by Dylan Young
* * *
In the flat, she showered, made herself a stir-fry and put on Free’s ‘Fire and Water’ before checking her emails.
DI Gwynne. Intrigued by your email. Be happy to talk. I enclose my mobile number.
Best wishes,
Professor Jane Markham
Pleased, if a little daunted, Anna finished her supper and called the number Prof. Markham had enclosed. The voice, when it answered, was instantly recognisable from a dozen lectures.
‘Professor Markham, this is Anna Gwynne. Thanks for getting back to me.’
‘Pleasure. And it’s Jane.’
‘Right… I don’t for one minute expect you to remember me—’
‘Of course I remember you, Anna. I remember the ones that stand out from the herd. It’s no surprise to me to hear you’re hunting monsters.’
Anna took a moment to absorb that. She hoped it was a compliment.
Jane continued, ‘How is our friend Shaw?’
‘Friend is not a word I’d use when it comes to Shaw.’
‘Indeed, and my apologies. Though it’s no accident that I use the word. People like him see the world in a very simple way. Either friends or enemies.’
‘I revisited your teaching materials. The Connor interview.’
Jane sighed. ‘Connor was naive and poorly prepared. I felt for him and his boss. Were you teaching?’
Anna got straight to it. ‘Not exactly. We have a historical DNA match for Shaw in an unsolved rape case going back almost a year before he was imprisoned.’
The line stayed silent.
Anna continued, ‘Three months after reporting the attack, the girl, Tanya Cromer, disappeared. We think Shaw is responsible.’
Static crackled on the line. Anna could hear Jane breathing. Eventually she spoke. ‘Shaw… he’s capable of just about anything. But I am a little surprised. Sexual predation was never his motivation. How much do you know of his background?’
‘I know he’s killed more than once.’
‘He has and never denied any of that. But his case, as despicable as it is, remains interesting.’
Anna tried to find something appropriate to say, but, before she could, Jane spoke again.
‘Shaw worked at Government Communications Headquarters in Manchester. He was a network operations specialist, though I can’t remember what his role was exactly. I seem to remember it being glossed over at trial as “sensitive”. These days it would be cyber intelligence, or something like that, but they didn’t call it that back then. What I’m saying is that he was more than tech savvy. He and his wife had been separated for some time. His daughter lived with her mother. Abbie was bright and followed her father in that. He saw her regularly alternate weekends. The separation came partly as a result of his wife’s alcohol problems, but she still held down a job of sorts, though sickness absence was on the up. Their relationship was troubled, but neither Shaw nor his wife were prepared for what happened to Abbie.’
‘You mean when she threw herself under a train?’
‘It sounds horrifyingly simple when said like that. The fact is she’d shown no sign of depression. Good in school, not sexually active, but later it transpired that she’d fallen in with a group, an emo crowd. It was they who led her to the online games. Have you ever heard of the Black Squid?’
Anna hadn’t and said so.
‘People dismissed it as an urban myth. An online game that goads people into killing themselves sounds far-fetched. But Abbie’s death proved that it wasn’t.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The game works by finding vulnerable teens through suicide groups. For the victim, there’s the thrill of discovery and, once an administrator accepts your request, you’re set thirty daily challenges. It originated in Eastern Europe. Sites get shut down constantly, but they simply go underground. They’re still there if you know where to look.’
‘Abbie Shaw joined one of these groups?’
‘She did. The tasks condition the victim. At first, they’re easy, like not talking for a whole day. But they soon escalate to antisocial or dangerous behaviour. Things like sitting on a high roof with legs dangling over the sides, or carving a number into your arm with a razor. In both cases the instruction is to send an image of the completed task to the administrator. The players are warned that if they pull out of the game they will be found and killed. The last task is to draw an image of a black squid on your face, send a photograph, and then, complete the final task. In Abbie Shaw’s case, throw herself under a train.’
‘It sounds…’ Anna struggled for the right word.
‘Incredible, I know. But those who have fallen victim are all emotionally labile teenagers. It’s an ideal pool in which to fish.’
‘It must have been hard for Shaw to take.’
‘He reacted badly. Blamed his wife for not knowing who Abbie was spending time with. He had a point there, but he blamed himself as much. What we now know is that he spent the next eighteen months devising ways of getting to the administrators. He trawled the dark web, visited chat rooms, posed as a teenager himself, made his own variant of the Black Squid game to see if he could trigger a reaction. Eventually, he did. He then used his network-tracking skills to trace an administrator from the game. He found him and killed him. But not before torturing the man into telling him about the other devisers of the game. He found them too.’
‘What about his wife?’
There was a pause and the noise of swallowing, and then the gentle knock of a glass being replaced on a table. ‘Shaw, when he was caught, had abnormally low levels of serotonin. There is a subgroup of borderline personality disorder patients with very low levels of this hormone.’
‘Serotonin? Doesn’t that modify aggression and impulsivity?’
‘It does. Shaw controlled his aggression prior to Abbie’s death. Some people have theorised that his work, and more importantly his daughter, allowed him to keep a lid on it. With her gone, he was a bomb waiting to explode. When he did, his wife got caught in the shrapnel.’
‘But it doesn’t preclude him from sexual aggression as in Tanya Cromer’s rape?’ Anna wanted reassurance. When it came, it was far less effusive than she’d hoped.
‘No, it doesn’t. But it’s an anomaly.’
The line crackled feebly as silence ballooned.
Jane broke it. ‘I didn’t ring to rain on your parade, Anna. If there’s anything I can do, just pick up the phone.’
‘That’s good to know. Thanks, Jane.’
‘Don’t thank me yet. My main reason for ringing was to warn you… I presume you’d like him to confess to the rape and abduction?’
‘It would be so much kinder on Tanya’s family if he did. That would mean no trial. Just evidential presentation and sentencing.’
‘Then I wish you the best of luck. Genuinely. But you need to try to understand Shaw’s mindset.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘Truth is, no one’s really achieved that. Of course, we as professionals have been desperate to label him. Is he BPD? Is he a sociopath? Or, is he truly psychopathic? As so often is the case, it’s blurred. He had some classic signs of a borderline personality before it all happened. Chaotic interpersonal relationships, anger issues, poor intimacy skills. My own interpretation of the killings is that he was a coping BPD who, under severe psychological stress, descended into full-blown sociopathy, perhaps even psychopathy. I don’t want to lecture you, but BPD patients struggle with nuance. The world is black or white for Shaw. If he’s stable and has taken to you, then he may well appear to let you in to his world. But he can’t help being manipulative and exploitative. That’s the default setting. He lies. He does things only for his own benefit. Be prepared.’
Jane rang off, leaving Anna anxious and unsettled. She’d devoured the stir-fry through hunger, but now it wallowed like a lead weight in her stomach. She wished, not for the first time that day, that Shipwright was at her elbow. He’d been her shield for the last two years, and after talking t
o Jane Markham she felt his absence keenly.
On impulse, she rang Mrs Shipwright.
‘Fran, it’s Anna Gwynne. How is he?’
‘Desperate for a fag. Even more desperate knowing he now has to give them up for good.’
‘Any news?’
‘He’s in the queue, they keep telling me. Can you believe that? You queue for a bus, not to have your heart fixed.’ Concern made Fran’s voice waver.
‘I’m sure he’ll be fine. You know him, he’s made of different stuff from the rest of us.’
‘I know he likes everyone to think that, Anna. But he’s scared. I can see it. This has put the willies up him. And I know what you’re going to say. It does serve him right.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘No, I know you weren’t. But we’ve all thought it. The way he eats and smokes and… oh shit, shit. If anything happens to him, I’ll blame myself. I should have—’
‘Don’t do this, Fran. We both know that he’s at least fifty per cent mule.’
Fran let out a helpless little laugh. ‘I tell him that all the time and then he’ll say that mules have other attributes below the waist and that’s why I married him. Oh God, he’s such a bastard.’
Anna didn’t think she’d ever heard ‘bastard’ delivered with such tenderness. ‘Say hello for me, will you? Superintendent Rainsford has told us no visitors yet.’
‘No work, he means. But he’ll see you, Anna. Any time. You know that.’
Anna went to the fridge and poured herself some wine before settling in an armchair in the living room to read the chapter in Lentz’s book. Paul Rodgers wooed her with some white blues vocals, but even he couldn’t lessen the horror of what she read.
On 15 February 1998, Deliah Lambton was walking her dog near her home in Millend in the Forest of Dean. The previous few days had been exceptionally warm for winter, with nearby Bristol airport recording an unheard of eighteen degrees. Rain was forecast over the weekend, but Sinbad, Deliah’s Labrador, made the most of the fine weather, searching for rabbits and squirrels. However, when Sinbad refused to come back from where his nose was buried near a collapsed pile of branches, his odd behaviour made Deliah curious. Sinbad’s tail was between his legs and he kept darting forward and retreating. When Deliah got close enough to see, the sight of a body under the makeshift covering of branches would be one she would never forget.
What Sinbad had found was the slain victim of the killer known as the Woodsman.
Emily Risman had been missing for two days. Strangled, raped and then stabbed almost thirty times, her death and the death of her unborn child led police to believe that they were dealing with a deranged killer. A fun-loving girl who travelled every day to work in Coleford, Emily was popular with the boys. The police investigation, led by the Central Counties Regional Crime squad, centred around three main suspects.
Richard Osbourne had been dating Emily for two years. Older, working, with money and a car, their relationship blew hot and cold for months, as Emily experimented with other boys. But it was Osbourne she went back to when her flings with the other men blew apart. Osbourne swore that their relationship was open, and yet could jealousy have unleashed the beast inside him?
And then there was the father of her child. Roger Willis cut a tragic figure. A good-looking boy and an athlete, Willis’s life was falling apart as he began developing symptoms of a blinding hereditary condition. Willis had inherited a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, which caused nyctalopia, rendering him virtually blind in dark conditions. Emily had already broken up with him by the time of the murder and the police feared this rejection might well have triggered a violent reaction.
Thirdly, lurking in the background was Emily’s neighbour, Neville Cooper. An epileptic, educationally challenged, adolescent youth, with a mild behavioural disorder characterised by aggression directed mainly towards immediate family. His epilepsy was reasonably controlled by drugs and he did well at the residential training unit he attended, but his social worker admitted that the designated regimen, which was meant to encourage accepting greater responsibility for his behaviour, was not working out at home. Cooper, in the words of his contemporaries, was wild. Perhaps, with teenage hormones raging inside, his wildness could have spilled over into something much, much worse.
It would take police three months before the vital clues that led to the Woodsman’s conviction came to light. Three months in which the community cowered at the prospect of the Woodsman stalking the countryside, searching for yet another victim.
Lentz liked adjectives. Emily was a ‘fun-loving’ girl, her killer was ‘deranged’. Osbourne was a potential ‘beast’, Willis cut a ‘tragic figure’, Cooper was ‘wild’ and ‘raging’. This was history as written by the victors. By the time of publication, Cooper was in prison. All too easy to accept and believe that the aggressive, challenged youth, frustrated by the pretty girl, turned on her in a frenzy. It was like Beauty and the Beast without the talking teapots. Cooper had been an easy target from the outset. Best to hive him off from society as the devil that he was, and everyone could sleep a little more soundly in their beds. Sensationalism sold, everyone knew that.
But there were a few little nuggets here that were worth exploring.
Had Emily really been that popular with the boys?
And Osborne, the older man, the bad boy that Emily was attracted to, were they really in an open relationship?
Lentz had taken the path of least resistance. Sound bites that echoed, she suspected, press fixation on the lurid aspects of the case. A fixation that might have fed into the police’s approach to the investigation. And if that was true, what else might they have missed or glossed over?
And then there was Willis.
She put down the book and went to her laptop, typed in ‘retinitis pigmentosa’ and clicked on a medical information website called Medoracle.
In terms of symptoms, RP patients first notice loss of peripheral vision, and nyctalopia, another common symptom (night blindness), is due to the poor adaptation of the eye to dim illumination as the decline of rod sensitivity progresses. As the degeneration spreads to the central area of the retina, the initial ‘tunnel vision’ leads to eventual blindness.
Other than a slightly better understanding of who the main players were, Lentz’s account contained little of any real use to her.
She needed to let her mind disconnect from the present, allow it the freedom to travel the roads where a young, pregnant girl would find herself in an isolated spot with a killer. Did she go there of her own accord, or had she been taken against her will? Did she know the man who’d done this to her or was she the victim of that most difficult of crimes to solve, a random attack? What significance should they attach to the pregnancy? Or was it a more important element, something with a deep, and as yet hidden, emotional significance?
Anna let her mind generate these questions and noted them down. In her experience, not all of them would be answered, but, if some of them were, it would inevitably lead to a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the crime. She sensed that this was what she needed to do. Understand. And that applied to both victim and perpetrator.
Suddenly, the enormity of the task threatened to overwhelm her. Rainsford, at Shipwright’s behest, was taking a big punt on her to deliver. And here she was, staring at a blank wall, trying to look through it and see the threads of the case reaching out into the street and the city and the past. There were many, but she knew she’d have to pick the one that would lead on to answers, if she were to have any chance at all of solving this case. This was a huge responsibility and a great opportunity. Yet it was also obvious to her that there were some people in her own profession, and her life, who would love to see her fall flat on her face.
The music reminded her, as it always did, so much of her father. A man who had loved her and protected her and emboldened her to be true to herself. Whereas Shipwright’s advice was that of a mentor, delivering his crit
icisms of her flaws with blunt honesty, her father had couched his encouragement with a tender smile. But looking back, Anna realised that sometimes what she’d read as tenderness was in reality a kind of sadness. Because even then he’d known full well that Anna’s gifts came at a cost.
The music rolled over her and she let it engulf her, pulling her knees up to her chest like she had done as a child.
It helped. Like it always did, to wash away the doubts.
Seven
The televised public appeal for help in Nia’s disappearance was the third Breakfast News piece the following morning, after an allegation against a government minister and another terrorist bombing in Israel. Gloucestershire’s assistant chief constable led the press conference, with Harris next to her. The ACC read out a statement, her delivery suitably deadpan:
‘We are continuing in our efforts to find Nia Hopkins, now missing for seven days. We would like to appeal to the public for any information regarding her whereabouts. In particular, we would urge the community to spread the word through social networks. We are grateful to everyone who has already given their time in the search. We appreciate the difficulties searchers are experiencing in covering the terrain, and the relative remoteness of the environment. Mr and Mrs Hopkins are with me today and, though understandably distraught, have asked to speak.’
Someone had convinced Sara and Chris Hopkins that an emotional appeal to the public was worthwhile; that it might trigger feelings of guilt in someone who knew the killer. Anna watched as first Nia’s father and then her mother broke down and sobbed and begged Nia to get in touch, and for anyone who knew something to come forward. The form of words they’d recommended the Hopkinses use came straight out of the training manual. At this stage, the couple were incapable of any rational thoughts of their own. They would have been guided, if not cajoled, by someone in authority into appearing like this. Anna sat with her arms folded, unsure as to what difference this sort of harrowing display ever achieved, but also knowing that the team needed to keep the momentum going. Increasingly infuriated as the cameras hid nothing of the Hopkinses’ pain from the viewing millions, all she wanted to do was ring Slack. Was it worth it, seeing all that pain on display? Was it worthwhile?
