by Steve Mosby
When he is finished, he shuts both devices off and stores them in his pack. He hoists it on to his shoulder as though it weighs nothing. The anger remains present as an undercurrent, but there is still no panic. He has a plan, and for the moment he is in control of the situation. And so, less than twenty minutes after learning of his new predicament, John Blythe steps into the undergrowth and disappears into the shadows between the trees.
Six
I want to tell you a story. . .
With his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, Simon Bunting imagined the man from work cowering. The exact scenario didn’t matter, but he pictured this particular confrontation occurring in the man’s bedroom. He’d never seen it, of course, so his mind conjured up a dirty little area: a single bed with filthy sheets; old paper peeling off the damp walls; clothes strewn everywhere. The kind of place such an individual deserved.
Andrew Reardon.
He was the manager in the warehousing department of the company Bunting worked for. Reardon had been with the company since he left school, working his way up from the floor, and he was still more blue-collar than white: shaved head; broken nose. At well over six feet tall, he towered over Bunting, and was muscular and tough – or so he thought, anyway. But in Bunting’s imagination now, Reardon had an expression of utter terror on his face as the Monster approached him.
I want to tell you a story, Andrew.
A story about what happens when you bully people.
Bunting nodded to himself as he drove. It would be Andrew, of course. The Monster would always be superficially polite; when you were that dangerous, you could afford to be. Firstname terms were all about power. Its voice would be dripping with menace, though. He liked that, actually. Dripping with menace. He might write that one down when he got home, he thought. It sounded professional.
In reality, Bunting knew that Andrew Reardon was probably anything but afraid right now. Most likely he wasn’t even thinking about their encounter at all – he was probably drinking a beer or hitting his wife. Bunting recognised his type from childhood: the boys who couldn’t do anything with their heads, only their hands, and who took their frustration at the world out on the quieter, softer, more academic children like him. Boys with violence inside them who quickly learned the lesson that hitting downwards felt good. Bullies never changed. They just grew older, the exact same behaviour manifesting itself in more adult ways.
Take today. Bunting was in the IT department. Last month he’d been charged with creating a new database for Reardon’s team, which he’d dutifully done, even working late last night to finish it on time. And he had, of course, produced something that, on paper at least, hit the given spec perfectly. This was no surprise. He liked databases. He enjoyed the step-by-step complexity of constructing the foundations, and then designing the front end so that less intelligent people would be able to use it. He liked the sensation that he had programmed something intricate and clever, and that he was the only one who understood the underlying code. Any problems, they’d have to come to him, the same way a dim-witted motorist with a faulty engine would need to visit a mechanic. It was a trivial but satisfying use of his talents.
Not good enough for Reardon, though. In the meeting today, he’d demanded a last-minute change – something else the database needed to do that hadn’t been specified at the beginning. Bunting had considered it quickly on the spot and realised it was impossible. That was the thing about databases, he’d tried to explain to the room full of people staring at him. You needed to build them from the ground for a specific purpose. If it were a building, it would be like asking him to add a new floor halfway up. It should have been on the plans to start with.
Reardon had barely been able to hide his contempt. He’d sat there, sneering openly at Bunting, with his big arms folded aggressively, and told him it should be easy for a man as clever as he was. He’d made clever sound like an insult, for God’s sake! Someone had actually laughed. Bunting had looked around the room and felt himself reddening. He could see himself through their eyes: short and soft; pudgy; an easy target for picking on. He’d remembered the way the girls at school had called him Slimon, and he’d felt little again.
Not so easy now, though, is it, Andrew?
I’m sorry, Reardon said in his imagination.
But the Monster moved towards him. Sorry won’t cut it with me.
Was that another good line? Bunting wondered, just as the blare of a horn shook him out of his thoughts. In the rear-view mirror, a car was disappearing away behind him, the vehicle stopped. Shit. He realised that, lost in his fantasy, he’d just gone straight through a red light. Fortunately, the traffic was sparse. He could have been killed!
He tried to calm down and laugh it away. No harm done. ‘Yeah,’ he told the car in the distance behind him. ‘That’s right. I don’t give a fuck.’
But he stopped at the next set.
Lost in his fantasy, though – that wasn’t quite true, was it? Fantasy was the wrong word, because what enabled him to get through days like this was something that men like Andrew Reardon didn’t know.
The Monster was real.
In his lonely teenage years, Bunting had gorged on comic books. He’d found a world of escape and support in the stories of superheroes and villains in the comics, which he saved up for and bought secretly from the local newsagent. The old man had taken to ordering them in specially, keeping them behind the counter ready for Bunting to pore over privately until they fell to pieces. He left the tattered pages in woodland the way other children did pornographic magazines.
What he loved most about them was not the heroes and the things they did, but their alter egos: the people they became without their costumes. They seemed like ordinary men and women. Nobody around them suspected the secret powers they had and the things they were capable of. How easy it must be to be bullied or belittled when you’re Peter Parker or Clark Kent, when you know you could stop it at any moment. That was a different kind of power. It wasn’t flying or crawling up walls or invisibility; it was a by-product of those things, and actually far more profound. It was the power of knowing you could hurt someone if you wanted to, and every time he’d been pushed over or spat on as a kid, and every occasion he was mocked as an adult, he’d tried to summon that spirit inside himself.
I could stop this whenever I want.
You don’t know how lucky you are.
It had been a fantasy back then. But it wasn’t any more. Because the Monster was real. It was like a costume he could put on if he chose to – a mask and cape he could wear. Reardon didn’t know how lucky he was. Because Simon Bunting, the small and apparently defenceless man he was abusing, was really just an alter ego. Simon Bunting had a monster he could unleash if he wanted to. All it would take was an email. And that knowledge gave him the power to choose not to. Which was why he’d taken the contempt, smiled politely at Reardon, and then left work early for time in lieu, albeit clocking out without anybody seeing him.
The lights changed.
Bunting decided not to head straight home. Instead, he would drive a couple of streets along from his own house to where the Monster lived. He liked to do that from time to time, especially when he knew the Monster was entertaining a guest. There was no danger in doing so. He knew the location of the CCTV cameras in the city and avoided them by instinct. And there was little risk of the Monster noticing him. Some nights, he would park a way down the street and leave the engine idling while he peered over the steering wheel at the house, feeling the thrill of having a monster under his control.
I know who you are, even if you don’t know me.
You’re my secret power.
And so Simon Bunting drove past the end of his own street, and towards the house of John Edward Blythe.
He was almost there when he saw the congregation of media and police outside, and realised that his life was about to change forever.
Seven
‘You’ve done well for yourselves,
’ Ferguson said.
We were heading down the corridor towards the main operations room, where the teams we’d been assigned had assembled and were waiting to be briefed. Ferguson was leading the way, conspicuously and deliberately so. Emma was making more of an effort to keep up than I was.
‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
‘Crowbarring your way in like that.’
‘Rubbish. Our scene. We found it.’
‘A car thief who couldn’t drive found it.’
‘Oh come off it, James.’ She made it sound breezy. ‘Anyway, you know what this is going to be like. By the time we’re done, every officer in the department is going to be involved.’
Ferguson smiled over his shoulder. ‘Yeah, but we both know that it helps to be in at the foundations.’ He glanced at me, slouching along behind. ‘You’re wrong, by the way, Turner.’
‘Oh?’
‘I think he’s going to kill himself.’ Ferguson turned back, sniffing loudly as he walked. ‘We’ll look for him, and look for him, and six months down the line some walker will find a bunch of bones in the woods somewhere. Bet you.’
‘I don’t want to bet you,’ I said.
‘Well then, there you go.’
‘You sound quite happy at the prospect, though.’
‘I’m not crying about it.’ Ferguson shrugged. ‘Plus, it would tie things up neatly enough for us. I don’t see it matters much.’
I thought of the barrels I’d seen in Blythe’s cellar. They were being removed – covered, of course, to hide them from the prying eyes of the media. I imagined Blythe’s collection of dead women still packed away inside, their bodies pushed down like rubbish. The families would be watching the news right now and wondering.
‘It might matter to the victims,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but the thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts, Turner.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Don’t you? What the hell is it you do believe in, then?’
‘He believes in pareidolia,’ Emma said.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s kind of when you mistake inanimate objects for human beings,’ she said. ‘So it’s basically the opposite of the problem you have.’
Ferguson thought about it.
‘Very funny. But the point stands. The victims are beyond caring now.’
I had a strange flash in my mind at that: an odd sensation of the way time can knit together, fold on itself, forming shapes and patterns that you can only see if you look at them right. In that moment, Ferguson’s question made no sense to me. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I wasn’t sure I believed in that division of then and now either.
‘They would have cared once,’ I said. ‘That’s the point. But actually, I was thinking of the survivors. The relatives. They’re victims too. I’m sure they’d want him to face justice. And you’re forgetting something.’
‘What?’
‘Amanda Cassidy,’ I reminded him. ‘She’s not dead.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’ He was silent for a moment then, and I realised I’d stung him a little. That had been his case, his way in to this investigation, and he’d already moved on to the other victims. ‘I guess we can ask her what her ideal end scenario is if she pulls through.’
He paused as we reached the operations room, considering what he’d just said. Adjusting it.
‘When she pulls through.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When.’
Ferguson opened the door.
Inside the room, we were met by a warm hum of activity. Over two dozen officers were arranged at the various desks or leaning against the walls, talking quietly amongst themselves. As we walked through the throng towards the front of the room, they all fell silent, leaving only the quiet whir of the standing fans.
‘Good afternoon, everybody,’ Ferguson said. ‘I’m DI James Ferguson, and I’m in charge of this operation. This is DI Emma Beck and DI Will Turner, who will be assisting.’
Emma kept her expression neutral, but I knew that inside she’d be bristling at that. I didn’t mind. I stood there with my hands clasped in front of me, head bowed slightly. You don’t need to win everything. You don’t need to be the main character or the hero. When you don’t let it bother you, and instead quietly concentrate on what matters to you, it makes it much easier to deal with people like Ferguson.
And all I cared about right then was that I was in the room.
‘Right,’ Ferguson said. ‘Let’s talk about the Red River Killer.’
As far as we knew for sure, the man who would eventually become known as the Red River Killer abducted his first victim in May 1999.
There would have been others beforehand, I was sure. Killers as accomplished as this rarely emerge out of nowhere. It takes cunning, organisation and practice to make a person vanish from the face of the earth the way he did. It also, of course, takes the desire to do so. That all develops over a period of many years. It seemed likely to me that there would be earlier victims who had, for various reasons, never been connected to the case. But, for now, we had to work with what we knew, which began in 1999.
In the intervening seventeen years, another fourteen women had gone missing, bringing the Red River Killer’s total to fifteen, including Amanda Cassidy.
Until today, no bodies had ever been found. The women he abducted seemed to vanish without a trace, roughly at the pace of one a year. They were taken from different locations around the country, possibly suggesting the killer was transient, but there was no definite geographical pattern from which to work. It had never been clear if he was travelling for his job, or whether he was deliberately visiting other cities to obscure his trail.
The women were generally abducted on their way home from work, often from footpaths, isolated side streets or canal towpaths, but there was little else to link the cases at first.
Not until the so-called ‘Red River letters’ were sent to the police.
One was posted for each missing victim, always sent from the town where she had lived. At first, they had not been taken seriously, but when the sender finally included evidence with his correspondence, several separate investigations were immediately brought together into one, albeit fragmented across various departments.
I hadn’t followed the case at first. Like most people in the country, I was aware of it, but the crimes were distant. Until Amanda Cassidy, only one of the other abductions, years earlier, had fallen under our jurisdiction, and I hadn’t been involved back then.
In addition, I had an instinctive dislike of the way the media handled such things: the way the victims’ lives were pored over and dissected, their images all but fetishised in newspaper pages, the press tripping over itself to unearth the prettiest picture or the most emotional anecdote; the intrusive photographs of grieving friends and family; and – most of all – the elevation of the killer himself. Somehow the existence of the letters leaked, gifting the press with a title: the Red River Killer. It wasn’t enough for him to be a man. Instead, he had to be transformed into a monstrous figure with a super-villain’s name. I found it all distasteful and exploitative, and so for a long time I only vaguely followed the reports.
That changed in 2008.
‘How many of you are experts on the Red River case?’
Ferguson looked around the room. Among the assembled officers, not a single hand went up. They all knew the investigation, of course, but they recognised the trap in that word expert. I resisted the urge to raise my own hand, and continued to stand there with my head slightly bowed.
‘Well,’ he continued, ‘you will all shortly become experts. And that includes Detectives Turner, Beck and myself. Let’s start with the victims.’
There was a laptop hooked up to a large plasma screen on the wall behind us. Ferguson worked at the keys. I remained facing forwards for a moment – preparing myself – and then turned around.
The screen showed head shots of fourteen of the victims.
There’s a
lways something disconcerting and sad about the photographs used in these circumstances. We always ask for recent shots: the best quality possible, showing the missing person clearly and recognisably. Sometimes that’s a passport photo, but for others – and it was the case with many of these – it means ordinary and prosaic everyday shots: snaps in which the women looked unguarded and happy; captured moments of their lives when they hadn’t known what awaited them.
I scanned the screen until I found her.
I knew the photograph off by heart, of course, but it was still jolting to see it projected so large. I did my best to remain implacable at the sight of her. In the picture, she was looking back over her shoulder towards the camera. She was blonde and beautiful and smiling.
And, for a moment, I found myself transported back in time, from the pain of the ending of our relationship, through the intense, heady teenage years we’d spent as a couple, all the way back to the day I’d stood on a bridge with my best friend Rob, and he’d teased me about the girl in our class who he knew I was in love with. Even then, years before Anna and I had actually got together, I’d known he was right.
You could take Anna with you.
No way. Why would I do that?
Because you’re in love with her, of course.
Typical little-boy bravado – and yet only a handful of years after Rob had said that to me, I would have given anything to do exactly what he had suggested. And I would have readily admitted how I felt, too, even if it hadn’t already been obvious to everyone who saw us. She was the first girl I held hands with, the first I kissed, the first I ever told I loved. The first everything.
Ferguson let everybody take in the screen for a few moments, and while he did, I felt held in stasis: trapped, almost, in two times at once. I stared at the photograph. Anna was probably about twenty-five when it was taken. That was two years or so before she disappeared from life altogether. And about seven years after she’d already disappeared from mine. Long enough ago that my name had never come up in the initial investigation into her disappearance. Long enough that I could be in this room now, even if I knew emotionally, in terms of what the case meant to me, that perhaps I shouldn’t be.
