by Steve Mosby
Ferguson tapped on the keyboard, and the image changed. I didn’t shake my head; I didn’t need to. The memories were gone: still present, but out of sight now, the way you might slip a photograph into your wallet and put it in your pocket. On the left-hand side of the screen was a list of women: their names, ages and the dates of their abductions.
1. Rebecca Brown (28), 6 May 1999
2. Mary Fisher (23), 22 November 2000
3. Kimberly Hart (32), 2 October 2001
4. Grace Holmes (41), 15 January 2003
5. Sophie King (16), 7 May 2004
6. Melanie West (29), 30 August 2005
7. Chloe Smith (19), 26 January 2007
8. Anna Parker (27), 12 June 2008
9. Amy Marsh (32), 19 January 2010
10. Ruby Clarke (30), 4 July 2011
11. Olivia Richardson (29), 7 December 2012
12. Carly Jones (31), 22 May 2013
13. Emily Bailey (36), 12 August 2014
14. Angela Walsh (32), 10 June 2015
15. Amanda Cassidy (34), 26 May 2016
On the right-hand side there was a map of the country, complete with numbered markers detailing the sites of the abductions. Even from a cursory glance, the geographical spread was obvious. The Red River Killer had hunted far and wide. My gaze turned to number 8, which was several miles away. Even though numbers 6 and 15 rested exactly on our city, number 8 still remained the closest to me.
Anna Parker.
‘Amanda Cassidy,’ Ferguson said.
For the last minute or so, the room had been entirely silent. Ferguson had let the photographs and names speak for themselves. Although officers might joke amongst themselves, letting off steam, everybody here knew deep down how serious this job was. They might forget that as the investigation progressed, especially with the possibility of glory in front of them, but for now, this was a stark reminder of what we were dealing with.
‘As those of you who were in my earlier team know, Amanda was abducted a little over a month ago. The current word from the hospital is that she’s in a serious but stable condition. It looks like she’s going to make it. There was some speculation at the time about a possible connection to the Red River case, but nothing conclusive. Now, we know for sure.’
I wanted to frown at that, but kept my face impassive. Yes, we almost certainly did know, but if it had been me delivering this part of the briefing, I would have been more cautious.
‘As many of you will also be aware, today we found several sets of remains at the house of this man, John Edward Blythe.’
Ferguson clicked on the keyboard, and the names and the map on the screen were replaced by that now familiar photograph of Blythe. Displayed this large, he looked even more intimidating than before; he seemed to be glowering down at the room. I tried not to imagine how it must have felt for his victims, or to think that this image right here was probably the last thing at least fourteen women had ever seen.
‘The remains were located in the cellar, stored in four plastic barrels. Blythe moved into the property in October 1998, and so I fully expect that the remains we have found will account for the list of victims you’ve just seen. In terms of workload, myself and my earlier team will search the house, evaluate the evidence and begin to make links between Blythe’s life – his work, his activities, his travels – and each of these women. They were taken from different parts of the country at different times of year, and it’s going to require a great deal of co-ordination between ourselves and other forces. But we’ll do it. We’ll make sure that Blythe, when he is caught, is held responsible for everything he did to the women you just saw on the screen up there. Yes?’
There was a murmur of assent from the room. I glanced from face to face. Every man and woman seemed focused and keen. Ferguson turned to Emma and me.
‘Detectives Beck and Turner?’
As usual, Emma took the lead. She moved over to the laptop, while I tried hard to analyse the unease I’d felt over what Ferguson had said a minute earlier. We did know for certain that Blythe was the Red River Killer, didn’t we? Unless there were two equally prolific killers out there, one flying all but impossibly below the radar, then he had to be. But something about it made me uneasy. Maybe it was just a case of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but this investigation was too important to take anything for granted.
‘As DI Ferguson suggested,’ Emma said, ‘the investigation will have two connected but separate areas of focus. The first will be handled by him and his team, and that is a matter of tying the victims to John Edward Blythe. The second – and most important right now – is to locate Blythe himself.’
I glanced at Ferguson to see how he’d taken the barb. He did well; his expression barely changed. If anything, in fact, I thought there might even have been the wryest of smiles there – the look of a man appreciating a skilful move made by an opponent. Both he and Emma had more of an aptitude and an appetite for the jousting than I ever would, and for a moment I felt a brief tinge of jealousy, as though they were united in some way that excluded me.
Emma ran through the basic details with the team: Blythe’s age, height and build, car and registration number, last known movements.
‘This information,’ she said, ‘along with the photograph, will be released to the media shortly. DCI Reeves will be giving the statement. We’ll be appealing for Blythe to turn himself in at the earliest opportunity. Given the circumstances, we don’t feel that’s a likely outcome. At this point, he knows he has nothing to gain from doing so. So it’s likely we’ll be facing either a suicide or a fugitive situation. Until we find him either way, we’re going to be involved in one of the largest manhunts this department has ever taken part in.’
From the atmosphere in the room, everybody knew it.
‘We’ll also be interviewing extensively. We need an idea of where he might have gone. Neighbours. Work colleagues. Friends – assuming he has any. And of course, anybody who comes forward with information. We can expect an avalanche of potential sightings over the time it takes to find him. A couple of you lucky officers will have the job of sifting through those for the tiny percentage that might prove useful. The others will simply have to envy you that task.’
Under different circumstances, there might have been a few good-humoured groans about that. We all knew how monotonous and unrewarding such work was. But today Emma’s words were greeted with silence. Everybody was willing to play their part. And that was good, because it was going to be how we got him. Assuming he stayed on the run, Blythe would only have to make one mistake and we’d have him in custody.
Emma began to divide up the various assignments. Unlike me, she knew the names of all the officers. I did marvel sometimes at her ability to work a room. Really, she was wasted with me.
‘Detective Turner?’ she said finally. ‘Anything to add?’
I stood there quietly for a moment, looking at the room as the room looked back at me. Many of the faces seemed blank; a few were curious. Most of these officers had heard more about me over the years than from me. My reputation for weirdness would certainly have spread, though, and it wouldn’t have been helped today by the fact that I’d spent most of the briefing lost in thought. The screen at the back of the room no longer showed Anna’s photograph, but I could somehow still feel her there behind me, staring out at me from my past, my memories. Demanding something of me. And with the weight of that gaze pressing against my back, I found I had to force myself to speak.
‘Detective Beck has covered most of it,’ I said.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say next. But then, just as the room seemed to be accepting that that had been the sum total of my contribution, I started speaking again.
‘There’s something else, though, and actually, I can’t emphasise this enough. To all of you – not just the teams working under DI Beck and me. There’s going to be a lot of interest in this investigation, and if anybody’s getting too involved, too attached, we n
eed to look at them. We need to look at them closely.’
Emma was watching me, unsure of what I meant or where I was going with this. And I was far from certain myself. Across the room, Ferguson had folded his arms and was looking at me with something entirely different from the vague camaraderie he’d shared with Emma earlier. I didn’t care. It felt important to say it, even if I didn’t understand why. We couldn’t afford to miss anything here. For Anna’s sake. For all of them. For me, even.
A hand went up. The officer was frowning, reading between the lines of what I’d said.
‘Are we not assuming Blythe is our guy then?’
Silence again for a moment.
‘It looks like he is,’ I said eventually. ‘But I don’t want to assume anything just yet.’
Eight
‘So what was that about at the briefing?’ Emma called through from the lounge.
‘Nothing.’
She and I had been living together for over two years now. It was a good arrangement for both of us. When my previous lease had expired, I’d needed somewhere cheap to stay, and Emma had had a spare room she was thinking of renting out anyway. We got on well enough beneath the superficial bickering, and we both knew there was zero chance of any kind of relationship occurring between us, so it hadn’t been a difficult decision. We had one rule: any romance was to take place off the premises. To be honest, while Emma occasionally had her absences, it hadn’t been a rule that had affected me much.
I was not a hoarder. My bedroom was actually the largest in the house, and my meagre belongings fitted comfortably in there, so most of the rest of the house was unequivocally hers, in the sense that it had remained pretty much unaltered by my presence. The spare room downstairs was full of books. Three of the walls were lined with heaving bookshelves, and there were several haphazard piles on the floor, too. Emma was a reader. Her favourite authors had entire shelves to themselves: hardbacks bought on the day of release pressed tightly together, along with the weathered copies she’d searched out from charity shops to complete her collections. That was one of her preferred weekend activities – browsing the aisles and turn stands in second-hand bookshops. She bought new and she bought old, and it seemed she rarely if ever threw any of them away. As little impact as I’d had on the rest of the house, my contribution to this room was precisely nil.
‘Nothing?’ Emma appeared in the doorway carrying two glasses of white wine. ‘I don’t believe you.’
I shrugged. ‘Just a gut feeling.’
‘Ferguson didn’t like it, you know.’
‘Ferguson doesn’t like anything.’
‘He likes me. But then who wouldn’t? Here.’
‘Thanks.’ I took the wine, then turned back to the bookshelves. ‘I’m just worried there might be something we’re missing. Pinning everything on Blythe. Not looking for other possible angles.’
‘Putting all our eggs in one barrel? No, wait, that’s too much even for me.’
I shrugged again. ‘It’s probably nothing. You know what I’m like.’
‘Yes. A source of constant irritation and sorrow.’
‘But you’d be lost without me.’
‘No, I’d be DCI without you.’
‘Maybe you will be soon anyway, if we play our cards right with this one.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘You don’t care about that at all, do you? Your reputation, I mean. How you come across.’
‘No, not really.’
‘Probably a good thing, considering.’ It was a joke, but for a moment it seemed like she was going to expand on the topic. Instead, she came and stood next to me. ‘What are you doing, anyway?’
‘Admiring your library.’
‘Glorious, isn’t it. Anything take your fancy?’
‘Not really, no.’ I looked around. Most of the books were crime thrillers or horror. ‘I’m genuinely not sure why you like this kind of stuff. You live the reality of it all day, and then you spend your evenings reading deeply unpleasant things that people have made up about it.’
‘Escapism.’
‘Exploitation.’
‘Ha! You’re way too serious sometimes. You do know that, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘While I don’t care, I am aware of my reputation and how I come across.’
I’d meant what I’d said, though. In much the same way the newspapers amped up the gory details to sell copies, these books were filled with violence as entertainment, and it all felt the same. Dead women shifting units.
‘I like the fact that at the end of them the bad guy gets caught,’ Emma said. ‘Doesn’t always happen like that in the real world, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t. Although it will with this one.’
‘Yes. It will.’
‘Anyway.’ I turned away from the shelves. ‘I’m too serious. I know that. Maybe I’ll give one of them a try some day. See if it surprises me.’
‘I’ll be happy to guide you in the right direction.’
‘And I’ll be happy to be guided.’
I sipped the wine. It was ice cold, and exactly what I needed right now. Only one tonight, though; we remained on call. If Blythe was located, we needed to be on the move.
‘In the meantime,’ I said, ‘I think I’ve got enough reading material for tonight.’
The first letter from the Red River Killer was received by police on 28 July 1999. In common with the correspondence that followed, it was printed on one side of a single sheet of generic white paper, double-spaced, in twelve-point Arial font.
Whoever sent it had been careful about covering their tracks. No DNA evidence or prints were recovered from either the letter or the envelope it was sent in – or indeed from any of the ones that followed. It was sent from a postbox close to the scene of Rebecca Brown’s abduction, and the ones that followed were always posted similarly from the town from which the victim had been taken.
When it was initially received, the first letter was assumed to have been sent by a crank. That was an understandable response; in my experience, even the smallest murder investigation attracts them. You get false confessions from lonely people looking for attention, and you also get more malicious communication from people who want to play games. If you’re not careful, such correspondence can derail an investigation and send it spiralling off in an entirely wrong direction. It can cost lives. Although the letters were casually investigated, it would be several years – and victims – before their authenticity was finally corroborated and the contents taken seriously.
There were scans of all of them in the case file. While Emma curled up at the other end of the settee, reading whatever battered old paperback she was currently invested in, I logged into the department system on my tablet and loaded up the first of them.
I want to tell you a story about a girl named REBECCA. Rebecca was a BEAUTIFUL girl once, with long brown hair. She also had the most GORGEOUS eyes you will have ever seen. She cycled here and there and everywhere and her legs were very tanned and toned as a result of this. She was a very pretty girl indeed back then and was never wanting for male attention, which she encouraged and enjoyed. Despite being married, she had MANY lovers and her husband never knew.
She was cycling when she met me along that lonely towpath and it is true that I was later also to become her LOVER and that she would later also come to encourage and enjoy that. She stayed with me for two months and I want you to know that I was the last thing she ever saw and that she was BEAUTIFUL when she was dying and that her eyes remained GORGEOUS as they emptied. She is alas not so pretty now but I will take good care of her remains although the best of her is of course gone and washed away in the RED RIVER.
Staring at it now, I felt like the words were crawling on the screen. With the benefit of hindsight, the letter made for disturbing reading, but it was understandable that it hadn’t been taken entirely seriously at first. Certain information about the disappearance of Rebecca Brown would have been circulating in th
e media at the time, including photographs, and there was nothing in this letter that suggested the person who had written it had done anything more than watch the news and read the local papers.
Washed away in the RED RIVER. . .
That final sentence had eventually given our killer his special name, as each of the letters that followed made some reference to the term. Each also began in the same way: I want to tell you a story. . .
The letters had been taken far more seriously after the abduction of Melanie West in 2005. I turned my attention now to that sixth letter, which had arrived a month after her disappearance.
I want to tell you a story about a girl named MELANIE. Melanie was very BEAUTIFUL but not in a conventionally attractive way and so she had to settle for marrying a man who was UNWORTHY of her and did TERRIBLE things to her. But she had an inner light that shone through her skin and everybody agreed she was very kind and gentle. She liked to walk and it was while walking home by the side of that canal that she met me, a far more worthy man, and now I can appreciate that glorious light AS I WISH.
Melanie remains with me still but she will know the RED RIVER soon just as she secretly already knows it in her heart. I have taken good care of her for as long as I can and I will keep that special light aglow until the waters finally wash it to darkness. I return AN ITEM that she no longer needs, for in the eyes of the world she must now be seen as DIVORCED.
I tapped the screen, which changed to show a photograph of the item that had been returned with the letter: Melanie West’s wedding ring, which she had been wearing when she went missing. A note in the file confirmed that her husband had identified it. Although no further tokens were received with subsequent letters, it was enough to confirm to investigators that the correspondence was genuine.
Why send the wedding ring?
Had Melanie West meant more to Blythe than the others? Or was it just another dig at the relatives? The allegation that Rebecca Brown had had affairs, for example, had never been substantiated; her husband denied it, and there was no evidence to suggest it was true. People have secrets, of course, but I thought the most likely explanation was a banal form of sadism: a little extra detail that would hurt the people left behind even more. Or perhaps he had sent the ring because he was worried the letters weren’t being taken seriously, and that the barbs he included in them weren’t getting through to the families and sinking in. . .