by Steve Mosby
The Grief House is relatively intact internally, but still freezing cold at night and utterly inhospitable. Nevertheless, it has been a decent enough home to him for the last twenty-four hours, and it feels relatively safe. It’s dangerous to think that, though. Don’t get complacent, he reminds himself; don’t fall into traps. In his situation, a day is too much time to stay in one place.
Always keep moving.
Blythe goes to the window that looks out over the road. It’s little more than a hole in the wall, with what remains of the sill blanketed in moss. He breathes out into the night air, and watches the steam cloud before him.
He feels the trickle of excitement in his abdomen: that familiar sensation that comes from being alone and hidden. There is nobody out there. The road is empty; the landscape is totally dark; the world is completely silent. He might well be the only thing alive for miles.
That won’t last.
If you were to believe the online reports, there have been no developments in the hunt for him. Blythe does not remotely believe that. While there is no way of knowing for sure, he feels certain that the petrol station attendant has come forward by now, and with this being where he grew up, they will begin to concentrate their activity in this area soon. They will find his jeep at the campsite. And they will draw a line between the two sightings that will point more or less directly here, towards the old Grief House and then to the mountains beyond. Which of course was the destination in his original plan.
He is changing that plan now.
The time he has spent in the Grief House has been adequate but far from comfortable, and he has to face certain facts. He can live off the land, yes, but that’s no long-term solution, and the further he travels into the wilds, the harder it will be to escape the area. Ultimately, he needs to get away from Moorton, which will become more and more difficult if he heads north and buries himself into the landscape like a tick. So he needs a different solution to his problem.
He needs the Worm.
Blythe has no idea exactly who his mysterious email correspondent is, or how much knowledge of the area the man might have, so he needs to suggest a pick-up place they both know. And he can think of only one spot the Worm knows for absolute certain. . .
Suddenly he realises that, lost in thought, he has been scraping the tip of his knife against the stone wall below the window. He shakes his head. Must stop that immediately. Another mistake. He might not have a chance to sharpen it again in the near future.
He moves back to the centre of the room, and turns on the laptop and Wi-Fi device. Beyond a three-green-bar display, currently on two, there is no way of judging the charge on the latter. The laptop is presently at 68 per cent. Which is another reason not to leave escape too long. Within days, and certainly within weeks, he will lose all contact with the outside world, and he will be alone.
But he is not alone yet.
Blythe logs into his email. The Worm has still not replied to his messages. He suppresses the anger he feels at that. It’s of no use to him. Except. . . well, he allows himself a small amount. Because it’s time to pile on the pressure.
He imagines that, over the years, the Worm has come to believe that the two of them are friends, but that is certainly not the case. They have been in contact for fifteen years now, following the first anonymous email Blythe received from the Worm, explaining what he knew and how. At first, Blythe was annoyed to learn he had made a mistake, although it had never occurred to him to deny it: clearly no point. He’d spent time attempting to track the Worm down, but it had proved impossible. And so, over time, he had begun to tolerate the man’s intrusions. In the early days, the Worm had insinuated that if he didn’t get what he wanted, he might go to the police with what he knew, but that intention had clearly disappeared. And he didn’t ask for much really. He wanted photographs and details of the women; he wanted to know what it was like. Ultimately, it was no skin off Blythe’s nose to comply, and it had never before been worth calling the Worm’s bluff.
It is now.
He begins typing.
I said where are you? You little shit, you runt, you nothing. You WORM. After all this time you think you can just WALK AWAY from this and go on with your life as normal? You will have some HONOUR and you will come and help me or believe me you will suffer for this, I can promise you that. They don’t have my computer yet but they will if they find me and they won’t take me alive I can assure you. So it will be YOU left to carry the consequences. YOU that’s still alive to be paraded through the media as I AM NOW. That’s assuming you don’t have the courage to kill yourself because that will be your only way out UNLESS you help me. Let me assure you you are NOT safe. You might think you have been careful but you know deep down that isn’t true. They have more technology than you can dream of and they WILL find you. Your only choice is to help me. Reply to me NOW or I will not be held responsible.
Good enough. He clicks send.
While he needs to conserve the battery life on both devices, he’s also certain that the Worm will be checking his emails as constantly as possible. After all, he doesn’t need to save power, and the man is clearly a coward. Incapable of killing for himself, he’s spent years enjoying Blythe’s actions from a distance. While the Worm might want to pretend all this isn’t happening, he will be too scared not to be checking his emails. He does not possess Blythe’s inner strength or his ambivalence towards consequences. Blythe can imagine the Worm panicking now, feeling small and frightened. When he sees an email has arrived, he will probably piss his pants in abject terror.
It’s another mistake to stay logged in, though. Blythe is still staring at the email when he hears a noise on the road outside.
A car.
Slowing down.
He closes the laptop immediately, and the room goes dark. That sudden difference tells him everything he needs to know: the light from the computer must have been visible from the road, even if just as a faint glow, and whoever is driving the car has seen it.
The police?
It’s possible. He listens carefully, and can still hear the engine. It’s a little further away now, but the sound is constant. The driver has pulled up a short distance down the road and left the engine idling.
He’s not going to risk looking out of the window. Instead, he picks up the knife and creeps quickly down the open stairs at the back of the property. The night-time breeze hits him, but for some reason it feels warmer outside the old house than in. The thrill of the hunt, perhaps. He reaches the far corner of the building and peers carefully around the edge. Nobody can see him here, but he can see the car: an oasis of shining light in the darkness, about twenty metres down the road.
He lowers himself into a crouch, then moves swiftly through the heather along the ridge of the small hill until he draws roughly level with the vehicle. The driver doesn’t see him, he can tell; after all these years, he’s developed a knack for invisibility. He lies on his stomach now, and begins crawling carefully down the embankment through the undergrowth.
He stops just a few metres from the road, the grass here tickling his face, and then lies immobile. The car is clearly visible, and it’s not police, which makes things easier. There’s only one occupant, in fact: a man in his mid forties, talking into a mobile phone. Blythe holds his breath and listens, but can’t hear the conversation. Every now and then, though, the man glances around nervously, either back towards the Grief House, or at the dark, empty countryside surrounding him. At one point, he looks directly at where Blythe is lying just a few metres away, his knife ready in his hand, but Blythe doesn’t react, doesn’t move. He hasn’t been seen. He’s just been sensed. The man’s spine is telling him there is a monster out there in the night, perhaps even nearby, and he is afraid.
As he should be.
The question, as always, is what to do about this development. If the man hadn’t been on the phone, Blythe might have attempted to kill him and stop a call taking place. Too late for that; nothing to be
gained. If the man gets out of his vehicle, though, he will gut him. He can be up and on him in two or three seconds at most.
He waits.
The man finishes his call and continues to look around. He reaches out to the side, as though to open the car door. Blythe tenses. But the man pauses. A moment later, he faces forward again, nodding silently to himself. Then he drives off down the road.
Blythe watches him go before standing up at the bottom of the embankment. He has a few minutes at most. That’s the worst-case scenario, and so it’s the one he has to work with. He runs quickly back to the old house, no longer concerned about being seen, and gathers his stuff together. There’s too much spread around, but he shouldn’t need most of it. He gathers the bare necessities into his backpack, and in less than a minute he’s out of the old house and heading away into the night.
Time to put his new plan into action.
Your only choice is to help me. Reply to me NOW or I will not be held responsible.
Eighteen
‘Aha!’ Emma appeared in the doorway to our front room. ‘I knew I recognised the name from somewhere.’
‘Who?’
‘Jeremy Townsend.’
I shook my head. It seemed as though we’d somehow swapped roles. I hadn’t forgotten about my encounter with Jeremy Townsend; it still niggled at the back of my mind, something about it not sitting correctly. But since getting home, I had been trying to distract myself from thoughts of the bodies we’d found. Instead, I had immersed myself in the hunt for John Blythe.
The sighting hadn’t turned out to be the huge breakthrough we might have hoped for. But it was something. A worker at a petrol station close to Moorton, where Blythe had grown up, claimed to have seen him a few days earlier. For the moment, that couldn’t be fully corroborated: the station was some old, ramshackle affair out in the wilds and wasn’t fitted with CCTV, while the staff member himself didn’t know Blythe directly and was basing the ID on TV reports he’d seen. But the customer had paid cash, which fitted, and it was in an area that made sense. It did feel right.
Local police were following it up, searching various possible areas in the vicinity, and DCI Reeves had swung it for Emma and me to head up there first thing in the morning if there were any further developments. So far there had been nothing major, but I was following what little there had been on my laptop.
Whereas Emma, it seemed, had been occupied with my earlier concerns. When I looked up at her, she seemed pleased with herself. She was holding a hardback book.
‘I told you it rang a bell.’
‘What’s that?’
She walked over and handed me the book. The jacket looked tattered and old: Emma kept almost everything, but never bothered much about taking care while reading them. The cover of this one was mostly black, with a small cluster of trees, almost childlike in conception, in the centre. They had chunky dark brown trunks and muted green leaves bushed up overhead, and seemed small and shadowy, as though the darkness of the rest of the cover was intruding into them. Or perhaps the reverse – as though some inherent blackness from amongst the trees was extending out and infecting the rest.
The title and author were above and below the image.
‘What Happened in the Woods. Jeremy Townsend.’ I looked up at Emma. ‘He’s a novelist?’
‘I guess so.’ She inclined her head and frowned at the cover. ‘I can only vaguely remember it, to be honest. I’m sure there was some kind of buzz around it at the time, but I can’t have liked it all that much.’
I turned the book over. The back of it was taken up with a large photograph of Townsend: an austere professional head-and-shoulders shot that I thought was very much an ‘author photo’. It was recognisably him, but it was astonishing how much younger he looked here: confident, cultured and far less troubled. I wondered when the book had been published. Turning it back over and flicking to the copyright page gave me the answer: 2003. Two years before his wife’s disappearance. It was dedicated to her, as well: ‘For Melanie, with all my love.’
There was a synopsis on the inside flap of the cover.
You know the past is the past. . .
The day that sixteen-year-old Jonathan Jameson found the body of his best friend in the woods, his life was torn apart. In the years that followed, he built himself back up. Now a decorated homicide detective, that traumatic event has defined him, even as he’s done his best to leave it behind.
You know the present is safe. . .
When a new murder draws Jameson back to his home town, he must confront the girl he left behind, a vicious killer in the present day. . . and the secrets of his own past. Because everything he’s ever taken for granted is about to be overturned.
You know what will happen. . .
The clock is ticking. The secrets are coming out. The body count is rising. And if Jameson can’t unravel what really happened in the woods on that terrible day, he and everyone he loves might not have a future at all.
You think you know. . .
YOU DON’T.
‘So. . . he’s a crime writer,’ I said.
‘Yeah. Hey – maybe that’s the reason you took against him.’ I gave Emma a look for that. She was only joking, of course, but it did seem to be exactly the kind of book I wouldn’t like, whatever she said about escapism and happy endings. Reading and writing this kind of material seemed like an unpleasant form of play to me: making entertainment out of pain that some people suffered for real. Looking at the photograph on the back of the book, I was struck again by how confident Townsend appeared. At that point, his life had presumably not been touched by the kind of horrors his work focused on. The contrast with the hollowed-out man today could hardly have been more pronounced.
I set the book aside and turned my attention back to the laptop, opening a fresh window and loading up Amazon. A quick search for ‘Jeremy Townsend’ produced an unedifying page of results. He had written three novels, with What
Happened in the Woods the last chronologically. If there really had been some kind of buzz around his final book, it couldn’t have come to much. He hadn’t published anything since, all three books were currently out of print, and second-hand copies appeared to be changing hands – or not – for pence.
‘I don’t think your copy’s worth much,’ I said.
‘That’s a shame.’
‘And I think he’s given up writing.’
‘That’s a shame too.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
I could imagine a number of reasons he might have stopped. Perhaps he’d simply found it too hard to continue when the whole subject was no longer as far from home as it had been. Or maybe he’d simply been too broken, too desolate, to write anything at all. For Melanie, with all my love. Perhaps with her gone, he didn’t have anyone left to write to.
Either way, I supposed Emma was right.
But my interest had been piqued now. I spent a while checking back through the old news reports on Melanie West’s abduction that were available online, and only found a couple of mentions of Townsend’s profession. On one level, that seemed surprising. If he’d achieved at least some minor success as a novelist, that was the kind of detail the press were usually keen to latch on to. Then again, it wasn’t like he was a household name, and it was possible the detail had just been missed. There was a lot for the media to keep track of. After a while, with a case like this, the quantity of information begins to swamp the finer details. And at that point, they’d just had the confirmation of a serial killer to run with.
But that didn’t mean the connection had gone entirely undiscovered. Searching more generally took me to a writing website that had a forum devoted to obscure and forgotten authors, and I found a thread from a couple of years ago discussing his work.
THREAD: Anyone remember What Happened in the Woods by Jeremy Townsend?
#1: writer_at_heart
This just came back to me. I remember reading
this book a few years ago, but then there’s been nothing since? No new releases available on pre-order or anything. The guy’s got no website either. Anybody know What Happened to Him? (Sorry. . .)
#2: crimefan_33
Yes, I remember that. I think it did quite well from what I recall? The cover looks familiar. He wrote two others before it but I don’t know anything about them. Looking at the listings on Marketplace, I’m not sure they were crime. Think he was a literary-style writer and WHITW was a shift for him and maybe it didn’t work out.
#3: writer_at_heart
You said it did quite well?
#4: crimefan_33
Well, maybe not well enough! I don’t know, I don’t have access to the sales figures. But we know full well from this forum that loads of good writers slip through the cracks. That’s why we’re here, after all!
#5: writer_at_heart
True, true. But it’s surprising he hasn’t published anything since in any capacity. I’m going to do some digging.
#6: writer_at_heart
Okay, I turned up something potentially interesting? (I mean, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it is.) His name is mentioned in this article here. It’s a news piece about those abductions. The Red River case? Melanie West was apparently the fifth known victim, and Jeremy Townsend’s name is given as the husband. Not sure if it’s the same guy?
#7: crimefan_33
Holy shit, yes. It doesn’t say what he does for a living, but from the bio it’s the right geographical area. I wonder if that’s really him? If so, that might explain why he hasn’t published since. Imagine that. You write a crime novel and then something like that happens to you. That’s fucked up. Holy shit indeed.
