by Dylan Young
‘You must be DC Holder,’ the woman said holding her hand out. ‘I’m Gail Willis. How was your journey?’
‘Easy, thanks to your map,’ Holder said.
Gail laughed. ‘The map’s been perfected over the years since we moved here. Coffee? Tea?’
‘Coffee for me,’ Holder said.
‘Tea would be good,’ said Anna.
‘Could I tempt you with something herbal?’
‘Well…’
‘I make them myself. Try some camomile. I guarantee you’ll like it. Charlie’s popped out for a walk. He usually does after lunch. Come into the kitchen and we can chat.’
They followed Gail into the kitchen. Holder ducked, conscious of the low ceilings. The surfaces and shelves were laden with brightly coloured pottery of unusual design. Anna picked up a pale green mug, hand-painted in a flowing floral pattern.
‘These are interesting.’
‘Thank you,’ Gail said, with a smile.
Anna caught the genuine pleasure in her voice. ‘Did you make them?’
‘Make them and try to sell them.’ Gail pointed out of the window at a large wooden outbuilding, which might once have been a summer house, but which now had pink dust coating the inside of the windows and unglazed pots all over the small veranda. ‘That’s my workshop. One of the reasons we moved here was for the extra space. I can work anywhere if I’ve got clay and an oven, and Charlie does all of his stuff from home.’
‘The home office concept?’
‘Especially in Charlie’s case. He can’t really function without his CCTV now.’
‘CCTV?’ Anna stared blankly and saw Holder’s puzzlement register too.
‘You don’t know?’ Gail asked.
‘I’m afraid I know very little. We’re here to speak to him about his brother,’ Anna said apologetically.
Holder glanced at his notebook and chipped in, ‘We have Mr Willis down as an electrician.’
Gail’s smile was full of pain. ‘That’s what his trade was, but he had to retrain. The CCTV is a tool he uses. You can’t tell from reading his work, but Charlie is sight impaired. He has retinitis pigmentosa.’
The penny dropped with a thud. Anna recalled Lentz’s chapter and the Medoracle website’s explanation about how the condition was inherited. Charles, like his brother, had lost the gamble.
‘I knew his brother Roger was affected,’ Anna said.
‘It’s progressed slowly. We’re hoping that it won’t get much worse. Charlie copes amazingly well. Gets his bad days, obviously, but he’s determined not to let it hinder him.’ Gail shrugged. ‘You can’t tell by looking at him. I thought it best that you knew though.’
Holder said, ‘You mentioned just now that you couldn’t tell from reading his work. What work is that?’
Gail’s chin tilted upwards a degree. A gesture full of defiant pride. ‘He does a little freelance work as a journalist. Mainly technical writing. Assessing new equipment and tools for the trade journals. Writes for the local paper too, though; lighter stuff, news snippets, articles. It’s a huge struggle, but it’s his passion.’ She poured boiling water into a pot in which she’d already placed some dried green leaves. ‘Sugar?’
Anna shook her head.
‘Their mother was a carrier. As you can imagine, she was mortified in those days there was no such thing as genetic counselling.’
Gail Willis was insightful enough to sense the discomfort her statement caused in her audience. ‘Don’t worry. We’re fully aware of the genetics. Charlie is adamant about that. And children were never on my agenda. We’ve only known each other for six years and I’m sad that I never met Charlie’s mum. She shouldered all the blame for both her boys.’
She poured steaming liquid into a mug and handed it to Anna.
‘Smells lovely. Sort of grassy and warm.’
‘Good?’ asked Gail as she watched Holder sip his coffee.
‘Lovely.’
Anna felt unable to hide her surprise and pleasure. ‘It’s smooth with a hint of mint.’
‘Refreshing isn’t it?’ Gail giggled enthusiastically.
Anna found herself liking this woman. She exuded a warmth and genuineness that was almost palpable.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ Gail asked, clutching her own mug in both hands and leaning against the sink.
‘I’d like to have a closer look at your pottery.’
‘Really?’
Anna nodded. ‘Really.’
She spent a pleasant fifteen minutes wandering around Gail Willis’s workshop and studio, amazed and surprised at the craftsmanship and natural earthy beauty in the designs that Gail had imprinted onto the plates and jugs she made. The patterns were floral and natural, but there was nothing twee about the bold colours. Anna was drawn especially to a corner cabinet laden with Gail’s most recent design; an oceanic motif full of swirling blues and greens.
‘Do you have an outlet?’ Anna asked, admiring a large milk jug splashed with yellow, green and blue sealife.
‘I have a shop in Cheltenham with a flat above it. I stay there three nights a week from Tuesday through Thursday. I come home lunchtime on Fridays. It’s a bind, but a sacrifice I readily made for the chance of living here. A friend of mine does Fridays through Mondays.’
Anna saw Holder watching her from the kitchen, clutching his coffee, bemused by her interest in pottery, no doubt. She hoped he was learning. Shipwright had taught her always to find common ground, where one could, with the major players of any investigation. She’d found it counterintuitive at first, preferred to root out the hard facts, the unimpeachable truths for her analytical brain to play with. But so often said truths were hidden inside the layers of lies everyone lived by. A concept that the original investigative team had spectacularly failed to grasp. And if she felt any guilt at this tactic, she buried it.
Besides, she really did like Gail Willis’s stuff.
‘These are fantastic,’ Anna said with feeling, moving from one piece to another. For a brief moment, she lost herself in the art, almost forgetting her reasons for being there, until a voice hailed them from outside.
‘We’re in the studio,’ shouted Gail in response.
Charles Willis was not as tall as Holder, but just as lean beneath the padded jacket that he unbuttoned and removed as he walked into the workshop. Gail went over and kissed him gently on the cheek. She took his arm and brought him over to where Anna waited. Holder followed behind them.
‘Inspector Gwynne, this is Charlie, my husband.’
Anna noticed how Willis looked directly at her, staring unremittingly. It was almost disconcerting.
‘I saw the car,’ he said, grinning. ‘I guessed it was you.’
‘And this is DC Holder.’
They shook hands as Gail explained, ‘In daylight, Charlie has very poor peripheral vision. What he has is a central tunnel. He sees best directly in front of him.’ It was all delivered as matter of fact and without a trace of embarrassment to either of them.
Anna studied the man in front of her. He had been almost fifteen when Emily Risman was murdered and echoes of his youth persisted in a long face dotted with freckles. He had a full head of wiry hair that curled naturally on his head in dark spirals above a lined forehead. As Gail explained, his damaged eyes showed no external sign of defect and were of a dense brown colour that made his pupils all but invisible.
‘I see Gail has already done refreshments. Would you like something else?’
‘Another camomile tea would be lovely.’
Gail took her mug and Charles said, ‘Let’s go into the office.’
Anna watched as Gail took her husband’s coat and adjusted a wayward collar of his checked shirt. Her face filled with pride and Anna’s admiration for her grew in that moment. Charles’s illness was a burden that this couple shared and Gail struck Anna as a woman who entered into the relationship with the dice loaded but with her own eyes wide open.
Charles’s office was a high-tech
workstation, all order and neatness. On a large desk against one wall stood a Mac, next to an odd-looking grey box perched on two struts twelve inches above a tray. The box, which had two large knobs like eyes on the front panel, was connected to the tray by the legs that stood at the rear of the unit.
‘We’ll get straight to the point,’ Anna said, when they were all seated. ‘We realise that it was a long time ago, but we have to go over statements and facts pertinent to the Risman case.’
Charles shook his head. ‘It’s difficult to believe Nev Cooper’s been inside for seventeen years for no reason, isn’t it?’
‘We’re really here to talk to you about your brother, but before we do can I ask, what were your impressions of what went on?’
‘You’ll have to remember that I was only fourteen at the time. The cops scared the crap out of me. They seemed big, hard men. They weren’t too bad, I suppose, but I can imagine what it must have been like for Nev.’
‘You knew him well?’
‘Everyone knew Nev. He was wild. He’d do anything you’d ask him to do as a dare. I suppose it was nothing more than a need to be accepted, but he’d eat worms, steal fags, anything, if he was in the mood. He didn’t know where to draw the line. That’s why people were ready to believe it could have been him.’
‘Was he violent when you knew him?’
‘Not really. Throwing stones at the windows of empty buildings was about his limit. But he was wild. Ever since I read about what the police did, the confession and suppressing evidence’ – Charles Willis shook his head – ‘it’s made me boil inside.’
Holder had a notepad in his hand but sat back, letting Anna take the lead.
‘That’s understandable,’ she said. ‘A lot of people feel like that.’
‘Seventeen years.’ Charles shook his head.
‘And you moved here sometime after your brother’s death. Is that correct?’
‘We’ve only been here six years. Roger died twelve years ago.’
‘A car accident, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. We were abroad. In France. I still had a licence then. We still had some money left over from when Mum died and we decided to spend some of it on a proper holiday before Roger’s vision got too bad. Just the two of us. I suppose I should have given up driving, but I could see well in daylight. It was getting late, not dark but heading towards dusk. I shouldn’t have been on the road. Someone tried to overtake us. I panicked, swerved… I was thrown clear, broke my arm in two places, but Roger didn’t make it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said. ‘It must be painful for you.’
‘It’s OK. I only get the nightmares a couple of times a month now.’
‘If we can go back to Emily Risman. Roger was the father of the child she was carrying, wasn’t he?’
Willis nodded. ‘He admitted it freely and the tests were all positive. He’d always fancied her, even though she was a bit easy. Funny really. I never understood that. I mean she wasn’t a bad-looking girl; she didn’t need to put it about like that. I suppose she just liked it. Rog had been with her a couple of times. Bought her a few beers and got his leg over. He thought he’d been careful but…’
‘He hadn’t used a condom?’
Wills threw his hands up.
‘It wasn’t what we might call a steady relationship then?’
‘No way. Emily Risman was the original “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” girl.’
‘And you brother was eighteen when all this happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember Richard Osbourne?’
Willis smiled. ‘Yeah. Flash bugger with a car.’
‘Did he object to the fact that Roger was seeing Emily?’
‘I don’t think he liked it much.’
‘What do you mean?’ Holder asked.
‘Tried to warn him off. After a couple of drinks, Osbourne could be a bit mouthy.’
‘So, there was bad blood?’
‘A bit. But Roger was never serious about Emily. At least, I don’t think he was.’
‘You mentioned that you drove until twelve years ago. That would have made you what, nineteen or twenty? Does that mean that your condition came on later than your brother’s?’
‘By a couple of years, yes. By the time Rog was twenty, he was struggling. He hated the winters, hated the dark nights. Like I do now.’
‘He didn’t have a driving licence?’
‘Yeah, he did. He passed his test as soon as he was seventeen in our dad’s old Granada.’
Anna shuffled through some papers on her lap. ‘On the day of the murder, your brother attended the hospital, is that correct?’
‘Yeah. Check-ups every three months by that stage. RP affects the retinas of your eyes, but you can also get cataracts at an early age. They were monitoring him.’
‘And you went with him?’
‘Yeah. It was half term. Rog had an afternoon appointment. That meant he would have to come home in the dark. He needed someone with him. Mum was too busy at the factory and my dad worked in lumber. He’d be in the middle of nowhere, mostly.’
‘And you travelled by bus?’
‘To Gloucester Royal, there and back. Nearly an hour each way.’ Willis shook his head, as if remembering slow, trundling journeys.
‘And what time did you get home?’
‘I think it was around half-five, maybe six.’
‘Your brother’s statement says five forty.’
‘Then that’s what it was. I think he went to the pub after that.’
Holder came in with a question. ‘Can you remember the last time your brother saw Emily Risman?’
‘Must have been the football club the night before she went missing. He danced with her. Everyone danced with her. Most of the guys were hoping for a quick feel outside in the car park. Emily was a very friendly girl. A fact that was common knowledge amongst the local boys. Just how friendly depended on how much cider she’d drunk.’
Anna steered things away, asking general questions about Charles’s work. He showed them the grey box next to the screen and used a newspaper to demonstrate. Placing a sheet of the paper on the tray, he took the mouse and the icons on the PC screen flashed across until he found the one he wanted. He double-clicked the mouse and part of the page on the tray appeared on the screen. The grey box on legs was a camera. The words blurred and sped across as Willis adjusted it until he found something to show them. An advert appeared, huge and surprisingly clear.
‘Big help this,’ said Charles, looking from Anna to Holder. ‘Couldn’t survive without it.’
Neither of them commented.
‘So, are you interviewing everyone involved? Eighteen years is a long time to remember stuff,’ he said.
Anna nodded. ‘We can but try.’
She made to leave and Holder took his cue. ‘Uh… you don’t mind if we contact you again? We might need to check some detail.’
Willis shrugged a yes.
Anna took the signal and couldn’t help but wonder what he was going to think if and when Cooper was dragged back into the limelight again.
She left shortly afterwards, with one of Gail Willis’s wonderful milk jugs wrapped in newspaper in one hand. Kate’s birthday was looming. Problem solved. They said their goodbyes on the doorstep of the idyllic cottage, Anna leaving with a promise that next time her visit would be less rushed. Gail walked with them to their car and they stood for a moment admiring the Willises’ shiny Isuzu jeep.
Gail said. ‘It gets very wet around here and there’s a lane at the bottom of the hill that floods regularly. Once the sun goes down he’s effectively blind. He tries to make the most of daylight and depends on me to do all the driving, of course. I’ve kept the old Astra for running around in, but the Isuzu should keep us mobile in all conditions. It was Charlie’s idea really.’
‘He is remarkable,’ said Anna.
‘Yes, he is,’ said Gail.
‘They were close as brothers, were they?’
‘I think so. I never met Roger but I think Charlie took his death hard. He was devoted. His dad never really recovered from an accident at work and Charlie more or less became Roger’s carer after their mother died.’
Anna again caught tender admiration in the glance that Gail Willis threw across to her husband as he stood in the doorway, before she walked over to join him.
* * *
Holder drove. Anna still had the list of questions she’d asked herself at the beginning of all of this in her notes. She glanced at them again now.
Emily.
* * *
Goes to woods of her own accord to meet, or taken against her will?
* * *
Does she know the man who’d done this to her or victim of a random attack?
* * *
The pregnancy?
* * *
Other?
‘Charles Willis’s recollection of his brother’s relationship with Emily Risman suggests that her pregnancy was an unfortunate accident,’ Anna commented.
‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ Holder frowned.
‘Well, why didn’t Emily insist that Roger used a condom? And then there’s Richard Osbourne’s statement that he didn’t keep tabs on Emily. Yet, according to Charles, he did and he even threatened Roger.’
‘And Osbourne had a car, ma’am.’
‘What’s the significance of that?’
Holder shrugged. ‘It means he’d be mobile.’ He nodded out of the window. ‘I mean, you’d need to be mobile out here.’
Anna flicked her notebook shut. He was right. The villages and hamlets were not far from each other in the forest, but getting to them was a logistical nightmare. ‘Why do you think Osbourne lied about not caring?’
‘Because it shows he wasn’t really Mr Cool and that he did give a stuff, ma’am.’
Anna turned back to look out of the window. Right again, Justin. None of that was enough to suggest Richard Osbourne was a murderer, but it did mean that their presence was making people nervous. And nervous people made mistakes.