You Can Run

by Steve Mosby

  He couldn’t stop himself from looking as he went past.

  There were a number of cars and vans parked up, and a bunch of officers standing by the entrance to the footpath. They watched him without much interest. Surely they were going to stop him? And yet they didn’t. He looked into one of the cars he passed and recognised the man sitting there. The suspicious detective from yesterday. Turner.

  Staring right back at him.

  Townsend faced forward immediately and sped up a little. Not a lot – not a guilty amount – but enough to leave the cavalcade behind him. Damn, damn, damn. He watched the scene in the rear-view mirror the whole time. As he reached the next bend in the road, he saw the indicator light on the detective’s car.

  Round the bend, he sped up again, accelerating as much as the tight country lanes would bear. Damn. He slowed only slightly as the car reached the humped bridge over the river, and the chassis jolted as he hit the flat road beyond it. He needed a turning, but it was just woods to the left and hedgerows to the right. A cemetery. Then fields. He was trapped, with Moorton only a mile or so ahead now.

  He checked the rear-view again.

  Nothing for the moment.

  But the detective had seen him. Presumably he was here to help with the hunt for Blythe, and he would obviously have recognised Townsend from their encounter yesterday. It was impossible to imagine that Turner wouldn’t come after a man just happening on the scene who had such a clear connection to the case.

  You can justify it, though.

  Yes, he could. He was a victim, after all – a survivor of the Red River Killer’s violence. It was only natural, wasn’t it, that he might have seen the news and be drawn to Moorton, to watch first hand as the hunt for his wife’s killer unfolded. Frog Pond – well, that was a coincidence. He didn’t know the roads well. He’d taken a wrong turning.

  All explicable.

  Or else you could give in, he thought.

  Tell them everything. Finally.

  There was a moment when that seemed like an actual possibility. What would it feel like, after all this time, to explain everything that he’d done? The guilt could never be taken away, but perhaps it would ease slightly. It would be like passing on a terrible gift. Here: I’ve carried this for so long; it’s yours to take care of now.

  But it was only a moment.

  He owed Melanie better than that.

  Another bend coming up. Townsend glanced in the rear-view and finally saw the car coming after him, a light blinking on the roof. He rounded the corner and it disappeared from sight.

  But looking ahead, he was descending towards the village. It was inevitable that he’d be stopped there. He didn’t have long. As he drove, his thoughts turned to what it all meant. He couldn’t process this new information – couldn’t work out the repercussions of what he’d just seen back at the path to Frog Pond. Had they found Blythe? Had they captured him alive, or was he dead? Or had he somehow managed to blink away from the police, the same way he’d so successfully vanished with his victims in the past?

  A moment later, he hit the tail end of a short line of traffic on the outskirts of Moorton and came to a halt. There were traffic lights a few cars in front where the police had set up some kind of checkpoint and were inspecting the vehicles entering and leaving the village. But it was clear that he wasn’t going to have to wait – an officer with a thick moustache and sunglasses was already moving up the line of cars towards him. Turner must have radioed ahead. I’m a VIP now, Townsend thought. I’m jumping the queue. He wound his window down as the officer reached him.

  ‘Mr Townsend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask you to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle, please.’

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘Just do as I ask, please.’ The man turned his head and stared up the road away from the village, then sighed to himself. ‘Ah. Here comes Hopalong Cassidy.’

  Townsend opened the door and got out. Looking up the road, he saw immediately what the officer was referring to. The car that had followed him from Frog Pond was listing badly, one of its tyres flapping angrily out to the side, and it arrived with a clattering sound. When it pulled to a halt behind Townsend’s own vehicle, he thought he could smell something burning.

  A woman got out of the passenger seat and began circling the car, running her hands through her hair. Turner got out of the driver’s side, and if he was aware of the damage to the vehicle it clearly didn’t bother him. He headed straight for Townsend.

  ‘Jeremy,’ he said. ‘You might remember me. Detective Turner? We met yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  While the officer who stopped him had clearly been issuing orders, at least he’d been polite about it. There was none of that with Turner right now. Yesterday he’d seemed kind to start with, but that had changed as the meeting had gone on. Townsend knew he was a bad actor, and that Turner had seen through him almost immediately – that he was hiding something. There was nothing but animosity on the man’s face now. Turner might not have known anything for certain, but he suspected. And of course, he was entirely right to.

  Keep calm.

  ‘I saw the news,’ Townsend said. It had seemed so natural and easy in the car, but he struggled to find the words now. ‘The man took my wife. I wanted to be here.’

  ‘Not sure I believe you, Jeremy.’ Turner was staring at him intently. ‘Just happened to be passing Frog Pond, did you? Were you a bit surprised to see us there? You looked it.’

  ‘I lost my way.’ Christ, he was on the verge of stammering. And had he just given himself away there? ‘I don’t know what Frog Pond is. I was trying to get to the village but I ended up on the wrong road.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Townsend couldn’t speak. He’d never been great at talking at the best of times, never mind when facing down naked aggression. And he understood now that there was no way he was going to convince this man with lies; he would see straight through them. Turner took a step closer, bringing them face to face, and Townsend almost flinched from the force of the anger coming off him.

  ‘I think you’re lying, Jeremy,’ Turner said quietly. ‘You’re hiding something. You know something. And you’re going to tell me what it is.’

  ‘I. . .’

  But he couldn’t think what to say next. Couldn’t come up with a falsehood. A decent story. Turner’s manner was simply too intense, and whenever he tried to think, it was as though somebody was clicking their fingers repeatedly in front of his face to distract him. He was going to have to tell him. Confess it all.

  ‘Will. . .’

  The female detective was beside them now, her hand on her partner’s arm. Turner seemed completely unaware she was there. His gaze was locked on Townsend’s own.

  ‘I. . .’

  ‘I read your stories, you know.’ Turner took a step back and nodded to himself. ‘Pretty sick stuff, if you don’t mind me saying so. I’m not sure what to think about the kind of man who writes stuff like that.’

  The stones.

  And just like that, the spell was broken.

  The guilt, the shame, the self-hatred – it flipped in Townsend’s head, and suddenly, rather than being intimidated by the man in front of him, he was angry instead. Turner had dipped a bucket into a deeply personal well of pain and misery, one he couldn’t hope to understand, and had just triumphantly slopped the contents at Townsend’s feet. It was too much.

  ‘My stories,’ Townsend said quietly.

  ‘Yes. The ones about your wife.’

  ‘They’re my way of coping. My way of dealing with things.’

  ‘Seems a bit weird to me.’

  ‘I don’t care how it seems to you,’ Townsend said.

  He stared back at the detective, more confident now. Anger had a way of doing that, he knew. Never a fighter, perhaps, but he’d still felt it on occasion – the way fear could roll over inside you,
revealing anger on its underside. And for him, there was that whole weight of guilt and pain behind it too, pushing the anger forward. To hell with this man. A moment ago Townsend had felt feeble and had been ready to tell Turner everything. Now he felt ready for a fight.

  How dare he?

  ‘Will, please.’

  The female detective spoke quietly. She still had her hand on Turner’s arm, but the man was ignoring her, still staring at Townsend.

  ‘I don’t care how it seems to you,’ Townsend repeated slowly, letting the anger surface. And didn’t it feel just a little bit good? He’d been trampled underfoot for so long that it was almost surprising to feel some sense of validation. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to lose somebody the way I have. You don’t know how it feels. I’m not apologising to you.’

  Turner stared at him for a moment longer, but Townsend met his gaze implacably now. To hell with you. Each of those stories had ripped him to pieces. The detective couldn’t possibly understand the pain they had caused him.

  Turner broke the stare first.

  ‘You won’t mind me checking your car, will you?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll open the boot for you.’

  ‘Will.’

  But the woman stood helplessly as Turner moved away from both of them, around to the back of the car, waiting. As Townsend took his keys from his pocket, he glanced across the street and realised what she was so concerned about. There were reporters on the pavement there, and cameras pointing their way, eagerly filming every second of this encounter.

  Thirty-Two

  Later.

  Much later.

  ‘Why are we here, Will?’ Emma said quietly.

  I peered through the windscreen at the building I’d parked up outside. It was two storeys tall and looked very old. The roof was peaked in places. Whenever I visited here, it always reminded me of a mansion in the countryside, although we were only a few secluded and leafy roads away from a town centre. There were many windows. Most were dark right now, but a few were softly illuminated behind peach-coloured curtains.

  ‘Why are we here?’ she repeated.

  After my encounter with Townsend, Emma had – understandably – torn shreds off me, wanting to know what was going through my head and what the fuck I thought I was doing. She was right: I’d lost it. The mistake I’d been so worried about making had happened. It would no doubt be all over the news by now, and there was a danger we’d end up removed from the investigation as a result of it. I was erratic at the best of times. This was anything but the best of times.

  My mistake. My fault. And although I hadn’t answered Emma at the time, and hadn’t explained, I’d known deep down that she deserved better than that. When we’d finally got the tyre fixed and left Moorton, I’d told her that I was going to drive.

  Why were we here?

  ‘To see a friend,’ I said simply.

  ‘Bullshit.’ Emma sounded uneasy. ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  Normally, she might have said that as a joke, but tonight I didn’t smile. She was more right than she knew. And I understood the doubt I heard in her voice, because the truth was that the last few days had begun to change things between us. However much we’d butted heads in the past, it had usually been playful at heart, and there had always been a tacit degree of trust between us. We had shared a flat for long enough that she had perhaps thought she knew me as well as anyone. Right now, it must have felt like I’d suddenly opened a door and revealed a secret room that I’d kept from her all along. When that happens in a friendship, whatever the content of the room itself, it changes how you feel about someone. It’s enough to discover it exists at all.

  ‘What is this place?’ she said.

  It’s not too late, I told myself.

  I could turn the engine back on, reverse out of the gravel car park and drive away without explaining. Even if Emma came back, she wouldn’t get a definitive answer to her question beyond the obvious: that it was a hospital of some kind. An institution. That wouldn’t tell her why we were here, though, and as good a detective as she was, I doubted she’d be able to find out on her own.

  But she deserved better.

  I opened the car door before I could change my mind.

  ‘Come on.’

  Emma hesitated.

  ‘They’re not going to let us in at this time of night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They will.’

  The nurses’ station inside was occupied by a woman I recognised from previous visits. I showed her my ID.

  ‘We’re here to see Rob Parker,’ I said.

  Even at night, a regular hospital has a kind of life to it. There’s a sense of activity – the presence of doctors and orderlies and patients. But in this place, everything was deathly silent. The hall lights were dimmed and the atmosphere was more akin to a chapel of rest. Just walking along the corridors, you understood immediately that nobody who moved into one of the rooms behind the closed doors you passed was expected to move out of it again.

  ‘It’s very expensive here, you know,’ I said absently. ‘I looked it up once. I can’t remember the exact figure any more, but it must be costing them the earth.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My friend’s parents.’

  Rob’s family had always been wealthy. It had been one of the few differences between us as children. My mother, a single parent, had struggled every month to make ends meet. But it had never mattered. Rob’s parents might have been rich, but they had never been stand-offish or snobbish with me or my mother. They were good people, and had always welcomed me into their home. There had even been trips and holidays abroad, where I’d been invited along and treated as part of the family, and as far as I knew, the issue of money had never been raised. I think they’d worried that their small, shy, sensitive child would have trouble fitting in amongst the other boys and would never find a friend. In me, he had practically found a mirror.

  ‘Will—’

  ‘We’re here.’

  I stopped outside the familiar door. Over the years, I’d visited every few months, and the sight of it was indelibly stored in my memory. When I closed my eyes at night, I could picture every detail of the walk in my head.

  ‘Who is this friend?’ Emma said.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I turned the handle and opened the door.

  Although softly lit, it was not what could be said to be an intimate or comfortable room. It was dominated by technology. An intricate nest of machinery rested behind the headboard of the bed, with tubes hanging down from racks above and several monitors mounted on supporting poles. The bed itself was elevated at a slight angle, with equipment around the sides: things that always looked to me like old-fashioned computers and printers.

  And lying there in the bed, the focus of all this attention, was Rob.

  I stared at him. Whenever I visited here, I was never entirely sure what to expect. On one level, Rob never really changed. After a period when his weight had deteriorated and his muscles had slackened and loosened, his body had seemed to settle into a form that never really altered. There were small changes – his hair varied in length, for example, or his head might be turned one way or the other – but they weren’t substantial. And yet he always seemed different. Perhaps it wasn’t him that changed at all – maybe it was more that I ended up viewing him through the prism of my emotions at the time, and so any changes I saw came from inside myself.

  He looks young today, I thought.

  It was partly because of how small he appeared in the bed. The covers were rolled down to his waist, with his bare forearms resting on the top of them to either side, and his head seemed almost lost in the pillow supporting it, the way a body looks in a funeral casket. But it was more than that. His face was unlined – almost serene. Aside from the plastic tube that fed into his mouth and the wires connected to the bed and his arms, he might have been a child sleeping.

  ‘Hello, Rob,’ I said quietly.

  ‘C
an he hear you?’ Emma asked.

  ‘I doubt it. You hear all these stories, though, don’t you? People in comas – their relatives playing them their favourite tunes over and over, and they remember it when they come around.’

  ‘He’s in a coma?’

  ‘Yes. But according to the doctors, he doesn’t have much remaining brain function. And it’s really only this equipment that’s keeping him alive now. He’s never going to come round.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  I took a deep breath, knowing that the answer I was about to give was insufficient and wrong, but also still deeply true.

  You were my best friend.

  That was what Rob had told me in the email he sent me. The email that I’d kept over the years and still read occasionally. The email that I still sometimes thought about replying to finally, despite the fact that there was nobody alive now who would ever read it. Pointless, perhaps. A meaningless gesture. But then, as I’d just said, people play music to people in comas, don’t they? They visit graves and talk to the patches of ground as though someone might still hear. It wouldn’t be so very different.

  Rob and I. Once upon a time, as boys and then teenagers, we had been inseparable. Although we gathered friends around us over time, the two of us had always seemed distinct from the other boys: quieter; more sensitive and introspective; each of us likely destined for a childhood of alienation but for the sheer fortune of finding each other. We seemed to look at the world differently from other children. No, more than that, I think we actually saw it differently. I have never felt closer or more attuned to anyone. Not even Anna, I think.

  It’s been so long since we’ve spoken.

  Our relationship changed over time, of course, because everything does. In the end, it was two things that separated us. The first was geography. Rob went to university to study English, while I remained at home and joined the police force. Those choices were in keeping with both our natures, I thought – the same introspection and sensitivity manifesting itself in different ways. Rob had always been happy lost in the words, thoughts and emotions of others. For him, it was about empathy and caring. And in my own way, that was what drove me into the police. Rob graduated three times, eventually achieving a PhD in literature. By the time I moved cities and made detective, he was married, teaching and publishing academic papers of his own, and we were long estranged.