The Runner

by P. R. Black

  ‘I don’t know anything about any victims,’ Solomon said, in a bored tone.

  ‘I know, I mean… I’ll… I’ll come back,’ Freya said, snatching up her notebook. ‘We’ll talk this over.’

  ‘Oh, we will,’ Solomon said, grinning. ‘This has been enjoyable. Even stranger, it’s been… interesting.’

  11

  In order to escape the pinging phone and the creeping notifications across social media, Freya got on with dyeing her hair. The smell of the dye reminded her of her mother – she’d gone through a phase of having blackcurranty red through her hair, which had lasted until Freya had asked outright if it was Autumn Plum, and streaks of the stuff had lingered in the bathroom sink for a long time afterwards.

  Freya took a good while to work up the courage to look at her handiwork, unwrapping it slowly. The colour didn’t suit her eyes, she saw that right away, but it would do for now.

  She was on the front cover of two newspapers. She put them face-downwards on the kitchen table, not minded to pick them up again. One saving grace: she had taken a lovely photograph, at least in the newspaper where she’d sold her story.

  Mick Harvie had screwed her over, of course. She’d had the byline in the Salvo – that had all been above board. But he’d also written his own piece, under his own name, in the tabloid’s biggest rival. No professional photographs had accompanied that one, but the paper had ruthlessly plundered her social media profiles for other ones. She’d even been disgusted to note that pictures from last Christmas night out – the one where she’d kissed her little officemate – had also appeared. Either stolen or sold.

  The article had been excruciating in its appraisal. To see ourselves as others see us, she thought, as she forced herself to read the article headlined: THE WOODCUTTER’S DAUGHTER. In the strapline underneath: Serial killer Gareth Solomon’s secret daughter says: My father may not have done it.

  The story had called her a ‘diffident twenty-five-year-old, strikingly but strangely dressed, fond of thick eyeshadow and mascara, of the type you might recognise as a goth’. And it went on to say: ‘She admits to a fascination for the dark side of life – particularly that of her father. Gareth Solomon was jailed for life eleven years ago for the murder of June Caton-Bell, but is suspected of having murdered at least four more young people who vanished without trace in suspiciously similar circumstances. Today, veteran investigative reporter Mick Harvie lifts the lid on the case that chilled the nation and dares to ask: was Gareth Solomon wrongly convicted?’

  ‘Not what you said to me,’ Freya huffed. ‘Defended that dodgy copper to the hilt, didn’t you?’

  Then came the part that caused Freya to stand bolt upright, in the silent flat.

  ‘I can exclusively reveal that the testimony that ultimately put Gareth Solomon in jail never made it to open court. Solomon had an alibi on the night June Caton-Bell was butchered in the forest all those years ago. He was having an affair with one of the investigating officers.’

  Inset was a grainy picture – not taken all that long ago, but weathered, pre-digital, sometime in the late 1990s going by the woman’s blood-bright lipstick and powder-pale face. Her hair was black, and caught the light beautifully. She was pretty in a severe way – teacher-pretty – with big, heavy cheekbones that reminded Freya, disconcertingly, of her mother’s features. The pic ID’d her as PC Carol Ramirez.

  ‘When I contacted Ms Ramirez – who left the police soon after the conclusion of the Woodcutter case – she refused to comment on the matter. Nor did the police force who employed her.’

  ‘How the hell did he find that out?’ Freya yelped. She turned on her phone, scrolling past unacknowledged messages from her friends.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ she asked Harvie, by text. ‘PC Ramirez? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He replied soon after. ‘I’m a journalist.’ Then he added an emoji depicting an animated figure shrugging its shoulders. ‘And I kept up my end of the bargain. You’ve also got the contacts. You’ll learn not to cry over spilt milk. You got a very good deal out of me. I’m not always so generous.’ The message ended with a smiley emoji.

  Freya had written and deleted several ripostes to this, before degenerating into angry, clenched-fist tears.

  Still there had been offers from several newspapers, who had all somehow tracked her down. Text messages asking for interviews, including one from broadcast news.

  It was all a mistake. I should have ignored this guy.

  There she was, yet again, on the front page of the Salvo. Hand on her hip – not a good pose, really, although she looked thinner than she realised – with the jointed shadows of the woods over her shoulder. She was smiling, if only slightly. It was a face Freya might have wanted to slap, all things considered.

  Then came an intriguing message on email. It was marked RInk.

  ‘I have information regarding your father. He may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Please don’t delete this. First of all, visit www.crossedoutwithredink.co.uk My name’s Glenn. I can help. Get in touch via the website – or give me a call.’

  Freya clicked on the link; it took her through to a blog on what appeared to be famous murders, from Jack the Ripper through to some ‘recent disappearances’, decorated with mockingly jolly pictures of the dead or missing – people at Christmas parties, or in wedding outfits, or posing on beaches, or pouting for all they were worth on selfies. The top item on the blog bore her father’s face as a masthead image – all the more striking for having been clumsily cropped. His eyes were freakishly insulated from light, as dark as they came. Like hers. It wasn’t quite a malevolent stare, in his final mugshot, but it was unsettling, even for Freya. In a staring contest, you would have blinked first, gladly.

  MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE – WAS THE WOODCUTTER SET UP?

  There then followed a detailed, euphuistic blog, with paragraph stops and indeed full stops a rare respite from the dense text. It had appeared in her research into the victims earlier; she recalled the layout, now that she scrolled over it at her leisure.

  One or two familiar pictures appeared: the luckless June Caton-Bell – pictured in rude health rather than a pile of sliced meat – the other victims, the police officer, and then Carol Ramirez – a different image, in full uniform, a big-hipped, heavy-breasted woman in a dress shirt. She looked more obviously Hispanic in this picture. She was the type of woman who might have been better suited as a prison officer, Freya thought, unkindly.

  Freya read the blog for a while, then, before she could change her mind, she filled in the contact box.

  ‘This is Freya. I got your text message. Very interested in how you managed to get my number. Anyway. Do let me know what information you have regarding my father.’

  She wanted to add ‘…THE WOODCUTTER’, all caps intended. Then realised that of all the missteps she’d made in the past few weeks, tormenting someone she didn’t know on the internet had to be up there with the worst of them.

  Freya hit send. Then she tore off the towel and stared at her hair. She mussed it up, ran a brush through it, then her expression softened in the mirror. Not bad. Might need a spot of spray to give it the ringlets look – but not bad at all. It didn’t quite suit her – only black suited her eyes; this was a truism for Freya on a par with the earth being round, or water being wet – but it was striking.

  ‘Yeah. Cover girl,’ she said, wryly.

  Freya turned away from the mirror, snatched up her keys, put on her jacket, and headed out into the street.

  It wasn’t long before she reached the lane down the back of the bigger houses, away from the Victorian block of flats where her mother had invested wisely, and carried on past an overgrown wooded area towards the farmer’s fields. The sun had only just began to sink on the day she went nationwide with the story of who her father was; she’d secured another feature for the Salvo, this one on her impressions of her father at their first meeting – one she had still to write, ahead of the Saturday
magazine. And she had something to go on: the possibility that he wasn’t a killer, after all.

  Freya made her way onto a track that cut through a field of cabbages, rutted where a tractor had passed only recently. Past the vegetation, there was a fenced-off housing estate, partly obscured by electricity pylons. Freya often walked out here, but never quite so late; you met the odd dog walker, but by and large the place was quiet, a public footpath that people didn’t take owing to the local farmer’s habit of discharging his guns, unseen. It was a secret place; Freya liked to go there to stretch her legs. She pulled her jacket close, and smiled.

  *

  Push through. Take deeper breaths. Get that lovely oxygen in. Let it fight off the acid build-up in your muscles, the sneering traitor that tells you to stop. Don’t bounce on your heels. Don’t fight gravity. Don’t waste energy. Don’t even consider stopping. Remove it as a concept. Replace ‘stop’ with ‘keep going’. Steady rhythm. Nothing hasty. The good zone to be in. The good place.

  What Freya loved about the path round the fields was that a full circuit got her up to about ten K on the nose, give or take a tenth or so. She wasn’t particularly bothered about getting a good time in, so long as she got the distance behind her. The fitness tracker – her mother’s last Christmas gift to her – told her that her resting pulse rate was excellent, putting her in the same zone as professional athletes, but for Freya it was less about streams of figures and sellable personal data, and more about the steady routine – The Plod, was her term for it – and the glow of endorphins after she finished. It was habit-forming, she knew.

  The farmer’s path was perhaps her favourite route of the three she went on regularly, although they all had merits and drawbacks. The canal path was a good all-rounder, and didn’t tend to pool puddles or have too much mud – a long, straight path, and some ducks to look at. But there was heavy traffic in its narrow confines, too many fellow runners, cyclists, dog walkers or just people out stretching their legs. As in many other things, Freya was an intensely private person, particularly when it came to running. She’d never encountered anyone on the canal path who was up to no good, and there’d only been one or two catcalls from troglodyte males on the other side of the water; but too many people simply didn’t suit Freya.

  The route around the back of the houses and up and down the ginnels and through the parkland was mostly private, but also enclosed and constricted, with a sense of danger that she could never quite shake. There had been no Minotaur lurking in that labyrinth, but there was always the sense that there might be one. The regularity of the fences and the general good condition of the houses was a plus, but this was at the expense of open ground and a bigger sky, two things that she had come to value on her runs.

  That’s why the farmer’s field was her favourite. She’d discovered it on a website for runners, although she very rarely saw them on the land. The farmer was relaxed about open access to the paths, although Freya sometimes despaired at the empty water bottles, discarded dog bags and other detritus that she came across. It ran along the fringes of a variety of crops – barley, wheat, even rhubarb in its Triffid-like stalks, grown taller than Freya in the warm months before they were cropped – and if the weather had been dry for a few days, it was a delight. It curved up towards some woodland, which provided a pleasing contrast to the flat open plane, and her ankles and knees always thanked her rejection of concrete in favour of less rigid terrain. This latter quality ensured that it could get boggy, even treacherous in patches if the grips on her trainers had worn smooth. She had come home in some appalling states, a fine workout for her washing machine, but today promised a drier time of it.

  Push through. Push on.

  She sometimes used music, although just as often she disappeared into her imagination. As she skirted the edge of the woods, heading towards the stony path that took her through the treeline, she made sure the player was off. Though she never felt any sense of threat in the woods, it was still a lonely place, and Freya knew it paid to be wary.

  On. Step up the incline; take the strain. Tight at the calves. Head down. Grit teeth. Step up and push through.

  Freya was sweating freely as the trees closed in. Occasionally she had to beware the odd patch of nettles or leap over the groping crimson tentacles of bramble bushes, and dog mess was a constant danger – an unfortunate side effect of having a farm so close to a built-up area – all a help, all keeping her supple and fit, and largely calm.

  That was the day that she saw the arrows. They had been carved in the bark of an ash tree not yet blighted with the dieback she’d noticed in other wooded areas. At first the intrusion on the texture of the trees had annoyed her – regularity in a place where it was unnatural. An arrow, pointing to right, leaving an oozing raw patch bleeding sap, like fresh skin after a plaster is ripped off. The arrow was telling Freya to follow her usual path, and she only felt a sense of unease, rather than dread. It did not occur to her that this patrin was meant for her, until she trudged past it, and noticed that a name had been carved underneath the arrow.

  FREYA.

  She stopped, and ripped the earbuds from her ears. A scan of the trees, a kaleidoscope of browns and greens as she spun around. No one. Not that she could see, anyway.

  She carried on, muscles aching from the sudden braking. Her heart rate had picked up, and there was no need to check her fitness tracker to be sure of that.

  A second arrow urged her to change direction, down a more overgrown path that she had followed once, and not enjoyed. It, too had ‘FREYA’ carved underneath, in thick capital letters.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she whispered to herself. But the trees thinned out into birches and pines, nothing that someone could easily hide behind. Even if they lay in the grass or the bushes, there were no thickets close to the path, weed-choked and generally overgrown as it was. After ducking past some overhanging branches, she reached a huge old oak, its bough twisted like a lightning bolt, with an immense bole at its centre.

  Above this bole, there was another arrow. This one was pointing downwards. Again, her name was attached underneath.

  Something white was inside the bole.

  Now, the oak was big enough for someone to hide behind, for sure. Freya took her time, giving it a wide berth, feet crunching through a carpet of detritus and pine needles, circling the immense tree. No one hid behind it. No one hid in it, either – she thought, for one horrible moment, that someone might be perched on a branch, squeezed in among the natural forks and crossbeams like a leopard, preparing to pounce. But she was alone here, surely.

  She approached the bole. There was an envelope, sealed up in a plastic zip-lock bag. Even through the clear plastic, she could make out her name, inked in the same blocky lettering on the front of the envelope.

  Freya took it out by her fingertips, dropping it to the forest floor. She crouched, darting quick glances towards the trees, sweat cooling on her brow, as she unlocked the bag and brought out the envelope.

  It was unsealed, the protective paper still stuck to the gummed edge. Inside was a piece of paper with a printed-out message on it at the top, in black ink.

  It read: On the middle fork, you go past the hanging oak. Then you prove your mettle.

  She heard footsteps on the trail behind her. Freya threw the letter into the zip-lock bag, stuffed it into the pocket of her training top, and began to run, darting through the trees towards the main path.

  There was a man behind her – dressed in dark clothes, and running fast. Panic flooded through her, her feet hitting the trail hard, the trees a blur, before the man shouted:

  ‘Hey, Freya – wait!’

  12

  The worst thing was, she didn’t run far. She got away from the tree and the oozing arrows, but her path took her into a thicket. She turned and faced the man who ran after her.

  He slipped through the trees, nightmarishly sinuous, shoulders fluid as they turned this way and that to admit him. Where Freya would probably have tr
ipped over, or had her face striped by branches. He had a thin face with a pointy chin, and long dark hair shot through with grey that made him look like a busker who had weathered well, or a rock star who had weathered badly. He was tall, dressed in black except for a reflective neon bib, and athletic. He had his training bottoms tucked into thoroughbred white cotton sports socks.

  Freya shrank away in terror. ‘What do you want… what do you want with me?’

  He stopped and raised a hand. He was out of breath and sweating, and looked as if he had been running as long as Freya had. ‘I can explain,’ he said, taking deep breaths. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Connor Tamm. I’m a police officer. I’m actually off-duty… This is awkward. Wait.’

  The man reached into a pocket and brought out some ID. He held it out to Freya, as a tourist might hold out a biscuit to a baboon on holiday. Freya made no motion to take the card, but from that distance she could see that the name and the face matched up on the ID.

  ‘I’ve never seen a warrant card before – that could have come out of a Christmas cracker. What do you want from me?’

  ‘I couldn’t get a hold of you, and there’s no number for you listed on any database. I spoke to a neighbour who told me you ran – the lady who lives across the hall. She said that on Tuesdays, you head over to the farmer’s fields.’

  ‘So you followed me? What for?’

  ‘It isn’t like that…’ Then he sighed, and placed his hands on his back. ‘OK. It is like that. I just wanted to check in and say hello. It has been brought to my attention that you published a newspaper article on your… relationship with Gareth Solomon.’

  ‘He’s my father. You don’t need to skate around it.’ Freya had still to calm down. The fear had not subsided. The man made a show of staying back and keeping his hands empty, but Freya felt boxed in among the trees. She could force herself through the thicket, but he would surely catch up with her before she did so.