The Runner

by P. R. Black

  ‘You’ll have to see, won’t you? It’s all in hand. That could be another exclusive for you.’

  ‘Interesting. I’ll bear it in mind. And get an answer to you – when we’re sober.’

  ‘You’re all business.’ Freya drained her pint. ‘I like that, believe it or not.’

  ‘I’m glad. You’ll appreciate what I say next, then. I’m going to be up-front.’

  She laughed, much too loud. ‘Now I’m officially goddamned intrigued!’

  Glenn placed both hands on the table in front of him, as if to steady himself. ‘I think your father has an excellent case, if he appeals his conviction. There is reasonable doubt that he was fitted up in the Caton-Bell case, probably by the police in charge. They’ve got previous for it. And reasonable doubt is enough to get him out of jail. But in terms of the Woodcutter case, and the other missing people… I have every suspicion that he snatched them in the same way, and there’s every chance he was the person who killed them.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, casually. ‘All a matter of legal terminology and technical detail though, isn’t it? I mean… No bodies. No proof. No witnesses. Just a bunch of dates and coincidences in terms of his courier job. That goes for him and thousands of other long-distance drivers. How many times a week do truckers go up and down the major motorways?’

  ‘I get all that,’ Glenn conceded. ‘To be clear, I don’t have a firm opinion one way or the other. I go by the facts, and I raise questions where they need asking. When things don’t make sense, I say so. In the Caton-Bell case, there are inconsistencies that have never been explained. That makes me doubtful. But only in terms of the conviction. I don’t have much doubt that he’s a killer.’

  ‘Very forensic. I noticed that about your Red Ink site. You’re big into the science of it. That ties in with the data and statistics, I guess.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose. It’s not all raw science, though. Tips can help. I have put away a couple of people. You know that, right?’

  Freya lifted her glass; he clinked it with his own, reluctantly. ‘Oh, I know it. You got the guy who shot that shopkeeper. Mentioned in dispatches by the police, and all sorts. Though secretly I bet they hate you. You made them look a bit daft.’

  ‘Oh, they hate me, all right.’ He grinned again. ‘Don’t doubt it.’

  ‘What’s your thing, then?’

  ‘My… thing?’

  ‘Yeah. What is it that you’re into? I would have said, you have an unhealthy fascination with murder. So does everybody. It’s not that unusual. But they don’t start some white knight website because of it. What’s the deal? Why do you do it? You must have built this website when you were at school. And the detail is… unbelievable. Forensic is the word. Chemistry, the pure science of it, the pathologists’ reports… It’s so dense it seems like a medical textbook, rather than a website for murder junkies. So, what is it? What’s the juice?’

  ‘The juice, as you put it, is to do with unsolved crimes. I don’t like people getting away with murder. I don’t like people suffering, knowing that guy who killed their loved one is still out there. And above all, I don’t like innocent people being blamed for things they didn’t do. I want the baddies caught. So that’s my thing. Seeing as you asked.’ Glenn finished his pint and folded his arms.

  Finally. A reaction.

  ‘Want to get out of here?’ she asked.

  ‘What, again?’ He sighed. ‘Look, I’m tired, I’ve had a long week at work…’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She coloured. ‘I’ll be honest, it’s a long time since I had a night out.’

  ‘Well, this is just, you know. A couple of pints after work. No big deal.’

  ‘Totally,’ she said, much too quickly. ‘No big deal at all. You OK with doing it again? Go over some notes, or whatever?’

  She could have died at his expression, right then. Utter incredulity. Then she noticed he had begun to blush, too. ‘Sure. We can get back next week. That’s a date. I mean, we’ll make a date for it. In our diaries, thing. Um.’

  ‘You’re right, definitely. Let’s swap numbers. I’ll choose the next place, if you don’t mind. And – it’s your round.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ He grinned, slyly.

  Freya drained her glass. ‘There’s one other thing to say. It might sound mad…’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, cautiously, his drink paused on its way up to his mouth.

  ‘Well. I had this message. Anonymous. I won’t say exactly how I got it, but… I’ve had some kind of, what you’d call, I guess…’ She exhaled. ‘A tip.’

  ‘A tip? About your dad?’

  ‘I don’t know. Look – we should probably wrap this up. This is going to my head. One pint. Jesus.’

  ‘You’ve had three. Listen, you said you’d had a tip?’ His fingers were a blur on his phone. He was making a note. ‘When did you get it?’

  She felt a sense of horror, as if a trapdoor fell somewhere in her guts. Said too much. Shouldn’t have said that. After one pint! With one boy!

  ‘Look, I said I have to go. It’s fine. We’ll talk later.’

  ‘Well, can we share a cab? Where do you stay?’

  ‘It’s fine, I’ve got a bike. I don’t think I’m drunk enough to get stopped by the police. Shit… am I?’

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘That be OK?’

  ‘Sure. Any time.’

  15

  A hangover. Despite not having so much to drink. Possibly it was just shame. Shame at the ebullience. At being out and about. At saying intensely, unbearably stupid things. She’d said too much. Her baseline was cringe. That was her starter for 10. Had she really said anything bad? She didn’t think so. God, she hadn’t even had too much to drink.

  No. Wait. She’d told him…

  Freya was staring at her phone, sitting on the edge of her bed, thinking about a text to compose, when he rang, right there, out of the blue.

  ‘Everything OK?’ was the only thing she could think to say.

  ‘Well… Yeah. Suppose. I meant to say – I’d been thinking. About the tip you got. Anything more you can tell me? It might be important. I could help.’

  He could help. That was the thing. Freya did need an ally. That ally wasn’t Mick Harvie; Freya felt like he’d be a better fit. ‘Sure. It was a message. In the woods. I know that sounds…’

  ‘In the woods?’ he spluttered. ‘What was it, the Blair Witch?’

  ‘It sounds silly, but believe it – there was a message left for me, on my running route, through the woods, and it told me: On the middle fork, you go past the hanging oak. Then you prove your mettle.’ Freya stared through the net curtains onto the busy street below the flat. ‘There are a couple of vague hits on the internet, but I thought we could talk it through, later. I suppose we got sidetracked.’

  Glenn sighed. ‘This is all difficult to believe, I have to say. Some random note, left for you in the woods?’

  ‘It wasn’t random. Sounds specific, wouldn’t you say? I think someone’s been stalking me.’

  ‘And your stalker left you some sort of Simon Says puzzle?’ He sighed.

  ‘You can believe it or not, but that’s what happened. It can’t be a coincidence after I appeared in the press. There was another thing…’ She told him about DI Tamm.

  His reaction was not unexpected. ‘What! And some copper happened to appear… I mean, what am I expected to think about this? You’re not even sure he was a copper?’

  ‘DI Connor Tamm – I looked him up. He’s attached to loads of press releases. Worked on murder cases, gangland stuff. It’s definitely him.’

  ‘Christ, that is peculiar. Basically stalking you? Why wouldn’t he keep you under surveillance?’

  ‘He said the police are skint.’

  ‘That, I buy,’ he said, in a less febrile tone. ‘You reckon he suspects something?’

  ‘No idea,’ Freya said, picturing the police officer with the neon bib. ‘They all think they’re Columbo. Which i
s fine, unless they act like it. He was a bit of an enigma.’

  ‘So, the note… what are you saying? This was the actual Woodcutter, come to give you a clue? Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know what was going on, or who did it. I’m just telling you what happened. It could be some twisted arsehole. It could have been the Woodcutter. For all I know, it could have been you.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Freya flushed with shame. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m a bit stressed.’

  ‘It’s fine. Understandable. OK. We’ll talk about it. What exactly did the note say, again?’

  ‘He said, “On the middle fork, you go past the hanging oak. Then you prove your mettle.”’ It almost felt embarrassing, said aloud, like a magic spell for a child.

  ‘Someone left you a bloody crossword puzzle? Two down, three letters, does the splits? Forgive my cynicism.’

  ‘Take it or leave it. Give me a call when you stop wasting my time. Forgive my impatience.’ She stabbed the disconnect button.

  Freya watched buses seem to kiss each other as they stopped, seemingly nose to nose, at opposite ends of the road. At this time of day, the people on board looked particularly grim. Older folk, students, mothers with clambering children. She was going to tear the net curtains down, soon. She’d already rearranged the furniture in the front room, and was going to have the carpet replaced. Soon it would feel like it was hers.

  The phone rang. It was Glenn.

  ‘Look, I’m…’ He took a breath, held it, then said: ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re fine. No big deal.’

  ‘Right. Listen, I’ve been thinking… you said you had some internet hits for a place?’

  ‘Yeah, one or two places in the UK.’

  ‘When I made the crossword puzzle joke, it got me to thinking. If he was giving you some kind of cryptic clue to follow, then it wouldn’t give you lots of options to waste your time on. It could be Timbuktu, for all you know, if it was something vague, possibly global. You’re probably quite close with a basic internet search. It’s promising. I’ll get on it, then get back to you.’

  *

  Neither of them had a car. On Glenn’s day off, a couple of days later, they took a train then a Toytown bus service over undulating country roads. Freya felt she was in a children’s stop-motion animation as the bus heaved and wheezed up and down narrow roads.

  They were the only passengers for much of the journey. Watching the farmland on either side, with barely a house to be seen, the crops still low in the early springtime, Freya grew uncomfortable.

  Glenn had put on a podcast; seeing Freya’s uncomfortable expression, he pulled out his earbuds. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t like this. It could be a complete wild goose chase.’

  ‘Could be. But at least we’re checking it out.’

  ‘I’m thinking that calling the cops was probably the best idea. They could have done something. Forensics. Fingerprints. Tweezers. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I did say you should call the police.’

  ‘Yeah, but not very convincingly.’

  Glenn shrugged. ‘It’s what I would have done. Probably.’

  Freya nudged him, and smiled. ‘You’re not the world’s best liar.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you’re obviously as into this as I am.’

  ‘If you get a lead, you follow it through.’ He shrugged, and looked away. ‘Best to check it out. This was the best hit we got.’

  ‘I think you were reaching. Just a little bit.’

  ‘I wasn’t reaching at all. It was a reasonable deduction, based on what you told me. This was our best bet.’

  ‘So, you basically typed “Middle Fork” and “Hanging Oak” into a search engine, and you got this place?’

  ‘It was a tiny bit more involved, than that. I worked it back the other way. I searched for “Hanging Oak”, first. There’s even a pub called The Hanging Oak, can you believe that? “Families welcome – two for one on Sunday lunch at The Hanging Oak”. I then got a little bit sidetracked, looking for pubs with dodgy names. The Spurting Stump, The Cold Embrace of the Grave, that sort of thing.’ When Freya didn’t laugh, he continued: ‘I crossed that off the list, first. Not much to link that with anything called the Middle Fork. So I indexed all the places that listed “the Hanging Oak”. There were quite a few of these, but that’s when I put it together. Looking at them with just the term “fork” took me to a place called Devil’s Fork Road. This is close to an actual hanging oak. In fact… We’re coming up to it… Christ, I think this is it.’ Suddenly he got to his feet, ringing the bell and pulling his backpack off the overhead rack.

  They were almost immediately beset by tiny flies as they got off at a bus stop fashioned out of drystone, a bunker set before a wall, complete with a mossy slate bench. Freya supposed this was meant to look organic, but it just came off as creepy. A troll lives there, she thought.

  Glenn heaved the rucksack over his shoulder, grimacing at the weight. It was one of those Nordic trekker numbers, too big and too long for an average back, perhaps better suited to a polar bear’s. Inside it, metallic things grated and clanked. ‘Now we’ve got a bit of a walk.’ He indicated the road stretching up ahead, as the bus crept out of sight around a corner.

  Freya glanced over her shoulder at the empty road. ‘There’s no pavements. And the road seems narrow. And we can’t see what’s coming when it goes around a bend. We could get squished, here.’

  ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’

  Any excitement either of them felt was gone after an hour. The day was overcast but it had an unpleasant, muggy heat, as if the late morning was giving serious consideration to a storm. They had to look lively over a course of about three miles, stepping to the other side of the road as a bus came in the opposite direction.

  ‘Here’s a maths question,’ Freya said. ‘Two trucks coming in opposite directions. In the exact point that they pass each other, we’ll be in their way. My question is, how fast do you think you could climb that wall?’

  ‘Fast enough, if it came to it,’ Glenn said. She doubted it, though. She noticed he was sweating freely. She’d offered to take the backpack off him, but he’d scowled at her in that almost cute, petulant way of his at the suggestion. He wasn’t quite so fit as he looked, she thought, but at least he was a gentleman.

  Glenn palmed sweat off his brow, then squinted at the curving road up ahead. ‘Right – I think there’s a way in… Just up here. Oh, hello.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a lay-by. It’s not obvious on the online maps… It wasn’t on the OS, either.’

  ‘I thought it was a ditch.’

  ‘You could definitely park something there.’

  ‘Why would you want to?’

  Glenn didn’t reply. He didn’t have to.

  ‘That’ll be our way in, then,’ she said.

  It might have been a turnstile of some kind; there was a gate, but its bars were rusted into twisted ruin. A giant might have twisted these, for fun. The hinge just about worked; it gouged out a fresh furrow in the dank turf.

  ‘Nancy Drew says, no one’s come through here in a good while,’ Freya said, indicating the freshly scarred turf.

  Glenn nodded. ‘This all kind of ties in.’

  ‘You going to talk in riddles all day, or are you going to explain yourself?’

  He huffed and straightened the backpack on his shoulders, as they faced an open, fallow field, becoming slightly overgrown with the burgeoning spring. There was not a living creature to be seen aside from the flies. ‘Well,’ Glenn said, ‘this ties in with a long-standing theory about the Woodcutter. The reason I haven’t explained all this is because, well, I kind of assumed you would have studied all this.’

  Freya held her tongue.

  He continued: ‘So, stop me if you’ve heard any of this before. The theory is that, given what happened to June Caton-Bell, the Woodcutter kidnapped peopl
e out on their own, alone. Men, women – they were all quite strong. Runners. Ex-military, a guy who could handle himself. He incapacitated them, somehow. The post-mortem on Caton-Bell’s remains showed she hadn’t been drugged, but might have been knocked out. Blow to the head, maybe. So the thinking is that the Woodcutter woke his victims up, and set them free. He gave them a head start. And then he chased them.

  ‘That was the juice. He wanted to run them down. Then, when he caught up with them… You know the rest.’

  ‘Is it possible the Woodcutter took one of them out here?’

  Glenn indicated the desolate plain before them. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon maybe.’

  They carried on in silence, before their path was ended by a drystone wall. There was a stile set into the crags and outcroppings, basically a set of iron slabs protruding from the rock. None of this looked particularly safe; it creaked when Freya placed her foot on the first rung, and she expected it to crumble as if made of gingerbread. But they clambered over quickly enough. This crossed into even wilder meadowland. Dandelions poked their head out of the grasses, but this was no wildflower-strewn arboreal idyll; the place looked sick, neglected.

  ‘Swampy in here,’ Glenn said, glancing at his boots after one good big squelch.

  ‘I think there’s a trail of some kind up there.’

  ‘Yeah. And I think what we’re looking for is right over there, in the other field.’

  He gestured, but Freya had to squint to make it out. ‘The Hanging Oak?’

  Glenn nodded, somewhat smugly. ‘Yeah. That’s the one, right there.’

  ‘It’s got character, that’s for sure.’ There was something particularly forbidding about the stunted shape in the distance, a black, twisted knot on the horizon. It was as if it had noticed them. It looked poised to break into a run, Freya thought.

  ‘My thinking is that the Woodcutter might have taken one of his victims out here,’ Glenn said. ‘Looking at the wider map, this was either Coleen Arden, or Max Dilworth. Draw a circle around the abduction sites, and plot the points, then those are two closest locations to here.’