The Silent Girls

by Dylan Young

Khosa added, ‘It was his brother, he claims, who suggested planting the underwear at Cooper’s house. To throw the police off. Neither of them thought for one moment that Cooper would confess. Eventually, Roger Willis simply couldn’t live with it. That part is the one thing Willis won’t talk about.’

  Anna nodded. ‘I’m not surprised. Roger Willis acted to protect his little brother, but then had to watch Neville Cooper rot in that prison, and that wouldn’t go away. I suspect his guilt erupted each time Cooper’s plight was paraded in the press. The year Roger died might have been the time of the first TV programme highlighting Cooper’s appeal.’

  Holder and Khosa stared at Anna in silence.

  ‘I think Charles Willis drove off the road and into that river deliberately, to silence his brother,’ Anna said.

  Khosa winced. ‘It must have been horrible. All that water rushing around you and not being able to even see.’

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Anna asked, ‘So Willis was committing the rapes while Gail was away at her shop in Cheltenham?’

  ‘It looks that way.’ Holder nodded. ‘I mean, who would suspect a blind man?’

  ‘Gail. That’s why he killed her,’ Khosa said. ‘Osbourne visited, Willis told us that. Wanted to speak to him about things. He saw the Isuzu, commented on it, thought he’d seen it over near Blakeney a couple of times when he’d been delivering his Cruck barns. Gail finally put two and two together and checked the mileage on the Isuzu. It didn’t add up. Charles Willis got to Osbourne as he left. We found traces of the same stuff Willis used on you in the toxicology analysis of Osbourne’s remains. He hasn’t said much about Gail, but my guess is that it must have been her that tried to phone you that night, ma’am. Maybe she sneaked out and checked the car. Thinking it was safe in the dark until her husband caught her.’

  Anna wanted to scream. She’d made mistakes. Sucked in like everyone else by Charles Willis’s scheming. He’d even insisted that Gail have the Isuzu to keep her safe in the bad weather.

  Sometimes her good memory was nothing but a curse because she could remember exactly what he’d said when they’d talked to him: ‘Ever since I read about what the police did, the confession and suppressing evidence, it’s made me boil inside.’

  ‘He’s probably laughing at us, is he?’ Anna asked, the pain in her face thumping again.

  ‘At the CCRC he is. He says Maddox was a thug, looking for the easy route. But not at you, ma’am. He doesn’t laugh when we talk about you.’

  ‘What about his computer?’

  ‘Nothing on the desktop,’ Khosa said, ‘but there was a thumb drive under some floorboards in the studio. In a section Willis used to store wood for carving, ironically enough. We’re digging into his Internet history as we speak.’

  They’ll find something. Shaw knows they will, Anna thought. Perhaps a girl in a dress with roses on it…

  A nurse appeared in the doorway armed with a blood pressure monitor and a thermometer.

  Holder and Khosa stepped back and moved towards the door. ‘We’ll come back later, ma’am. We can go over the details. Everyone sends you their regards.’

  Anna waved them away with her best attempt at a smile, then turned her face towards the window and the world outside, trying not to think of Neville Cooper and the years he must have spent staring out of the window of his own cell, knowing of his innocence and despairing. She despised Willis for what he had done to her and to the women he had killed and raped. But she hated him for what he’d done to Neville.

  Occasionally, she put hate aside and thought of what Charles Willis’s damaged mind had been trying to achieve. She tried to find sympathy for the tortured adolescent unable to handle Emily Risman and their unborn child; a child Emily was desperate to get rid of. She tried to grasp what kind of warped mind could adopt his brother’s affliction as a perfect camouflage, an affliction which even his own wife had not seen through, and which allowed him to attack women for years with impunity. And she tried to understand the look, the smile, that Khosa said he’d given when apologising to his victims. A smile which, more than anything else, cemented her conviction that Willis had all the cunning hallmarks of a psychopath.

  And though she tried hard, running it over and over in her head, Anna failed. There was no understanding such a total lack of empathy.

  Recriminations were all well and good. The fact remained that she should have seen it all coming. She thanked God that Wyngate had, if indeed there was a God. It brought a bitter smile. If there was a God, his face had been turned to the wall in all the time Willis had been walking the woods.

  The bitter smile on her bruised face gradually faded.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Anna got a surprise visitor. Shipwright appeared with a huge bunch of flowers.

  He stood awkwardly. She saw him try to smile.

  ‘Sit,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Anna. What have you done to yourself?’

  ‘It’s the job.’

  ‘It’s the way you do the bloody job, more like. If you won’t find a bloke then you need to get a dog. Big bugger with teeth.’

  ‘They all come with teeth.’

  ‘Like I said, let me do the jokes. I’ve taken a hundred calls. They’re queuing up to come and visit you. They want to throw you a party. I know you love parties.’

  Anna ignored the banter. ‘They?’

  ‘Rainsford, Slack, the whole bloody lot.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s just guilt. They can all come, but not yet. Not just yet.’

  ‘I’ll keep them at bay until you give the word. I’ve told them they can send cards. Here’ – he hoisted a bulging plastic bag onto the bed – ‘these all came to the squad room.’

  ‘Are you back then, sir?’

  Something came over Shipwright’s face. Sadness? Regret? Resignation? It was difficult to pinpoint.

  ‘No, I went to pick up my things. I’m not coming back, Anna. I’ve had a wake-up call. I want to be able to see all my kids as goats in Old Macdonald’s sodding farm. Too cool for school, me. I’m calling it a day. And no, before you ask, I won’t be getting a hi-vis jacket and helping kids across the road.’

  To hide the moisture in her eyes, Anna made a show of peering into the bag. There must have been fifty envelopes.

  When she looked up, Shipwright looked suddenly uncomfortable.

  ‘What?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Rainsford will kill me, but I know you’ll want to know. Forensics on the second body that Shaw dug up for you – it’s a male. Mihai Petran, thirty-two, Romanian national. Dropped off the radar in 2004. Wanted for questioning in several sexual assault cases. We thought he’d buggered off back to the salt mines in Turda.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Bled to death. Evidence of electrocution and mutilation. Has friend Shaw’s paws all over it.’

  ‘Don’t say “friend”,’ Anna frowned.

  ‘And, surprise, surprise, his DNA matches the other half of the mixed samples found near Tanya Cromer on the night she was attacked.’

  ‘The mixed sample that contains Shaw’s as well?’

  Shipwright nodded. ‘And so the circle closes. Looks like they were in it together.’

  Anna shook her head, suddenly and utterly convinced that Shipwright’s surmise was wrong. ‘No. I think Shaw might have picked this Petran guy out from his online travels. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been watching him. I think it may even been possible Shaw had tried to stop him.’

  ‘You mean the night Tanya Cromer was raped, Shaw tried to stop it?’

  ‘It would explain the mixed sample. Shaw grappling with this Petran. Of course, I have no proof.’

  Shipwright’s expression was half-bemusement, half-horror. ‘Bloody hell, Anna. You can certainly pick them.’

  ‘I’m beginning to believe they pick me.’

  Shipwright nodded. ‘The squad is yours if you want it. Rainsford asked me to tell you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. Under any ot
her circumstances, she would have danced a jig. If she tried it now, something might well fall off. Besides, she was in too much pain, not all of it physical.

  Shipwright stayed a while longer, but she was glad when he left. She wanted to grieve alone.

  * * *

  Some time later, when she’d stopped snivelling and the nurse had fed her, she opened the cards. Get wells and thank-you notes from Slack and the chief constable of Gloucester. Stupid, bawdy puns from Holder. Balloons and a hand-drawn horse from her niece and nephew. There were dozens of others, but halfway through she opened one that was bigger than the rest. It was a large card with a cartoon of a young woman tearing up an ‘L’ next to a shiny new car. The greeting said:

  Congratulations on Passing Your Test

  Inside was a folded sheet of paper and a photograph; a slightly blurred snapshot of Anna in her running kit outside her house. She frowned and looked at the message in the card. There was one sentence in capitals:

  GLAD WE COULD HELP

  He’d signed it:

  HS

  Anna dropped the card as if it had burst into flames. After a moment, she dared to pick up the folded sheet. There was no letterhead or address, but it was typed and the paper was of good quality. As she read it, she heard all the words in Shaw’s voice and accent.

  Dear Anna,

  I hope this finds you well. Like the card? One of my journalist friends chose it. I didn’t think the woman looked much like you, but it captured the moment quite nicely, don’t you think?

  I hope your injuries aren’t too serious. The papers said that you were stable and that they were not life-threatening. You’re a survivor, Anna. Like me. Strong and capable. So was the Woodsman, of course. But I knew that you would be a match for him. He needed to be flushed out. I guessed his ego would not tolerate your successes being waved in his face like a red flag. And the Internet’s a wonderful thing, Anna. CILF, I thought, would be very effective, if a touch crude. Did you know you went viral? The rest I left up to you and you acquitted yourself magnificently, as I hoped you would.

  By now, maybe your gorilla and the labourer will have worked out who I buried on the east side of the chapel in north Wales. He told me his name along with many other things, but I forgot it. You don’t remember the name of the poisonous insects you crush. I refer to him only as the Gypsy and I trust you to work out the truth. During our discussions, he told me many of his secrets and drew many maps, sometimes in his own blood. He was a busy man. If you plug him in to your DNA database, I am certain he will light up the board. We will, I’m certain, enjoy many days out when the time is right for more treasure hunts. Take great care, Anna.

  * * *

  Best wishes and until the next playtime,

  HS

  * * *

  PS: Your meddler-ex, Lambert, whose filthy mouth needed shutting, is no longer singing his tawdry song. It’s difficult enough to breathe through a wired- together jaw, let alone speak.

  * * *

  Anna picked up the snap again. A yellow marker pen had been used to encircle two things on the glossy paper. The first was the front door of her flat, the number grainy but just legible. The second, a blurred smudge of the street name stuck to a low brick wall. It, too, was unreadable, but she guessed that if you ran the tape that this photograph was taken from enough times and froze it at just the right spot, it would have been legible.

  God, she’d been so stupid. Her photograph in the newspapers, the CILF tweet. Shaw had designed them to get underneath the Woodsman’s skin and offered her up as the Judas goat.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when she woke up in the early hours, or during those curiously quiet periods in hospitals in the late afternoons, when no one stirs, she knew her father was there with her. She saw his silhouette sitting in a chair, watching her, but it was Jane Markham’s words she’d hear coming from his mouth. Another one of the grave, poetic warnings she so loved to deliver to her students: ‘Remember, we are all capable of acts of terrifying destruction when the tenuous constraints of consciousness snap and the primal impulses ooze and stain the world.’

  Anna had proof enough in the dark recesses of her mind that she’d been tainted by the ooze and was driven by a need to clear it away from herself and those near her. It was why she did what she did.

  But at what cost, Anna?

  She still let the pain come occasionally. Harnessed it as a reminder of how instrumental Shaw had been in putting her where she was. But had he not also been responsible for helping her to get closer to the Woodsman, pointing her in the direction of finding what he’d been doing for all those years, and helping give all those other women closure?

  She knew she’d supped from a poisoned chalice. But she was alive and, somehow, had passed his bloody test.

  * * *

  What will happen to Anna next? And will Hector Shaw return? The next book in the series comes out soon – sign up below to find out more.

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  Ackowledgements

  Thanks go to my family who put up with me when my mind is elsewhere, in dark places where no one else would want to go, but where I have all the fun. And to Jennifer Hunt at Bookouture for giving me the opportunity to share these dark places with the world.

  Published by Bookouture

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  An imprint of StoryFire Ltd.

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

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  www.bookouture.com

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  Copyright © Dylan Young 2018

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-78681-315-2