by Steve Mosby
‘What are you looking at?’
Emma had put the paperback down, splayed open on the arm of the settee, and was staring at me curiously.
‘Just the case file.’
‘You seem completely lost.’
‘Do I? I’m sorry.’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t apologise. It was just strange. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody look so absorbed in something. Even you.’
‘I’m reading the Red River letters.
Thinking about them.’ ‘Thinking what about them?’
For a moment, I couldn’t answer. The truth was that I was actually building up to something – steeling myself to read the one piece of correspondence that mattered to me the most, and procrastinating as I did so. Putting the moment off. I’d read that eighth letter before, of course – Anna’s letter – and I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do so again now, except that it felt important in some way. A kind of pilgrimage, perhaps. I was in the room, after all, and Anna was the reason I needed to be. It pained me that I couldn’t explain any of that to Emma, but it was my burden to shoulder.
There was more to it, however, than simply dwelling on the past. Something about the letters actually was bothering me. They didn’t seem to fit somehow. I was struggling to articulate what it was when Emma sighed, perhaps reading at least some of my thoughts.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘you know where we stand. Ferguson made his play. He’s handling that side of things. Let him worry about the letters, the victims, tying them to Blythe. All that. It’s our job just to find him. And if there was anything in those letters that would help us, it would have been spotted long ago. Let’s not go treading on toes.’
‘I think you secretly get a kick out of treading on toes.’
‘Only when those toes are in the way. And they’re in the right direction.’
‘Ferguson did say we all had to become experts on the case.’
‘Yes, very good.’ Emma shook her head. ’I just have this strange feeling that I’m going to have to watch you on this case, Will. Even more than usual.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You and your feelings.’
‘Hmmm. Well played, I suppose.’
She didn’t sound remotely convinced, but she picked up her book again anyway, and I turned my attention back to the tablet. Both of us, in our own ways, immersed in stories of horror.
But instead of heading straight back into the case file, I opened my email and read the message that was there.
From: [email protected]
Will, you must have seen the news. You must know what’s happened. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to think or feel. And I’m sorry for everything, and I really wish you’d get in touch with me. I’m so sorry. I miss you, you know? You were my best friend, and it’s been so long since we’ve spoken, and I could really do with getting back in touch with you again right now.
I wonder, do you ever think about that day on the Bridge? I don’t know if you even remember, but one day we cycled there and I thought I saw a man. A man with a sad face. But there was nobody there really. Do you ever think about him? I think about him all the time. I think about you all the time too, believe it or not, and I’m so sorry we don’t speak any more. Please talk to me.
I stared at the email for a long time, reading it through over and over again. It was impossible to know what I felt in response. Anger? Guilt? I’d done my best to forget about Rob. I hadn’t even known my former friend still had my email address. I should have changed it.
You were my best friend.
I’m so sorry.
For a few moments, my fingertip hovered over the reply button. I almost pressed it. But what was there to say after all this time? And what would be the point?
Please talk to me.
It was far too late for that.
I’m sorry too, Rob. I moved my finger away from the screen. But I’ve not got time to think about you right now.
Beside me, Emma shifted on the settee, and out of instinct I closed the email down. But she was only adjusting her legs. I opened the case file again and took a deep mental breath, then clicked through the various screens until I found the letter I wanted to read. The emotions threatened to overwhelm me, but I forced them down, clicked on the link and began to read.
Immediately, the memories came flooding back. I might have been a teenager again, as deeply in love as it felt anyone could ever possibly be. The sadness followed swiftly after.
I want to tell you a story about a girl named ANNA. . .
Nine
‘Good evening. Thank you all for coming.’
The young woman onstage had a microphone, but the volume was turned so far down that it barely made a difference. Sitting two rows from the back of the room, Jeremy Townsend thought that was probably deliberate. He had been to many meetings like this over the years. Everyone spoke softly at them, as though attempting not to bruise the other people present. The bond they all shared demanded quiet. These gatherings were more like church congregations than support groups.
‘My name’s Mary Cooper. I organise this group, along with my brother, Ben. I see a few familiar faces in the crowd tonight, but also some people I think are attending for the first time.’
As she spoke, her gaze moved around the room. It landed on Townsend and he felt a prickle of alarm. He was tall and angular, and the rows of seats were so narrow that he had to sit perched carefully, in a way that hurt his back. He imagined he looked as awkward and uncomfortable as he felt. Cooper’s gaze seemed to linger on him. Was he going to be recognised? Singled out as an interloper and an impostor?
You have every right to be here, he told himself.
That wasn’t true, though. It wasn’t true at all.
But then Mary Cooper looked elsewhere.
‘I want any newcomers to feel welcome,’ she said. ‘There is never pressure on anybody to take the stage here. But before we begin, I want to explain a little about who we are and what we do here.’
Relax, Townsend thought. It was foolish to worry. He had been to enough of these meetings by now to know that nobody was ever forced to speak. That would go against the support they endeavoured to provide. At places like this, you were always allowed to talk in your own time, or to not talk at all.
The meeting this evening was being held in the hall of a local primary school. It was a cavernous, echoing space. The floor was made of polished wood, and the bare brick walls were lined with folded-away climbing frames and ropes tethered by metal hoops. A pile of faded blue crash mats rested in the corner beside the stage. Over the years, Townsend had become used to places like these. School halls. Churches. Rooms in buildings that had more regular uses during the day, but which shifted their purpose come night-time. They might house a community meeting, or a local film society, or a children’s karate class. Sometimes, like tonight, they played host to support groups.
Wherever he was in the country, though, the people who attended always seemed familiar, like the same cast of actors assembling in different locations. There were couples leaning together for comfort, their fingers intertwined; single people staring down at something invisible in their laps; the young and the old. And yet while they were all separate individuals, they were also all the same: lost souls; souls who had lost. Grief, Townsend had read once, was love without a home. It was grief that had drawn these people here, and it defined them far more strongly than any physical characteristic.
Townsend was only interested in one of them, and he could feel the man in the row behind him now, close enough to touch if he were to turn around and reach out. Tom Clarke had arrived so late that Townsend had been worried he might not show up at all. That would have been annoying, as he’d travelled a long way for this. But a minute before Mary Cooper took the stage, he felt a tingle on the back of his neck, turned slightly and saw him there.
He had been forcing himself not to turn around ever since.
On stage, Cooper took a deep breath.
‘We founded this group because, several years ago now, Ben and I lost touch with our father.’
As she spoke, Townsend listened to the beats of her story play out. The details and characters were as familiar as the people here. There was the alcoholic father, the redundancy, the divorce. As adults, Cooper and her brother had discovered their father was living rough, because he had been too ashamed to seek help and then too proud to accept it when it was offered. He continued to live rough on the streets, and then, some time later, he disappeared.
All familiar. But then that was what stories did. They played out over and over again, in different places and at different times. The actors changed but the roles remained. Townsend had been a writer once. He wasn’t any longer – not properly, anyway – but he still knew how to listen carefully enough to hear the refrains repeating in the world around him.
‘To give an update,’ Cooper said, running a hand through her hair, ‘there’s no news. We continue to look, of course. We’ve done some travelling this week. It seems impossible that our father can have just vanished, but that’s exactly how it feels. Nothing changes. Except that we miss him more every day.’
More every day.
Townsend felt the pit begin to open up inside himself.
That’s exactly what happens.
Over the following hour, members of the audience took their turn on the stage, each quietly telling their own story. As well as a congregation, the room reminded Townsend of a group of townsfolk meeting to discuss the existence of a monster nobody else would believe in – and in a sense, he supposed, that was exactly what they were. Everybody had lost someone, but for most people that loss was attached to a single moment, or perhaps a short string of them. There might be a car accident, a hospital stay, a week of slow deterioration – and then it was over. However devastating and horrible death was, the fact of it was finite. But everyone present here tonight was missing someone, and that was an entirely different thing. Here there were men and women whose friends, lovers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters had not died but disappeared. And there was no closure there. Missing was not a single moment. It was never finite.
A disappearance raised a hundred ongoing questions. Was the loved one alive somewhere? What kind of life were they living if so? Where might they be? In the absence of a final explanation, the possibilities were limitless. As a storyteller, Townsend imagined it as a book with empty pages at the end. You could allow your mind to go in any direction and complete the story in any way you wished, but you’d never know for sure if your ending was a deviation from reality or a mirror of it. Dead and not dead; happy and unhappy. The missing existed in all states simultaneously, because you lacked the knowledge to narrow the possibilities down to a single definitive narrative.
As he listened, he felt the ache inside him widening. It was always there, but much of the time he managed to suppress it so it was just a background throb of pain and guilt. But it flared now, profound and hollow, an absence that carved him from the inside out. Loss and guilt. The two always stayed close together, like a dog and its owner, even if it was never clear to him which was which. He fought them with reason now. There was no taking back what he’d done. There never could be, however much he might want to.
The hour was nearly over before Tom Clarke took his turn to speak. Clarke was big and burly, with long, bedraggled hair. In his jeans and checked shirt, he looked like a trucker. Townsend recognised him well enough from the media coverage five years ago, but the intervening years had not been kind to him. Clarke looked weary and lost as he moved slowly to the stage, and when he spoke, his voice seemed too small for his frame.
‘Hi, everyone. I think most of you know me by now, but for those who don’t, I’m Tom. Several years ago my wife – my Ruby – went missing.’
Several years ago.
At meeting after meeting, Townsend had heard variations of that same phrase. It was minimising: the way you’d talk about something so insignificant that it was almost hard to remember. Or something so horrific that it had to be pushed away and kept at a distance.
‘Nobody knows exactly what happened to Ruby. Not for sure, anyway.’ Clarke took a deep breath. ‘But it seems fairly clear now that a man took her. She was walking home one night. She always took the same route. I never worried; there were usually lots of people around. It should have been safe. But it wasn’t, not that evening. She never made it home. It was as though she just vanished.’
Townsend found himself nodding at that. It was almost as though the man who had taken Ruby Clarke possessed supernatural powers: as though he could appear suddenly from nowhere, wrap his arms around a victim, and then blink away again without anyone seeing him.
‘Not long afterwards,’ Clarke continued, ‘the police received a letter from the man who claimed to have taken her. They let me read it. It was. . . awful. So I suppose I’m not like many of you here, because I think I do know what happened to my wife. And I believe that she’s at peace now. But at the same time, I don’t know for sure.’ He pressed his fist against his chest. ‘Not in here. And I won’t know for certain until she’s found – if she ever is. So as stupid as it sounds, even with what I know deep down, I don’t give up hope.’
Clarke looked around the room helplessly.
‘Because you should never give up hope,’ he said.
And this time, the ache inside was much harder for Townsend to suppress.
No, he thought emptily. You should never give up hope.
Despite travelling all this way to see him, Townsend hadn’t been intending to talk to Clarke in person.
Which of course begged the question: why did he come to these things at all? He always struggled to answer that for himself. Why did he drive miles and miles to sit in an audience, listening, waiting for one specific person to take the stage and share their particular loss? One explanation was that a part of him felt an urge to see the relatives of the other victims with his own eyes: to take them in and hear them speak. When he was a writer, he had always been thorough in his research. He never relied on the internet, instead getting out into the world, visiting places and talking to people. So perhaps it was partly just some leftover instinct from his old life.
But it wasn’t only that.
There was a question he needed to know the answer to. On the rare occasions when he had spoken to one of the other relatives directly, he had never asked it out loud. To do so would mean revealing who he was and what he had done, which was impossible. But the truth was also that he had never needed to ask. The answer had always been obvious in their eyes; he didn’t need to hear it out loud. And he couldn’t bear the thought that, even in a room like this, where he should feel kinship, he was still utterly alone.
Tonight, however, when the meeting was over, Townsend hovered close to the door as people drifted slowly past him out into the night. Clarke had moved over to a table where coffee was set out in polystyrene cups. Townsend watched the man retrieve a hip flask from his coat pocket and top one of them up. If anybody noticed, nobody seemed inclined to say anything. Clarke downed the coffee in one, then picked a second and repeated the process with the flask.
And despite everything, Townsend found himself walking over.
Up close, he could smell Clarke. Not just the whisky in the coffee, but the wild smell of the man himself. His long hair was slick with sweat, and there was a sheen of dampness on his cheeks. He looked desperately unhealthy.
‘Excuse me.’ Townsend smiled awkwardly. ‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to say. . . I suppose that I was really moved by what you said on stage. I’m really very sorry.’
Clarke didn’t look at him. ‘Cheers.’
‘What happened. . . it must have been incredibly hard for you.’
‘Harder for her, I imagine.’ Clarke laughed slightly at that, then shook his head: a gesture of contempt directed towards himself.
This is a mistake, Townsend thought. He was about to step away when Clarke turned
to face him. His eyes were red and bleary, and Townsend wondered whether the man had been sipping from that flask all night.
‘You didn’t speak tonight, did you?’ Clarke said.
‘No.’
‘And I haven’t seen you around here before, have I?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it can be hard the first time.’ Clarke shrugged, then drained his drink. ‘But it’s supposed to help, letting it out. That’s what they say, anyway. Bullshit, of course. Nothing helps. Not when you know they’re dead. Not when you know what they went through.’
Be careful, Townsend reminded himself. Be very careful what you say next.
‘I lost my wife too,’ he said. ‘Different circumstances, but. . . well, not so very different really.’
He swallowed. Why had he said that? Despite the alcohol, Clarke suddenly looked uncertain.
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Townsend said. ‘Sort of. You said the man responsible wrote a letter to the police?’
Clarke nodded. His gaze was intense and suspicious now, and the air between the two of them had become electric. Townsend wondered what Clarke saw when he looked at him. Because he too appeared much older than he really was. His own loss and the guilt over what he’d done had added years to him.
And in that moment, the question came out.
‘Did he ever. . . write anything else to you?’
Immediately the answer was obvious in Clarke’s expression. The question had baffled him.