement in her peripheral vision brought her head back around. The bodies were descending. Everywhere, clones of Gail gradually floated down to the woodland floor as the ropes lengthened.

  ‘Take your time, look around.’

  Behind her, the rustling of leaves became rhythmic, the noise of footfalls gathering speed. She stumbled towards the path, her gut churning as all the bodies reached the ground and stood, turning dead eyes full of accusation towards her. The rustling became a stampeding drumbeat of feet as she stumbled and clawed her way forward on the path, certain now that something was behind her, almost upon her. A hot, animal breath seared her neck.

  * * *

  She came awake confused and disorientated, sweat beading her forehead, exhausted. The lurid dream left her aching and tired and she toyed with turning over and seeking refuge in a doze. But she knew it was not going to happen. A fear of revisiting that subconscious charnel house would keep sleep at bay. She switched on the light and got up, acutely aware of one thing and one thing only.

  The Woodsman was off the leash.

  * * *

  Harris’s team convened in the conference room at Gloucester. Two sets of photo-boards were now set up, one for Nia and one for Gail. They sat in a semicircle around a raised dais on uncomfortable plastic chairs, each with a wooden fold-up writing table. Out front stood Harris, tie done up, his face moist with a rubric glow of dull anger. Anna looked from him to the photo-board. It was the first time she’d seen crime-scene photos of Gail, and the sight triggered fresh memories of her lying in the garden. One of the images hung awry and it was all she could do to stop herself from getting up and adjusting it. It seemed somehow disrespectful.