by Steve Mosby
‘No.’ He looked even more uneasy now. ‘What do you mean?’ Townsend felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. What was he doing here? He needed to get away from this man before he said something he’d really regret. But at the same time, he felt a desperate urge to explain. And he was a storyteller once, wasn’t he? He could still make things up.
‘Mine did,’ he said. ‘The man who killed my wife, I mean. He wrote to me from prison. I don’t know why. I think it might have been out of guilt. Like he wanted to apologise. . . or somehow take back what he’d done. As though he was pretending to himself that he hadn’t meant to kill her. I had to talk to the officials in the end. Get them to make him stop.’
He realised he was gabbling and ground to a halt. Were those good enough lies? He thought they might be. The best lies were built around a kernel of truth, after all. Every story, however fanciful, must be tethered to the ground to stop it flying away.
Clarke continued to stare back for a few seconds, still evaluating him, still uneasy. Then he shook his head and turned away. ‘The man who took my wife was never caught.’
He got out the hip flask again.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Townsend said.
More sorry than you know.
He stepped away then, grateful that Clarke, lost in the act of preparing his next drink, didn’t bother to return the sentiment. And as he walked towards the door, towards the blissfully cool night air, he thought:
I’m sorry that your wife is dead because of me.
Ten
When he’d first moved to the city, Simon Bunting had chosen his house for a number of very specific reasons, not all of which could easily be explained to an estate agent. One of them was the proximity to Blythe’s own house, in this area of identical properties; Bunting had wanted to feel as close to his Monster as possible. Another was that the hedges to the side of the driveway and garden were high and overgrown enough to seclude him totally from his neighbours. Bunting valued his privacy. He stood in his driveway now, breathing in the cool night air, still trying to calm himself down.
Because panic wouldn’t achieve anything.
After passing the scene at Blythe’s house, he’d circled the neighbourhood, checking out his own street from both ends to make sure there were no police waiting for him. Everything seemed quiet, but as he’d got out of the car, he’d been expecting to hear megaphones crackling and to sense bodies rushing him from all sides.
Nothing.
He was safe for the moment.
Get inside. Watch the news.
That was exactly what he had done. He needed to keep calm, scope out the terrain and find out the exact parameters of the situation he was dealing with.
Inside the house, he’d listened carefully for activity and checked for any sign of disturbance. There was nothing. The back door was locked and bolted; the windows hadn’t been tampered with; the cellar remained secure. Everything was precisely as he had left it. In the front room, he had turned on the television and flicked through to a news channel.
Blythe’s face was right there, staring out of the screen at him. A woman’s voice was talking loudly over the image, and Bunting almost laughed as he heard it. The Monster would be affronted by that, all right. He’d never have stood for a woman talking over him.
‘Police are appealing for anybody with knowledge of John Blythe’s whereabouts to come forward now. They are urging the public not to approach the man, but to report any potential sightings immediately. It is. . . ah. . . urgent, they say, that they locate this individual as soon as possible.’
He hasn’t been caught yet.
Bunting had marvelled at that. He’d always been aware that Blythe possessed a certain degree of base, animal cunning, but the man was still a brute at heart, and Bunting had always seen himself as the brains of the operation. If it could be called that. But here was Blythe, apparently outwitting the authorities for the time being, while Simon Bunting sat in his front room fighting back the fear that his intelligence hadn’t been enough. That he hadn’t been clever enough.
How careful had he been?
You’ve been careful, he’d told himself. Just watch the news for now.
Yes – that was what he needed to do.
The basics of the situation soon became reasonably clear. Blythe was on the run, and the police didn’t seem to have any idea right now where he might be. They’d released his name, photograph and details of his vehicle. Amanda Cassidy had been found alive in Blythe’s house, but was currently in a critical condition in hospital. Other remains had been found within the property.
Those were his parameters, then.
Except not all of them. Not yet. Bunting had looked across the room to his small dining table, where the laptop sat. Closed for the moment – always closed in the house, of course, precisely because he was clever and careful. And if he was going to extricate himself from this situation – if he was going to untether himself from the Monster and come away clean – then it was precisely that intelligence that he would need to rely on.
He had to keep calm. He had to stay in control.
Maintain frame. That was how they described it on some of the masculinist websites he visited. Obviously he only logged on to them so as to laugh to himself at the people who posted there – men like Reardon for the most part, he imagined – but he had to admit, you could sometimes find common sense there too. Maintain frame. Manage the conversation. Control what people were thinking. He liked that.
But in order to do so, he needed to know everything.
Bunting carried the laptop and the portable Wi-Fi device out to the car. He drove for about half an hour, avoiding CCTV cameras, until he found an isolated spot, where he parked up in the black space between two street lights. He was careful, clever. And so only then did he risk connecting to the internet, logging into his anonymous email account and checking for messages.
There were two, in bold, right at the top of the page. One from this afternoon, and one from this evening. As always, Bunting felt the touch of fear that came from being in contact with something that wasn’t entirely human. In the past, there had also been the thrill that came with that, because he was safe and secure from the Monster – in control of it even – but not tonight. The door to the cage was open, and the animal was loose.
Steeling himself, he opened the most recent message. And despite himself, as he read what was there, the calm dissolved inside him and the panic took over.
Where are you you WORM?
Because I promise you you ARE going to help me.
Part Two
Eleven
The next morning, Emma and I arrived at the city hospital early.
We had been told that Amanda Cassidy was in Room 211, but it would have been easy enough to find her on that floor anyway, as two police officers were stationed outside the door. We all knew that the chances of Blythe coming here were ridiculously slim, but it wasn’t impossible. More to the point, it wasn’t beyond the daring of some of the more repugnant reporters gathered outside to attempt to sneak in.
We showed our IDs.
‘Any excitement?’ Emma said.
‘Nothing, ma’am. The doctors are in and out. One of them said he’d be with you shortly. The husband’s sitting in with her.’
‘Thanks.’
The husband’s sitting in with her.
I wasn’t relishing that. Normally I was good at talking to the relatives of victims; it was one of the few things that Emma usually left to me when necessary. She had only been half joking when she told me that my unnatural solemnity suited such encounters well. For some reason, I had no desire to do it today.
As it happened, the door didn’t lead directly into Amanda’s room, but into a kind of exterior viewing area. There was another door leading into the room itself, with a large glass window that ran along the rest of the wall. Through that, I could see Amanda Cassidy lying in bed. Her head was wrapped in bandages so that only a quarter of her face was visible, and ther
e seemed to be tubes emerging from everywhere under the covers, connected to an elaborate arrangement of equipment behind the headboard. A man in his early thirties – her husband – was sitting on a chair by the side of the bed. He had his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped, his head bowed.
Was he praying? It looked that way. If so, I wondered what those prayers might be: whether he was asking for Amanda to come through this, or offering thanks that she had been found alive. Either would have made sense. She remained critically ill, and yet over the course of the last month, her husband must have given up hope and assumed that she was dead. I couldn’t imagine what he had gone through in that time, and what he must be feeling now. Wrong, perhaps, to concentrate on bis feelings in a situation like this. And yet, cocooned in the bed, Amanda looked so still and peaceful that he almost seemed the sicker of the two.
‘Detectives.’
A doctor entered the viewing room behind us, then closed the door gently. He was tall and thin, with grey hair and a serious, hawkish face.
‘I’m Dr Cleaves. I was told you were coming. I’m afraid it’s not going to be a very helpful visit for you.’
‘No,’ I said. We’d been hoping to interview Amanda, as it was possible she might know something about where her captor had gone. A slim chance, admittedly, but we needed all the information we could get right now. It was obvious just from looking at her, though, that it wasn’t going to happen this morning. ‘What’s her condition?’
‘Our patient is very ill indeed,’ Cleaves said. ‘At the moment, she’s in a medically induced coma. She’s lost a lot of fluids and her body has been subjected to a significant degree of trauma. She’s stable for the moment, but she still needs a great deal of care.’
‘I understand.’
Cleaves stared through the glass at his patient.
‘I’ve worked here for decades now, Detectives, and in that time, I’ve witnessed some horrific injuries. But I think I can speak for all my staff when I say we’ve never seen anything like what has been done to this young woman.’
When Amanda Cassidy had been brought in, he told us, she was severely dehydrated. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a number of days; she was also disorientated and traumatised, and lost consciousness soon after arrival. In addition to her general physical state, she had suffered a number of more specific injuries. There was evidence of a series of prolonged sexual assaults. She had also been tortured. There was clear indication of burning to her legs and torso, along with severe bruising all over her body.
I looked down at the floor as Cleaves spoke, trying to keep my face impassive. None of it was any real surprise; it was the reason men like John Blythe abducted women in the first place. But it was hard to hear. Hard to extrapolate from that to what his other victims must have gone through too.
They were downstairs now. I’d attended several autopsies at the morgue in the basement here. It was likely a coincidence that the bodies were stored down there, but it sometimes seemed that there had been a design to it, however subconscious – an understanding that the dead belonged under the ground, away from windows and daylight. That was where the victims were right now, just a few floors below us, and for a moment it felt like I could sense their presence in the soles of my feet. Her presence.
‘Some of those wounds were open,’ Cleaves said, ‘and infection had set in. I’d say that if she hadn’t been found when she was, there’s a good chance she would have been dead within hours. As it is. . .’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Well, let’s just say that we’re still not out of the woods.’
I nodded to myself. Out of the woods. The expression felt right. It was as though Amanda had been stolen by some monster from a fairy tale and hidden away in the depths of a secret forest. We had found and rescued her, and so by rights she should now be safe, and yet a part of her remained there. Even though she was back here with us, it was still possible that the monster who had taken her would end up killing her. However many policemen we put on the doors, and however hard we hunted for John Blythe, nothing could change that.
I stared through the window at Amanda Cassidy lying bandaged and motionless, kept alive for the moment solely by the plethora of equipment that surrounded her. If she did survive, her life would be irrevocably changed – damaged perhaps beyond repair. My gaze moved to her husband. Not just her life, either. The lives of everyone who had known and loved the person she once was.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Emma said. ‘Are we done, Will?’
I continued to stare at Amanda for another few seconds, then looked at Cleaves. Something about what he’d said was niggling at me, I realised, but it could wait for a moment.
‘We’re done,’ I said.
Back outside the room, we walked slowly to the elevator.
‘Well, that was disappointing,’ Emma said.
She spoke quietly, with none of her usual breezy confidence, and it was obvious the details had got to her just as much as they had to me. Disappointed wasn’t quite right, though. While it would have been good to get a lead of some kind, it also felt important just to have seen her. It was a reminder that, among the death and horror that Blythe had wrought, one woman had survived. For now, at least.
I said, ‘I was thinking about what Cleaves just told us. That if Amanda hadn’t been found when she was, she’d have died pretty soon after.’
‘Right?’
‘Well, does that fit with Blythe?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not with Blythe,’ I corrected myself. ‘With the letters.’
‘Oh God. Not back to the letters again, please.’
‘No, hear me out. Think about it. Blythe apparently goes on holiday and leaves her alone without food or water. She’s injured. He must have known there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t thinking. Hard to imagine what goes on in the head of someone who’d do that.’ Emma glanced behind her, back down the corridor. ‘Or perhaps he was even counting on it. I mean, for all we know, that could be his preferred method of killing them. He just leaves them to die when he’s finished with them.’
‘Exactly. And that’s at odds with the letters, isn’t it? In the letters, he seems to talk about actively killing them – about being involved.’
There was more to it than that as well, I thought. The whole tone of the letters was strange. They seemed almost loving in places, albeit in a disturbing way, and that didn’t seem to fit with the details of sexual assault and torture we’d just heard about. It also didn’t seem to fit with just leaving his victims to die, discarded like pieces of trash he no longer cared about.
‘Maybe he changed his MO with this one?’ Emma said.
‘Yeah, maybe.’
We reached the lift and stepped inside. But instead of hitting the button for the ground floor and reception, I hesitated, then selected the one for the basement instead.
‘Will,’ Emma said patiently. ‘What exactly are you doing?’
‘We’re here anyway.’ I shrugged. ‘I want to see them.’
Except that wasn’t true. The fact was that want didn’t actually come into it at all: it was a sense of compulsion that was taking me down to the autopsy suites. And it worried me as the elevator began descending that perhaps just being in the room wasn’t going to be enough for me with this case.
Because if that wasn’t enough, then what would be?
Twelve
One of the worst things when a relationship ends is the way it makes you distrust everything that happened before.
You’re forced to question it all – especially when the end is sudden, arriving unexpectedly and apparently from nowhere. When one day everything is fine and the next it’s over, you know that it’s impossible for your life to have fractured so completely overnight. So it’s natural to work your way back through all those recent I love yous, all those I couldn’t live without yous, and cross them out one by one in your mind, dismissing them as the lies they must
have been at the time. You feel foolish and stupid. You were tricked. And that’s what allows the hate and anger to come flooding in.
That was exactly how it felt when I lost Anna. And I did very much think of it as losing her when it happened, as though something I’d possessed had been taken away from me. When it was over, I went back through all the happy times and experiences, the secrets we’d shared with each other, and I drew a thick black line through each of them. I worked hard at negating her and everything she’d meant to me. That wasn’t fair, of course. With hindsight, I came to believe that it wasn’t a lack of love that had made it so sudden; more that Anna had been unhappy for a while but reluctant to hurt me. There had been no malice. It had made no difference at the time, of course. I was devastated and I was angry, and in my head I rewrote everything that had happened between us and cut her out of my life.
The last time I saw her was before her second term at university, at the train station, when she was heading back after the Christmas we’d spent together. In hindsight, again, I realised that she had seemed a little more distant than usual over the break – slightly distracted, as though her thoughts had been somewhere else half the time. I’d put it down to the fact that her life had diverted along a new and interesting course. While I had stayed home and applied to the police, Anna had moved into a very different existence of studying and socialising. It was natural enough, I’d thought, for her to change a little because of that. I’d been too stupid to recognise that the path she was heading on was diverging quickly from my own, and that they would shortly be too far apart for us to hold hands over the divide.
As a teenager, I’d been convinced Anna and I would be together for the rest of our lives. I’d always imagined that she felt the same. When our relationship ended, I wondered if I had only ever been a stage to her, and if she’d known all along that she would leave me behind. If when I stood by the ticket barrier that day waving her off, she’d been thinking what a fool I was, and perhaps even – intolerable, this – feeling pity for me. We talked on the phone a few times after she went back, and exchanged emails. And then a few weeks later, in one of those phone calls, she told me that she’d met someone else at university and that it was over between us.
