The Silent Girls: A gripping serial-killer thriller

by Dylan Young

  Holder reddened. Anna tagged it mentally. So Harris didn’t suffer fools gladly, but there were ways of letting the inexperienced down that did not involve the verbal equivalent of GBH. She knew then that she was never going to like him.

  ‘Obviously, early observation suggests that Nia Hopkins has little in common with Emily Risman,’ Anna said. ‘Different colouring, build, age.’

  ‘And she wasn’t a little tart,’ added Harris.

  ‘Even little tarts don’t deserve to be strangled and stabbed,’ Anna said.

  Harris didn’t respond. Anna and Holder walked out of the stable block. The paddocks surrounding the property ended in fences bordered on two sides by woodlands. The abductor could have found his way in from almost any direction. Holder turned and looked back at the house.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, sonny,’ Harris said, joining them.

  ‘We have no intention of crowding you, sir,’ Anna said.

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it. Now, I think a little discussion about ground rules is in order, but not here. I need to speak briefly to the family.’

  They made arrangements to meet at the Robin Hood pub in Quedgeley before Anna and Holder made their way back to the car. They watched as Slack and Harris went towards the house, where the family stood.

  Sara and Chris Hopkins wore the haunted, sleep-deprived faces of people in a waking nightmare. Anna knew the look. She’d seen it many times on the faces of relatives outside mortuaries and intensive-care units. Faces with irreparable damage written all over them. Anna wondered if she should nod, at least, but decided against it. Best they remain simply anonymous officers, ancillary to Nia and her family.

  Even so, as they followed the serious crime officers’ vehicle, Anna caught Sara Hopkins’ eye. In that one split second, she read desperation and terror. Like a primate caught in the coils of a python. The family liaison officer would stay with them. They would have talked about the need for calm and the possibility, however remote, that there might be a ransom call. They were stuck, prisoners in their own home, victims of their own imaginations. Abductions were a form of mental torture for those involved. Emotions were laid bare and see-sawed between wild hope and soul-wrenching fear. It tore families and relationships apart. It remained the thing she found most difficult to forgive of abductors, and of suspects, who continue to plead innocence, denying a victim’s family closure, answers… a body to bury.

  Her mind did an easy cartwheel to Hector Shaw and his enigmatic reply to Shipwright’s request that he let Tanya Cromer’s family grieve. She had no doubt that he knew exactly where her body was buried. But getting Shaw to acknowledge and confess would not be easy, not without Shipwright’s help. Might there be a way in to his troubled psyche? She parked the thought and let it brew.

  * * *

  Beams on the ceiling, specials chalked on a board on the wall, abstract carpet on the floor… Anna didn’t like pubs with carpets. Might as well rename them all the Petri Dish Arms. In the Robin Hood, they sat at a table with an L-shaped banquette upholstered in red velour. Through the windows, the hum of traffic on the ring road was almost hypnotic. Four other members of Harris’s team sat at another table. Harris didn’t bother to introduce them. Fraternisation was not on the menu.

  Anna sipped a lime and soda, while Slack and Harris nestled against the wall, nursed beers, and shed a small avalanche of crumbs each time they bit into huge, crusty ham rolls. Holder sipped his second diet Coke.

  ‘So,’ Harris said, after pouring half a pint of bitter down his throat, ‘this is nice, isn’t it? Lunch with colleagues.’

  Holder kept his eyes on his drink.

  ‘Have you any leads at all?’ Anna asked.

  Slack grunted. ‘There’s a fourteen-year-old neighbour with a photograph of her on his phone.’

  Holder looked up. ‘If he’s fourteen, where would he get ketamine from?’

  Slack had a mouthful of roll. It didn’t stop him from answering. ‘Same place everyone else gets it from. Nicked from vets or stables. Special K from your local drug dealer.’

  ‘Is he a drug taker?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ Harris answered. ‘But we have fifty people knocking on doors, getting people to check their outhouses and sheds in case she’s dosed up and incapable. We’ve searched the properties of everyone who knows the family and found sod all, so we’ll take anything we can get at the moment. He’s on our radar because of the fact that he knew her.’

  ‘Does he have access to a vet?’

  ‘No. But the family does have horses,’ Slack said.

  Harris put down his drink and stared pointedly at Anna. ‘Look, OK, the kid didn’t take her. But there’s a chance he knows someone who was sweet on her. Or maybe he’s seen someone hanging around, some bloody maniac with an agenda he keeps in his own private box of frogs.’

  Anna wasn’t prepared to let it go. Harris was angry. Every squad member in the pub was angry, and that was understandable. Most of them had daughters or sisters. None of them needed more incentive than they already had. But she couldn’t help but believe that it would do no harm to bring a little cold, analytical thinking to the situation. ‘Maniacs, as you put it, very rarely abduct anyone. Something less than one in two hundred of all referrals to regional secure units are involved in abductions. Those that do get referred are male and have personality disorders but very rarely psychoses.’

  Harris rolled his eyes up and applauded with three slow claps. ‘Great. So, you went to the bloody lectures.’ He downed the rest of his pint and burped.

  This was old-school button-pushing and Anna wasn’t going to play. ‘We’re not here to interfere.’

  ‘Well you are. Inter-bloody-fering.’ Harris spat the word out through clenched teeth. ‘How long have you been an inspector?’

  ‘Since this morning.’

  His eyebrows went up. ‘Since this morning. And they think they can send a…’ He checked himself.

  Anna smiled. Go on, say it. I dare you to say it. Woman? Girl? Bint?

  ‘… you up to oversee my investigation?’

  ‘Not oversee. We were told to get a handle on things, that’s all.’

  Harris nodded. ‘I know Ted Shipwright. If I rang him in his hospital bed, would he give you his backing?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He would.’

  ‘Then you know as well as I do that if he was here we wouldn’t be doing this stupid little dance.’ Harris’s eyes bulged. He cupped his ear and turned to Holder. His turn to be poked. ‘Can you hear it, Constable? The trumpeting?’

  Holder frowned. ‘Trumpeting? No, sir.’ He glanced at Anna in panic.

  Anna put him out of his misery. ‘He means the elephant in the room, Justin.’

  ‘The big, grey, shit everywhere, elephant in the room. Neville Cooper.’ Harris nodded, a joker smile on his face. ‘Ted Shipwright would have brought a big gun in case we needed to shoot the bastard.’

  No, he wouldn’t. Not the Ted Shipwright I know, Anna replied silently. But what she actually said, was, ‘Sergeant Slack says he has an alibi.’

  ‘His dear old mother. But Cooper had seen Nia with her father at the feed depot where he works. He knew who she was, where she lived.’

  ‘That’s hardly—’

  Harris didn’t let Anna finish. ‘And something else I know, and that I didn’t need to go to a bloody lecture to learn, is that sexual predators reoffend.’

  ‘Cooper has not been convicted as a sexual predator yet,’ Anna said.

  Harris dropped his head. ‘No, he hasn’t. Despite spending seventeen years in prison. But he’s out of prison now, and if he is the bastard who killed Emily Risman, the Appeal Court, in their great and liberal wisdom, gave him the opportunity to do it all over again.’

  Only if he’s guilty, Anna wanted to shout. Calmly, she said, ‘If you arrest him, there’ll be a press feeding-frenzy.’

  ‘He’s a person of interest,’ Harris said, his eyes cold. Anna realised then why Rains
ford had been so careful with his words that morning. Harris, unlike the politicians and her managers, couldn’t care less about fighting fires. He was more inclined to set them.

  ‘But there is a chance Nia is still alive, isn’t there?’ Holder said.

  The question dropped into the group like a grenade. Conversation fell away and the whole of Harris’s team turned to Holder, looking at him as if he’d spoken the punchline of some terrible, inappropriate joke. Anna read hope and fear in equal measure in their faces.

  Harris said, ‘Believing that is what keeps us all going, Detective Constable.’

  ‘Are you extending the search?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Divers in the rivers and a flooded quarry next,’ Slack said. ‘Then the press conference.’

  Anna’s stomach swooped. Everyone in that pub was desperately hoping against hope that there was a chance, however slim, that Nia would be found alive. But the reality was that the search teams were now looking for her body. Anna didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be much point. But she could see in the faces around her the grim reflection of her own misgivings. Young girls sometimes went missing of their own volition, in pursuit of misguided adolescent dreams. But they were hardly ever abducted for purposes other than the most dire, and Slack and Harris knew it. As for any links with Risman, they were tenuous, flimsy threads, but they clung annoyingly to Anna and she couldn’t shake them off. Cooper’s shadow loomed, but it remained insubstantial, a disquieting and unsettling presence that had no business being there.

  Anna finished her drink and she and Holder left. Someone started whistling the Lollipop song by The Chordettes. If they were hoping to offend Holder, they were way off. He didn’t even know what it was.

  * * *

  Anna chewed some gum in the car, but the minty freshness did nothing to relieve the bad taste that the visit to Cotty Hill had left in her mouth. She was glad when Holder asked her a question.

  ‘What you said, ma’am, about abductions. Is that true?’

  She knew the stats. She remembered them with ease. ‘I used a bit of artistic licence. The stats are almost split in half. Maybe fifty per cent of child abductions are by perpetrators known to the victim. The other half are by strangers, and only a quarter are successful.’

  ‘But this looks planned. I mean, why didn’t he take both girls? And surely he didn’t just stumble across them in that stable?’

  ‘I don’t know why he didn’t take Beckie, Justin. Maybe he didn’t want to risk it. But I’m with you on the planning. It feels thought-out to me. Most abductions involve the use of a car, are opportunistic and sexually motivated. The usual predatory preoccupations are the triggers: indecent exposure, touching or feeling. Rape is rare. Murder is rare. Our man is not your usual.’

  Holder sat quietly for a while, driving, processing. After a minute, he asked, ‘How common is it, ma’am? Child abduction, I mean.’

  ‘More than fifty, less than a hundred per year. And this is not your usual type of grab and go. Not in the slightest.’

  ‘So, how could they think that Cooper…’ Holder let the statement hang.

  Anna knew what he was alluding to. Slack had said it himself in his own politically incorrect and inimitable way: Cooper was ‘In old money, a bit simple’. Could he have planned all of this, sourced a drug, used it on Beckie so she’d be rendered incapable while he took Nia?

  Holder echoed her thoughts. ‘I mean, is Cooper honestly capable of that kind of sophistication? DCI Harris seems a bit… fixated.’

  Anna glanced at Holder. He still looked about fifteen. ‘Now you know why Rainsford wants us on this. We’re the buffer between Harris and Cooper. We need to pick up the other threads in the Risman Case, and soon.’

  Holder blinked. His mental cogs were now in overdrive. ‘This has a really bad smell about it, ma’am.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Justin. That was just the stale beer and testosterone in the pub. Gets stuck in the sinuses,’ Anna said.

  Holder blinked and she knew that he was trying to work out if she was being serious or making a joke. And he was clearly struggling with it as people around her so often did. It was amusing to watch the mental battle.

  After a few more seconds of studying the panic flickering in Holder’s eyes, she said, ‘You’re allowed to laugh, Justin.’

  Holder let out an unconvincing titter before turning his gaze back to the road.

  Anna told herself she needed to try harder at this social interaction caper.

  Six

  They got back to Portishead to find Trisha had already set up the incident room. In truth, it was more an incident wall, consisting of a large whiteboard studded with photographs and a map. Setting up a lines-of-inquiry flow chart was a hugely underestimated skill and Trisha excelled at it. Patient, thorough and clear in her approach, she’d set out the timeline of Emily Risman’s murder with precision.

  Anna peered at the whiteboard, trying to absorb the information and get a feel for what happened all those years ago, but her eyes kept coming back to that one image from the crime scene: Emily’s body pushing up out of the leaves, as if reaching for one last desperate grab at life. Or, said her imagination, waiting for Anna to see her, like a beseeching child in a classroom.

  Here I am, Anna. Find out.

  On the other end of the board, a series of individual photographs were pinned under the heading ‘CCRC’. Half a dozen old images from personnel files. She zeroed in on three: Detective Superintendent Briggs, DS Maddox and DI Wyngate. Next to the single images hung a photograph of the three of them together, arms around each other’s shoulders in celebratory post-trial euphoria. Craggy-featured men, Briggs the oldest. Smiling. Jubilant. Briggs and Wyngate would need to be found and interviewed. Slack’s comments over Harris’s connection with this squad echoed in her head. Did he mean the inevitable professional acquaintances one made over a lifetime’s work, or something else? Friendships, perhaps, that could lead to closed ranks and resentment. In either case, it was an unwelcome wrinkle.

  The necessary fraternity that existed between police officers helped them to cope with the dirty job they did, but sometimes it got in the way. Despite the new evidence that, had it been presented at the time of the trial, would have undoubtedly caused the jury to doubt the dubious links between Cooper and the murder, Anna knew that there were those out there who would still like to have Cooper neatly tucked away behind bars. The CPS certainly believed he should be.

  The fact was that more than one officer involved in the original investigation had colluded in an unsafe conviction. It was difficult to credit now that the CCRC officers extensively interviewed suspects without solicitors being present, and that selective disclosure of evidence had been rife. Shallow remarks from the prosecutors involved in the trial, in response to allegations, seemed hopelessly inadequate. That such actions were said to be ‘routine at the time’ earned little in the way of merit for a justice system on the rack.

  A face appeared at the door. Female, Asian, clean hair and dark eyes, the body that followed smart in a grey skirt and black blouse.

  Holder looked up. ‘Can we help?’

  ‘DC Ryia Khosa. Superintendent Rainsford said you needed a hand.’

  ‘Great,’ said Anna, smiling. She introduced herself and the others. She asked Holder to bring Khosa up to speed, while she went back to her desk and began making notes, pulling out ‘names’, trying to piece together twenty-year-old relationships from the dry and dusty police files. It was mainly background material, though sketchy to say the least. But amid the big wad of papers stacked by Trisha on her desk was a paperback; one with a black spine and menacing artwork and the title in bold red type that read: Tracking the Devil. The author, Eric Lentz, was an unfamiliar name.

  Curiosity piqued, Anna walked across to Trisha’s desk.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  Trisha’s cheeks flushed pink. ‘The second-hand bookshop on St Nicholas Street. You know, Crime Time? I had a brainwave a
nd rang them up. I’ve walked past the window often enough. Anyway, I knew that they had a True Crime section in the window, so I just asked. The bloke there’s a real nerd. Knew all about it. I nipped in at lunchtime and bought a copy. There’s a whole chapter on the Woodsman. I thought it might help. With background, you know.’

  ‘Trisha, you are an absolute star.’

  Pleased, Trisha grinned. ‘But there is some bad news, ma’am. I’ve been chasing up addresses and I found out that one of the other main suspects, Roger Willis, is no longer around.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He died in a car accident, ma’am. I spoke to his brother’ – Trisha’s fingers danced over her keyboard – ‘umm, yes, here it is. Charles Willis.’

  ‘OK, then we’d better speak to him instead.’

  Anna went back to join Holder and Khosa. ‘What’s your background, Ryia?’

  ‘I’ve been with the robbery squad in Plymouth for two years, ma’am. Before that I was in Stafford, organised crime.’

  Anna nodded. Just what they needed. Someone with a bit of experience under her belt. ‘As you can see, we’re a much smaller team. I’ll want you to sort through the CCRC personnel. See who’s still around or still in the job. Justin, you concentrate on Emily Risman. I’m going to get us all some tea. Sugar and milk, Ryia?’

  ‘Just milk, thanks.’

  There was a machine that dispensed warm brown fluid in plastic cups, but Anna preferred the communal kitchen with its old-fashioned kettle and teabags. She sourced four mugs, washed them out and put a teabag in each. When the kettle boiled, she poured boiling water over the teabags and let them brew for four minutes. She distributed the tea and went back to work.

  There were other cases pending at various stages of investigation, and though Rainsford’s instructions were that they concentrate on the Woodsman, there were reports to file, queries to answer, feelers to put out, emails to read…

  Anna wondered if Prof. Markham had replied.