It was a steel-grey morning on the other side of the Bristol Channel, heavy with the promise of rain on a chill sea breeze. Anna met Holder and Khosa on the approach to the bridge near Magor where the train had struck the body. She’d crossed on the second Severn Crossing, coming off the motorway at Junction 23A, and had driven along the winding lanes that divided the flat landscape of the estuary. Now she parked at the end of a line of police cars and, walking up, she could see that it was a thirty-foot fall to the tracks beneath the bridge. A young uniform stopped her at the police cordon, but Holder emerged from behind a white Scientific Support Unit van and waved her through.

‘Morning, ma’am,’ he said, with little of his usual joviality. ‘I’ll take you up.’

At the parapet, Anna looked down on a small army of white-overalled CSI officers combing the tracks, with uniformed transport police in the hedgerows searching for clues.

‘They’ve bagged fourteen separate body parts so far,’ Khosa said as she joined Anna.

‘Has there been a formal ID?’

‘Pathologist says it’s impossible. The head and upper body are unrecognisable. He was corkscrewed under the wheels. We’re relying on document ID and clothing for the moment,’ Holder said.

Khosa shivered.

A uniformed officer approached and Holder stepped to one side to speak to him.

‘Driver’s quite shaken. Thought it was kids messing about,’ Holder said, turning back to Anna.

She grimaced. ‘Can’t have been pleasant.’

‘Bound and dumped in front of an Inter-bloody-city. Bastard.’ Khosa glowered.

The area was surprisingly built up. Half a dozen houses nestled within a stone’s throw of where they stood, screened from the five lines of track by a tall line of trees. From their vantage point, Anna could look east towards the swollen river, where it ballooned out towards the channel. A quarter of a mile further on and the houses petered out to be replaced by fields and hedgerows. To the west, new estates had sprung up in what was the newest part of the M4 corridor. She peered down the railway track itself. This section had several bends. To the north and south, it was a bare four hundred yards before the line curved out of sight, but she could see four bridges from where she stood, some designed for traffic, others mere footbridges.

‘I can’t believe no one saw anything,’ she said eventually.

Holder pointed to some scaffolding poles that stood proud of the parapet towards the edge of the bridge. ‘They’re repairing the supports. It’s like a hide under there, look.’

Anna and Khosa followed Holder thirty yards to the west. He leaned over a fence so that he could look back at the bridge. ‘There. See that tarpaulin? The workers leave it hanging up as protection against the weather.’

Anna followed Holder’s pointing finger and took in the flapping grey-green sheet hanging under the bridge. The scaffolding extended across in a spindly framework beneath the whole span. He was right. It was perfect camouflage. They went back up and stood for a while, watching, until they turned away collectively, letting the specialists do their job.

‘We found the Isuzu in a side street two hundred yards away. There are no security cameras,’ Khosa said. ‘But Osbourne’s fingerprints are all over the steering wheel. He nicked the jeep, hid up somewhere and drove Willis to this spot last night after…’

She didn’t need to say it. They were all still raw from what had been done to Gail Willis.

Holder shook his head. ‘We need to find this bastard.’

‘Where’s Harris?’

Khosa pointed a thumb over one shoulder towards the line. ‘Down there somewhere. I’d say this has become something more than personal with him.’

And so it should, Anna thought. She’d warned him of the consequences of showing his hand regarding Cooper too early. Harris knew he should have taken her more seriously. Now they had two more murders on their hands and being right held little consolation for her. She’d give anything to have been wrong and still have the Willises alive.

Holder shook his head. ‘What’s Osbourne going to achieve by all this except to make us more sodding angry? It’s like he doesn’t give a toss any more.’

‘It could be just that,’ Anna said. ‘This has all been brewing for seventeen years, remember. But you’re right. The sooner we find Osbourne, the better.’ It sounded reasonable, and everything pointed to Osbourne as their perpetrator, but she had to admit to herself that she shared Holder’s confused consternation as to what was going through this man’s very disturbed mind.

The rain started then, spitting out at them on the gusting wind, cold and lancing. ‘Look, there’s very little we can do here.’ Anna turned her back to the wind and pulled her coat about her. ‘Can we get out of this?’

‘Of course, ma’am,’ Khosa said.

‘I’d like us to sit down and go over the who, what and why of what we actually know.’

Holder nodded. ‘Sounds a better idea than hanging around here, ma’am.’

‘If they find anything, I’ll make sure they let us know immediately. It’s Gwent police’s patch,’ Khosa added.

Anna glanced around once more at the toiling men below.

‘Don’t feel sorry for them, ma’am. At least they’re alive to complain about the weather,’ muttered Khosa.

---

Back at Portishead, they’d barely had time to sit down before Trisha took a call. ‘DCI Harris has called a conference for two p.m.’

‘Fine. That should give us enough time,’ Anna said, hearing her own words bounce around in the echo chamber inside her head and wishing she could believe them. She needed to bring the team back into focus. The key to the horrific events of the present lay in the past and she needed them all to concentrate on what had happened right at the beginning.

Patterns and habits. Everyone had them. People lived by them. Emily Risman worked, and travelled, and did things that she would have been unaware of, that would have been invisible to her but not to other people. And Anna liked patterns. What detail had they seen and ignored since they’d opened this cold case that held the code to unlocking the door?

She was supposed to be good at this stuff, wasn’t she?

Anna squeezed her eyes shut before looking at the whiteboard once again. ‘I know that what happened last night has distracted us so I thought we ought to review what we know.’

She ran through everything, her memory detail-perfect, revisiting Emily’s movements on the day she went missing.

Holder and Khosa both nodded along.

‘So, what about contradictory evidence?’ Anna asked, her abrupt question taking the other two by surprise.

‘Mr Stanton, the van driver,’ Holder said triumphantly, ‘I know Ryia ended up going down a few blind alleys, but it was Trisha who finally tracked him down.’ He nodded towards the analyst who smiled. ‘He is now a resident of The Meadows nursing home in Kidderminster,’ Holder continued. ‘Had a small stroke five years ago but he’s still pretty switched on. I spoke to him last night and he remembers Maddox interviewing him quite clearly. In fact he even remembers being pretty cheesed off that no one came back to him for details.’

‘Does he remember what he saw?’

Holder riffled through his pad. ‘He was sitting in his van reading the paper and eating a sandwich in a corner of the car park. He watched Emily Risman walk across to a dark blue saloon that then drove off.’

‘Can he remember the make of car?’

‘He thought it was an old… umm… Cortina?’ Holder held up a printed image of the model and pinned it to the board.

‘What was Osbourne driving at the time?’

‘A blue Escort.’ He flourished another image and pinned it up next to the first.

Anna looked hard at the cars. ‘How far away was Stanton?’

‘Seventy odd yards.’

‘So even though the make is not quite the same, it would do for Osbourne’s car?’

‘The old Escorts were pretty boxy at that time.’

‘Did you suggest to Stanton that it might have been an Escort?’

‘Yes. He admitted it could have been.’

‘Good. And Emily stepped into the car of her own volition?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes. Obviously knew the driver.’

‘OK,’ Khosa said. ‘So, Osbourne met her and took her back to the forest that afternoon.’

Holder took up the ball and ran with it. ‘He takes her to the woods, comes on to her and she says no because she’s having a thing with Roger Willis. Is, in fact, pregnant with Willis’s kid. Osbourne loses it and kills her. He panics, tries to bury her, is disturbed. Waits for the police to sniff around, twigs that they like Cooper, and plants the underwear.’

Khosa nodded. ‘It also maybe explains why he’s gone after Charles and Gail. Grumbling resentment for Roger Willis getting Emily pregnant?’

‘It’s a stretch, but I suppose resentment could easily brew into hate,’ agreed Anna.

‘Right,’ said Holder, holding his palm out in front of him with the fingers splayed and squeezing his eyes shut in a gesture that said he’d just remembered something important. He slid across to his desk and came up with some stapled sheets. ‘Accident reports from France. I’ve had these for almost a week but they kept slipping my mind.’

Anna took them and scanned them quickly.

‘The gist of it is that Charles Willis was driving, lost control on a bend and went down an embankment into a river. He got out, his brother didn’t.’ Holder said.

‘Not alcohol related?’

Holder shook his head. ‘Wet night. There were dozens of accidents, apparently.’

‘Nothing to indicate mechanical failure or sabotage, or them being forced off the road?’

‘You don’t think that Osbourne…’ Holder let his sentence hang.

‘Just a thought,’ said Anna. ‘Worth checking on Osbourne’s movements at that time. Was he in the country? And the same applies to the serial sexual assaults. Ryia, set up a meeting with Thames Valley. Let them know what we have.’

Khosa nodded.

Holder was looking chirpy. ‘So, it’s looking good for it being Osbourne all the way through, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ said Anna with little enthusiasm. ‘Doesn’t help us get anywhere nearer him though, does it? We can only hope that he’s not harbouring a grudge against anyone else.’

‘I can’t see us second-guessing this bloke at all.’

‘Agreed. We need to go over everything again today. Emphasis on the original interviews and what information Sue Donaldson has given us. See if there’s anywhere that he could have gone to ground or if we can get a handle on what his next move is likely to be. The area where Nia was found had been searched two days before her body turned up there. He had her hidden somewhere out there in the woods, I’m sure of it.’

The idea of a lair crept into her head and wouldn’t leave.

‘You won’t be going to the conference then?’ Holder asked.

‘Not this time,’ said Anna. ‘I’m sure you two can handle it perfectly.’

‘Won’t be the same, ma’am,’ Holder complained.

‘You’ll survive, Justin.’

---

Anna read and reread her notes until her eyes burned with dryness. Outside, through the window, the day descended into a colourless drizzle and then heavy rain. Her journey home was an unpleasant, gloomy trip through a constant wall of spray. The drive demanded all her concentration and the unanswered questions thrown up by her endeavours simmered on the back burner of her consciousness, fighting with the droning buzz of that enigmatic certainty she had that the answers were all there, but hidden under a morass of superfluous information. She got home at four, changed into joggers and braved the rain for the retail delights of Waitrose.

She could, she knew, have gone to Gloucester and listened to the theories, but she didn’t need that. Didn’t want that. What she wanted was some time alone inside her head.

There was a reason, albeit twisted and pathological, for Osbourne’s seemingly mindless violence against Gail and Charles Willis, just as there was a link between what had happened to Emily and the rapes he had been committing. Those certainties plagued her. But she’d spent too much time focused on the hard-boiled facts of the problem. What she needed to do now was give free rein to her imagination to allow it to make that empathic leap and try, for one moment, to truly think like Osbourne did. Like Shaw did.

She wasn’t psychic and the effortless way TV sleuths managed to ‘become’ the killers they were chasing always filled her with amusement. But she had learned techniques; ways of divorcing herself, of taking on board the extreme aspects of the human condition that went beyond the normal bounds of behaviour. She needed to try and understand the subjective state of the killer at the time that he committed his crimes.

That process had begun on her way back from the railway tracks in Wales. This was also the main reason for her wanting to be away from the frenetic intensity of the station. Khosa had seen and understood it, Holder had not.

Anna bought groceries and took them home to the kitchen. It was about time, she reasoned, that she cooked something decent. But it was also part of the process. Food preparation relaxed her, occupied her, let the right side of her brain do its thing.

She made mustard chicken pie, with mangetouts and a pasta salad. She ate, drank water and found a Deezer playlist on her iPhone. This stuff was a country mile away from her father’s music. Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve, Midlake, London Grammar; folk rock psychedelia to free her mind and let the nuggets of that day’s conversations mingle with the stark and dreadful images she kept in the lock box of her professional mind. Anna sat on her sofa and tried to wind down.

Gail Willis loomed large, as did the Hopkins family; the railway bridge a new and oozing wound. Wyngate hovered in the wings, and the outliers – the things that had nothing to do with the Woodsman – buzzed in and out like irritating flies that needed swatting: her CILF images and, of course, Shaw. Bogeymen that simply wouldn’t go away. And try as she might to push them to the back of her mind, and concentrate instead on Osbourne and where it all began – in the depths of an ancient pagan forest and its silent watching trees – a collage of horror remained. Emily and her dead beseeching hand; Gail’s bulging eyes; Nia; and Megan Roberts’ damaged life, all swirled around like leaves in a drain, blocking out any clear thought.

Anna tried to force it. It still troubled her that she didn’t have the whole picture about Osbourne. What had triggered this need for murder? Where did his ability to meld into the environment come from? Everything pointed towards him, and his skill with wood had a kind of resonance with the awful sobriquet. Yet there was something she could almost touch that bothered her, but that wouldn’t crystallise into anything solid, and so she was left with a vague awareness that scratched away inside her head.

Intuition, Anna?

That thought brought with it the realisation that everything was on the line. Rainsford had trusted her to clear up this case, and so far all her efforts had drawn a blank. It seemed to her that Shipwright’s trust and belief had all been misplaced, too. Perhaps she should go back to being the sergeant and let someone else take the weight. Someone like Harris.

The idea made her cringe.

At a little after eight, her work phone rang. Holder’s mobile number. The background drone told her he was in a car on hands-free.

‘How was the meeting?’ Anna asked before he could say anything.

‘Nothing new, ma’am,’ Khosa said now. ‘They’re tracing Willis’s relatives. There’s an aunt somewhere. I’m not sure why. There’s not enough of Willis’s head left to identify. It’ll be dental records, once they find all the pieces for a reconstruction. They’re still out there looking, apparently. Slack had Sue Donaldson back in but she’s a wreck.’

Holder said now, ‘No point you being there, ma’am. Waste of time. They’re no further forward.’

Khosa once more: ‘What about you, ma’am? Any joy?’

‘No. Nothing. You two get home. We’ll have a fresh look in the morning.’

She put down the phone and tried to marshal her meandering ideas. Something Holder had said a long time ago snagged on a niggling thought. But it vanished almost as soon as she became aware of it. She needed to organise her head before it would come back to her. She was surprised by how confident she was that it would.

Vengeful, that was the word that sprang to mind. First Gail, then Charles had met a brutal end. And there was no doubt now that Gail’s murder had been carried out maliciously. If Osbourne had committed all the sexual assaults, then doing what he’d done to Gail was a big departure. She didn’t fit the profile of the rape cases. It meant that he was no longer differentiating. Whatever survival instinct had held him back from killing before had gone. Firstly with his willingness to coldly implicate Cooper by killing Nia and then a malignant resentment festering over eighteen years finally unleashed as hate with what he’d done to Gail.

Yet, Charles’s death was something else again.

Such a ruthless destruction of another human being smacked of vindictive malevolence, a need to finally wipe Willis off the face of the earth. There would be nothing left except mangled flesh and bone and the torn remnants of the clothes he was dressed in. Why was Osbourne so intent on ridding his world of any trace of the Willises? What had happened between them all those years ago to engender such hate?

Could Osbourne have taken offence to Emily’s pregnancy and transmitted blame to Roger Willis’s brother? Had Gail been simply collateral damage?

It didn’t quite fit. Would a nineteen-year-old have been troubled by an insult to his manhood in such a way? Most nineteen-year-olds she’d dealt with possessed no paternal aspirations whatsoever. Unless there was another element. Osbourne was infertile but what about impotence?

Psychosexual dysfunction in a normal setting could escalate towards an aggressive reaction aimed at the partner, or if you extrapolated it, victim. But Sue Donaldson had mentioned only infertility and they’d need to ensure Osbourne’s movements did fit with the rapes and attempted rapes.

And all the while he was still out there, running, looking for somewhere to hide in all that vastness—

And there it was. The thought that Holder’s words had snagged on. Something he’d said right at the beginning when they’d visited the forest… its remoteness… about the fact that the only way to get around was with a car… Anna stood up, blowing out air as if she’d just finished a round of press-ups.

The writhing, twisting tentacle of an idea reached out from the murky waters of her mind to strike. It floated tantalisingly close before drifting away. She stood stock-still, as if she’d been hit by a gorgon’s stare, waiting for it to drift back again. It did and she felt her pulse tick in her throat the second before she had it.

The reason Willis had to be annihilated.

She held the idea up for inspection, took it apart, looked at it from all angles, shone the brightest light of doubt she could muster on all of its facets, and knew, with a dread certainty, that it worked.

This was a clever, devious and troubled mind they were dealing with. A mind that contemplated eventualities for eighteen years and emerged with a dreadful, cynical, sickening strategy. It was such an abhorrent idea that she struggled not to shy away from it, unwilling to accept the harrowing implications. But it fitted. All of it.

She glanced at her watch and realised that it was almost ten already. She’d been worrying at this case for hours. Nevertheless, she reached for her phone and dialled Slack’s mobile; the background chatter that accompanied his greeting hinted at a social setting.

‘Evening, ma’am.’

‘Sergeant, I realise it’s late.’

‘An hour to closing time. Not late at all.’

‘I’ve just got off the phone with Holder. He briefed me on the conference.’

‘I’ve been in better meetings,’ Slack said.

‘I’ve had some new thoughts. They may sound totally off the wall, so I need you to do something for me before I run off at the mouth and end up in that place where they wear the nice white coats with the buckles in the back.’

‘I don’t follow you, ma’am.’

‘I want you to get hold of the specialist that runs the infertility clinic where Osbourne and his wife are patients.’

‘Uh…. do I have a reason for doing that on a Friday night, ma’am?’

‘Yes, Sergeant, a very good reason.’

She explained to Slack as briefly as possible. He listened without comment, whether it was through respect or frank disbelief, she wasn’t sure.

---

Anna tried reading in the hope that it might lull her to sleep. But at midnight, she was wide awake, unable to do anything but wonder how successful Slack was at twisting a few officious arms and frustrated at knowing he would only get back to her in the morning. She went into the kitchen and made some hot chocolate, took it back to the living room and watched her current TV fix. By one, she’d numbed her brain enough with the vicissitudes of fiction to feel that sleep would come and took to her bed to await whatever the dawn might bring.