You Can Run

by Steve Mosby

  I leaned back in my seat, feeling hopeless now. I remembered what Bunting had told me. There’s often been a funny smell down there. Like old meat. Had he recreated Blythe’s crime scene that meticulously? First choosing a house with the same exact layout, then studying photographs that Blythe might have sent him to the point that he could even source the same mattress? And then tidying everything away when Blythe went on the run. In a tip somewhere there’d be a mattress just like that, I realised. And from his arrogance, I imagined old meat was precisely what he’d used.

  All gone now.

  I like my house to be clean and tidy.

  But I had to keep trying.

  ‘Do you remember seeing this woman?’

  I showed her a photograph of Amanda Cassidy.

  ‘No. He was the only person I ever saw. As much as I ever saw him.’

  Which again proved nothing. Amanda had been found restrained in Blythe’s garage. There was no evidence he’d ever taken her down to the cellar.

  ‘What can you remember about the last few days?’

  ‘Not much.’ Melanie put the glasses back on and frowned. ‘I was asleep more than usual. I think he might have put something in my food. I remember that he seemed excited, nervous. That was before we left. I don’t know how long ago that was. Then I was in an enclosed space for a while. A vehicle, I think. I could feel it moving around me. And I was excited, because maybe he was going to let me go. And then scared, because what if he wasn’t?’

  ‘Do you recall anything else?’

  ‘We camped for a while. I’m not sure how long, but there was a tent. I heard water at one point. It’s all a blur. Fresh air, though!’ She smiled. ‘It was unbelievable. I couldn’t see anything, but I could tell we were outside. I was seeing the woodland as a hallucination, but for once it felt like it matched the world around me. We were in undergrowth. There were trees – I could smell them. It was early morning, I think, and we were moving fast. He was telling me we had to move quickly. He gave me something to drink, and I was asleep again, and then I don’t remember anything else. Not until. . . the end.’

  The end.

  I looked at her. It was difficult to know what she must be thinking and feeling. Yes, she was free now. And yes, this man had imprisoned her – but he had also cared for her and been her only companion for a decade. Her life had been twisted off course, causing huge emotional pain, but then it had settled into something new: a different kind of existence, one she had become acclimatised to over time. Now that too had been wrenched away from her, and everything was different once again.

  Or perhaps not. I wasn’t sure whether she could see us through the dark glasses, or whether it was simply a matter of reading the silence and unspoken implications in the room, but a moment later, she smiled again. And this time, it wasn’t sad. It was the smile of somebody who had held tightly to hope for a very long time, never allowing herself to be swept away by the surrounding storm, and had that hope land finally on a shore.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she said.

  Jeremy Townsend was waiting outside when we left.

  He was holding a coffee, and looked smarter than the last time I’d seen him. His clothes were still archaic, as though from a different age, but he seemed cleaner, and the outfit somehow better put together. His hair was neater, and he’d trimmed his beard. There was a stronger aura to him now. His experience had of course been entirely different from that of his wife, but in his own way I supposed he’d also been trapped in the darkness all this time, enduring his own punishment.

  Of course, other people might have been saved if he’d acted, and we still weren’t sure exactly what was going to happen to him: whether it was in the public interest to prosecute him for what he’d done and what he hadn’t. Looking at him right now, though, I didn’t think he would care what we did. He’d acted out of guilt and love and hope, and everything he’d done, however misguided, he’d done as an act of atonement in order to keep Melanie alive.

  ‘Mr Townsend.’ Keep calm. ‘I’m glad your wife seems okay.’

  ‘You’ve finished speaking to her?’

  ‘Yes. For now.’

  ‘And?’

  I hesitated. Even if I could have talked about the investigation, there was nothing to tell him. The truth was that Melanie’s answers hadn’t brought us any closer to charging Bunting, and right then, I couldn’t think what might. So I opted for the most honest answer I could give.

  ‘And I’m glad she’s as well as she is. Truly.’

  ‘She’s always been strong.’

  ‘Yes. She must be.’

  ‘I saw that you’ve arrested Simon Bunting.’

  There was no point in denying that.

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘You think he’s the one who abducted Melanie and sent those stories to me?’

  ‘I can’t talk about that right now. He hasn’t been charged yet.’

  ‘No. I understand that.’ Townsend frowned, looked down at his coffee. ‘But I’ve been thinking about that. About him.'

  ‘I’m sure you have.’

  ‘And the thing that keeps coming back to me is that this man is a storyteller. Because if he really did this, then he’s made up a lot over the years, hasn’t he? And if he’s denying it, then he’s still making things up now.’

  I nodded slowly. He was right, of course. Bunting had woven a story not from words or pictures, but from reality itself. He’d created a narrative that had played out over the years, and which was now moving towards what seemed its inevitable conclusion. Very shortly, he would become known as the man who stopped the Red River Killer. He would be the hero the media wanted him to be. And it was possible that that would be how history remembered him. He had plotted the whole thing out carefully enough that I wasn’t sure we could stop that right now.

  Townsend was still looking down. Still thinking.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I can tell you something about storytelling. He thinks he’s good, this man. But from the ones he sent me, he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is. I had to correct them. Just little bits, here and there. I don’t know why I bothered, but I did. He always hit the main beats, but the stories didn’t hold together when you looked at them closely. There were always details that didn’t add up, at least before I edited them.’

  They’re not very good, are they? I remembered reading that comment on the forum I’d found, and agreeing with it when I sampled the stories themselves.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ I said.

  ‘That he’ll have made a mistake somewhere. That his story will have a hole.’

  Townsend looked up at me.

  ‘It’s just a matter of finding it.’

  Forty-Seven

  ‘So.’ Ferguson stood with his hands on his hips, glancing around the front room. ‘What are we looking for exactly?’

  He, Emma and I were downstairs in Simon Bunting’s house. It was early evening now, and growing dark outside. Most of the reporters that had been gathered in the street had gone home for the night. We’d been met at the cordon by a solitary pair, who hadn’t badgered us for a quote or even bothered taking our photographs. The house around us now was still and silent.

  But it did have a story to tell. I was sure of it.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ I said. ‘A hole.’

  Ferguson looked at the floor.

  ‘Not a literal one,’ I said. ‘A hole in Bunting’s story. I think that what Townsend told me at the hospital was right. There will be one somewhere.’

  Ferguson grunted. Despite the tentative degree of co-operation between us now, it was clear he hadn’t entirely shaken off the animosity he felt for me, and also that he considered our visit to the house right now something of a fool’s errand. Looking around the room, it was easy to imagine he was right. Almost every visible surface, from the walls to the chairs to the coffee table in the centre, bore the pale grey swirls of printing dust. The whole house had received similar treatment, fr
om the attic high above to the cellar below our feet, and the test results had been rushed through. Bunting’s account of what had happened here stood up forensically as well as verbally.

  I wandered over to the flat-screen television, which was angled on a stand in the corner. A home wireless device behind it was glowing with soft blue light. There was a sheen of dust on top of the screen. Nothing useful there. I turned around and surveyed the room. Ferguson still had his hands on his hips and was shaking his head. I ignored him, concentrating instead on the scene. It was easy enough to picture Bunting and Blythe sitting in here, exactly as Bunting had described.

  ‘I think it went down in here more or less as he told us,’ I said. ‘There will have been differences, of course. I don’t think he was a prisoner, for one. And I think it was his laptop all along, and that he was the one working on it, writing the story. But he’ll have shown it to Blythe – or shown him something. The camera, too. He needed to get Blythe’s prints on all the right things to make the story work.’

  ‘Which doesn’t help us,’ Ferguson said.

  ‘It doesn’t.’ Emma sighed. ‘It means that any hole we’re looking for will be somewhere outside the details in his story. He’ll have told us things that fit the facts. So we’re not going to disprove it by attacking those things. There’s nothing here, Will.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  But I was distracted. My mind was drifting, and the silence in the house was hypnotic. I turned around and looked at the television again. Something about it was bothering me, but I couldn’t work out what. Bunting really didn’t catch any of the news about Blythe while he was off work? I didn’t buy that. But again, there was no way to prove he was lying about it, and therefore no point on dwelling on it.

  I walked past Emma and Ferguson, through to the kitchen. They followed behind, but I was barely aware of their presence.

  ‘The lock on the cellar door still doesn’t sit right with me,’ I said. ‘Okay, it’s old enough that it could have been there when he moved in. But it’s weird, isn’t it? No need for it in terms of security.’

  ‘Traced the previous owners,’ Ferguson said. ‘They’re elderly. They can’t remember whether it was there or not when they lived here.’

  I looked at him, surprised.

  ‘You did that already?’

  ‘Yeah. While you were getting nowhere in the interviews, I did something useful.’

  ‘Right.’ I looked back at the lock. ‘Not that useful, unfortunately.’

  ‘I also checked a few of the local shops, to see if we can find where he bought the newspaper. No joy there, either. It’s not like we can check the CCTV everywhere that sells newspapers between here and Moorton, and he knows it. He’s smart, Turner. That’s assuming it really is all him. I’m almost beginning to doubt it myself.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You were right the first time. He’s just smart.’

  That was certainly what he wanted us to think, anyway. But maybe he wasn’t quite as clever as he thought. In my encounters with him, I’d caught sight of the shy, bullied boy beneath the superior demeanour, the hubris. I could easily imagine the attraction he’d felt as a child to an older boy like John Blythe: similarly ostracised and hateful, but much larger and stronger, much more comfortable in his own odd skin. Bunting was a smart man, and I had no doubt that he’d thought things through very carefully. He would have taken pride in it: enjoyed it, even. But the fact remained that, underneath it all, there was still an angry little boy doing at least some of the driving.

  ‘Why didn’t he kill her?’ Ferguson said. ‘That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘You make it sound like you would have done,’ Emma said.

  ‘No witnesses. Would have made it even harder to contradict his story, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘He’d have run the risk of messing up the scene in the cellar,’ I said. ‘Her blood could have ended up on Blythe where he was lying. Anything might have happened. That’s far too unpredictable for a man like Bunting.’

  ‘All right. But like he said in the interview, why send the email asking for help? He could have brained Blythe and killed Melanie West, or just carried on as before, and we’d never have been any wiser. We’d never have found him or known about any of it.’

  The police didn’t catch him, did they?

  I did.

  ‘Because that’s not the way he wanted this thing to end,’ I said. ‘He had to save her.’

  Bunting had spent years manufacturing the story of a serial killer and becoming part of it. I doubted this was the ending he’d planned all along, but events had dropped it into his lap, and I was certain it was the ending he wanted now. Killing his own creation; saving Melanie West; becoming the hero. However convenient it would have been to kill Melanie too, or stay in hiding, it wouldn’t have been as satisfying a resolution for him.

  Ferguson started to say something – another objection, I assumed – so I ignored him and walked back to the front room, frowning at the television as I passed it, and then through to the spare downstairs room. In Blythe’s house, it had been full of apparently random debris. Bunting’s was effectively a library. Just like in the house I shared with Emma, the walls were lined with shelves, and those shelves were filled with books.

  I scanned them, searching the spines for Jeremy Townsend’s name.

  ‘It’s not here,’ I said. ‘ What Happened in the Woods.’

  ‘No,’ Emma said behind me.

  ‘But he must have had it at some point.’

  ‘He had a couple of days to prepare this place, Will. To get everything to match his story. He was hardly going to leave that book lying around, was he?’

  ‘No.’

  She was right, but I’d still been hoping. Just one hole in Simon Bunting’s story. That was all we needed. Something small that he’d overlooked, either because he couldn’t think of everything, or because of a blind spot of some kind.

  Hubris. Pride.

  ‘We’re running out of time this round,’ Ferguson said. ‘Let him walk. What does it matter? We can come back to him.’

  ‘That’s not good enough.’

  I shook my head, still scanning the shelves. Bunting would emerge to a hero’s welcome, and the press would run with that narrative. After everything he’d done, I wasn’t going to let him have the ending he wanted, not even for a minute. There had to be something. It would be something between the details, or behind them. . .

  Behind them.

  I turned around slowly. Through the doorway, I could see all the way back into the front room, to the television in the corner. With the home wireless device glowing softly behind it. That was what was bothering me, I realised. What was alleged to be Blythe’s laptop had always used an anonymous portable device to connect to the internet, until the final email Bunting sent for help. And Bunting’s own laptop – his innocent one – had been entirely clean of incriminating material.

  But.

  I stared at the blue light for a moment longer, putting things together in my head. Remembering something again now.

  Words coming back to me.

  ‘Will?’ Emma said.

  ‘Just a minute.’

  I tried to suppress the thrill I felt in my chest, because at that moment I couldn’t be sure. It could still be nothing. But as I turned back to the bookshelves, the feeling became stronger. Hubris, I thought, looking over the shelves again. Searching for something.

  And there, right at the bottom, I found it.

  I crouched down and slid it off the shelf. 1 opened it very carefully indeed and looked inside.

  ‘Will?’ Emma said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Good news and bad news,’ I said.

  ‘Bad first,’ Ferguson said.

  ‘We’re going to be very busy.’

  I looked back down at what I’d found, thinking about the huge amount we needed to accomplish in the next couple of hours. It seemed insurmountable, but we could do it. One thing after another: that was what
it came down to. We would do it.

  I stood back up.

  ‘And we need to call DI Warren in Moorton.’

  Forty-Eight

  Just over an hour to go.

  That was by his estimation, anyway. In truth, Bunting was so exhausted by now that it was difficult to keep track of the time and the numbers. But as he sat down in the familiar interview room, he was also feeling a sense of exhilaration: he was going to beat them. They’d thought they could break him, but he’d stuck to the meticulous narrative he’d constructed, and he was confident he hadn’t made a single mistake. If he had, they’d have found it by now.

  The pair of them – Turner and Beck – looked suitably solemn as they entered the interview room and took their seats across from him. That alone told him they had nothing. It was easier to see in the woman; she’d never given anything away before. The man, Turner, that just seemed to be his manner. Always dejected, that one. Well, he had good reason to be tonight, didn’t he?

  Whereas Bunting himself felt elated at the sight of them. In an hour, he’d be out of here. Too tired to give any statements to the press right now, but willing to talk about the whole ordeal in the morning. All of it, too. Not just his terrifying experience at the hands of the monster John Blythe, but his decidedly shoddy treatment by the police afterwards. He would be understanding, of course, but only up to a point. The media had already been starting to question the police investigation, and he was sure they’d draw convenient conclusions about what was happening here to the man who’d stopped John Blythe and saved Melanie West. It would feel good to give that knife an extra little twist.

  Turner did the formalities – starting the recorder and stating the names of those present and the time of the interview. Bunting sipped from a cup of water throughout. He was so close now that it was hard to suppress the smile, but it was important to stay in control. There was a camera in the upper corner of the room, also recording the interview, and it wouldn’t do to leave footage that presented him in a bad light. He’d seen that used against people in the past, and he wasn’t about to make an amateurish mistake at the last minute.