by Steve Mosby
YOU CAN
RUN
STEVE MOSBY
To Carolyn
Prologue
Once upon a time there were two boys.
But we can be more specific. It was twenty-five years ago and one of those boys was me. The other was my best friend Rob. It was a warm August day and we were out on an adventure. We were ten years old and we had our bikes, our small rucksacks and our internal maps of the village we lived in.
My mother had an old, weathered road atlas that I liked to look through on long car journeys. Grown-up maps, as I thought of them back then, show grown-up things: churches and pubs and petrol stations. I’d had to learn the various Ordnance Survey symbols for them at school. But a child navigates by an entirely different set of waypoints, and so at that age I thought not of street names and landmarks but of the Quarry, the Field, Killer Hill, the Chalkie, the Old Oak. Places that were unknown and unnamed by adults. They might as well have been legends that children told each other, important only because we met and played in them. Grown-up places were where adults needed to go. Kid places became places simply because we went to them.
As we rode along the quiet streets of the village that day, Rob was always slightly ahead of me. I remember the way his T-shirt billowed slightly at the bottom, and the angle of his arms as he gripped the handlebars. His clothes and bike were much more expensive than mine, but we were best friends and had been since we started school together six years ago, all but inseparable from the first day. Although we did get along with other children, there was perhaps something different about the two of us. We were both quieter than the other boys: a little more sensitive; not quite so rough. Our parents were very different – Rob’s were well off, whereas my mother certainly wasn’t – but we were similar children. Best friends forever, my mum had beamed at us one day. That’s what I think I’m looking at here. I remember that. It didn’t feel embarrassing when she said it. And on that day in August, it still held true.
Rob looked back over his shoulder.
‘The Bridge?’
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘The Bridge.’
The Bridge didn’t really go anywhere. At one side was the corner of our village; at the other, a dirt path and a load of farmers’ fields. The field we played in the most was behind Rob’s house, and it had a climbing frame and a slide. These other fields were unknown territory that looked like they stretched away for miles, and were too large to be considered a place. The Bridge itself was more contained, though, and interesting in its own right. There was a thick wall on either side, and the ground between them was uneven: neglected and overgrown. On both sides there was a vast drop to the train tracks below.
Rob and I cycled up and leaned our bikes against the wall. The world whirred into silence.
We walked a little way along, stones crunching beneath our feet. There was no real purpose to being there apart from to be there, so we stopped about halfway across. The walls at the sides were as high as the top of our chests, but if we reached over and grabbed the far edge, we could hoist ourselves up on to the rough stone surface and peer down.
‘Do you think the fall would kill you?’ Rob said.
I stared down. We were very high up, sixty feet or more, and all that space between us and the ground seemed full of echo and potential. The twin tracks below stretched away ahead, surrounded on either side by an infinity of tiny dirty pebbles, and then the steep sides of the embankment, thick with ferns and trees and jutting rocks.
‘Too right it would,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t be so sure. You might survive.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Not in one piece, though.
‘No. No way. And not for long.’
Still clinging on, I spotted that there was a snail between us on the top of the wall. The pattern on its shell was striking, and I loosed one hand to reach out and trace the whorls there with a fingertip. Round and round they went, circling down to a black dot, but I thought that if you could see much better, and your finger was small enough, you could trace those circles forever. . .
‘What are you doing?’ Rob said.
‘I don’t know. It’s just cool.’
‘You’re not going to flick it off, are you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’
I moved my hand away immediately. The thought would never have occurred to me, although I imagined it then, of course: the snail tumbling almost weightlessly through the air, its tough shell clattering on the pebbles far below. Actually, I thought, the snail would probably survive the fall just fine, but I would never have done something like that.
Rob looked genuinely concerned, though. It was how he’d been all year. Over the last twelve months, he had become preoccupied with death. The summer before, his little sister Mary had died, and he’d not been the same since. We were still best friends, but there was a sense that Rob had aged a little quicker than I had, in a way I would never be able to catch up with. He seemed to see the world differently now: as a place full of bad things and threat and danger. He worried about everything. In turn, because he was my best friend, I worried about him. I wanted him to feel safe.
‘Of course not,’ I said again.
And then I looked up and saw that a train was approaching in the distance. I took hold of the wall with both hands again to steady myself. From this far away, the train appeared slow and lumbering as it curled towards us, its carriages locking into place one after the other. It was only as it reached the Bridge and thundered underneath that the speed and power of it became obvious.
Sixty feet above, I felt the air folding and pushing up at us, and the whole world rattled and shook. I could even feel it in the stone beneath my arms and my chest. Carriage after carriage – the train seemed to go on forever, impossibly long. And then suddenly it was gone again, a furious sound receding into the distance behind us.
I turned my head towards Rob, feeling exhilarated, and was about to say something when I saw that he looked terrified. He was still clinging on to the edge of the Bridge, but he was staring straight past me now, and his face was pale, his body trembling.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘There was someone there.’
He was still staring to my right, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond me, and he spoke with such conviction that, when I looked that way a moment later, I was almost surprised to find that the Bridge was empty and we were totally alone.
‘Someone where?’ I said.
‘Just there,’ Rob said. ‘Right next to you.’
I looked again. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I’m not. I saw him. A man with long hair. He was sitting on the wall there, looking right at me. And his face, Will. . .’
‘What about it?’
‘He looked so sad.’
‘Really?’
I tried to sound low-key about it, but the truth was that he was scaring me a little. I could always tell when he was joking about something, and this wasn’t remotely like that. He meant it; whatever he’d seen had really shaken him. It had been a sunny day before, but I realised that a cloud had drifted over the sun and the world had become darker.
‘Maybe you saw a ghost,’ I said.
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head and lowered himself back down on to the Bridge. ‘Or maybe I’m just going nuts.’
‘What do you mean, “going”?’ I said.
‘You’re really funny, Turner. You should take that act on tour.’
‘Maybe I will.’
‘You could take Anna with you.’
‘No way. Why would I do that?’
‘Because you’re in love with her, of course.’
He made kissing noises, and I rolled my eyes. Anna Hilton was a girl in our class who Rob l
iked teasing me about. While I always denied it, he was right, of course. I was totally in love with her.
‘No way,’ I said again.
‘Race you to the Chalkie?’
‘Yeah, you’re on.’
But as Rob walked back to where we’d left our bikes, I found myself hesitating. He was a little bigger than me, but right then he looked very small, and I felt that protective instinct again. I wanted him to be okay. I wanted him to feel safe. A moment later, I reached out and picked the snail from the stone, then placed it safely in the undergrowth at the base of the wall. It was a pointless gesture, and Rob didn’t even see it, but it still felt meaningful in a small, quiet way.
We never spoke about that day again, or the man with the sad face Rob thought he’d seen. I did think about it from time to time, though, especially when I saw Rob staring off into the distance, lost in thought and preoccupied by something that remained invisible and out of reach to me. I suppose I always thought it must just have been a hallucination of some kind. A daydream. Or an instance of pareidolia: that strange sensation when shapes in the world around us come together and momentarily form a pattern, an image, a face.
It was only many years later, after the Red River Killer came into my life, that I began to wonder if it had been something else.
Part One
One
She has nothing left to do now but make up stories.
As a child, Amanda would do that all the time. That’s what children do, of course. Confronted with the confusion of the world around them, they create fantasies to shape and make sense of it. They turn what happens to them into narrative. They tap their toys against each other and make a noise.
But unlike other children, Amanda would write her stories down.
Her mother would fold sheets of coloured A4 paper in half, sew them together and say: Here is an empty book, Amanda; fill it for me. They were poor, her family, but her mother encouraged her to believe that there could be worlds within pages, and it was a lesson she learned well. She wrote stories about other planets, and princesses, and dashing heroes and winged horses. The stories she wrote became more elaborate just as she did, but one theme remained constant: good always triumphed over evil, and the monsters in the stories could always be beaten. When you confronted them, they were never as scary as you imagined them to be.
Of course, she knows differently now.
Once again – in the silence, in the dark – Amanda eases her wrists forward. Once again, there is absolutely no give in the makeshift pillory. The man has clearly constructed it himself – or at least adapted it, perhaps carving three holes in some sturdy old dinner table, then sawing it in half and adding metal hinges. The two holes to either side are smaller; they hold her wrists in place. The central one is for her neck, and angled so as to force her head back. She is kneeling on the rough stone of the garage floor, with only her hands and head visible above, like some kind of macabre dinner tableau on the stained, pitted surface.
She is not sure how long she has been here now.
Nothing left to do but. . . Well. Write stories in her head.
She imagines the canal path, still dappled with spring sunlight even in the early evening. In the stories she tells herself, she cycles along it slightly earlier or later – or even avoids it completely. The man makes a mistake, and there is someone there to save her. Or else the man isn’t waiting in the undergrowth at all.
What if. . . ?
She might have stopped writing stories down over the years, but she knows she never stopped telling them, because that’s what adults do too. The childish toys might be replaced by news articles and promotions and relationships, but they’re still all knocked together to create stories that make sense of the world. As a grown-up, she has told fictions about herself and the things that have happened to her. She has sought meaningful constellations in the random sky of her life.
But, like most people, the stories she has told herself have always been subplots or chapters. Until now, she has never really thought about the final conclusion: The End. But now it’s hard not to. The man has shown her photographs of some of the others: the women who came before her. She knows exactly what The End will involve.
Hopefully it will be soon.
The tape is wrapped so tight and high around the lower half of her face that she has to concentrate every single second on breathing through her nose. How long has it been now? Not since the canal – that time is endless and infinite and can’t possibly be counted in human terms – but since she’s seen him? Well over a day. Probably longer, actually. Her body is rigid; her mouth is parched. Perhaps she is finally going to die. And in her delirious state, it is hard to separate reality from the vivid stories she keeps replaying in her head.
What stories, though!
On the first day of her captivity in this place, Peter found her somehow. That was a sweet story. She imagined Peter taking one of the things the man has hurt her with and swinging it into his head, then holding her and telling her it’s all okay now, that she’ll be okay and that nobody will ever hurt her again.
Peter at home with Charlotte, their daughter. At the breakfast table for some reason. Is Mummy home yet? Where is Mummy? Peter looking sad, hardly able to answer. Not yet, sweetie. Soon, hopefully. And then a knock at the door, and it’s the police, and she has been found alive.
In the darkness and silence now, she tells herself one last story.
The world is a river of cause and effect, and one single change, however small, can divert the later course of it an enormous distance. So Amanda imagines herself as that little girl again, staring at her bookshelves – we can always find money for books, Amanda – and sitting cross-legged on the floor in the local library, and then writing her own stories. But this time she changes a single word – a letter, even – in one of them, and in the present she lurches from this hideous dungeon into the body of a subtly different woman. A woman who has lived a gradually divergent life and reached a much better end than this.
If only.
And yet. Lives are stories, and sometimes stories have twists and surprises in them. The world keeps secrets from us until it’s ready to reveal them at exactly the right time.
Here is a secret.
As Amanda squats there in the darkness, lost in the past and imagining a different present, the constraints of the pillory force her to stare in the direction of the front of the garage. She has been kept in here now for nearly a month, and has actually been alone for well over forty-eight hours without food or water. Right now, she thinks she knows exactly how her story is going to end.
But she doesn’t.
Because right now is when the front of the garage explodes loudly and violently in a sudden, shattering burst of brightness and noise.
Two
There are people who think you can tell.
My mother was one. She believed in ghosts. When I was a child, she told me that when something terrible happened in a place, the events imprinted themselves on it, and that a person who was sensitive to such things could pick up on that. That was what a ghost was, she said – a vivid memory, held not by a person but by a place. It was as though the houses and alleys and isolated pathways where bad things occurred ended up dreaming of them over and over again, unable to wake, just as a person might relive some awful event in a nightmare.
I believed it as a boy. As an adult? Not so much.
As a police officer, I’ve turned up at plenty of places where bad things have happened, and the truth is that you often can’t tell. Houses are stone and cement and fixtures and fittings. They don’t know or care. It’s people who know, and it’s people who care – or who don’t.
Places can often be granted power and meaning, but only in hindsight. It’s why the concentration camps feel like hallowed ground, and on a much smaller scale, why people leave flowers tethered to lamp posts after an accident. Some places of horror and sadness are maintained forever: tended like gardens. But then you have t
he houses where atrocities have been committed that are razed to the ground in the years that follow, leaving their streets like mouths with a missing tooth. It’s the tension we feel between the desire to erase and forget and the need to always remember, and that only happens after you know, never before.
But there have been a handful of times when I’ve questioned that. Occasions when I’ve pulled up outside a house and felt like I knew that something was very wrong inside, and been proved right. Confirmation bias, people might say, except I don’t always believe that. In each case, the feeling has been different from simple unease. It’s more a sense of dread throbbing in the back of my skull, like an unpleasant memory of something that hasn’t happened yet. A part of me still believes the things my mother told me, and I’ve always paid attention to that feeling, confirmation bias or not.
And I had it that day, as Emma and I arrived at the house of a man named John Blythe.
There were already three police vans parked by the house when we arrived, but aside from that, there was little to distinguish the property from its neighbours – or indeed from any of the other houses in this drab area of the city. Fifty years ago, this was all waste ground. When I’d transferred here, over ten years earlier now, it had been transformed into a square mile of superficially aspirational suburb, but even back then you could tell the dreams were going nowhere. All the streets here were the same – endless rows of all-but-identical conjoined semis, with nobody caring enough to paper over the cracks that appeared and spread over the years. Some places are just like that. You can build or plant whatever you want in them, but it’s as though there’s something in the ground that stops things growing.
I parked up behind the nearest police van, then folded my arms and leaned on the steering wheel. The house was two up, two down. Because the day was gloomy, it was possible to tell there were lights on in the two upstairs rooms, the bare bulbs visible behind the red curtains. The front door was open. An officer was waiting there, his hands behind his back.