The Silent Girls Page 4

  From the reports, Anna could sense that the mood of the investigation had changed as time went on. No longer considered completely innocent, Emily started to be viewed as a rather unruly, precocious girl. The net widened, and as the sordid details of her death began to emerge, the press began hounding the police for results. By the end of a month, that hounding became shrill provocation. The police’s decision to protect the family by withholding some of the more unpalatable aspects only served to fuel press speculation. Emily and the Woodsman became a national obsession.

  Neville Cooper had already been questioned by CCRC officers – the regional team put in charge of the investigation once the local CID’s efforts had not borne fruit. The same age as Emily, Neville lived one street away and neighbours had reported that from his back garden he would sit on a wall and consider the Risman property, and watch Emily sunbathe. Despite the similarity in their age, Emily and Neville were not schoolmates. Cooper had attended a special needs unit in Hereford since the age of eleven. By the age of two, it had become obvious that he had behavioural problems and, at six, he had thrown his first epileptic fit. An IQ test at the age of nine measured eighty-four. His parents adopted a typically overprotective attitude, and for years Neville was not allowed to play with other children for fear of this triggering ‘one of his turns’.

  A lack of boundaries meant that he was seldom disciplined for his unruly behaviour and, as his mother put it to social workers, he ‘ran rings around her’. This entailed absconding from home, staying out late, and playing truant. When the opportunity arose for the eleven-year-old Cooper to attend the special unit, the disciplined, structured regimen did wonders for his behaviour. But, once at home during the holidays, it became all too easy for Cooper to revert to his old ways. Ways that were compounded by the continued absence of a father, whose job as a long-distance driver took him away from home for days if not weeks on end. A friendly and charitable neighbour felt obliged to relieve Mrs Cooper of her responsibilities at least one night a week, and insisted on taking Neville to the local youth club. There, the neighbour supervised as best he could.

  Five weeks after Emily’s death, they found her pants in the Coopers’ garden shed, together with an assorted collection of women’s underclothes culled from Millend’s clothes lines. Neville Cooper was arrested and held. The arresting officer was DI John Wyngate and the confession extracted by DS Maddox from Cooper became the foundation stone of the prosecution’s case, despite its retraction during and after the trial. But the true extent of the police’s role in suppressing evidence and coercing key witnesses came to light only after Cooper’s appeal had at long last been upheld.

  In his defence, Cooper stated that on the Thursday afternoon in question, he’d caught a bus to Coleford, ‘hung about’ at the Klondike amusement arcade, watching kids playing the slot machines and space invaders and then gone to the cinema. His friend and alibi, William Bradley, was a petty thief and truant from a neighbouring village, whose previous record of appearances in court, and reputation as a compulsive and hopeless liar, were all brought unremittingly to the jury’s attention at the trial. Mehul Patel, the owner of the Klondike, was never called as a witness, but his affidavit of having warned Cooper for pestering smaller children for change was a vital element in the Appeal Court’s decision to release Cooper seventeen years later. When asked why he had not come forward before, the Klondike owner merely responded that he’d made his statement to DS Maddox seventeen years before and had been told that he would not need to give evidence. Subsequently, in the light of several appeals, Maddox visited Patel and warned him about getting involved with tricky lawyers who might twist his words. Unwise, Maddox had said, for someone from abroad, who wanted to stay in this country, to get caught up in a murder investigation. Patel, despite flourishing as a successful businessman, had only felt safe in speaking out once Maddox’s hold over him ended with the officer’s death. Such was the fear that the policeman had instilled in him.

  By the time she’d finished, Anna already knew how their investigation would pan out. They’d have a head start because of the work done for the appeal, but it would still mean tracing investigation files, officers’ pocket notebooks, witnesses and relatives. By this time, the individuals could well be anywhere in the country, or even abroad. More important still would be the hunting down of forensic exhibits. The original investigating force would have used laboratories long since defunct, or which might have moved premises. The exhibits themselves would likely have been divided and split.

  And, of course, there would be the police personnel. Given the nature of the Woodsman fiasco and the criticisms that were levelled, she deemed it unlikely that anyone involved was going to welcome a dirt-digging lollipop man or lady with open arms. The Ice Queen was in for a frosty reception.

  She sipped at the wine and grimaced. The glass was still half full, the contents now warm and unpalatable. She threw it in the sink and then listened to her sister’s message.

  Hiya, babes. Just checking in. I guess you’re too busy to chat with your little sister. No biggie. Just a reminder about Sunday lunch. Mum is coming and the good news is that Rob’s mum and dad can’t make it. Oh God, I don’t mean that. Another emergency babysit for my sister-in-law, because her boyfriend’s been picked for Cardiff against Sale in some rugby cup. Anyway, give me a ring if you’re not too busy. Byeee.

  Anna toyed with phoning back but exhaustion prevailed. Kate knew her far too well to expect an effusive response. Or any response. Anna would, no doubt, end up getting flak for it, but Kate could wait until tomorrow and a carefully worded text. Yawning, she went to the kitchen, drank a glass of cold water and went to bed.

  Three

  At the same time as Anna struggled to find solace in sleep, twenty-five miles away, near a spill of red ochre under a canopy of oaks, a figure paused. Unmistakably male he stood in contemplation, having finally found what he’d been searching for under the frozen November moon. He seemed immune to the biting cold. Instead of shivering, he bathed in it with his face upturned and his arms open wide in supplication. The moon energised him just as the rain quenched his thirst, and the sun warmed his bones, and the night enveloped him in her concealing gloom.

  The moon was not yet full, but this evening it was gloriously gibbous and bright enough to light up the scene perfectly. A hollow in the landscape; a setting. This would be the place where he would be born again. They’d witness his re-emergence as with a moth from its cocoon, though the truth of it was very different. He had not been sleeping for all these years. Rather he’d existed in a different form. A patient predator who’d never strayed over the red line. But now he would express himself again and they would say his name and tremble.

  Reading that name in the newspapers had transformed his life all those years ago. Given him purpose. He took it as their gift to him. An acknowledgement that allowed him to relinquish all constraints and become something so much more than merely a man. The woods had called to him, sheltered and hidden him. Provided his hunting ground.

  He had fresh prey, captured and alive in his lair. And now that he had found a suitable place, there would, finally, be a deliverance.

  The creature known as the Woodsman sucked the freezing air into his lungs and smiled.

  Four

  She was running. Familiar paths and sights danced in and out of her imaginings. She was invisible, feet pounding the pavements under a burnt sky until, as so often in reality, the streets gave way to greenery. Her usual ‘long’ run, her endorphin fix, took in Horfield Common, a mile or so of streets, and then the ten-hectare oasis of Badock’s Wood. She followed the path, revealing the odd recognisable image, and some that had no place there.

  Shipwright appeared as she ran, incongruous on a bicycle on the wooded path, face straining from the effort, looking as if he might topple at any moment. Across a field, a man in a grey tracksuit grinned at her, his hands shackled to the earth beneath him. He opened his mouth. It kept opening like a b
asking shark’s, hopelessly, abnormally wide, until it took up half the space of his head. Yet though his grotesque jaw moved, no words reached her. But his presence disturbed her enough to turn away.

  Now she was in a different place. A strange, unfamiliar woodland, the trees ancient and gnarled high above her, looking down on where she tried to run. The long straight path was gone. Now she followed a winding track, fending off denuded branches that hung like elongated fingers and brushed at her face and clothes. Black peaty water oozed up from around her feet where she stepped, her breath like dragon smoke in front of her. The way became more difficult and she slowed, dark branches crossing, brambles snagging her legs. But something drove her on.

  She glanced behind. Still the grey man in the field was shouting. She pushed on, breaking through into a treeless depression, looking down into a gouged-out leaf-strewn bowl in the landscape.

  She stood, surveying this place that had drawn her to it. A noise, high up near the sentinel trees drew her gaze. The thud of steel against wood echoing in the air. An axe.

  At the edge of her vision, down in the hollow bowl, something moved beneath the leaves. The movement grew into a shape.

  She wanted to turn and run, capture the freedom she’d had moments before, but her feet had sunk into the peat. They would not, could not move.

  The axe again, louder this time. She jerked her gaze up but there was no one there. When she turned back, Emily Risman stood just feet away, hand outstretched, looking at her with white, dead, coagulated corneas.

  * * *

  Anna jerked awake, the memory of the dream pounding the pulse in her throat as she gasped. Was there something in Emily’s hand? But it shimmered and shifted like a pixelated face as she tried to recall it. Unsettled, she got up and drank some water, letting the image fade, but knowing it would not be the last time she would see it. Her curse, whenever crime-scene photographs were pored over, was to dream of the case. Dreams that were vivid and startling, taunting her with meaning.

  During her time as a student at Goldsmiths she’d volunteered for some tests in the psychology department. One of them involved measuring memory. Anna had always been good at exams, but to be told that she was off the psychometric scale for a certain type of visual recall came as a complete shock. Like a colour-blind child, who knew no better, she’d assumed that everyone could remember the way she did.

  But it had motivated her to reflect on the personality traits she’d struggled with over the years. She had always disappointed her mother by wanting to dress only in jeans, never been big on hugs and kisses. She’d never fitted in, striving for achievement as a teenager and being labelled an arrogant princess for it. At school, she’d learned early on to deliberately flunk the less important tests, or the odd question even in the important ones, so as to avoid the worst of the name-calling. ‘Geek Anna’ hurt at ten years of age. Her gifts, she very quickly realised, came with consequences, and her initial survival response in the sprawling state school she’d attended had been to deliberately underachieve. And as for boys… they had to be at least as good as her at everything to even stand a chance.

  She ran and reran tests on herself in the college library, introspective self-report questionnaires, which put her in the category of an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. So appropriate that she should find out in a library annexe; the kind of calm, silent place she’d always gravitated to.

  INTJ: an Intuitive Introvert who prioritised Thinking and Judgement. Big words that didn’t mean a great deal to anyone outside a psychology department. But it was a big deal to the doctorate student she’d discussed it with.

  ‘Way to go, Anna. You and Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates, too. Oh, and there was Lewis Carroll. Seen any white rabbits lately?’

  ‘That doesn’t exactly make me feel better.’

  ‘OK, well, only four in every five hundred women end up with this. How about Jane Austen and Jodie Foster?’

  She’d liked that. She wasn’t big on literature, but Jodie Foster she could certainly live with. Still she remained sceptical, but the doctorate student was adamant.

  ‘I’ve seen you sitting alone in the refectory, reading a novel. So, you’re happy to be alone, right?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘When you go shopping, you’ll make a list and try and combine everything into one trip?’

  ‘That’s just efficiency.’

  ‘Not big on surprises? Parties need planning and an exit strategy? Oh, and not a big hugger, am I right?’

  That made her sit up and take notice.

  ‘Better wear a badge to work though,’ the doctorate student had grinned. ‘Hate the mundane, independent, despise authority. Hate the water cooler even more, and people will confuse your confidence with arrogance. Ever thought of medicine?’

  She hadn’t. She’d thought about the police instead.

  The doctorate student had asked her out, but he’d only lasted one date, falling at the first hurdle by not knowing that Ray Bradbury had written the screenplay for Moby Dick. An obscure fact of little importance, but something he’d argued with her about. Given his analysis of her, he should have known better.

  She’d never told Shipwright. In fact, she’d only ever told Kate and one significant other about any of this, but the chief inspector read it in her anyway and had couched it in his own, inimitable terms.

  What I like about you, Anna, is that you see patterns where others see mess, you ask questions no one else does, and you don’t let emotion cloud your judgement. That’s rare in this job.

  In fact, knowing what she was at last helped only to an extent and four letters could hardly do justice to a whole personality. But it had provided insight into how others saw her. What people had the most difficulty with was reconciling her natural reserve with her physical appearance. Blondes were meant to have all the fun, weren’t they? And hazel-eyed, physically fit, imperious-looking ones especially. But that was simply the wrapping. This blonde genuinely enjoyed being alone. Happy to be in her own mind, even energised by the thought of it. She needed reason and logic and liked to plan. Meet Anna Gwynne, freak.

  She blew out a dismissive snort and went back to bed pondering these thoughts and knowing that they needed to be put away, back in the cupboard where they belonged. Perhaps it was the hour, or that she was alone, or that she’d spent the day dealing with the very worst that humanity could offer in a poky interview room at Whitmarsh. Whatever the reason, as she lay in bed waiting for sleep to come again, Anna couldn’t shake the irrational conviction that seeing Emily Risman rise from her grave had connotations besides the simple explanation of her brain not letting her forget.

  Beyond the transient horror of the dream lay reason. Emily Risman was calling to her. Asking her unspoken questions that echoed inside her own head. Where would the key be? What hidden thing needed to reveal itself to her? What smell, or sight, or sound? What buried thing that the original team had missed?

  ‘Seeing the patterns,’ Shipwright had said. The N, the misnomer in INTJ, stood for intuition. Drawing from the deep well of experience, other people, books, art and personal interactions, which were filed away and stored in her capacious memory. That was what she needed to do now. Then she could do the ‘T’, the thinking bit, the analysis. And the outcome would be closure. Judgement was something she craved more than anything.

  She was made to be good at this job.

  Come on then, Anna. Prove it.

  Five

  She was at her desk at 7.45 the following morning. Holder arrived shortly after, shrugging off his backpack and unscrewing a bottle of water, which he upended and drained.

  ‘Rough night?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Been to an early spinning class,’ Holder replied.

  They both looked up as their civilian support walked in on her trademark three-inch heels.

  Trisha Spedding called out a cheery ‘Morning’, and unbuttoned a woollen coat which she hung on a coat hanger. The heels came off and were repla
ced by a pair of black Nikes kept hidden under her desk. Style tempered by pragmatism was one of the things Anna loved in Trisha.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Holder asked, pointing to his copy of the files. ‘The Woodsman,’ he added with a theatrical wave of both hands.

  ‘Not exactly Bridget Jones,’ Anna said.

  Trisha looked concerned. ‘I hope it was enough. Superintendent Rainsford didn’t give me much time…’

  ‘More than enough, Trish,’ Anna said. ‘Did he say why there’s such a rush?’

  Trisha shook her head and pursed her made-up lips. ‘Just said anything and everything I could lay my hands on.’

  Anna nodded. Trisha was the glue holding the thinned-out squad together and was as motivated as the rest of them. Divorced and a single mum to two teenage boys, Trisha looked after herself and everyone else. Anna had huge respect for her professionalism and the way she’d worked her way up from filing clerk to being a highly organised criminal analyst. She knew the job and knew how to get it done, and with a better attitude than a lot of warranted officers.

  ‘Bloody unbelievable, though. I mean, in prison for seventeen years—’ Holder shut off the flow as the door opened and Superintendent Rainsford entered.

  Anna couldn’t resist glancing at her watch. Seven fifty-five on the dot. Rainsford did things by the book. He’d been in the job for only five years, significantly less time than Anna. One of the new breed; a direct entry superintendent levered in without the usual slog up from constable. Eighteen months of training and a further eighteen of probation saw him go from uniform to operational and into plain clothes with meteoric speed. He kept tabs on many operational and task-force teams, but he seemed to have a soft spot for them. No one was entirely sure of his background, but everyone assumed it was the forces, because of his military bearing, the old-fashioned cut of his wiry hair, and his clipped delivery. Early fifties and rake thin in a blue suit, plain tie and crisp white shirt, he looked at them in turn. A couple of seconds each, making the connection. ‘Rain Man’, ironically, made a big deal of eye contact.