by Steve Mosby
The list of emails rolled down the laptop screen, with a new one at the top arriving in bold. He clicked on it.
You know where I am.
Yes, Bunting thought. He had been right. It would be there, wouldn’t it? It would have to be.
He got out of the car and walked around to the boot, checking what was inside. It was all fine. Everything was still going more or less exactly according to plan for the moment. He took out a pile of blankets and placed it on the back seat of the car, then stood there for a few more seconds doing nothing at all – not even thinking right now, just allowing the peace and silence of the surrounding area to drift around and through him. The calm before the storm, he thought. If that wasn’t a good line then he didn’t know what was.
Things would become difficult now. But he could do it. And if he succeeded, there were going to be some truly great lines ahead.
He got back in the car and started the engine, wondering how long his luck would hold out. Then he drove out of the car park and headed north, towards Frog Pond.
Twenty-Six
‘Why do you think it’s called that?’ Emma said. ‘Do you think there are going to be lots of frogs there?’
‘Kids give places names,’ I said.
‘I hate frogs.’
I didn’t reply, just stared out of the passenger window, watching the scenery flashing past: identical stretches of grassland and hedges, differentiated only by the occasional farm vehicle pottering steadily along in the distance. Life – at least in this part of the area – seemed to be going on as normal. I supposed that many of the locals had read the news reports and come to the same conclusion as Warren and his team. The Red River Killer might have been here for a time, but now he was heading north, further into the wilds and towards the mountains.
Emma said, ‘Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking?’
‘I’m not thinking anything in particular.’
‘Not thinking,’ Emma said.
‘Feeling, then,’ I said. ‘Yes. Perhaps.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head. It was hard to blame her for that. She hadn’t been happy about being dragged away from the main search, where at least we’d have been a more integral part of the investigation, and there was no real logic to heading out here. Blythe had grown up in the area and presumably knew these haunts, with their passed-down titles, but it made no sense that he was navigating on that level. It just reminded me of Rob, that was all – of my own childhood places. A confluence of circumstances that didn’t mean anything.
‘We weren’t doing any good back there,’ I said.
She didn’t reply. I watched the empty road ahead of us.
‘There aren’t enough police out here,’ I said.
‘They’re doing their best, Will. And they’re playing it the right way for now. It’s just that you think they’re missing something, right?’
‘I think we all are.’
‘You don’t think Blythe is heading for the mountains?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he is, but it wouldn’t work out for him in the long term. I think he’s got a different plan.’
‘That involves him moving dangerously close to the village?’
‘Maybe.’
‘For reasons unknown?’
‘Exactly that.’
‘Except not exactly that.’ She looked at me. ‘You actually think somebody’s helping him, don’t you?’
For a moment, I was about to disagree. Because on one level, the idea was ridiculous. When you had a hardened criminal on the run – an armed robber, say, or a gangster – you might expect them to rely on a support network of some kind. They would have friends and associates who hated the police and were prepared to take the risk of helping them out of sympathy or loyalty. But Blythe was in an entirely different category. Even friends – assuming he’d ever had any – wouldn’t want to help him after what he’d done.
And yet. There was something to it on a subconscious level. A feeling. And I didn’t think we could, or should, discount anything right now.
‘I just want to cover all the bases,’ I said. ‘But actually, on that subject, I’m still not sure about the letters.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Will.’
‘No. Something about them feels off to me. They don’t strike me as the kind of thing that Blythe would have written, given what we know of him. The language. The content.’
‘Given what we know of him'
‘Be honest, Emma. Don’t you think that too?’
She shook her head, turning the wheel to take us along a smaller country road.
‘We know they’re legitimate. And that Blythe didn’t end up with barrels full of women in his cellar by accident.’
We know they’re legitimate. That was true, but only because of the corroboration in the letter about Melanie West. Which brought me back to Jeremy Townsend again. But it was all just feelings, hunches, and Emma was clearly exasperated enough with me that I knew not to bring Townsend and his stories back up again.
And I needed to be wary of following hunches and feelings too far, because I was way too close to this case. I needed to be careful. Because of Anna, it meant too much to me. I could feel the tension in my chest from that right now. There had been a low-level anxiety from the very first day, and it had only increased with every passing hour. I was in danger of making a mistake.
‘Well, we’re not far off now,’ I said. My voice sounded far tighter than I would have liked. ‘And it’s probably nothing.’
But I felt a chill inside me. And the distant heartbeat of Blythe’s presence seemed to be growing stronger, so that now I could almost feel the pressure of each heavy thud in my ears. Despite what I’d said, and even though there was no reason for it, a part of me really wasn’t sure that it was probably nothing at all.
Warren had insisted we were both fitted with GPS trackers, the same as the other officers in the field. Anyone looking at a screen in the vans outside the Grief House right now would have seen a pair of overlapping arrows slowly and steadily approaching Frog Pond.
And then driving past it.
The countryside around us had gradually condensed into woodland, until all I could see out of the passenger window was a wall of trees. They had thin trunks, but they were packed together so tightly, and the grass was so overgrown around them, that the whole area looked impenetrable. As the marker on our own GPS device reached the trail, I caught sight of the briefest break in the undergrowth, and then we were past it almost immediately.
‘Back there,’ I said.
‘I saw. We’ll never get the car down that.’
‘Parking area.’ I pointed back. ‘Just by it.’
It was more of a passing area than a parking one, with space for two or three cars at most, but it was empty right now. Emma turned the car and pulled in. When we got out of the vehicle, I was struck again by the profound silence, although it was different here than it had been by the farmhouse. The land there had been open, whereas here it was contained. This was the silence of seclusion, of a place packed away from the world. When I closed the car door, the sound seemed to echo off the trees and go nowhere.
As Emma pinned her GPS tracker to her jacket, I walked around to the back of the car. It had been a long time since I’d carried a baton on my belt, but I felt like doing so today. I took mine out of the boot and clipped it on.
‘Are you serious?’ Emma said.
‘Don’t you want one?’
She looked at me incredulously for a moment, then round at the trees, clocking how utterly silent the woodland was. Even the breeze, moving the branches and leaves ever so slightly, produced no sound at all. It was eerie. But at the same time, it didn’t feel like we were entirely alone.
When Emma looked back at me, she didn’t seem quite so incredulous any more.
‘Actually, yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’
Twenty-Seven
Right then, Bunting thought.
He d
rove past the vehicle that was parked up by the entrance to the footpath leading to Frog Pond, risking a glance into the car as he did. Empty. But he had little doubt that it was a police vehicle, and that meant they were already on their way to where Blythe was hiding.
Well, it had surely been impossible for his luck to hold forever.
After leaving the cemetery, he’d been surprised again by the lack of police activity on the roads directly north of Moorton. The search seemed to be based entirely in the village itself, as though they were confident that was where Blythe was hiding out. Which meant that if Bunting could get to Frog Pond, he had a decent chance of slipping through whatever tatters of cordon there might be out here.
Worry about the route you’ll take in a minute, he’d told himself.
First of all, get Blythe.
And he had begun to feel confident that he would manage that until – slowing the car slightly as he rounded the corner to the Pond – he had seen the car parked there.
He sped up now, then drove around the next corner and stopped. There was no parking space here; he just pulled the car in against the undergrowth, but not in it – he didn’t want to leave any tyre tracks. Which was good, he realised, as it meant he was still thinking. His heart was beating hard, in fact, and he felt more awake than he had in hours.
Somehow, the police had discovered where Blythe was hiding. But actually, was that necessarily the case? For one thing, he couldn’t be sure it really was a police vehicle. And surely, if they’d known that Blythe was in there, they would have set up proper cordons around this area immediately, and there would have been more than one car at the scene. Could it be someone was following a hunch? Maybe they’d just made an association with the pond and decided it was worth checking out.
Either way, he had very little time. If the police found Blythe, it was all over. And if they stopped Bunting right now, he was in deep trouble. One look at the contents of his boot and his story was in tatters. He would be finished.
He took the laptop off the passenger seat and opened it. After the cemetery, he’d left the wireless connected, so he got into his email within seconds. There had been no further messages from Blythe since the one he’d already seen, and he could only hope that the man had his own laptop open and ready for updates.
His hands were trembling as he typed; his fingers kept jabbing the wrong keys. But aside from the physical shaking, he was surprised at how level-headed he felt. This is what it must be like, he thought. This was how it felt to be someone like Blythe: someone who simply didn’t care. After a while, the fear of it all diminished.
Looks like police car at the entrance road. On way already. Not sure if they know or it’s a search on spec, but no way I can get to you there. Get back to the main road somehow and follow the road NORTH. I’m about two minutes away if you run. Bring laptop, leave everything else.
Bunting glanced in the rear-view mirror. The road remained empty in both directions. No traffic at all for the moment. He prayed it would remain so.
After a moment’s hesitation, another thought occurred to him. Whoever was going to Frog Pond had no real idea who they were facing in there. What they were facing. Because Blythe was far more powerful than just a man, wasn’t he? He was the Red River Killer. He was the Monster. Violence was what he did, and that suggested another way out of the situation for them both.
Although there are probably only a couple of them, Bunting typed quickly, and then sent the email.
Twenty-Eight
The trail to Frog Pond was about a mile long, and only about ten feet wide. The ground beneath our feet was dry and hard; it was churned up, but by the tread of boots not tyres.
If Carling was right, and kids did come down here, they must have done so on foot. As Emma and I walked, the trees tall and silent around us, I could picture them in my mind’s eye: groups of teenagers, walking in twos and threes, carrying plastic bags full of cans, torchlight sweeping back and forth over the undulating ground. Warm summer days, the air thick with midges; and then cooler nights, someone perhaps lighting a fire. There were places like this I remembered from my teenage years. They were subtly distinct from the more innocent maps of younger childhood, albeit sometimes sharing locations: a slightly different but overlapping web of connections laid over the neighbourhood.
The two of us remained silent as we walked. Presumably Emma still had whatever doubts had been there on the drive, but there was always something about heading into woodland this thick that was unnerving, and we both tried to walk quietly and carefully, making as little sound as possible. The silence containing us was oppressive – so complete that it was almost a presence in itself. It was hard to see very far between the trees to either side, but easy to imagine yourself being watched from among them.
When we were about halfway there, I felt a chill on my back and stopped.
‘What?’ Emma whispered.
I didn’t say anything. I just stood very still, staring into the woodland to my right. The undergrowth between the trees was waist-high here, and it was impossible to see very far, but now that I’d stopped moving, I could hear the tiny clicks and cracks of nature. My heart was beating quickly, and my ears started ringing as I strained harder to listen. I felt something on a primal level: some deep-set genetic response to a presence that was sensed rather than seen, but no less real for it, and no less convincing.
There is a monster nearby in this forest, it was telling me.
And you need to run.
That was the last thing I was going to do, though. Instead I continued to stare intently into the woodland. Nothing was moving there.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Emma said.
‘But you can feel it?’
For a moment, she didn’t answer.
‘Come on,’ she said.
A minute further down the path, I heard a noise.
At first it wasn’t obvious. It was more like the ringing silence was somehow growing louder. But then I recognised it for what it was: a rush of water away to the right beyond the trees. The river. It remained out of sight for the moment, but it was clear that we were getting closer to it, and it sounded more and more relentless as we did: much wilder and less constrained out here than it had sounded while driving through Moorton itself. By the time we reached Frog Pond a couple of minutes later, the noise was a constant roar to the right-hand side, so loud now that I almost felt nervous turning my back on it and facing the pond.
‘Well,’ Emma said, standing beside me. ‘I can sort of see how it got its name, anyway.’
I nodded. The pond was much larger than I’d been expecting. There was an area of grassland off the left-hand edge of the path, and then the water expanded away in an oval shape until it reached a far bank of trees about thirty metres away, their branches hanging down in a sweeping curtain. Everything in sight was green. The sunlight cut through from above, rendering the whole scene vibrant and bright, and the air misty. Where we were standing, enormous fronds of grass lined the edges of the pond, and most of the surface was coated with light patches of leaves and darker green algae – so much of it that it must have accumulated over many years, all of it layering over and forming a crust on the water. It seemed much warmer here than it had on the trail, as though the water was steaming. It felt like the pond should be bubbling slightly, but the surface was entirely still. Breathing in slowly, I could smell the heady aroma of the overgrown vegetation.
‘He’s not here,’ Emma said.
I looked around. There was no sign, in fact, that anybody had been here for quite some time. I caught sight of a few old cans, the metal bleached clean by the sunlight and tangled in grass that had grown around it, but other than that, the place seemed completely undisturbed.
But the sensation I’d had on the trail remained. I still felt watched. It was that kind of place, of course; a hidden spot of silent natural beauty always feels alive – always feels as though it somehow has eyes of its own. Blythe wasn’t here, and there wa
s no indication that he had been.
But I still felt it.
Emma kicked a stone from the bank. It landed on the surface of the water and rested there for a moment before sinking down out of sight.
‘Can we go now, Will?’ she said. ‘It stinks here.’
‘In a minute.’
I turned around slowly and stared at the wall of trees that separated the trail behind us from the angry noise of the river beyond. A little way past the entrance to the pond, there was a break in the trees. Not large. But wide enough for a person to move through.
I walked across to it, the sound of the river growing louder. And that thud of Blythe’s presence, fast and heavy now.
‘Will?’
Emma hadn’t shouted, but I held my hand out behind me, indicating for her to keep quiet, then beckoned with my head. Let’s check this out. I didn’t wait for her to reply – just stepped carefully off the trail and between the trees.
Thud.
It was a path of sorts. The undergrowth had been worn away, and the ground was overlaid with a thatch of thin sticks and branches that looked to have been pressed down over the years into a kind of carpet. The foliage to either side remained overgrown, pushing gently at my waist as I moved through.
Thud.
As I stepped through a proper break in the trees, there was the river.
I found myself standing on an open bank of mud and stones, with the wide body of water tumbling violently past in front of me: sleek and fast at the centre, but crashing and flicking up at the edges, a bright white churn of froth and foam, with droplets saturating the air.
Thud.
I looked down. The bank beneath my feet was sodden. My shoes had sunk slightly into the mud, creating a perfect imprint. . .
Thud.
Amongst all the others.
Thud.
Amongst the flurry of footprints that were already there.
Thud.
And then that heartbeat fell silent.
I looked along the bank to the right, and there it was, where it felt like I’d somehow been expecting to see it all along. A tent. It was pitched close to the woods, the camouflage colours blending in with the pattern of the trees behind. The front flaps were peeled back and pinned into the mud, and clothes were strewn in front, as though whoever had camped here had left in a hurry.