The paddocks around the Hopkinses’ property were damp for eight months of the year. A smallholding nestled in the western shadow of the sprawling Forest of Dean, the wet came with the territory. But, on a fine, chilly November morning, one might have been excused for believing rain was a stranger to this place with the blue expanse of the heavens above and the ground beneath rock hard from the third consecutive night of frost.
Chris Hopkins blew pluming furls of steam from his mouth into the windless air, then smiled as he stepped out into the yard from the warm farmhouse kitchen. Despite his two sweaters and a waxed jacket, he shivered. He cupped both hands around the Thermos of coffee he’d just prepared, but it didn’t help. How could it? Chris smiled and shook his head. Far too early for all this.
Five steps and his ears were already stinging; always had and always would in this weather, being the generous size they were. His smile widened into a grin that had won him some good friends and several lucrative contracts in the competitive animal feeds’ market, which occupied his nine to five and a good slice of his remaining waking hours. He put the Thermos under one arm, curled his fingers into a soft clenched fist, and blew into both his hands before rubbing them together to get a little circulation flowing.
He had warned her, but as usual she’d insisted and got her own way. He shook his head and wondered again at his daughter’s stubbornness, knowing it was glued onto a gene with more than its fair share of his wife, Sara’s, DNA. OK, perhaps it was better that at sixteen Nia still wanted to sleep in her horse’s stable with her best friend, rather than hang around outside pubs or stay up all night at some rave experimenting with God knows what, but she could have chosen a better night for it, for crying out loud. Well, maybe it would at least cure her of the habit for the winter. It hadn’t been so bad during the summer but this was becoming ridiculous, hi-tech Arctic sleeping bag or no. Next thing you knew, Gwen would be wanting to do the same thing and Sara, still warm and cosy under the duvet upstairs, would throw a blue fit. She was not going to let a ten-year-old girl freeze to death in a stable, even if her big sister wanted to, and that was that. Gwen had yet to develop Nia’s manipulative skills, but it would come. Chris secretly looked forward to it.
Jesus, it was cold. He shivered and hurried down the yard to the whitewashed stable that had been nothing but a rat-infested hen house when they’d bought the place five years before. He glanced about him as he walked, feasting his eyes on a Christmas card landscape of white. All around him the bare trees were wreathed in feathery hoar frost, and across the lower fields a surreal milky mist hung low, creeping stealthily upwards towards the tree-lined horizon. It was going to be a beautiful day. Crisp and clear and unpolluted; the sort of late-autumn day he loved.
‘Wakey, wakey, girls!’ he called as he pushed open the stable door. The musty odour of hay and horse greeted him, mixed with something else, something unusual: a sharp, unpleasant tang.
He heard no rustle of sleeping bags and so added a chastising, ‘Come on, ladies. Don’t tell me you’re still asleep? I come bearing hot coffee!’
His eyes locked on to the horse. There was something wrong with Genevieve. The mare stood huddled in the corner of her stall, shivering and twitching, not offering her usual greeting nicker.
‘Nia? Beckie?’ He stepped in and looked over Genevieve’s stall to the stall containing the camp beds, fan heater and rickety desk lamp Nia had collected into a makeshift bedroom. Everything was still there, but order had been replaced by a chaotic jumble. A Microlite sleeping bag and three extra blankets lay piled in a heap near the foot of an upturned camp bed, the lamp lay on its side, shards of broken glass from the shattered bulb scattered over the floor. On the other bed, a lumpy shape lay unmoving. The sharp tang that greeted his nose crystallised into the unmistakable stink of vomit and triggered a frown of sudden concern.
Chris stepped across and pulled back the blanket that covered the shape on the bed. Beckie lay there, pale and sweating, mouth open, saliva and vomit glistening on her chin.
‘Beckie? Beckie, what’s wrong?’
The girl moaned, leaned over and retched.
A barbed, unnameable fear lanced at Chris’s gut. What the hell had they been doing? He put down the Thermos and looked around, eyes wide, registering the space where there should not have been one.
‘Shit. Nia? Where’s Nia? NIA?’
Ugly thoughts tumbled over in his head. Maybe the girls had eaten something. Perhaps they’d been stupid enough to try something. He pawed at the debris on the floor. Chocolate wrappers, Coke cans, phones. No sign of matches. No cigarette papers or syringes…
Syringes? What was he thinking?
No, he knew his daughter. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom. He turned back to Beckie. She didn’t look well.
‘Beckie, love, what’s wrong?’
She opened her eyes. Looked at him but didn’t see him. Her eyes drifted up and over Chris’s shoulder to the tack on the walls, the light beyond.
Something visceral and deep within him rippled and uncoiled.
Beckie giggled. He glared at her, but she still wasn’t seeing him. She giggled again but he barely heard, because he was stepping back, his skin crawling, confused and unnerved. No syringes or cigarette papers maybe, but something was very wrong here.
Heart knocking hard against his chest, Chris moved forward again, stepped over Beckie, and leaned in to pick up the canvas camp bed. The expensive orange-and-grey sleeping bag lay like a collapsed cocoon on the floor. He picked it up to throw it back on the bed, but stopped as his eyes fell on a dark purple stain covering two handbreadths of the surface in an irregular smudge. Whatever fluid had been spilled, enough of it had leaked through to the inner lining to mimic the surface stain. Chris stared, the sudden trembling in his arms nothing to do with the freezing temperatures.
Behind him Beckie moaned again.
A dark liquid smudge. The colour of blackberry juice. Chris brought the material to his nose and breathed in a sickly mixture of iron and copper. Blood. The sleeping bag fell from his fingers. He turned, stumbling over Beckie, feeling his way along the walls to the outside, his mind buzzing with chaotic panic as he sprinted back to the house. He threw open the doors, calling out his daughter’s name.
‘Nia? Nia?’
She was not in her sister’s room. Not in the bathroom, kitchen, living room. His frenzied search woke up the other children, and they watched with bleary, owl eyes as he yielded to blind panic. He ignored their frightened pleas for explanation, running from room to room, checking behind sofas and in cupboards.
Nia was not in the house.
Sara appeared on the stairs, but Chris was already heading for the door. He ran back out into the yard, heedless of his wife’s calling, hurtling around the outbuildings, opening doors, stepping up on the four-bar fences that ringed the fields to call her name. All the while seeing Beckie’s unfocused pupils and hearing that awful giggle in her voice.
‘Nia? Nia?’
No answer but for the cawing of the rooks his yells disturbed.
He turned and ran back towards the house, the freezing air searing his chest.
Sara stood outside the front door, arms clutching her dressing gown about her. She grabbed at him. ‘Chris! Speak to me!’
He could hardly breathe. There was no hope for words yet.
Her nails dug in to his arm. ‘Chris, you’re frightening me. What’s wrong?’
He sucked in air and looked in to his wife’s face, his legs trembling beneath him. ‘Nia’s not in the stables.’
Sara frowned, a half-smile began and then dissolved as his desperate fear ignited her own.
‘And something’s wrong… with Beckie.’ He threw out the words in a broken whisper.
Sara moaned and ran towards the stables. He let her go and staggered to the front door until the noise of his other children crying reached him. He ushered them into the lounge, frightened and confused, plying them with false assurances. He hurried to the kitchen, picked up the phone and dialled 999, recalling the stark, pathetic images of desperate, sleepless parents in the glare of TV lights, begging for help in finding a lost child.
A voice answered the phone, efficient and practical, asking him which service he required. Chris’s mind faltered, unable to respond to the simple question, wondering for a fleeting moment if he was overreacting. He stared at the kitchen door. Nia was going to walk back into the house at any moment, wasn’t she? Hugging a dressing gown around herself, fragile on those long, coltish legs, wondering what all the fuss was about. Her eyes, so like her mother’s, round and troubled from having caused her father the worry, spouting some improbable explanation so he could end this miserable call with an apology.
‘Is it the police you require?’
The question burned away his hope. ‘I…’
‘Sir? How can I help you?’
He tried twice and failed, the words freezing in his larynx until, somehow, he managed to vomit them out. Hearing them was like having his heart squeezed in an iron vice. ‘Ambulance and police. Something’s happened. I don’t know what. But my little girl, there’s blood.’ A sob choked off the sentence. He took a deep, tremulous breath and finished, ‘It’s my daughter… she’s missing.’
Detective Sergeant Anna Gwynne stared out through the windscreen of her car at the massive grey wall of Whitmarsh Prison, with its odd cylindrical crown, smooth and bulbous and, accordingly, impossible to climb. She shifted in her seat and flexed and extended her neck, easing out the stiffness induced by the long journey from Bristol. Her eyes looked back at her in the rear-view mirror. Hazel eyes, the bunched-up muscles beneath them always making it look as though she was smiling when she wasn’t; an attribute that men found engaging, but got her into trouble with stern teachers as a child. She lifted her chin in a quick inspection: minimal make-up; blonde hair stroked behind her ears in need of a touch-up on the roots; lips dry from the car journey. She reached into her bag for some balm.
The visitors’ car park was half-full on this bleak Monday morning, but Anna’s gaze settled on the heavy-set man hunched in a green raincoat and puffing on a cigarette some twenty yards away. He had his back to her, pretending to find the pay-and-display instructions meaningful, while he succumbed to his nicotine habit like the tobacco junkie he was. He turned, caught her looking at him, then took one final, defiant drag, stubbed the cigarette out under his comfortable shoe, and hurried towards the car. A bitter November wind picked up the thinning grey fringe of his hair and styled it instantly into a sparrow’s wing. The passenger door opened and Detective Chief Inspector Ted Shipwright eased his ample frame into the seat.
‘Right, Sergeant. Now that you’ve made me suffer for my sins, let’s get on with this.’
‘I’d never force you to have a cigarette, sir. Outside. In the bitter wind. And sub-zero temperatures.’ Anna kept her face straight.
‘We both know you bloody well did. Those recriminating glances are like porcupine quills. It’s a look you and Mrs Shipwright uncannily share.’
This time Anna allowed herself a smile as she reached for the laptop in the space behind the passenger seat. The unspoken rule during their many car journeys together was that they’d take her car and she would drive. There were several reasons for this, the chief among them being the fact that she was a good driver and he could nap when he needed to, but also because his car smelled like the mobile ashtray it largely was. And, since one of his daughters from his first marriage was almost Anna’s age, and flatly refused to get into the car because of the smell, Shipwright assumed – rightly but without even asking – that Anna would feel the same way.
On screen, Anna now brought up the video she wanted him to see.
‘Hector Shaw, sir. From ten years ago.’
Shipwright grunted. He smoothed down his hair with a shovel-sized hand, his strong features set and suddenly serious.
The screen flickered into snow and then cleared as the clumsy edit settled. A room came into focus: low, scuffed cream chairs of tubular steel with padded arms of sweat-stained hessian, coffee-coloured walls and a brown needlecord carpet in need of cleaning. An officer was seated in one corner, arms folded, dressed in a prison-service uniform. The view focused on a man in prison-issue fatigues, seated at a table.
Hector Shaw had a pear-shaped face, heavy-lidded eyes behind myopic glasses and, at thirty-nine, when the video had been made, a prematurely receding hairline. He stared across the table at the interviewer who, out of shot, spoke first.
‘Can we talk about your wife?’
Shaw tilted his head. ‘How is she?’ His accent was northern. The slow enunciation and the overemphasised vowels defining it as originating in Lancashire, more specifically, Mancunian.
There was a pause. ‘She’s dead. You killed her.’
‘So, when you ask if we can talk about my wife, what you’re really asking is how do I feel about killing my wife?’ Shaw’s gaze remained steady. When he blinked, he did so slowly. There was a suggestion of something crocodilian about it.
Off camera were the noises of shuffling papers and a throat being cleared. A pause and then, ‘Do you think that your two years at Rampton prior to your transfer here have helped you?’
‘Helped when it comes to talking about my wife, do you mean?’
‘Have you been able to try and imagine what it might have been like for your wife when you killed her?’
Shaw sat back and folded his arms. Anna, watching the video for the umpteenth time, sensed that this, this single movement, was the giveaway. The moment Shaw decided that the interviewer was a complete imbecile.
‘Are we talking about empathy or imagination? I have no conception of what it actually feels like to have a knife thrust into my liver, or to then have it slice my windpipe. I suspect very few people have.’
‘You used the word empathy—’
‘Because it’s what you were trying to imply I don’t have, isn’t it?’
Some more clearing of the throat off screen. ‘Erm, why don’t you try now? Imagine you’re a thirty-six-year-old woman at home alone. You hear a noise behind you. You stop and pivot. There’s a man there. A man who grabs you and drags you into your kitchen, where he ties you to a chair and then uses your own kitchen knives to stab you and cut your throat. And what are you thinking, do you suppose, in that moment of supreme terror when you realise someone is trying to do you real harm?’
‘If it was me, I’d want to get away. Definitely be somewhere else.’
‘But you’d tied her up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Emotionally, what would she have felt?’
Still Shaw’s expression was inscrutable. ‘Terror. Sick maybe, but mainly terror. But we are talking about my ex-wife here, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then most of her feelings would have been blunted by the bottle of Smirnoff she’d been sucking on since ten o’clock that morning. The same as she did every day. Plus, she knew me, so I would not have been such a big surprise to her. Unwelcome, maybe, surprise, no. We hadn’t surprised one another for years.’
‘Afterwards, what about her parents? How would they have reacted?’
Shaw uncrossed his legs. ‘I think they would have been quite happy to see me dead. They’d made that clear enough for some time.’
‘Is that how you would feel if someone attacked your daughter?’
Another pause. This time Shaw moved forward, elbows on the table, eyes on the ball of his left thumb as he massaged it with the thumb of his right hand.
‘I don’t have a daughter.’
‘But if you did?’
Shaw looked up. ‘I’d want to see the bastard dead. But we don’t have a death penalty, do we?’
‘But you killed your wife because you felt she was responsible for your daughter’s death?’
‘Partly.’
More rustling of papers. ‘Even though she, your daughter, umm, Amy—’
Another slow, crocodile blink from Shaw. ‘Abbie. Her name was Abbie.’
‘Sorry, Abbie, threw herself under a train?’
Shaw seemed to hesitate, his eyelids flickering momentarily as if he were calculating something. But he continued smoothly when he spoke. ‘My ex-wife was drunk on the sofa when that happened.’
‘Do you consider yourself to be judge and jury?’
‘I consider her not to have been a capable parent.’
‘Would you do it again?’
‘Like a shot.’
A long beat of silence followed.
‘You do understand that this interview forms a part of your continuing assessment for rehabilitation? You applied for certain privileges to be considered.’
Shaw’s mouth split into an enormous grin. ‘I wanted to test the waters. I guess it won’t be happening this time.’
‘No.’
Shaw smiled. ‘Then we’ve both fucked up, haven’t we? You need to be better prepared. Looking up notes during an interview is very rude. So is mentioning my daughter. Worse is getting her name wrong. And you need to ensure I don’t put anyone else in the hospital wing, right?’
‘You haven’t.’
Shaw was still smiling. ‘Not yet.’
The scene on the video erupted with the noise of scraping furniture and screaming as Shaw lunged across the desk out of shot before the watching guard could react. A blur of violent movement followed as Shaw pulled the interviewer across and buried his face into the exposed part of the back of the man’s neck, before the screen froze and went blank.
‘Who’s interviewing?’ Shipwright asked after several seconds of loaded silence.
‘His name was Conrad. The consultant who normally attended was lecturing at a conference and thought it would be good practice for his junior colleague. Conrad needed twenty stitches and a skin graft. I think he retrained as a GP after this. I got a copy of the interview from a lecture I once attended.’
‘What was the lecture called – “How to wind up a five-star psycho without really trying”?’
‘Almost. The lecturer used it to illustrate how easy it is to get things very wrong. So, what do you think?’
‘I think anyone who kills six people and puts another four in hospital during his prison term is a card-carrying nutter.’ Anna nodded, but Shipwright saw that she was pensive. ‘Come on, spit it out.’
‘It’s just that there was never an element of paraphilia in Shaw’s crimes. No sexual motive at all. It started out as revenge for his daughter and spiralled up from there. He got a taste for it, literally.’
Shipwright shook his head. ‘DNA doesn’t lie, Anna.’
‘I know.’
‘When’s Shaw due out?’
‘His is a whole life sentence.’
DCI Shipwright smiled. It lifted the craggy jowls an inch and transformed the grizzly into a teddy bear. ‘You meet the nicest people in this job. Shall we?’
They’d redecorated the interview room. This time there were drab grey walls, black plastic chairs and a metal-legged table with a Formica top. All in all an improvement on the brown, but despite liberal use of a sickly floral air freshener plugged into a socket at floor level, the room stank of old sweat and urine. Shaw looked thinner, harder, his face sunken, skin sallow from a prison tan. Blue bristles ran in a crown above his ears and around the back of his head from where he’d shaved off his remaining hair. He sat slumped and unsmiling, his arms folded, dressed in standard grey prison joggers and sweatshirt. His gaze flitted between Anna and Shipwright. Yet, despite his posture, his eyes brightened as they sat down, calculating and sharp behind his thick glasses.
The room was equipped with recording facilities and the interview would be videoed. Shaw had declined the presence of a solicitor. Anna did the necessary for the recording.
‘Interview at Whitmarsh Prison of Hector Shaw, under caution. Present are Detective Chief Inspector Edward Shipwright and Detective Sergeant Anna Gwynne. For the digital interview recording, the interviewee has declined the offer of legal representation.
‘Mr Shaw,’ Anna continued, ‘thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. You understand that you do not have to answer my questions. If you choose not to answer my questions, but this matter is raised in court and you answer the same questions, then the court will ask you to explain why you did not answer here today. The tapes of this interview can be played in court, so that the court will be able to hear what has been said. Please indicate that you understand.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ Shaw said. ‘What’s this about? And who the fuck are you, anyway?’
Shipwright leaned forward on the desk, fingers steepled. ‘We, Mr Shaw, are part of a major crimes review task force. What we do is take a fresh look at cases that have gone cold on our patch. The southwest, to be specific. I say, “our patch”, though we end up all over the place interviewing witnesses. And suspects, like you. Amazing what things come to light when they’re looked at from a new perspective. Especially in this high-tech world we now live in.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘Good question. Remember the evening of 15th June 2002?’
Shaw snorted and shook his head. ‘Yeah. Like it was yesterday.’
‘Well, you should. Because that was the evening a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Tanya Cromer was raped.’
Shaw continued to smile, but his jaw clenched, the muscles clearly working.
‘Tanya fought,’ Anna said. ‘And there was blood. A few spattered smudges on her clothes and under her nails.’
Shipwright added, ‘She’d fallen out with her boyfriend and everyone thought it was him. But he had an alibi tighter than a duck’s arse and the case went cold.’ He leaned a bit closer. ‘It had rained. The DNA samples were mixed. Pretty hopeless then, but now…’ Shipwright let his eyebrows crawl up towards his hairline.
‘Riveting,’ said Shaw. ‘Where’s this going?’
‘What the chief inspector means,’ said Anna, ‘is that we’ve made significant advances in terms of lab technology, mathematical models and bio-statistical software since then. These days our forensic scientists can successfully separate contributors in mixed samples.’
‘Couldn’t have put it better, Sergeant,’ Shipwright said. ‘And guess what? One of those separated samples matches your DNA, Mr Shaw.’
Shaw looked like he wanted to say something, but his mouth stayed shut.
Anna watched for one of the slow blinks that had marked his aggression in the tape they had viewed. So far it hadn’t happened. ‘So where were you on the evening of 15th June 2002, Mr Shaw?’ she asked.
Shaw still said nothing.
‘For the DIR, the interviewee refuses to answer.’
Shipwright pressed on. ‘Three months after Tanya reported the attack to the police she went missing.’
Three seconds of silence followed. So far it was a draw in the staring contest.
‘If you want to say something, now is the time, sonny,’ Shipwright said.
Anna pressed him further. ‘If you know where she is, tell us. Give this poor girl’s family a way out of purgatory.’
Still Shaw remained silent. His eyes looked back at them, his corneas reflecting the harsh ceiling lights, his irises the colour of oil spill on a grey sea. Anna waited and then said, ‘For the record, the interviewee has refused to respond.’ She looked at Shipwright. He shrugged in response.
‘I have to inform you,. . .
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