by Steve Mosby
Best friends forever, I thought. That’s what I’m looking at here.
A moment later, I lost them in the crowds, and then Emma drove forward again, and the school disappeared from view. Even so, I felt a kind of existential thump. I picked up my tablet and read the email I’d received from Rob again.
You ivere my best friend.
I’m so sorry.
I closed the message and instead opened the browser, loading up the link I’d saved last night.
THE MELANIE BOOK
J. S. Townsend
And as we headed out towards the wilds beyond the village, ever closer to John Blythe himself, the feeling of tension and urgency within me was replaced by one of dread.
Twenty-One
The last sighting of Melanie West, aside from a few grainy CCTV images from the town centre, was as she left her office in the English department at the university a little after five o’clock in the evening.
According to the reports Townsend had learned of, she’d called in at the main office to drop off some files, and said a breezy goodbye to the secretaries there. She’d been in good spirits. He could imagine all that easily; his wife had always been a friendly, down-to-earth woman, much liked at every academic level within the department. After leaving, she had then walked a short distance through the edge of the city centre, down to the wharf, where the canal and the river came together in a weave of interlocking waterways.
The home they’d once shared was three miles away. She hated the gym, and usually walked home along the banks of the canal, for exercise but also for enjoyment. On summer evenings, she generally dawdled, taking longer than she should. The surroundings were very pretty, and in the years before her disappearance she had taken up photography – strictly at an amateur level, she insisted, although to Townsend’s eye the images she captured always seemed unusually beautiful and well composed. He was pleased. She seemed to have given up writing prose and poetry, and he was glad that the spring of creativity inside her had found a new outlet. The camera he had bought her the previous Christmas disappeared along with her. Like Melanie herself, it was never found.
Some mornings or evenings – when the light was identical – Townsend took the bus into the centre and walked the same route that she had. He was never sure exactly why. Was it a kind of pilgrimage? Or was it in the hope that he might catch something in the air – that past and present might come together in some impossible way and reveal a glimpse of her? Ridiculous if so. But it was a romantic idea, and it appealed to whatever remained of the storyteller within him.
He stood now on the solid mossy blocks of stone at the wharf, gazing over the flat expanse of green water at the tall brick wall on the far side. The curls of graffiti scrawled there were reflected in the water below. This was once the heart of the city, but while the area remained heavily industrial, everything seemed run-down or derelict now. There were a few barges, but none of them looked like they had moved in years. The enormous factories beyond the far wall were mostly abandoned husks, their corrugated-iron walls thick with rust.
Gathering himself, he set off along the towpath.
For a time, the canal stayed relatively close to one of the main roads out of the city centre, and for the first mile or so he could hear the morning traffic a little distance away. Across the water, the broken-down factories continued for a time, before giving way to impassable banks of undergrowth and trees. The canal curled gently along. Every now and then, he stopped to peer into the water, occasionally catching sight of an old bicycle frame or shopping trolley lying in the silt below the surface. It was generally too murky to see much. The water was as swirled and foggy as it must have been when they dredged it, searching for Melanie’s body. But there were clearer patches. At one point, he even saw a shoal of small, thin fish darting about in unison. They formed a strange black language in the water, but were gone too quickly for him to decipher it.
The further he walked, the more the main road and the canal diverged. The land to the right now seemed as wild as that on the far bank. For the most part, the path was eerily silent, although he did see a few people, most of them cyclists coming from the opposite direction, heading to work in the city centre. In the evenings, it was the other way around: an exodus of people from behind. Because Melanie was walking, she would have been overtaken by a great number of people. Townsend wondered if she had been blasé about that – if the familiarity of the surroundings had created an illusion of safety. Certainly, he recognised many of the sights he passed from her photographs, and could easily picture her paused at the side of the path, concentrating on capturing the moment, oblivious to what was happening around her.
I doubt she was scared.
It was a thought he’d had many times before. She was never a fearful person anyway, and despite the silence and solitude, there was nothing particularly threatening about the walk along the canal. Without knowing what had happened here, it would seem tranquil and idyllic. It felt safe.
So, no. Melanie would not have been scared.
Not then.
But of course, it was likely that none of the other victims had been worried either – that was partly why the Red River Killer had managed to be so successful in his abductions. Townsend had also thought about that often. In reality, it was very difficult to kidnap someone in public in broad daylight, even if you were significantly stronger than them, or even armed. You needed a confluence of circumstances – an alignment of factors. You needed them alone; you needed them vulnerable and unaware; you needed a lack of witnesses. Perhaps more than anything else, you needed a degree of luck. And yet Blythe had got away with it again and again. And that was because every place, no matter how safe it felt, had a window of danger: a moment when a cloud passed quickly over the sun and everything went dark. Blythe had always been good at being there when it did. Townsend remembered what he’d thought the night before last, listening to the husband of Ruby Clarke speak on stage. It was as though Blythe could blink suddenly into existence and then disappear away again without being seen.
Would he manage the same trick in Moorton?
Townsend had slept badly, and he’d woken early to the news reports that Blythe had apparently been spotted in his home town. He believed those sightings. In fact, he could probably have told the police exactly where the man was heading. He still could, of course, although not without consequences that were impossible to calculate right now. At the same time, he had to do something.
You know what you have to do.
See this through to the end. Make amends for everything he’d done.
The thought terrified him. For now, he kept walking.
The police could never confirm the exact location of Melanie’s abduction, but Townsend felt sure he knew where it was, and about two miles along the towpath, he reached the spot. A little way ahead, there was a bridge over the canal, and there was something wrong with it.
It was difficult to say precisely what. Maybe it was because there didn’t seem to be anything obvious on either side of the water for it to lead to or from, or because it seemed so old and strange. Its ancient stone was scorched almost entirely black. It always reminded him of some malignant creature perched there over the water. Looking behind him, he saw that he was alone now, just as he always seemed to be when he arrived at the bridge. The world was entirely silent apart from the dripping sound from up ahead.
He kept walking.
The area beneath the curve of black stone felt like a small portion of an entirely separate world. It was dark and cold here, and the quality of sound was different. The ground to the side of the path was littered with large rocks, with dirty litter spread amongst them: old cans, bent at the centre; cigarette butts; scrunched-up pieces of dirty tissue. There was what appeared to be the remains of an old fire. The underside of the bridge was covered with graffiti, but whatever language it was written in was impenetrable. Townsend looked up. From between the metal struts and girders that underlined the dark rock,
water was dripping. It hadn’t rained in days, and he wondered where the water came from. It seemed like it must have been absorbed from the canal beside him, sucked up like moisture through the roots of a tree, and was now dripping steadily back down from the stone. The sound echoed: constant, deep and rich.
This was where she was abducted.
Nobody could know for sure, but Townsend did.
He had researched the area extensively in an attempt to discover what this bridge was for and how long it had been here. It felt like a place this ominous should have a name, even if just a colloquial, local one, but his investigations had found nothing.
As always, he didn’t linger. The bridge was only about eight metres wide, and he emerged quickly into the sun again. Approaching it, he always felt trepidation, as though moving towards something alive and dangerous. With it behind him now, there was a feeling of relief, but also an itch at the base of his spine. It was a strange, childhood sensation. There is something frightening behind you. You should run. Instead, with his heart beating hard, he forced himself to keep walking. There was no danger. Blythe had been here once, and his presence had poisoned the place forever, but he wasn’t here now.
As Townsend walked the remaining distance back to the village on the outskirts of the city where he lived, he was lost in thought, his mind circling the decision he had to make. The decision that he knew deep down had already been made.
When he reached the metal barrier, he stepped through, and then walked down the hill, crossing a different bridge, this time over the river. He leaned on the railings for a moment and stared down, smelling the flaking metal beneath his forearms and watching the rush of the water below. It was the kind of bridge you could play Poohsticks on. He remembered doing so with his mother on a different bridge, standing on tiptoes to see over the railing and watching the sticks dipping quickly away out of sight. Racing away together for a time, side by side. Then separating. And then lost.
He walked back to his house. Without going inside, he got straight into his car and began the long drive to Moorton, to John Blythe, to the Red River.
Twenty-Two
Emma drove us into the countryside along increasingly narrow lanes. It was farming and walking country out here; the village’s tourist trade generally came from ramblers and fishermen, while most of the local work was done in the fields we passed. There were large industrial sheds filled with tractors and ploughs, and dusty car parks with corrugated-metal signs advertising eggs, meat and vegetables for sale. I could see the beginning of the woods in the distance. In the real world, rather than just on a map, the scale of them looked daunting.
What I didn’t see was many police.
‘Not a van,’ I said. ‘Not a car. Not an officer. Oh – there are two.’
But they were just wandering slowly along the roadside, paying us little attention. Moorton had a much smaller department than ours, but even so . . . They seemed to have far too much going on in the village, where Blythe was unlikely to be, while the rest of their resources were presumably stretched out further north. It was a gamble, and it made me nervous. We needed Blythe quickly. We certainly couldn’t allow him to get away.
‘Playing the odds,’ Emma told me. ‘And they’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.’
‘And here we are.’
She laughed. ‘What are you looking at?’
I glanced down at my tablet, open on The Melanie Book.
‘Research,’ I lied.
While we were not remotely in charge here, I knew I should still have been concentrating on the hunt: checking maps, reading reports and thinking about angles. Predictably, my lie was not remotely convincing. Emma knew me too well.
‘You’re reading those stories again, aren’t you?’
‘No.’ I put the tablet down. ‘Yes.’
She sighed. ‘I think you should let that go.’
She was probably right. I’d shown her the one I’d opened yesterday evening, with that familiar first line: I want to tell you a story about a girl named Melanie. Checking the beginnings of a couple of the others, I discovered that all Townsend’s stories began like that. With the exact same phrasing that all the Red River letters did.
Emma, of course, had pointed out the obvious: all the relatives, including Townsend, had seen the letters the killer had sent about their loved ones. Beginning his own tales that way proved nothing beyond the fact that the words had stuck in his head and he’d decided to use them in the tales he wrote. She had then, perhaps a little pointedly, curled up at the far end of the settee and started rereading What Happened in the Woods, while I sat at the opposite end and worked my way through all the stories Townsend had uploaded to that website.
It was hard to disagree with what had been written on the forum I’d found. Not only were the stories not very good, they could barely be described as stories at all. They all began with the same opening line, and each of them then continued with a description of Melanie West walking home along the canal on the evening of her disappearance. At that point, what amounted to the plot diverged, exploring a number of different scenarios that might have happened afterwards.
In one story, Melanie tripped and fell into the water and was somehow washed away. In another, she travelled a long distance from the scene and committed suicide in a lonely, secluded spot where her remains would never be found. In a third, there had been an ongoing affair, and she met and ran off with a mysterious, superior lover. One scenario found her living anonymously in another part of the country – beginning a new life – as a punishment for some slight on Townsend’s part.
There were abductions too, of course, especially in the later stories. In some, she escaped and wandered, her memory occluded by trauma. In the hardest stories to read, she was vividly tortured and murdered, cursing her husband’s name either for failing to save her or else for something he’d done.
That was another common thread, I realised now. In every story, Townsend had written himself as the bad guy. Not always explicitly so, but he was invariably presented as pathetic and weak. Inferior. Deceitful. A failure.
A man who had done something wrong.
I found it hard to comprehend how he’d managed to write even the less visceral stories, never mind the ones describing Melanie suffering and dying, and what must have been going through his mind when he had. It was awful to realise that the horrors described in those later stories in the series were likely close to the reality of what the women Blythe had taken had undergone.
I should have been leaving it alone and concentrating on the matter at hand, but the disturbing effect of reading the stories remained. There was something about Townsend that bothered me. He was like an itch at the back of my mind that I needed to scratch but couldn’t quite reach.
‘I just can’t figure out why he would want to write things like this,’ I said.
‘Oh God, maybe he didn’t want to.’ Emma took her hands off the wheel in exasperation for a moment, then quickly grabbed it again. ‘Whoa there, cowgirl. What I mean is, maybe he just felt like he needed to.’
‘Why would he need to?’
‘Christ, Will. His wife had gone missing. Disappeared. Does it not make sense that somebody in that situation might begin to imagine all kinds of things? That’s what people do. And they blame themselves, too; they feel guilty, even when it’s not their fault.’
Yes, I thought. Yes, they do.
‘And Townsend was a writer, so it really doesn’t surprise me that he went and wrote all that down.’ Emma shook her head. ‘He was grief-stricken, Will. Still is, from what you said.’
She was right again, I supposed. There was a progression in the stories that hinted at that not-knowing – the exploration of different possible scenarios, all of them hopeful in terms of her fate, but negative about Townsend. The abduction of Melanie West rested at the pivot point of the investigation. Before her wedding ring had verified the letters and officially connected the disappearances, the relatives of the fi
rst few victims wouldn’t have known for sure what had happened to them; they might have been able to hold out hope. Perhaps Townsend had been able to as well, even after the letter arrived, but had gradually come to accept the truth about what had happened.
And yes, it was natural that he blamed himself. I understood that, not only because I felt it myself, but because I’d seen it many times before. If only I’d done this, everything would have turned out differently. The story might have taken a different course. It isn’t rational, but in the absence of an obvious perpetrator, thinking like that is one way for people to make sense of the world and attempt to process the pain they’re feeling.
It didn’t quite fit with the way Townsend had seemed, though. Nervous and awkward, fine. But I had also got the sense that he was hiding something, and that impression had not gone away.
How many bodies have you found. . .
‘We’re here,’ Emma said.
She pulled up on what barely amounted to the roadside. Looking around, we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere now, with the only real signs of life being the three vans parked up ahead of us. They were police vehicles, but unmarked. While the discovery of Blythe’s tent was already on the news, this more recent scene was being kept under wraps for as long as we could manage. Assuming Blythe was following the coverage – and I was certain he would be – we wanted him to know as little about what we were doing as possible.
Perhaps that was even an explanation for the fact that most of the activity was being concentrated back in the village – that Blythe might think we hadn’t realised the direction he appeared to be heading in. If so, there was a slim chance that he might relax slightly, make a mistake and give us the edge we needed. But that was all slightly more charitable than I was prepared to be.
It was cold outside the car, despite the sunshine. The air seemed damp, as though it was raining but the drops were too small to see, and the wind felt bitter against my face. It was also profoundly silent out here. If you shouted, it was easy to imagine the noise would echo for miles before anybody heard it.
