by Steve Mosby
The last time I saw her – except not quite. We lived in a small village, after all, with only a handful of pubs and places to socialise, so I would sometimes catch sight of her on the other side of one room or another, and I’d always leave when I did. I couldn’t bear to see her happy. I couldn’t bear to see her at all. And so we became ghosts to each other, only ever half glimpsed from the corners of our eyes, gone when we turned to look properly. There was no dissection of what went wrong. There was never a need.
People change, of course. Feelings soften and bruises fade. I like to think that if I had bumped into Anna now, it would have been okay. We might have gone for a drink and laughed, and I might even have begun to look at all those blacked-out memories and uncross a few of them. But it never happened, and after 2008, it never could. So I hadn’t seen her after that afternoon in the train station.
Today would be the first time.
In the basement, Emma and I passed the usual rooms.
There were several suites down here: all steel and porcelain, with square metal doors in the walls like ovens, and the pungent smell of antiseptic in the air. The bodies would be moved into those later today. But due to the scale of the investigation, it had been forced to begin elsewhere: the chief pathologist, Chris Dale, had arranged for a larger room to be used to house the barrels that had been removed from John Blythe’s cellar.
There was a police guard waiting for us by the door at the end of the corridor. As we showed our IDs, I looked at the closed door behind him. There was a crawling sensation in the back of my head. My heart was beating quicker now.
‘Detective Beck, Detective Turner,’ Emma said. ‘Is the good doctor in?’
The officer grunted. ‘Dale is, if that’s who you mean, ma’am.’
Emma nodded, with some degree of sympathy. Chris Dale was not particularly well liked by most people. He had a reputation for being blunt and sarcastic, and was allegedly none too forgiving of the staff who worked under him. He approached his interactions with the police in much the same spirit.
The officer opened the door for us, and Emma stepped into the room. I hesitated before I followed. It felt a little like moving forward into a strong wind, except it was a maelstrom of emotion and memory pushing back at me.
And then I stopped.
The scene before us was so incongruous that it was initially hard to make sense of. The autopsies I’d attended before had all been single victims, laid out on a gurney. What lay in front of us now was more reminiscent of something you’d expect to see in a war zone, where a field hospital had been hurriedly erected to deal with the bodies unearthed from some mass burial.
The room was much larger than I’d been expecting: long and wide, the floor almost entirely covered with polythene sheeting. The four barrels recovered from Blythe’s basement were lined up at intervals close to one wall. The tops had been removed, and the contents were now laid out carefully on further sheets in front of them. There were metal grilles whirring close to the ceiling, but the smell was so strong that for a second I might have been back in Blythe’s cellar.
‘Shit,’ Emma whispered.
I nodded, my gaze moving here and there, trying to take it all in.
‘No,’ Emma said. ‘I mean Ferguson’s here.’
I looked over. There were a number of people working in the room: men and women dressed in white protective clothing, moving solemnly around, some taking photographs, some crouched down measuring remains and even gently moving parts of them. Ferguson was at the far end, standing with Chris Dale.
For the moment, neither of them had noticed us.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh well.’
I walked across to the sheet laid out in front of the nearest barrel. Emma followed tentatively. From what I could see further ahead of me, these must have been the remains of the earliest victims. The contents of the first barrel Blythe had used in building his collection were spread out over a seven-foot-by-seven-foot square.
When somebody dies, the remains go through various stages of decomposition. The body bloats with gases; liquid escapes from it; the organs break down and effectively dissolve. It eventually ends up skeletal, surrounded by something called a cadaver decomposition island. In many scenarios, that matter will be absorbed by the environment: soaking down through soil or bed sheets. But not here. The barrels had been sealed, and so the bodies had decomposed and deteriorated within them, and none of it had escaped.
It would almost have been an alien sight, except it was possible to make out numerous stained bones amongst the mess. My gaze moved over ribcages and thigh bones and the cupped peaks of skulls. At the far end of the sheet, the barrel that had held them was still partially full at the base.
‘Lady,’ Dale said, arriving beside us. ‘And gentleman. Assuming that’s the correct word for you, Detective Turner, and I’m not at all sure that it is.’
I gestured at the remains on the sheet.
‘The oldest?’
‘Yes.’ Dale’s bald head gleamed as he nodded once. ‘For the moment, all I can really tell you is that you’re looking at the remains of four people. The way the bodies have broken down, we can’t be clear which bits belonged to whom yet, but hopefully we can attempt identification before too long.’
‘Beck. Turner.’ Ferguson had followed Dale over. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
I ignored him, still looking down at the bodies.
‘We were just in the area,’ Emma told him.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘We came to talk to Amanda Cassidy. And while we were here, I figured we might as well pop downstairs.’
I glanced at her for a moment appreciatively. I had no doubt Ferguson would know full well it was my idea, but it was good of her to side with me anyway.
‘Your job is to find John Blythe,’ Ferguson said. ‘I don’t want to tell you how to do that job, but I think you’re extremely unlikely to find him here, aren’t you?’
‘I’m surprised you’re not at his house,’ Emma said. ‘I mean, the TV crews still are.’
Dale snorted at that. Ferguson glared at him for a moment, then back at Emma and me. It was obvious he wasn’t going in for any kind of faux-friendly jousting this morning.
‘What can I say, James?’ Emma smiled. ‘Like you said yesterday, I thought it was important for us all to become experts on the case.’
My line, that one, I thought. I can manage them when I’m relaxed. I looked back at the remains in front of me. There was something horrifically hypnotic about the sight of them, as though if I stared at them for long enough they would begin to form a pattern of some kind. . .
‘What about you, Turner?’ Ferguson demanded. ‘Liking what you see, are you?’
I looked up at him, annoyed by that.
‘Four victims here,’ I said. ‘The oldest ones.’
‘That’s right. They counted the skulls.’
I kept his gaze.
‘Rebecca Brown,’ I said. ‘Mary Fisher. Kimberly Hart. . .’
I waited, still staring him straight in the eye, letting the silence pan out. He didn’t look away, but I could see the frustration on his face. The anger, too.
He didn’t know.
‘Grace Holmes,’ I said finally.
I walked past him. Dale and Emma followed me to the second sheet, Ferguson trailing behind.
‘Barrel number two,’ Dale told us. ‘We face a similar problem here to the first, although the bodies are slightly more intact, and I think we’ve managed to separate them. These victims were more obviously in layers. Again, it’s four bodies.’
‘I can see that,’ I said quietly.
As with the first barrel, there was a mess of material here, but Dale and his team had organised it into four roughly skeletal shapes, with the skulls resting on their bases at the top and bones arranged below. These remains were harder to look at than the last lot. That was partly because they were more obviously human. But it was also because of
the maths.
I needed to keep calm now. Give nothing away.
‘Sophie King. Melanie West. Chloe Smith.’ Despite myself, I hesitated. ‘And Anna Parker.’
My eyes moved over the bodies, the bones. Even with the victims separated, there was no way of knowing which of them might be Anna. I assumed that it would be the remains on either the left or the right, but I didn’t know for sure how Dale had unloaded the contents, and didn’t want to ask. The right, I guessed. My gaze moved over the bones there, up to the skull. There was nothing to differentiate it from the bodies beside it. The empty eye sockets were staring along the ground past my feet, long past seeing.
The first time since. . .
It would be too much to think about that now. I didn’t want to stand there for too long, so I moved on to view the contents of the third barrel, conscious of the sudden weakness I felt in my legs. Concentrate. Once again, there were four victims laid out here – Blythe had clearly decided that was the limit to what the containers could hold, unless the number had some other significance for him. These bodies were much more clearly delineated than those stored in the previous two barrels. Two of them were entirely skeletal, and looked similar to the ones from the last sheets, but the other pair had retained patches of skin. We were moving from the past towards the present.
‘Amy Marsh. Ruby Clarke. Olivia Richardson. Carly Jones.’
I tried to think back to the photographs of the victims from the briefing. In the hours that had followed, familiarising myself with the case as much as possible, I’d stared at each of them in turn, attempting to memorise them. Despite the level of decay here, I thought it should be possible to recognise at least one of the bodies, but I couldn’t. In fact, aside from Anna, it was hard to recall the faces of any of them at all right now.
Until we reached the final sheet, anyway.
‘Angela Walsh,’ I said.
Discounting Amanda Cassidy, she was the Red River Killer’s last known victim. Her body seemed mostly intact. Her hair was spread out in a wiry fan around her head, and her face was as taut as parchment but still clear enough to picture how she had looked in life.
I shook my head and turned to Dale.
‘Which doesn’t make sense. There was only one body in the fourth barrel?’
‘Yes, Detective.’ Dale nodded slowly. ‘I know you all have a very low opinion of us here, but that’s not something we’d have missed. Do you want to have a look for yourself?’
I ignored the sarcasm and glanced back down the line of sheets. Four bodies, four bodies, four bodies – and then one. I realised that, with the exception of Angela Walsh, any one of the names I’d recited might have been wrong.
Anna might not even be here at all.
‘Thirteen bodies,’ I said. ‘That means we’ve got one victim missing.’
Thirteen
NO FLY TIPPING, the sign said.
Simon Bunting almost laughed as he heaved the first of the bin bags over the low wooden fence into the field. The council was probably worried about people dumping broken furniture, or unscrupulous builders getting rid of old timber on the cheap. For once, they were going to have some actual flies to deal with.
He checked around as he lifted the second bag, but the country lane remained completely deserted. Best not to hang around, of course. He had been to a tip on the outskirts of the city earlier, disposing of the more everyday items he needed to be rid of. The attendant had been checking his phone throughout, entirely uninterested, but these would have got him noticed even there. Bunting tossed the second bag over the fence and it landed on the far side with a wet thud. He grimaced. He was wearing gloves, but rubbed the back of his wrist under his nose without thinking.
Jesus. The stench of them.
There were two more bags at his feet. The white polythene was stained red, while the contents, only dimly visible, were black and lumpy. They stank of rot – an odd, burning smell. It was a bright, sunny day and the warmth seemed to have brought the bags to life, so that their surfaces were squirming slowly, the maggots within turning blindly in the heat. He picked one up in each hand and threw them over quickly, one after the other, then walked back to his car.
Another task completed.
There were two ways to solve a problem, Bunting knew: analytically, by applying careful reasoning; and creatively, by thinking outside the box. Neither method was necessarily superior to the other, and often they could work in tandem. And so, after reading the emails from John Blythe last night, he had allowed the panic to bloom for a short while, and then he had calmed himself down and returned home to begin approaching what he thought of as the Blythe Problem from both angles.
Thinking analytically, was it a problem?
Put simply, was it possible for the police to uncover the fact that he had been communicating with the Red River Killer for all this time? Over the years, he had to admit that he’d grown slightly blasé about his correspondence with Blythe. Yes, he tried to keep up to date with technological developments and update his own security measures accordingly, but it was impossible to take everything into consideration. The individual computers he’d used when emailing Blythe had all been purchased second hand and paid for in cash. He’d used a portable Wi-Fi device and he’d bought new SIM cards for it – again with cash – every time the credit ran out. The email addresses he’d used were, he thought, untraceable: run entirely through the dark net.
But none of that meant he had been careful enough. He had grown blasé, he was sure – perhaps even overconfident. And that was how it happened. That was how people got caught. They took every possible precaution to begin with, but over time, as the previously dangerous situation became normalised in their mind, they relaxed and then eventually messed up. He didn’t think that was true in his case, but it was entirely possible that somewhere down the line he had made a mistake.
More to the point, he doubted Blythe had been particularly circumspect when it came to internet security. The man was cunning, yes, but also quite astonishingly insane. His areas of intelligence occasionally mapped over those of normal people, but not always and not consistently. Bunting had to assume that once the police had Blythe’s computer, they would discover at least some of the email correspondence between the two of them, and that they would then attempt to trace the source of it. He didn’t think they would be able to do so – but that didn’t mean he was right. In addition, he might well have given something away in the content of his own messages that he wasn’t aware of. At which point, he would be going to jail for a very long time.
In short – to be absolutely certain he was safe – he needed Blythe’s laptop out of the picture.
This morning, he had called in sick to work. His manager had sounded disapproving, even though it was rare for Bunting to miss a day. And of course, there was that database to finish. Well, fuck him, Bunting had thought. If there were to be consequences later, there were far more serious ones to be worrying about right now. He had surprised himself – briefly – by hanging up on the man mid-sentence. The database. Reardon. How inconsequential it all seemed now, when his freedom was hanging in the balance. So he had put it all out of his mind and set about the far more important matter of the Blythe Problem and how to solve it.
To secure the laptop, he would have to meet Blythe.
That was the starting point, and there was no way of getting around it. It was a frightening prospect. Blythe represented the kind of power he’d always fantasised about having, and for a time he’d been able to pretend to himself that he’d harnessed it – that the Monster had been like a placid tiger, tolerating the leash around its neck as it hunted for more interesting prey. But it wasn’t true. And he would have to face that tiger out in the wild soon.
He was in an extremely precarious position and time was not on his side, but it never paid to rush. When you rushed, you ended up with a database that needed something you should have planned for from the beginning. He needed to think. He needed to find the
right story.
Back in his car, Bunting smiled to himself.
The right story – that was the phrase that had come to him this morning, as he’d considered the situation and his place in it and turned his attention to the creative side of matters. He had been writing stories since he was a boy, at first emulating those superhero tales he loved, and then moving on to far grander and more ambitious works as he grew older. His parents had discouraged him, of course. His mother told him he was too clever for such things, and that he needed to concentrate on his proper studies, while his father seemed to see it as just another in the long of list of unmanly embarrassments his son represented. But Bunting had never given up. And whatever the spurious and stupid reasons for the rejections he’d received from publishers over the years, he knew deep down that he could tell a story.
That was what he needed to do now. If the police found Blythe’s computer and somehow traced their correspondence back to him, they would have a straightforward story laid out before them, one he would be unable to refute. What he needed to do was create an alternative narrative that held up even better.
And he had done so.
He had then spent most of the morning walking around his house, analysing each room and making notes of the various assets and obstacles that could either be utilised or needed to be dealt with to tell the tale he wanted. He wrote the tasks he needed to perform on an A4 pad by hand so that the list could easily be disposed of later.
Now, he drove a short distance away from the fly-tipping site, parked up again and took out the pad of paper. A number of items had already been taken care of, and he ticked off the latest one.
Off work ✓
Withdraw cash (£200 should be enough) ✓
Clean house ✓
Break and mend kitchen tap (Wrench? – yes) ‘ ✓