by Steve Mosby
Mental list of important area of house ✓
Cover story for moorton (use Marwood c?- yes) ✓
Disposel of various (collected) ✓
Disposal of old meat ✓
Purchase tent (cash)
Clean car boot
Purchase newspaper (tomorrow??)
And so on. . .
The next thing he needed to do was head to the outdoor supplies shop on the edge of town. There was one nearer – on a roundabout he passed every day on the way to work – but even paying cash there was a danger that that could come back to bite him. Better safe than sorry. Dot every i and cross every t. Bunting didn’t want to risk being caught on CCTV. And he had never bought a tent before in his life, and didn’t want to be remembered for any hesitation in a place the police might conceivably visit if and when it came time to test his story.
His gaze moved all the way down to the last item on the list, and he wondered exactly what to do about that. Because that one was outside his control for the moment. He couldn’t do anything about it for the next day or two. He had to let events pan out and see where they left him.
Bunting set off.
Jeremy Townsend would have to wait for now.
Fourteen
There was a café directly opposite the police station. Jeremy Townsend was sitting at a table by the window, with the greasy leftover swirls of a full English on a plate in front of him, watching the activity outside. He was on his third coffee now, and doing his best to make it last while he decided what to do.
The reporters lined up across the street seemed in good spirits. But then why wouldn’t they be? None of this mattered to them except on the level of it giving them a good story. They kept coming into the café for takeaway drinks and rolls, all of them smiling and chatting happily away.
Each time one of them entered, Townsend kept his head down a little, wondering if any of them would recognise him: the tall, thin man sitting by the window, looking exhausted and empty. None of them had so far. It had been a very different story when Melanie disappeared. Back then, even through the fog of grief and guilt, the relentless attention had made Townsend feel like an odd kind of celebrity. But of course, none of it had ever really been centred on him as a person. It wasn’t him they chased and photographed and clamoured at for a quote on what he was feeling and how he was bearing up. It was the grieving husband they were interested in – the character in the story, not the actor currently playing it. There was no reason for any of them to recognise him now.
The owner of the café came and took his plate away.
‘Everything all right for you?’
‘It was fine, thank you.’
She smiled as she cleared the table. She had been cheerful all morning – buoyed by the additional trade the journalists represented, he supposed. Either she didn’t know the reason for their presence or she didn’t care.
But then surely everybody knew by now.
It felt to Townsend that he must have been one of the last people in the world to find out. Last night, after talking to Tom Clarke at the missing persons support group, he had returned to his hotel room and opened a mostly blank Word document on his laptop. He hadn’t been able to write for years – unless you counted his work on the short stories, which he refused to – but the compulsion to try remained. Writing was a deep-rooted need for him; it always had been, even as it had become so frustratingly difficult over the years. In Melanie’s absence, though, the last vestiges of whatever decent material he’d been able to scrape out of himself appeared to have vanished altogether. The need, coupled with the inability, was a form of torture for him. One of many, he supposed. And he deserved them all.
Last night had been a similar exercise in frustration: a few bland sentences written then hastily deleted, followed by a feeling of emptiness and loneliness. He’d only turned the television on in the hotel room to give himself the illusion of company.
When he did, he’d sat very still for a long time, watching the news on the bright screen with a mixture of numbness and absolute horror. Some time before midnight, he had packed his few belongings, checked out of the hotel and driven home. He’d arrived back here in the city in the early hours, and hadn’t slept since. The exhaustion was making him hazy now. Thinking back, it was hard to believe that an unbroken stretch of consciousness linked him yesterday morning with him now.
The horror remained, though. That was keeping him going, acting like adrenalin. Every time he thought about what was happening, his heart lurched. He took out his phone and opened the browser, looking again at the page that remained open there.
At John Blythe’s face.
It had taken Townsend by surprise, the first time he saw it. It had appeared on the television screen without warning, and when he’d realised what he was seeing, he’d instinctively tried to blink the image away. Left to his own devices, he would have wanted to build up slowly and prepare himself for that moment, but the rolling news coverage had plunged him straight into the cold water of it. He had a name now, anyway, and a face to go with it. Staring down at the phone, examining the man, he saw all the hardness and cruelty he’d always expected to find. Was that down to expectations, though? People’s faces were often ambiguous, the meaning of their expression shifting with what you knew about them. But what surprised him most of all was that he didn’t recognise John Blythe at all. After everything that had happened, a part of him had expected to.
He put the phone down and sipped his coffee. It was almost too cold to drink.
Blythe was on the run. What did that mean? What were the repercussions? Townsend couldn’t hold his thoughts together, couldn’t think it through. He glanced out of the window again, at the police department across the street, and wondered what on earth he was going to do.
Whatever he did, it would doubtless be another mistake.
It felt as though his life had been defined by them. The first was in many ways the most unforgivable of all, although in the grand scheme of things it appeared small and insignificant now. But it was the nature of mistakes that there were consequences for them, and the more mistakes you made in response, the more those consequences accrued. That was how it worked. At first you might only take one step down the staircase into the darkness, but that step then led inevitably to the next – and then all the ones that followed. Mistakes had a velocity. Before you knew it, the light was a long way behind and above you.
The guilt threatened to overtake him now.
He put the coffee down, his hands trembling. Everything he had done was suddenly too much to bear. He closed his eyes and tried to gather himself.
The door opened, distracting him from his thoughts. He opened his eyes and saw a couple of men walk into the café, one of them rubbing his hands together as though it was cold outside. Reporters. He could tell. They had that air of importance about them. The stars of the show right now.
As they headed over to the counter, Townsend picked up his phone again and loaded a live page on a news website, scanning through to see if there were any new developments. There was little. Officers were still searching Blythe’s house, but there were no updates on the man’s location, or on the condition of Amanda Cassidy. The police had issued a brief statement, revealing that a number of remains had been removed from the property and post-mortems were due to be performed soon. There would be further statements later in the day.
None of which helped him.
So what are you going to do?
Deep down he knew the answer to that question. He had known it even before leaving the hotel room last night. He needed to find out what was happening. He needed to understand better what was going on here, and where that left him. If pursuing it turned out to be a mistake, then really, what did one more matter? He had to discover what the police had found. He had to know what they knew about. . .
Melanie.
They had met at university. Townsend was three years older than her, and had been starting an MA in English L
iterature when she arrived as an undergraduate. His talent for the subject, along with his passion for writing, found him already embedded in the department, and he had been asked to assist with first-year tutorials. Melanie had been in one of his groups. She was attractive – pretty and brunette – but what he recalled most of all was how inquisitive and confident she’d been. Most of the first years sat there in silence, sometimes out of laziness but more usually due to fear that someone might notice them. It took a while to shake away all the wispy insecurities from school; he’d been the same. But Melanie wasn’t like that. Her natural pose – one he associated with her from the beginning to the end; one he could still picture in his head so clearly – was leaning forward in her seat, her knees pressed around her hands, her collarbones visible at the top of her shirt, making a point. She had brown eyes, wide and earnest. Her intelligence had captured him, but he would be lying if he said those eyes hadn’t also played a part.
That his growing attraction to her was reciprocated was inexplicable to him. He’d been a shy, bookish teenager, accustomed to a lack of attention from the girls around him. He had average looks. He was good with language on paper, perhaps, but not so much in person. While he could write fluently, when speaking, the words failed him more often than they won. What could a woman as beautiful and bright as Melanie possibly see in him? And yet she saw something.
One evening, he’d shown her some of his fiction: a short story he’d written, or at least that he’d attempted to. He wasn’t happy with it, and that was how he’d presented it to her: with an apology in advance; an excuse for its shortcomings. Giving her his permission to hate it. And yet she had loved it. Or rather, she had devoured it, those eyes of hers wide when she’d finished, and had seemed to look at him in a new light afterwards. She had told him how brilliant he was with words. She wasn’t entirely uncritical, of course. Your prose is great, she’d said. Really beautiful. But there’s a lack of focus here, like you’re not entirely sure what you’re writing for. Or maybe why.
Or maybe who, he’d thought.
She had been right, though. His work did lack focus. He’d had an easy, uneventful upbringing. Nothing bad had ever happened to him, and he hadn’t seen enough of the world to gather subject matter inside him to use. As a result, his stories were empty. Graceful phrasings, yes, but with little in the way of substance beneath them. But he was almost drunk on the look on her face, and at that moment he’d resolved to change all that.
Hey, Melanie had said then, and he’d heard the same trepidation in her voice, the same nerves, that had been in his own. I’ve never told anybody this, but I write poetry. Do you want to read some?
Townsend shook his head now.
He didn’t want to think about the poetry, or really about Melanie at all. This right now was about him; his descent had always been his own. He was damned, and he was damned alone. The mistakes, the guilt, the deaths on his conscience – they were all his. And if the suffering from that sometimes seemed impossible to bear, then the knowledge that he deserved it was always enough to keep him going.
I love you, Townsend thought. I hope that somehow, wherever you might be now, you know that. And that deep down, you know that all the terrible things I’ve done, I did for you.
Then he drained the cold dregs of his coffee, stood up and headed across the street to make another mistake.
Fifteen
Only thirteen bodies.
It wasn’t our problem, of course; that was Ferguson’s headache. Our job was simply to track down Blythe, not tie him to the victims or identify the ones that had been found. But even so, as Emma and I worked our way through the reports and interviews gathered by our team of officers, my attention kept coming back to it. We had a desk at one corner of the main operations room. At the far end, the images of the fourteen victims remained on display on the large plasma screen there. However much I tried to focus on the information in front of me, I couldn’t help staring at their faces.
At Anna’s.
We had Angela Walsh. She was certainly one of the bodies found in Blythe’s basement, which at least proved that he was the Red River Killer. So who didn’t we have yet?
Inevitably my gaze kept returning to Anna. I kept thinking what if? But until all the bodies were identified, there was no way of knowing which victim we were currently missing, or what it meant that one definitely was.
Emma reached out and clicked her fingers quietly in front of my face.
‘Come back to me, Will. You’re drifting.’
‘I’m not drifting.’ I turned back to the desk. ‘I’m thinking. It’s different.’
‘No, with you it’s the same thing. And I don’t need you floating off right now.’
‘I’m tethered. I’m grounded.’
‘You’re still bothered by the thirteen bodies, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I resisted the urge to look at the screen again, but it didn’t help. I could feel the weight of Anna’s gaze on me regardless. ‘We’ll have relatives calling in soon. They deserve to know.’
‘And they will. But these things take time. Most of them have waited long enough.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the point.’
Survivors. When I thought of the word in relation to a case like this, it never just referred to women like Amanda Cassidy – people who had encountered a killer and lived – but also to friends and family of the victims. The men, women and children who were left behind.
Friends and family of the victims are always involved in an investigation to some extent. Cynically, there are things you want or need them to say, and things you need them not to. There are careful interviews to be conducted and tactful searches to be made. And as a case progresses, there are developments, or often the lack of them, to deliver.
Opinions vary amongst police as to how much to share with relatives and how to do so. Personally, I always told them as much as I was able. Everybody was different, but I could usually recognise the same aching emotional hole at the heart of those who had lost: the desperate desire to know. Some detectives preferred to pass that particular buck, either because they didn’t care, or because they couldn’t allow themselves to care, whereas others felt a responsibility to handle that side of things in person – to show that the loss and grief those people were feeling was being taken seriously.
Where possible, I was one of those detectives. With one exception, I would take on that role here too. But if Anna’s parents came to the department, I would have to delegate that responsibility, that duty. I could still picture them very clearly in my head. While they had undoubtedly changed a great deal in the intervening years, there was no way they wouldn’t recognise my name, my face, and I couldn’t risk that connection coming to light.
Emma said, ‘They’ll understand we can’t confirm anything at this point. It’s too early. Too soon.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Does it really not bother you, though? Thirteen bodies. We’re missing a victim.’
‘Thirteen – unlucky for some. In this case, Ferguson.’ Emma shrugged. ‘I don’t mean to be flippant about it, but there’s the rest of the house to take apart yet. Who knows what they’ll find? There could be more than one. The wall cavities could be full of bodies for all we know.’
‘I don’t think so. It’s clear from the way that Blythe stored the bodies that the method was important to him. It looks like he even slept down there from time to time. So why would he get rid of the missing victim in a different way?’
‘You expect a guy like Blythe to make sense?’ Emma said.
‘Yes. On his own terms, absolutely yes.’
‘You saw the inside of the house, Will. You saw what he did to those bodies. I’m not sure I’d be anticipating much sense there if I were you.’
‘Okay, but I expect his behaviour to conform to some kind of pattern. If he’s going to put thirteen bodies into barrels and keep them in his cellar, then that’s clearly his preferred method of disposal.’
�
��It could be the first one that’s missing.’
‘Rebecca Brown.’
‘Perhaps he disposed of her in some other way.’
‘Maybe. But if not, then we’re missing something. Either he deliberately changed his method, or something forced him to. And I want to know what.’
‘You can ask him when we get him.’ Emma looked at me. ‘Assuming we ever do at this rate.’
‘Yes. Okay. Point taken.’
I forced myself to turn my attention back to the reports on the desk in front of me. They made for depressing reading. It was our job to find Blythe, yes, and there was precious little to go on so far.
‘Still nobody who seems to have known him at all,’ Emma said.
‘No.’
It was frustrating. As well as the practical side of the search, one of our aims was to build up a picture of Blythe, to see if there was anything in his personal or professional life that might indicate where he could be right now. But the picture we were forming was still little more than an outline, with nothing much in the way of content. We knew his name, age and profession, the make and registration of his car – all of which had already been released through the media – but it was proving difficult to colour the man in any further.
According to his work colleagues, he kept to himself. They described him as a loner, gruff and unfriendly, and none of them had ever socialised with him. They didn’t know if he had any friends at all. If he did, he never spoke about them. His neighbours had told us much the same. None of them could remember even a single meaningful interaction with him, and most of them had only ever really seen him from a distance, leaving for work or returning. The woman in the adjoining house couldn’t recall him ever having any guests.
A search of his home had so far revealed no address book, no landline, no computer. He had owned a mobile phone, as his boss at the garage had given us the number, but checking through records had given us nothing: his only calls had been to the work number on the few occasions he phoned in sick, and he’d never sent a single text message. The last known location the phone company had for the mobile was his house, a couple of weeks ago. We had a search out for it, of course, and the moment he turned it on we’d know where it was. But something told me he wasn’t going to be that stupid. It wouldn’t have surprised me if we found the mobile phone in his house before too long: shoved away and forgotten in some drawer.