by Steve Mosby
‘The name had leaked to the press, sir. They had it already.’ ‘And how did that happen?’
‘I don’t know, sir. We arrived on the scene blind.’
Reeves let the silence pan out for a moment and then turned to me.
‘What about you, Boy Wonder? Anything to say?’
‘Not really, sir.’
‘ “Not really, sir”?’
Emma leaned forward.
‘It was Detective Turner who made the connection, sir. By the time we got outside, it was too late.’
‘I’ve seen photos from that second room in the cellar, Detective. I imagine it wasn’t a particularly difficult connection to make.’
This was the worst part of the job – the jostling and the politics – and I knew there would be more to come. This was only the beginning. Assuming the reports on the screen were correct, we were facing an investigation on a huge scale, taking in numerous forces across the country, and I already knew only too well what would happen. The victims would become less and less important, and the man behind their abductions and murders would be reduced to the status of a trophy. Hundreds of officers at every level would be squabbling for authority over the case: fighting to lead; straining for credit; ruthlessly apportioning blame for any mistake made along the way. The capture of John Blythe was a huge piece of pie, and everyone involved was going to want the biggest slice they could get.
Normally, none of that would have mattered to me. Under different circumstances I’d never have been bothered enough to fight for my piece. I’d have been happy enough just knowing that the man responsible had been caught. And perhaps that remained true here in a sense, in that it wasn’t the idea of taking credit that made it so important to me. Not exactly, anyway.
I slid a photograph across the desk.
‘John Edward Blythe,’ I said.
Reeves stared at me. I resisted the urge to stare back – to make this into some kind of competition. If he wanted to remove Emma and me from the investigation, then he would, and I wasn’t going to beg. In fact, I figured the best way to win this game was to bypass it altogether and refuse to play. So I just waited as he stared at me. After a moment, he picked up the photo and stared at that instead.
It was a head shot. Blythe had shoulder-length dark hair, and a hard face. There was something bad in his eyes – or maybe something missing, as though the concept of other people being real didn’t quite make sense to him. There was danger there, even in a still image. If you’d accidentally met his gaze in a pub, you’d have looked away quickly.
Reeves slid the photo back across the desk.
‘He looks utterly charming.’
‘Blythe is forty-two years old,’ I said. ‘He’s five foot ten, and apparently quite heavily built. Dark brown hair, worn as you’ve seen. Blue eyes. Beyond his size, he doesn’t appear to have any distinguishing features. He moved to his present address in late 1998.’
‘He works as a mechanic?’
‘Yes, sir. A garage just a couple of miles from his house. According to his boss, he’s very good at his job. One of the things he said to the officers was that Blythe “enjoys taking things apart”.’
‘Jesus. That’ll be one for the tabloids, won’t it? They’ll love that.’
Reeves leaned back and ran his hands over his hair. In his short-sleeved shirt, the biceps on his thin arms stood out. He seemed a little less angry now, or at least, angry at something other than me. Probably thinking about the press coverage. With a case like this, the surrounding media scrum would equal the jostling amongst the police, if not surpass it. The articles would pile up, the focus and emphasis twisting back and forth, and the press would turn on us quickly if we failed to deliver an arrest. That was always how the story unfolded.
And the truth was that, right now, none of us knew how far away an arrest might be. When officers had arrived at the garage Blythe worked at, the owner had informed them that he was on annual leave. He hadn’t been in work since the week before. Had the Red River Killer been identified, as the press were saying? Most likely yes, he had.
The problem was that we had no idea where he was.
‘We’re already running checks,’ Emma said. ‘Blythe’s credit cards and so on. Last withdrawal was for two hundred pounds, taken from a local cashpoint on Sunday. There’s no record of any booked travel abroad. His name’s not listed on any flights. I think the next step—’
‘Getting a bit ahead of yourself, aren’t you, Detective Beck?’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s not your case.’
Emma said nothing, but I could feel her bristling. She was considerably more ambitious than I was, and she knew what this case represented. It was as important to her as it was to me, albeit for different reasons.
Finally Ferguson came to life beside me. He had spent most of the meeting with his big arms folded across his belly. The abduction of Amanda Cassidy had been his investigation, but Emma and I had found the bodies, which made this unknown territory in terms of who would have primacy on the expanded case. I figured he’d be more than ready to plant a flag. And for once, I decided I would be ready to try tearing it down.
Reeves didn’t give either of us an immediate chance.
‘Tell me, Detectives Turner and Beck, do you think John Blythe is enjoying his holiday?’
‘I literally have no idea, sir,’ Emma said.
Reeves nodded to himself. ‘I imagine perhaps he is. After all, a man’s got to unwind, hasn’t he? But I suspect that enjoyment will shortly cease, assuming it hasn’t already. And while I’d dearly love for that to be because he’s unexpectedly taken into custody, I think it’s far more likely right now that it will be the result of him seeing his house on the news.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And we have to ask ourselves, don’t we, what will happen then? Will he run? If so, where? We don’t know where, of course, because you have no idea where he is. Or indeed, how fast he can run. Perhaps he’ll kill himself. Some of them do.’
I shook my head.
‘You don’t think so, Detective Turner?’
‘Blythe’s not the suicidal type, sir. It would make life easier for us, but you don’t do what he’s got away with for nearly twenty years and then just turn the knife on yourself. Not unless you have to. Whether he’ll allow himself to be taken alive is a different matter. But I think he’ll ride it out for as long as he can.’
‘Oh yes? And what makes you think you know him so well?’
I shrugged. There was no way of knowing for sure, but it was what I thought. Reeves appraised me for a few silent moments. I imagined my reputation for gut feelings had drifted far enough up for him to be aware of it, and he was a man who would hold such notions in contempt.
I picked up the photo of Blythe and held it up.
‘For the record, whoever’s case it is, I think we should get this out to the media as soon as possible. Along with his name. His house is already all over the news, so we’ve lost any chance of keeping him from finding out that he’s been identified.’
‘Unless he’s camping in the wilderness somewhere.’
‘No harm done if so. With a name and a photograph in the public domain, we’ve got a much better chance of someone coming forward. Someone must have seen him. So I suggest we go all out.’
Reeves stared at me again, considering it. At only a few hours into such a potentially controversial investigation, it was early to release the name and a photograph of a suspect, but time was pressing. Blythe wasn’t going to kill himself, I was sure of that. Which meant we needed to find him quickly.
‘All right,’ Reeves said finally. ‘Let’s get that done.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And now let’s talk ownership.’ He smiled thinly at that. I could tell he was relishing being the one to close a two-decade-old high-profile case. ‘DI Ferguson is nominal lead. But you two are on it as well. Can you all play nicely together?’
I felt a flood of relief.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Ferguson said. ‘But the house is where Amanda was found, and that was my case. I‘d like to handle that angle. The searches and so on.’
It might have seemed an odd choice – no obvious glory there – but I understood why he wanted it. Blythe was the prize and the hunt for him was the story, but the press were focused on his house right now. If Ferguson could show himself around there as lead, he’d end up on camera, get himself quoted a little. He’d become the name. And when Blythe was found, it wouldn’t matter to the media who’d done the hard work behind the scenes; there’d already be a face attached to the case in the public’s mind.
That probably mattered a little to Emma. It didn’t matter to me at all.
‘Fine by me,’ I said.
‘Sort it out amongst yourselves.’ Reeves leaned back. ‘Keep me updated on anything and everything.’
‘Yes, sir.’
And as we stood up and left his office, I finally allowed myself to think about my connection to the case. To think about her. Because while it shouldn’t have mattered who took Blythe down, it did. It really did.
And I’m in the room, I thought.
I am in that room.
Five
The woods around John Blythe’s small campsite are already growing dark.
It’s nowhere near evening yet. That’s just the way it is here. The trees are so overgrown that little sunlight reaches ground level. The surrounding undergrowth is thick with shadow. Whenever he camps here, whatever the time of day, it always feels like dusk, and Blythe likes that. After night falls, and it becomes pitch black instead, he likes that even better.
Breathing in deeply now, he can smell the trees and the fire and the meat cooking. It’s reassuring; he always feels at home out here, surrounded by nature. There’s something comforting about coming back after the things he does. He spent so much time in the wilds as a child that it feels warm and welcoming when he returns. It’s like an embrace. While he doesn’t believe in ghosts – he would have seen one by now, surely – he finds it easy to imagine a smaller version of himself sitting cross-legged in this exact spot, by a much older fire, sensing in turn the presence of the man he would eventually become. Stupid, yes, but the connection feels real. Maybe that’s why he was always at peace here all those years ago, and why it feels so good returning as an adult. Cotton threading together, two points in time.
The woman will be dead by now, he thinks.
Probably, anyway. Blythe has never been present when the women have died, so he has no idea how long it takes. No real idea of the cause, either. He’s done with them by then, so what does it matter? They die, and there’s no need to think any more deeply about it than that. At the end of his trip, he will return home and flick on the light in the garage, to be met with the familiar scene, silent and still.
In one of the homes he stayed in as a child, he kept a rat as a pet. The cage was in the dark basement, and it would sometimes be a week or more before he remembered to go down there and feed it. Whenever he opened the door, he’d hear it scrabbling. Week after week – until the day he heard nothing. He remembered the emptiness in the cool air as he descended the stairs and found the thing dead, small and curled up in the corner. It is no different with the women.
He carefully pokes the fire with a stick, turning over a couple of scratchy white coals. It’s burning well – small and hot and bright; warm on his face – and it makes the woods around seem even darker. From one side he can hear the hiss of the small gas burner and the water boiling, the peeled potatoes rolling and banging against the sides of the pan. The rabbit he snared earlier, skinned and gutted and tied, is on a spit above the flames. He puts the stick down and turns it now. Fat drips into the fire with a sizzle. The rabbit looks and smells ready. Blythe tests the potatoes and decides they’re soft enough to eat, so he retrieves a metal plate from the rucksack beside him. With his meal assembled, he sets about separating the rabbit meat from the bones and the stringy tendons, all of it steaming in the cool air.
As he eats, he turns on his laptop. There’s no real reason, but he has a Wi-Fi device with him and he likes to look at certain things. By default, the browser opens on Yahoo, so he sees the news headlines there immediately. The top three are all about him.
AMANDA CASSIDY FOUND ALIVE.
RED RIVER KILLER IDENTIFIED?
POLICE CONFIRM HUMAN REMAINS FOUND AT ‘HOUSE OF HORRORS’.
The photograph at the top of the web page is of his house.
Blythe continues to eat just as before, but as he does so, he clicks on the links, reading each article blankly and dispassionately. Then he loads up a number of other news websites and reads the reports there too, attempting to put together a picture of exactly what is happening.
After he’s finished the food, he puts the plate on the ground beside him. The inedible parts of the rabbit are already beginning to congeal. He dabs his mouth with a paper napkin, then wipes his fingers. Aside from the occasional crackle of the fire, the world is silent.
They have found him.
From the reports, it appears to have been down to sheer luck. That is unfair on one level, but there is also some consolation to be had there. He has always been very careful, and he would be annoyed with himself if he’d made a mistake. But he hasn’t. It was an accident. So there is that, at least.
He takes a long, deep breath.
It is not to calm himself. As always, he feels no real panic. In general, he feels little at all. His situation has changed, that is what it comes down to, and this is just a new scenario to understand and react to. It requires a shifting of perspective and attitude. That’s all. So he sits there quietly for a time and lets the subconscious machinery of his mind turn developments over and work out what to do next.
Actually, there is a little anger. Amanda Cassidy should not be alive. She should not be in hospital. She should be there in his garage, her body waiting quietly for his return. The others should be there too. They belong to him, after all, and the police are currently in the process of stealing them from him, which is not right. There is a genuine sense of loss – the sensation that he is a victim of theft – but none of these emotions are useful right now, so he pretends he is at work or in public, and the emotions go away quickly. He needs to concentrate on what is important.
What to do next.
The answer is that it depends. Blythe reads through various online reports again. What he needs to know is what the police know – but of course, the news will be incomplete; they will not release everything. They will assume that he will see all of this, and they’ll want to keep him in the dark as much as possible. Hunt him like an animal rather than a man. Not let him know how many paces behind him they truly are.
So: assume they know more than they say.
Blythe thinks carefully. Since his arrival in the area, he’s more or less avoided human contact altogether, but he paid cash at a petrol station a couple of days earlier, filling up the jeep and buying some supplies, and it is possible the attendant there will remember him.
So: assume that he will.
The police will therefore soon be aware of his general location, and while he has been alone at this campsite the whole time, it is reasonably well known locally. As he was buying camping supplies, that means it will be searched, and probably sooner rather than later. Therefore he has to move on immediately.
Where to?
The village itself is obviously out of the question. There are too many people there, several of whom might have recognised him even before his name and photograph appeared on the news. Ultimately, he needs to get out of this whole area, but they will be watching for the jeep on the roads. Their cameras can be programmed to search for it. So that’s already too much of a risk. And yet he can’t escape easily on foot.
All of which naturally leads to heading north for the moment: towards the deeper woods and the mountains. He spent most of his childhood living half wil
d in this particular area. He knows the land here well, and he can camp and hunt and live off it for a time. As long as necessary, perhaps.
It would be good if the police didn’t know exactly where he is heading, of course. The local officers may well know the land as well as he does, even if they’re soft and unaccustomed to it, and not as capable, so he should give them as little as possible to go on. He wants to keep them in the dark. Because he’s good in the dark. It feels natural to him. Always has.
Slowly Blythe clambers to his feet.
He clears the site as much as he can, packing only the necessities: knife, tent, clothes, cooking equipment, some basic supplies. He needs to travel fast, which means light. Is there time to collect all his snares from the surrounding woods? No, but he can always make more. He kicks over the remains of the fire and scatters what’s left of the rabbit amongst the trees.
The jeep is a problem, though. Parked to one side of the small site, it’s too large to manoeuvre into the trees out of sight, and he can’t risk taking it out on the roads. There is little point in removing the registration plates; the act will buy him less time than it takes to perform.
The last thing he packs is the laptop and Wi-Fi device. He will have no means of charging them now, and he’s momentarily annoyed with himself for leaving them both active while he’s been busy. That’s a mistake. He can’t afford to make mistakes.
He allows a little of the anger to surface as he logs into his email.
Very soon he will have the shadow of a huge police investigation falling over him, and he has no doubt they will throw the full weight of their formidable resources at him. So it is true that he now has some serious disadvantages to work with. Fie has certain assets of his own, though. His ability to live off the land is one. But far more important is something the police will be entirely unaware of.
The police don’t know about the Worm.
Blythe writes the email quickly. If it comes across as a threat, that is fine, because it is. He can’t escape from this area on foot, which means he needs help. And so the Worm is going to help him, whether he likes it or not.