The Silent Girls: A gripping serial-killer thriller

by Dylan Young

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Anna started walking, her breathing gradually becoming easier, but her head whirling with the consequences of Slack’s news.

  ‘Not to me. Osbourne kills Emily, Nia and Gail and then decides to top himself. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It makes perfect sense if you’re Charles Willis.’

  ‘What?’

  She spoke quickly, wanting him to understand. ‘What was left of the corpse we found on the railway line belonged to Osbourne. But we were made to think it was Willis. That’s why Osbourne’s in a hundred pieces, to make the ID nigh on impossible. The killer knew we’d go for the clothes and wallet. He knew we’d think it was Willis.’

  ‘Then where is Willis?’

  She looked up as a cyclist approached, stepped to one side to let him pass. ‘Good question,’ Anna replied.

  ‘Hang on,’ Slack said as a new thought solidified. ‘I thought Willis was blind?’

  Anna almost laughed out loud. ‘That’s what he wanted us all to think. And why shouldn’t we when it’s a hereditary condition that his brother most certainly had? But what evidence did we have except for what Charles Willis chose to show us?’ Anna walked slowly on, pausing now and again along the path, turning, seeing the trees and the meadow beyond, but not seeing them either, wanting Slack to see what she had finally understood.

  ‘But you saw the computer and that screen for magnifying things at Willis’s house, yes?’

  ‘Exactly. What better way to be the lie than to live it. The inheritance in the Willises’ disease is X-linked, also known as sex-linked because it’s carried by the X genes. The genes that determine the sex of the individual. It means their mother was a carrier. But Charles Willis was by no means sure of contracting the condition.’

  She waited for Slack to comment but the stony silence that followed was not encouraging.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘It’d be easier if I could draw you a diagram. Look, X-linked disorders are carried on the X chromosome, of which you have one and I have two, being a female. Female carriers of X-linked conditions have an abnormal gene on one X chromosome, which is counterbalanced by a normal gene on the other X chromosome. The normal gene suppresses the effect of the bad one. You with me so far?’

  ‘Keep going,’ Slack said.

  ‘That’s why carriers generally don’t manifest the disease. But male children of female carriers will inherit one of those two X chromosomes from their mothers – they inherit the Y chromosome from their fathers and that’s what makes them boys.’

  ‘Right, I can see that.’

  She stood aside as a jogger hurried past, before continuing. ‘So, obviously, they have a fifty per cent chance of inheriting the faulty gene from their mother, but it’s an equal chance each time.’

  ‘The Willis brothers had an equal chance?’

  ‘Yes. One could be affected, the other had just as much chance of not being affected. The other could be entirely normal, is what I’m saying.’

  ‘You mean Charles Willis was faking it? All of it?’

  ‘Why not? He’d get sympathy from friends and lovers and help from the state. Anything he did off his own bat would be looked upon as a spectacular triumph. He’d seen his brother from close quarters. He’d know exactly how to behave. He had all the equipment.’

  ‘But he was registered as blind. We found documentation with his name on it.’

  ‘That means nothing. Registration involves a form filled in by a busy doctor who, more often than not, does it from a set of notes. Charles Willis could have modified any of his brother’s documentation.’

  She didn’t think twice when the cyclist that passed her earlier turned around and stopped. It drew her attention momentarily. She watched him take off a backpack and remove something from it, vaguely registering the fact that it wasn’t a water bottle but something else altogether. A camera maybe? The woods were always full of twitchers.

  She turned her back on him, her mind on Slack, and took a step.

  Slack said, ‘Christ, that puts a whole new twist on things.’

  ‘I know…’

  A dull thud on the tree just to her left drew her attention. She looked up and then around. Had something fallen from a branch? Her eyes clocked something on the floor. Long, a steel needle, with a plastic cylinder and a bright yellow tufted end. She reached down and picked it up. A dart? She pivoted. The cyclist was still there, twenty yards away, pointing something at her. Something with a long barrel.

  She stared, momentarily uncomprehending, a frisson of fear squeezing her heart. She felt a sharp, bright stinging in her upper thigh and fell away from the impact, dropping the phone, her hand brushing at a point on her leg and feeling something hard quivering. Her eyes followed, seeing the dart, watching as her hand struck it, reacting as if it were an insect, pulling it out and letting it fall. It looked identical to the one she’d picked up near the tree. Long, a plastic barrel, a fluffed yellow stabiliser tail. But this one looked different, the barrel shorter from having discharged its load. The sting became a burning pain. Dark blood bloomed through her running pants on the front of her leg. She looked up again.

  The bicycle was on its side off the path, the cyclist on foot, moving towards her purposefully, tearing the helmet off his head.

  His head. Him. The Woodsman.

  Slack’s voice from the phone on the floor, tinny but urgent. ‘Ma’am? Inspector Gwynne?’

  She turned and ran, up off the path, towards cover, towards the trees. Up the slope, directionless, hearing him behind her, knowing she was quicker than him, trusting her body. If she made the top of the slope, she’d turn left. Back towards the burial mound and beyond it another entrance, a sports centre, people. No more than two hundred metres.

  Easy. She was fit.

  The pain in her leg slowed her down, altering her gait, but adrenalin was driving her, pushing blood through her heart and muscles. Bringing oxygen and glucose where it was desperately needed. But bringing, too, the veterinary grade ketamine and thiafentanil cocktail from the site of its injection deep in her quadriceps. It reached her brain just as she reached the top of the slope and Anna’s world changed.

  Time froze and her legs stopped pumping, her will and her power leeching away in a cloud of opiate-induced wonder. She was near a large tree. Waves of warmth oozed out of it. She stopped to touch it. It felt… wonderful. Anna’s gaze drifted to the first unspent dart still clutched in her hand, its yellow tufted stabiliser looking suddenly and astonishingly vibrant before she leaned over and threw up. But her stomach was empty, and even the nausea didn’t seem to matter.

  Noises behind her.

  She turned. He was there. Closing down on her. He pushed her over and she fell on her back. There was no pain. Even her leg didn’t hurt any more. He dragged her ten yards further into the wood, the dart she’d been clutching spilling out as her head bumped over roots and earth. Her mewling cries were muted and vague as he pulled her away from sight of the path. Out of sight of prying eyes.

  His hands tore at her weather-proof jacket and the running vest beneath. She tried to fight him but her arms were moving at a different speed, too sluggish to be effective. His open hand caught her a glancing blow on the head, but his second punch landed square on her nose and upper lip, mashing soft tissues against her teeth. She fell back, hands to her face, the salt in her own blood tasting amazing. He forced her down roughly, but she kept her hands over her nose until he kicked her in the belly. No pain, just a whooping expulsion of air as the breath was driven from her lungs. Something gave, a feeling like a soggy balloon rupturing inside her. She pulled her legs up, making herself a smaller target, but the fuzziness from the drugs slurred her words of pleading, turned her actions into slow-motion puppetry.

  He hadn’t spoken a word throughout. The only noise was his rapid breathing through the cycle mask. His eyes, locked on hers, were feral.

  Seein
g. Not blind.

  He ripped off her running pants, the leaves cold and wet on her bare buttocks, before straddling her, his weight crushing, hands ripping, his knees forcing her legs apart. It was then that she knew she was going to die with this man on top of her. It would be his hands on her throat, or a knife in her chest, and all she could think of at that moment was of how she didn’t fight enough. Slack would send help and it would arrive in time to find a still-warm corpse. Tears of sorrow and muted fear mingled with the blood in her mouth as she strained feebly to turn her head away from Willis’s choking hands.

  He sat back then, one hand squeezing her throat, the other clutching the glinting knife as it penetrated her breasts in sharp, stabbing bursts. He paused only to watch the blood run as she fought to ease the pressure on her windpipe. These were not deep wounds meant to kill. That would come later. He was playing with her. A cat with a mouse. But then her mind was drifting, lack of oxygen from one strong, choking hand colluding with the drug that was never meant for human use, pushing her towards unconsciousness.

  A shadow behind him drew her flickering eyes. A human shape moving quickly and stealthily for its size. Sharp crack like a stick breaking, Willis stumbling forward over her, half turning. Another crack and another. Then the weight was off her. The sudden light above coned her vision, but she heard noises and yells and oaths. She turned her head, willing her eyes to follow.

  Two people were struggling. The cyclist on top, knife still in his hand, held there by the second figure on the floor, reaching up, arms shaking from the strain of keeping that arm and knife away.

  She wanted to close her eyes, to giggle at the ridiculousness of it, stopped herself in time. She brought her fingers up to touch the blood on her breasts. Her skin felt strange, unreachable. She turned over, wanting to hide herself, wanting to crawl away…until her eye caught the brilliant yellow tuft of the unspent dart that had fallen from her hand. It lay a yard away, intact, the plastic chamber primed, the sharp needle dull with mud.

  Another yell and a grunt of effort from the combatants feet away from her. A voice shouting, desperate, ‘Run!’

  Despite her confusion, Anna knew she could not run. But she would not lie there, either. She crawled to the dart and picked it up. Sucking and blowing air like a steam train, she remained on her knees, the world swimming about her, and began crawling forwards. The cyclist had his back to her, kneeling over the other figure, limbs trembling with effort.

  Moving was taking all her willpower and effort. It would be so easy to lie down, collapse on to the floor. So easy…

  No! Not now. Not yet.

  Another foot, another, the leaves and dirt sliding like slime beneath her, her head hanging. The men were close. The smaller man could see her, his face grimacing with effort, eyes wide with fear and sudden determination. She reached out, and the cyclist, jolted by her touch, turned to look. The cycling mask had slipped, or been torn off, and Anna saw Willis’s face. Saw it and knew that all she’d surmised was true in the second before she summoned what was left of her energy and thrust the dart deep into the muscles of his back.

  She fell, his foot kicking her away, unable to do any more, vaguely aware of the cyclist on his feet, arching his back, desperate to remove the dart, stumbling down the slope to the path, heading for his bike and not reaching it as the drugs took hold and he stumbled and fell.

  The world darkened. Anna slid towards unconsciousness, but never quite reached its soothing shores. After seconds that felt like hours, she focused on a face leaning over her, large and craggy, the eyes full of concern. She concentrated, her own battered brows frowning, confused. She knew that face and yet couldn’t name it, because it was the last one she’d ever expected to see at that moment. One hand on the collar of the coat he’d thrown over her; the other still clutching a long black steel baton. He saw her look at it and put it down with an apology.

  ‘Done its job. I was watching your house. You were becoming the obvious target.’ He squeezed her fingers and she was grateful for it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said the craggy face. ‘He was a strong bugger. Stronger than me.’

  She found a smile of acknowledgement from somewhere, and tried to push it through her cracked and bleeding lips at the man who had promised Emily Risman’s parents that he would find her killer. At last, retired Inspector John Wyngate had done just that.

  Thirty

  They took Anna’s spleen away, fixed her nose and sutured her breasts. And the cheerful surgeon that visited her said they could have done it all without a drop of anaesthetic, there was so much thiafentanil in her system.

  Afterwards, after they’d reversed the opiate with naloxone and the ketamine had left her system, pain came in waves. Most of the time she declined the analgesics, preferring to use the aching as penance for her own stupidity. But sometimes she gave in to the soothing comfort of the analgesia pump she controlled with a push-button. A milligram of morphine now and then dulled everything just enough.

  Kate and her mother were there when she regained consciousness, though her memory of those early hours were viewed through a grey filter. But when that cleared, it was her sister’s hand and her mother’s wailing that she registered. When she and her mother were alone together, Anna pretended to sleep so as not to have to listen to the cajoling.

  ‘You’ll have to leave the police force now, of course. Someone I spoke to in Tesco said that you could sue them. Besides the physical injuries there’s post-traumatic stress…’

  When it was only Kate, Anna made her promise not to leave her mother alone with her any more.

  * * *

  Holder and Khosa came to see Anna on the third day after surgery. She was lying on her bed, resting with her head on one side, staring at a print on the wall of the room they’d put her in. One of three prints of nineteenth-century anatomical drawings with all the muscles delineated. The one she was staring at was on the wall opposite the window. It showed a human leg. It was meant to seem elegant and pleasing; a reassurance of how science and technology had progressed. All it made Anna think of was a scene from a shark movie, where a severed leg had drifted silently and slowly to the ocean floor after a ferocious attack.

  Holder knocked quietly and he and Khosa crept in.

  As if noise could make things worse! Anna smiled, grateful for the distraction. Holder’s gaze flitted over her, unsure on where to fixate on her face. She read in his closed expression the shock and horror of her appearance. It would all mend, the doctors said. But for now, every day was Hallowe’en.

  ‘They’ve cancelled my photo-shoot with Cosmo for this week,’ she said, her voice nasal from the splints up her nose.

  Khosa smiled with relief, but the frown didn’t leave her forehead.

  They feel responsible, Anna thought. They shouldn’t.

  ‘They’ve given us ten minutes, ma’am,’ Holder said. ‘I didn’t know whether we should’ve come but—’

  ‘I need to know.’ Her words emerged muffled because of her swollen tongue. They’d sutured a big laceration inside her mouth, caused by one of Willis’s blows. It made it difficult to keep her lips moist.

  ‘We’ve got Willis in a secure hospital. A few cuts and bruises but Wyngate didn’t break his skull.’ Holder sounded regretful.

  ‘Has he said much?’

  ‘He hasn’t stopped, ma’am,’ Khosa said. ‘Claims to be full of remorse for the victims and their families. But I think I’ve caught him trying not to smile when we ask him how he tracked the rape victims.’

  ‘Has it all come together?’ Anna shifted in the bed and winced. Khosa reached out a hand but she waved it away.

  ‘Everything. He’d obviously been following you. Saw you at Emily Risman’s crime scene when we went to visit. You were right, we were being watched.’

  ‘And Emily?’

  ‘He picked her up at the bus station in Coleford,’ Holder nodded. ‘You were right there, too
. She never caught the bus. The blue car that the witness reported was Willis’s father’s Granada.’

  ‘With Willis driving?’

  Khosa answered this time. ‘Yes. His brother, Roger, had taught him to drive when he was fourteen. By then, Roger’s eyesight was already fading so he had his little brother chauffeur him. That was how they managed the alibi. As you know, ma’am, Roger was out of the frame because of the hospital appointment and he told the court that he and his brother caught the bus to Gloucester. What they’d actually done was to take their father’s car from the lock-up and drive. This cut the journey time in half and gave Charles ample time to get his brother back home and then get to Coleford to meet Emily.’

  Anna nodded. Under the sink, to her right, between a metal bracket and the wall, she saw a spider scramble out over a dense, dusty cobweb. It had been her companion for three days, the only movement in the still quiet of the room. It turned now, showing her its large white abdomen before scrambling back to its nest to hide from the cleaners.

  ‘It wasn’t Roger Willis’s baby she was carrying, was it?’

  Khosa shook her head in agreement and a small smile of admiration appeared. ‘No. It was Charles’s baby. Emily knew it was Charles’s because he was the only one that had not used a condom. She was angry with him. He says he panicked when she told him. Panicked and wanted to make her shut up. However, he told Roger that the child was his. Told him that Emily was about to blab, that was why he’d killed her. And best of all the blood tests came back positive, as well they might.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Holder spoke. ‘I didn’t either so I spoke to a forensic guy. In 1999, they used only thirteen locus matches in DNA tests, looking for thirteen different markers. The chance that two people will have the same DNA profile at all thirteen loci is infinitesimal. But, in brothers, the chance is much, much greater. They were similar enough, in the Willis case, to not cast a doubt over Willis’s paternity. These days the more sophisticated DNA tests would have ruled Roger out. We would have got there eventually by retesting.’