You Can Run

by Steve Mosby

  ‘I understand.’ He was still looking down. ‘Is that the only reason you’re here?’

  It was obvious from his body language and tone of voice that he knew the answer to that question. He’d been expecting this – or something like it – for a long time. Now that it was happening, he seemed scared, but also strangely resigned. Perhaps, after all these years, it might even be a relief to explain it to someone.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not. Can we come in, please?’

  He still didn’t look up, but after a moment he nodded.

  As we followed him in, it reminded me a little of walking into Blythe’s house. The inside of Blythe’s property had seemed like a testament to his madness: the accoutrements of an ordinary life arranged in a chaotic fashion that only made sense to the occupant. The clutter in Townsend’s house was far more prosaic, but still revealing in its own way. It was the home of a man who threw little away, and who no longer took the time to clean anything that wasn’t necessary. Most of the settee was covered with clothes, leaving enough room for a single person to sit and watch television. Everything was dusty and old, and the air itched in my nostrils.

  And so, while superficially different, the house represented Townsend just as well as Blythe’s did. With his crumpled trousers, and the shirt with the old cardigan over it, he looked like a man from another era: one whose life had stopped at a particular moment and never carried on. His house seemed as much of a mausoleum as he did.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me clear a space.’

  After a minute, he’d uncovered enough room on a second settee for Emma and me to sit down. He took a seat in what was clearly his usual place, then rubbed his face thoroughly. When he finally looked at us, I could see the blood spreading back across the pale skin. He seemed very old indeed.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ I glanced down at the book I was holding, the one he’d already seen in my hands, and then back up at him. ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened in your own words?’

  He smiled at that. A horribly empty smile.

  ‘My own words,’ he said. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what happened.’

  Forty

  His own words.

  In real life, a man named John Blythe murdered a young girl named Jennifer Johnson, and her body was discovered by her best friend, Melanie West.

  It was an experience that haunted Melanie from that point on: a pivotal moment in her life. How could it not be? She was never able to leave it behind entirely.

  I’ve never told anybody this, but I write poetry. Do you want to read some?

  In an attempt to explore and make sense of what happened to her friend – and also to herself – Melanie began to write as a teenager. Poetry. Short prose pieces. Later, she would take up photography instead, always focusing on natural scenes. That was one of the reasons she loved the walk along the canal at the end of the day. There were similarities there to Frog Pond and to the river where the murder had happened. There was the smell of the water and the sight of that lush green undergrowth. When Townsend had visited Frog Pond, he had immediately thought of her photographs and realised how reminiscent they were. It was his wife’s way of touching a traumatic experience from a safe distance.

  And it had always been the same. Whatever the medium she employed, Melanie had spent her whole life exploring the moment when her best friend had died, and the place where it had happened. She had always been either pushing it away or approaching it from an oblique angle, confronting it and resolving the thoughts and emotions at a level she could be comfortable with. What had happened there absorbed her. Creatively, it defined her.

  Like her friend Jennifer, Melanie had always loved reading, and that love eventually took her away from Moorton all the way to a university further south, where she studied English literature and found an entirely different kind of love. She found him. Townsend had been shy and socially awkward, but he was in love with writing and stories too, and was already something of a rising star in the department. There was an innocence to him that had attracted her. His life had never been touched by any real tragedy at that point – certainly not to the extent that hers had, though he didn’t know that at the time, of course. It was a long time before she talked about Jennifer outside of her poetry. All he knew when they started seeing each other was that she admired his writing, and he hers, and that despite their differences there was a deep connection between them. He lived for that look in her eyes when she’d first read his story and told him she liked it. That moment when he had felt worthwhile.

  In the years that followed, he finished his first two novels, and they were published, and both were dedicated to Melanie. In truth, he had nobody else to dedicate them to. Regardless, the sentiment was correct but incomplete. Not only had both been written for her; they had been written because of her. Before their relationship, his writing had indeed lacked focus. During it, he became inspired. The books wouldn’t have existed without her, and it was entirely right that they be given to her.

  But then he had begun to struggle.

  Those books sold averagely well, and he found it harder and harder to come up with new ones. The problem, he realised, was that he had no ideas. There would be times when he’d sit and read Melanie’s poetry and it would move him to tears. Despite her comparative lack of success, there was a depth to her work that he could never hope to equal. She was the better writer, if only because she had a well of experience inside her to draw from, when his own well had always been empty. With a new contract to negotiate, and with every day’s writing failing him, he became increasingly desperate. While Melanie was a flow of poetry, he was two middling books about nothing, and that was surely all he ever would be. Without writing, what exactly did he have? How would she look at him? And yet the harder he tried to find a story within him, the clearer it became that there was nothing there to find.

  And so, in the end, he had done something that would haunt him forever. He had made that first mistake of many. Like the ones that followed, it was a mistake he made for love, really – for that look in her eyes – but that fact made it no less forgivable.

  He had taken a story that didn’t belong to him and tried to make it his own.

  ‘I didn’t copy anything she’d written,’ Townsend said quietly.

  Except that was a flimsy excuse, and he knew it. Children felt the need to add footnotes to admissions of guilt; adults should not. If it was all going to come out finally, then he needed to be honest.

  ‘I’d read all of it, though. And I used it. I used it to give me an insight into what had happened and how it felt. There’s no way I could have written what I did without it. The murder and finding the body – it ran all the way through Melanie’s work. You couldn’t always see it directly, but it was the skeleton on which it was all built. So Melanie’s work became the skeleton for my own novel. Her story, but told in my words. Except that really it was still all her. You don’t have to copy a work directly to steal it. I stole something incredibly important from her that I had no right to take.’

  Not plagiarism of words, he thought. Plagiarism of a soul.

  The two police officers had been sitting listening quietly while he’d explained what had happened. They remained silent for a moment now. Turner was staring down at the book he was holding. Emma Beck was looking across the room at him.

  ‘Did Melanie know?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at first, no. She knew I was working on something, but by then she’d stopped looking at my writing until it was finished. Sometimes not until the final copies arrived. She was a writer too, after all. She knew that things change. You edit stuff to get it right.’

  He wanted to laugh at that. It was an easy observation, but it was true: if only it was that simple to edit your own real-life stories, rather than just living them once and being stuck with the consequences forever. There was so much he would have changed. And of course, writing that book had only been his first betrayal.
He watched now as Turner held it in his hands, looking at the back cover: the photograph of the man Townsend had once been. Finally the detective looked up.

  ‘How did she react?’

  Townsend closed his eyes.

  ‘She never said anything.’ Was that the hardest part of it all? It might have been, if nothing else had happened afterwards. ‘She liked the book. She said it was good. But I never knew what she really thought, even though it must have been obvious to her what I’d done. Sometimes I tell myself that she didn’t mind. She was a writer too, after all, and there’s that saying – that a writer has to have a sliver of ice in their heart. Whatever happens to them or to people they know, it’s fair game to be used. Melanie would have understood that. Maybe she even thought that having her in my life meant the story was partly mine too.’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘But other times I remember how it seemed the light in her eyes had gone out when she looked at me. Maybe that’s just hindsight, though. Because of what happened.’

  That was the most important thing. He would never know for sure what Melanie thought of his book, so he was free to imagine anything. He could picture the best and allow the guilt to lift from him a little. But she did go missing and he was responsible for that, and that knowledge always brought the guilt back to him again. Because there was no escaping the consequences for her of what he’d done.

  Turner was looking at him with something close to pity now.

  ‘You think your wife was taken because you wrote about what happened?’

  ‘Yes.’ Townsend nodded. ‘I know she was. I changed a lot of the details. I made the dead character a boy, a man. But somehow. . . he knew. The man who did that all those years ago. He must have known Melanie’s name from the reports at the time. Perhaps he kept track of her all these years. And what I did made him angry.’

  Turner was silent for a moment. Then he placed the book down to one side of him, leaned forward and stared at the floor.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘a few days ago, I’d have said that was a ridiculous idea. Because there’s never been any evidence that the Red River Killer ever targeted his victims for a specific reason. There are no obvious connections between the women he abducted. And believe me, we’ve looked. There’s never been any indication that it’s personal for him, at least in that sense. I don’t think it’s a crazy idea now, though, but I do think you’re wrong. There’s still no evidence.’

  ‘It’s not a coincidence.’

  ‘No,’ Turner agreed. ‘It’s not. I think Blythe’s victims were chosen at random, but I don’t think your wife was taken by him at all. I think we’re looking for somebody else. Someone who knew what Blythe did at Frog Pond all those years ago, and who’s followed him since. I think this other man is the one who wrote the letters that were sent to us, and that he’s the one who abducted your wife. And I think you know more about him than you’re telling us.’

  Turner looked up.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he said.

  His expression was less hostile than yesterday; today it was tinged with sadness. It was more weary. But despite the lack of anger there, it was similarly intense, and Townsend knew there would be no escaping from it. He was going to have to tell them. Even though he had known that deep down from the moment they’d arrived, the idea still seemed impossible, and for a moment the words wouldn’t come. He could feel himself trembling.

  ‘Tell me about the stories, Jeremy,’ Turner said.

  ‘The stories?’

  ‘Those horrible stories about Melanie and what she was going through. Why did you do that to yourself? Was it out of guilt?’

  Townsend shivered, unable to look away from Turner’s gaze. He thought about it. The stories. The pain. The guilt. All of it together threatened to overwhelm him. And it was only going to get worse from here, once they knew. But there was no choice now. He couldn’t trust himself to talk sensibly or carefully, so he just spoke without thinking.

  ‘Guilt,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, exactly that. The stories are part of my punishment for everything.’

  ‘Whatever you did, Jeremy,’ Turner said, ‘stealing Melanie’s story, if that’s how you think of it, you don’t need to punish yourself as much as that. And I think even you know that.’

  Townsend looked down at his hands and willed them to stop shaking. After a second, miraculously, they fell still. You don’t need to punish yourself as much as that. Turner had no idea. No idea about what he’d done. No idea about all the people who had suffered because of him.

  He looked back up again and forced himself to speak.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The stories are a punishment from him.’

  Forty-One

  As Townsend led us along the corridor, I was still trying to make sense of what he’d told us.

  On one level, it appeared simple. He’d written a book based on Melanie’s experience as a teenager of finding her friend’s body. He – and more importantly, she – had been punished for that. I could understand the guilt he felt: that he had taken a story belonging to someone else and terrible things had happened as a consequence.

  What I couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t told us before.

  However guilty he felt about this apparent betrayal of his wife, what he’d done was no crime. And if he’d approached the police and revealed what he knew, it would have opened up an important new line of enquiry. We’d have connected the Red River Killer to Moorton and Jennifer Johnson, reopened that old investigation and possibly even identified Blythe as a suspect. Townsend might have saved lives. The only thing keeping a lid on the anger I felt was that he clearly knew all that. It was part of the explanation for the guilt that was so obviously weighing him down.

  So why hadn’t he come forward?

  He pushed open a door ahead of us. We followed him into a small room, an office of sorts. If anything, it was even more untidy than the rest of the house. Piles of cardboard boxes filled most of it, their sides damp and creased. The air in here stank of mould. Looking around, the walls were dappled with it.

  ‘What’s going on, Jeremy?’ Emma said.

  Townsend didn’t answer. In the only clear space in the room, an old computer was humming on a dirty glass desk. The monitor above it was on standby. Townsend reached out to move the mouse by the side of the keyboard, but then hesitated and stared into the black display for a few seconds.

  ‘The horror of not knowing,’ he said quietly. ‘I used to go to meetings for missing people – meetings where the relatives of the other victims went. I wanted to see and hear them. Their faces. The way they spoke. I needed to find out if they knew more than they were letting on – if they were just pretending, the way I was. But they never were. I’m sure of that. All along, it was only ever me that knew for certain.’

  Finally he nudged the mouse and the monitor came to life.

  An image of a woman filled the screen. It was a head-and-shoulders shot. She was lying with her head turned to one side, a blindfold around her eyes. Beneath her, a spread newspaper covered whatever she was resting on.

  My skin began to crawl. However reluctantly, I’d seen popular movies with similar images in them, and as shocking as they could sometimes be, there was always something far more horribly jolting at the sight of the real thing. It didn’t matter how well made a film was, or how convincing the actors and special effects were, you could always tell the difference when you saw real people and real suffering. It hit you on a deeper level. And from that sensation alone, I knew immediately that this image was real.

  Townsend touched the screen gently, as though he wanted to reach into the photograph and smooth the woman’s loose strands of hair. And just as I knew the picture was genuine, I also understood who I was looking at.

  ‘It came this morning.’ He pointed at the date on the newspaper in the corner of the image. ‘You can see it was taken yesterday. He used her camera – the one she had with her when she went missing. That’s why the resolution isn
’t so good.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’ Townsend nodded, his hand falling to his side. ‘She’s alive. She’s been alive this whole time.’

  The three of us stood in silence for a few moments. I was trying to take the information in, and Townsend – presumably – was thinking back over the last decade of his life. Melanie West was alive. It was impossible for me to accept. She was alive, and Townsend had known all this time. . .

  I looked at the photograph again. The question came urgently.

  ‘Where is she, Jeremy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  My heart was pounding. I wanted to grab him, shake him, but forced myself not to. Wherever Melanie was, she was clearly in danger. I had to keep calm. We had to find her.

  I took out my phone.

  ‘You need to tell us, Jeremy. Right now. Everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  As we waited for other officers to arrive, Townsend talked.

  The first email had arrived a few months after Melanie went missing. By that time, the Red River letter had been delivered, along with his wife’s wedding ring, and a connection with earlier abductions had been established. He had known what had happened. Or at least he’d thought he did. His wife had been abducted and murdered and was gone from his life, and he was alone.

  It was difficult for him to remember quite how black those weeks had been. When he tried thinking about it, all he could really dredge up was the crawling horror of it all. Things had been awful and devastating, or else they had been surreal, and either way there was nothing worth remembering there. It had been a period in which Melanie was missing, and then she was dead, and if he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with that then at least the world had stopped swaying quite so violently and he had been able to stand. Then the first email had appeared, taking his legs away again.

  He opened it for us now, and then stood back so we could read it.