by Steve Mosby
‘Yes. We’re sure.’
‘I knew deep down. Obviously.’ Finally he picked up the coffee and took a sip. ‘I saw the letter, way back, just after Ruby went missing. They showed it to me. Told me it was likely him, this man. And you know what the most terrible thing is? I wanted her to be dead then. At least, after a while. Because that was better than the alternative.’
I thought about Amanda Cassidy in the hospital, her partner waiting patiently by her side. She had been sexually assaulted, tortured, kept chained up for weeks, and had nearly died of dehydration. I understood what Clarke meant. Once you know that something horrible has happened to someone, and perhaps is happening to them, all you can really do is hope there’s a limit to it. That there is an end.
‘Did she suffer?’ Clarke said.
His voice was so deliberately matter-of-fact that I knew how much the question mattered to him, even if it was something else he must have known the answer to deep down. Had Ruby Clarke suffered? Yes. Of course she had. But that wasn’t a thing to hear or to say. In circumstances like these, we want to brush the truth away out of sight. To hear lies and to tell them. It’s a kindness.
But I thought about what Emma had said earlier – that it wasn’t about me – and I wondered if, by being kind to the living, we inevitably brushed the dead out of sight too. A woman had died horribly, and here I was, thinking of telling a man that it hadn’t been as bad as it could have been. Ruby Clarke deserved better treatment than that, didn’t she? It should be about her, not him.
In the end, those two conflicting instincts met halfway.
‘We don’t know,’ I said.
He looked down at the desk again.
‘What can you tell me? I want to know as much as I can.’
I told him what I could, even though most of it would already be familiar to him from the news reports. I told him about the bodies we’d discovered, and the efforts we were making to track down John Blythe, the man who had murdered his wife.
‘We almost had him yesterday,’ I said. ‘In Moorton. You won’t get this from the news, and it’s not official, but we were close.’
‘Do you think he’s still in that area?’
‘We don’t know for sure. But I can promise you that we’re doing everything in our power to locate him, and that we will find him soon. I’m certain of it. What you’re seeing here today – we’re a small cog in what’s going on behind the scenes. There are several departments and a huge number of officers working on this. And he’s just one man.’
‘It’s hard to think of him as that.’
‘I know.’ I hesitated. ‘But it’s true: that’s all he is. Whatever he does, whatever he’s called. He can’t run forever and he can’t hide forever. Sooner or later, we’re going to get him. And. . .’
But I trailed off as I noticed that Clarke was frowning again. He was distracted, staring at the desk. I followed his gaze and saw that it was Townsend’s book that had caught his attention. Emma had left it on the desk, lying face down, so the back was visible, showing that large photograph of Townsend.
‘What’s that?’ Clarke said slowly.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘My partner must have left it there.’
‘May I. . .?’
But Clarke was already reaching out, and I didn’t reply. When he picked the book up, I expected him to turn it over and look at the title, maybe flick through the first few pages, but instead he just held it as it was, staring at the photograph on the back. When he looked up at me, the frown on his face had deepened.
‘I know this man,’ he said.
Thirty-Six
Townsend spent most of the morning in his front room with the curtains closed, watching the coverage of the hunt for Blythe on the television.
He’d winced last night when he first saw the footage of his confrontation with Turner – but at least the cameras hadn’t captured their conversation, and in truth the coverage could have been much worse. Every time they replayed it, his heart still beat a little harder, but the media seemed much less interested than he’d feared they might be. He’d gone to sleep expecting it to be major news, but when he’d woken after a fitful night’s sleep, it had already been relegated to supporting footage for ‘police search potential suspects’ cars in Moorton’, and by mid-morning, it was being used as part of a collage of background colour while reporters talked about other things in voiceover. They were not interested in him.
Even so, he kept checking the curtains: opening them a little and peering down into the garden below. His flat was one quarter of a large Victorian house, and his front door was a long way from the street. Visitors had to walk all the way down a long concrete drive, through trees, and then down a set of old steps before they even reached his small garden. But of course, that hadn’t stopped reporters when Melanie went missing. He still remembered how those knocks and phone calls had jabbed at him ten years ago, like an alarm clock jolting you when you’re half asleep, and he couldn’t help expecting it to happen again soon. His nerves were on edge.
He sat back down on the settee.
There was only one free seat, as the rest of it was piled high with old clothes, papers and books. He couldn’t quite remember the last time he’d tidied or cleaned in here. After Melanie disappeared, he’d attempted to keep up some kind of pretence at normality, but over time that had faded away entirely. What was the point? The house had been gradually winnowed down to a utilitarian space: there was enough room for him to sit down in here; enough clear counter space in the kitchen to prepare a meal. The rest was dusty and messy. He put things down in random places and never picked them up again. It was a home where nothing had a home.
He shook his head.
The news wasn’t helpful. Reading between the lines of the developments, the widespread belief appeared to be that Blythe had somehow evaded the police in Moorton, and the media focus was shifting slightly, moving into that period when they began to apportion blame. According to one reporter, ‘questions are being asked’ about why Blythe hadn’t been apprehended yet, although it wasn’t remotely clear who was asking them. Another had remarked upon ‘a much heavier police presence today on the roads surrounding Moorton’, with the insinuation that perhaps it had not been sufficient before. Which of course it hadn’t. Before passing Frog Pond yesterday and encountering Turner, Townsend couldn’t recall seeing a single police officer or vehicle on the roads at all.
The anger from that confrontation had passed now. In fact, it was hard to remember the emotion at all, apart from when he thought about Turner mentioning the stories – a ghost of the rage raised itself up then. But it was intangible and barely there. The man didn’t understand what they meant, and Townsend could hardly blame him for that. He knew it must look like a strange and disturbing compulsion. The truth was that he’d been in tears every time he posted one of those stories online, but it was necessary. And if it hurt him to do it, and disgusted people to read them, wasn’t that at least part of the point? He deserved every bit of that pain and revulsion. He was guilty of atrocities.
He wished that Turner hadn’t mentioned the stories. Until that moment, he had been about to tell the man everything – to unload it all. Perhaps that would have been a mistake, but there was a sense that everything was coming to a head anyway. The end was approaching. As he’d walked around the house this morning, his legs had been weak and trembling, and for once he didn’t think it was simply because of the weight that he’d felt bearing down on him for so long now. There was also the realisation that everything he’d done was going to be exposed. His crimes were about to be laid bare.
The all-too-familiar photograph of Blythe appeared on the television.
Where are you, you bastard? Townsend thought. What are you doing right now?
He walked down the hallway, through to his office. It was a small room and had been barely worthy of that title even before Melanie was abducted, never mind now. There was a glass computer table in one corner, the mo
nitor humming softly away on the smeared surface. The black office chair pushed underneath it was speckled with mould. The smell of damp filled the air. It had spread in dots and flowery patterns over all four walls, and a portion of plaster below the window ledge had broken apart, its brown insides bulging out.
Let it, he thought. If the whole place was going to collapse, it might as well begin here. All three of his novels had been written in this room, and so it was only right that it was left alone now – that the place where it all began was allowed to succumb slowly to rot and decay, until it fell in altogether.
He walked over to the computer and nudged the mouse, and the monitor came to life. Given the damp in the room, it was a miracle the thing still worked at all; for a long time now, there had been condensation behind the glass in the top quarter of the screen. And the resolution was so low that it was hard to read any text on it. The words looked fuzzy. When you put your face too close to the screen, it seemed like the letters were fragmenting at the edges, coming apart and disintegrating.
He opened his email.
And there – finally – it was.
Townsend stared at the bold line at the top of the list for a long time, forcing himself to breathe steadily. He had been expecting this since first hearing the news, nearly three days ago now. Even so, the familiar random string of letters and numbers masquerading as an email address was almost too frightening to click on. Did he want to know?
No.
But he needed to, didn’t he?
A file icon at the side of the message title indicated that the email had an attachment. He wouldn’t look at that for the moment. The message itself would be enough to deal with for now. If he could be brave enough to open that and read it, then he could steel himself for the attachment later.
He clicked on the message and it opened in a new window.
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ.
He read the sentence again.
And then, not allowing himself to feel anything at all for the moment, he leaned forward and stared at the words, closer and closer, until the edges of the letters seemed to be flying apart like birds.
Thirty-Seven
‘All right,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes. Tell me what you’re thinking about Townsend.’
She spoke quietly, even though we were hunched on opposite sides of our desk in the corner of the investigation room, well out of earshot of the other officers. Ferguson was over on the other side. He kept glancing across at us – at me, really – with a look of contempt on his face. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging him, and wasn’t interested in what he thought about me right now. But even so, and even though Emma and I were still on the case, I was aware that we needed to tread carefully.
I’d already filled her in on what Tom Clarke had told me – that he’d encountered Townsend at a meeting for relatives of missing people, and that he’d had a conversation with the man that had unnerved him. Like me, Clarke had also intuited that there was something strange about Townsend.
‘I don’t understand what he’s doing,’ I said. ‘Clarke lives miles away from here. So what on earth is Townsend doing turning up there?’
‘Just passing through town?’
‘Yeah, right. Out of all the support meetings in the world, he just happens to stop by one where another of Blythe’s victims is attending. I’m not buying that. He targeted the place because Clarke was there.’
‘Okay, perhaps so. But why?’
‘I don’t know. Not for support, though. And I bet you anything that he’s been to see the others too – that he’s been seeking out the other victims. But why? I can’t figure that out.’
‘No,’ Emma said.
‘It’s strange, though, isn’t it?’
She considered it. A part of her still wanted to disagree with me and downplay it, and if this had happened yesterday then she probably would have done. But this was one more detail -another connection; another coincidence – and it was one too many. I could tell that the image of Townsend searching out and haunting these groups was bothering her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right, it is strange. But there might be a reasonable explanation for it. Maybe he just wanted to feel some sense of. . . I don’t know. Kinship?’
‘But never actually revealed who he was?’ I shook my head. ‘That doesn’t make any sense to me. And another thing: what do we know about the Red River Killer? He liked taunting the survivors by sending those letters. And now we have Townsend seeking them out. Watching them. The whole thing makes me uneasy.’
‘It’s pretty thin.’
‘It’s cumulative,’ I said. ‘By itself, it’s thin. But then there’s the rest. How many bodies have you found? It gets stranger the more I think about it. He’d come in to see us because of his wife, hadn’t he? Surely he’d only be concerned if we’d found her.'
‘We’ve been over that.’ She thought about it. ‘Maybe the meetings he goes to are research of some kind. He used to be a writer, after all.’
‘Still is. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about those stories.’
‘Oh, I’m well aware that you haven’t.’
‘But the point is,’ I said, ‘we’re still one body down. And I’m more and more sure that Townsend was expecting that.’
I glanced over at Ferguson, who was deep in a fairly furious conversation with a couple of officers at his desk. His team had been stripping the interior of Blythe’s house to its foundations, and they’d found nothing. The garden had been scanned: again, nothing. Which meant we had fourteen known victims of the Red River Killer, but only thirteen bodies, and no sign of the missing victim. Perhaps he’d disposed of her elsewhere, but the first victim, Rebecca Brown, was one of the bodies that had now been identified, and I didn’t believe Blythe was the type to have altered his MO or made some kind of mistake during his spree.
Another explanation occurred to me now. And for a few seconds I stopped thinking altogether and let the repercussions of the idea run through my head.
‘What if we over-counted?’ I said quietly.
Emma frowned. ‘Over-counted?’
‘What if there are only thirteen bodies in Blythe’s cellar because that’s actually all the victims he killed? And the fourteenth was taken by someone else?’
It was Emma’s turn to be silent for a moment.
‘Fourteen letters, though,’ she said.
‘Yes. One for each of them. But didn’t we say at the beginning that they seemed a little bit flowery for Blythe to have written?’
‘You said that.’
‘Well, we’re a team. You can take credit for my successes as well as my failures. But look at it this way – what made the original teams finally believe the letters were written by the killer?’
Emma thought about it. I watched it dawn on her a second later.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Melanie West’s wedding ring.’
‘Exactly. The letters were discounted at first. It was only when that one was sent that we began to take them seriously. There had been no evidence included before then.’
‘But the style is the same. They were all written by the same person.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just not by Blythe.’
‘You think it’s Townsend?’
I didn’t answer. On one level, something about it made sense to me. It seemed at least to begin to pull the connections together: Townsend’s nerves and guilt when I’d met him, as though some secret was weighing down on him; the stories he’d written, all beginning in the exact same way as the letters.
What if?
That’s how writers often say they come up with their stories, isn’t it? Asking a question and seeing where it leads them. I allowed myself to do that now. What if Jeremy Townsend had murdered his wife? That would explain why we were one victim short at Blythe’s house. That was how he would have known we were missing a body, along with why he seemed nervous and guilty. And that was how he’d been able to
include the wedding ring in the letter for Melanie. He’d written the others, too, planning all along to hide his wife’s murder in the middle of an existing serial killer’s spree.
But at the same time, something about the idea didn’t fit. While it felt like I was circling the truth, there was still something I was missing. A problem with the whole theory. And after a moment, I realised what it was.
Emma was still waiting for an answer to her question.
You think it’s Townsend?
‘No,’ I said. ‘Because that’s impossible.’
The first letter had been sent several years before Melanie West went missing. In itself, that wasn’t an issue for me. People had planned murder on longer timescales than that, and they could often be a lot more cunning than you might expect them to be. Townsend – a talented writer, no less – could easily have been plotting things out that far ahead: writing the letters as the victims accrued; biding his time before including his wife among them. He was an intelligent man, and intelligent men are more than capable of that kind of long-term preparation.
The timescale wasn’t the problem at all.
It was the foresight.
‘Rebecca Brown was the first known victim,’ I said. ‘She went missing in May 1999. But it’s only with hindsight that we know she was taken by the Red River Killer. 1 can’t remember for sure, but I imagine at the time it hardly even made the news. There was nothing to link it to any prior abductions. No evidence that it was the work of a serial killer – or a potential one, at least. Nothing to make it stand out.’
Emma could see where I was going.
‘But the letter was sent anyway.’
‘Exactly. The police received the first Red River letter long before Mary Fisher, the second victim, was abducted. I can buy the idea that Townsend decided on some long-term plan. I can’t buy that he just happened to get that lucky. Whoever sent the first letter had to have known from the beginning that there was something unusual – something special – about Brown’s disappearance.’