You Can Run

by Steve Mosby

  I pulled my coat around me and looked up the embankment.

  The old farmhouse stood at the crest, about a hundred metres away, its base obscured by overgrown grass and heather. It seemed so ancient that it might have been here for centuries, and although worn down, with its windows and door missing, there was still something solid and guard-like about it. It gave the impression that it would still be standing here in centuries to come, more a natural feature like a rock face than something man-made.

  Various officers were standing around it at the top of the embankment, and one of them began making his way down to us now, waving a hand overhead in a casual greeting. He was early thirties at most, good-looking, and he was wearing sunglasses and a pink shirt with a black tie that the wind was wrapping over his shoulder as he approached. No coat, but not remotely bothered by the temperature – or not showing it, at least. The perks of growing up acclimatised to the environment, perhaps. Which would apply to Blythe too, I thought.

  ‘Detective Turner? Detective Beck? I’m Dave Warren. I spoke to your DCI on the phone first thing. I’m in charge of the search, at least out here.’

  Up close, Warren was short, but also looked toned and strong. His smile was friendly enough, but when he shook our hands – or mine, at least – his grip was overly firm, and I thought deliberately so. It was a handshake that emphasised I’m in charge and the overall message was obvious enough: Emma and I had no real authority here; he was the one who would bag John Blythe and get the credit for it. Fine, I thought. I didn’t care about the latter so much. I wasn’t so sure about the former, though.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said.

  ‘Likewise. Okay, to fill you in on the scene, over there is the man who got in touch with us.’ Warren gestured to someone standing with officers by the side of one of the vans. ‘Stan Maguire. He’s a good guy. Owns a farm over yonder. You want to speak to him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ignoring the undertone in the question. Whatever the hierarchy of authority here, I didn’t think we needed permission to walk a few metres and talk to someone.

  ‘What’s his story?’

  ‘Not a long one.’ He pointed up the embankment. ‘That’s the old Grief House. Don’t ask: I have no idea why it’s called that. Has been for years, since long before I was a boy.’

  The Grief House.

  ‘Kids pass names down,’ I said, almost to myself.

  ‘Yeah, I guess they do.’ Warren cocked his head, considering the idea. ‘Anyway, it’s been empty for as long as I can remember. There are a bunch of them around here. Old fortified farmhouses. Stan’s an unofficial warden, I guess. There’s never any trouble, but he’ll drive past every now and then just to make sure everything’s still standing. With the news and everything, he drove past last night. He saw a light in one of the windows and called us.’

  ‘He didn’t investigate himself?’

  ‘No, he didn’t want to scare off whoever was inside. Plus. . . well.’ Warren looked slightly awkward. ‘You know.’

  I nodded. Stan Maguire didn’t look a particularly imposing type, and while John Blythe was only a man, he loomed much larger than that in everybody’s minds. He was the Red River Killer, after all, his identity bound up in the terrible, inhuman crimes he’d committed, which meant the danger he represented was exaggerated to similarly monstrous proportions. Confronting him would actually be the same as confronting any comparable human male, and yet it would feel different, as though you were standing face to face with something far more terrifying than just a human being.

  Which was rubbish, of course, but the idea was potent. I remembered reading that during the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s autopsy, the doctors – men of science and reason – had kept his corpse shackled at the feet. What he had done in life was so awful that even in death he caused fear. And Blythe, of course, was not dead.

  ‘I think he did the right thing,’ I said. ‘How long until you arrived?’

  ‘We had officers on scene within half an hour.’ Warren seemed to bristle slightly, as though I’d been accusing him of something. ‘I mean, we’re on high alert here, obviously, but we’re undermanned – for now, anyway. So, half an hour. By which point he was gone.’

  ‘You did well,’ I said. ‘Blythe probably thought the road would be relatively unused, but then he heard the car. I’m guessing Maguire at least stopped for a moment?’

  ‘Yeah, he phoned it in from the roadside. Doors locked. Said it was the scariest few minutes of his life. It felt like he was being watched the whole time.’

  ‘He probably was,’ I said.

  Still looking up at the old farm, 1 could imagine how frightening it must have been. This place was isolated and desolate enough even in daytime. At night, with nothing but the darkness and silence for company, it must have been unnerving as hell: staring out into the dark, expecting to see a figure emerge from the undergrowth at any moment.

  ‘But Blythe will have been gone quickly,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have hung around and taken any chances.’

  ‘Stupid of him to have a light on, if he’s being that careful.’

  Yes, I thought. It was. So there must have been a reason for it.

  ‘How strong was the light? What colour?’

  ‘I don’t know what colour. Stan said it was soft, though. Not flickering or moving about, so not a torch or anything. But it’s pitch black out here at night, so any light travels.’

  ‘Maybe he was checking a laptop,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  I shrugged. ‘Or whatever it is he’s using to communicate with the outside world. He saw the news coverage somehow, after all.’

  Warren looked at me, curious again.

  ‘You think he’s communicating with someone?’

  I didn’t reply for a moment. What I’d actually meant was that Blythe was observing the outside world somehow – and yet that particular word had slipped out. As though he might be interacting with someone. From our investigation, it didn’t seem that Blythe had a single living relative to turn to, and it seemed odd to think that anyone else might be prepared to help or shelter him given what had been revealed. At the same time, I found myself unwilling to take the word back.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just think we should be prepared for anything. Anyway. We don’t need to talk to Mr Maguire for the moment. I would like to see inside the property, though.’ ‘Why? There’s not much to see.’

  I shrugged again. ‘Just because.’

  The embankment was steep and the ground was uneven. I’ve always been a little uncoordinated, so I worked hard not to go over on an ankle in front of the other officers. The grass wavered around my shins. Beside me, of course, Emma managed the short climb with cool aplomb.

  As we reached the top, the old farmhouse came properly into view. It was separated from the embankment by a dry-stone wall with a wooden stile in it. The house was two storeys and made of old stone, coated in moss, with an open doorway at ground level and a rough set of steps that ran up the front towards another open doorway on the first floor. An empty window stared out from above. The roof had long since fallen in, but two triangles of stone remained at either end. When we reached the stile, the wood looked as old as the building itself, and one of the struts felt warm, as though it was somehow alive: a tree grown into a strange shape.

  Warren was with us, but I showed my ID to the officer guarding the stile anyway, and he nodded, stepping to one side to allow us through.

  ‘What are you expecting to see?’ Emma asked me quietly.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  I couldn’t say anything more than that, because the truth was that I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting. Blythe had been here, but he had left yesterday night. There was nothing to see. Perhaps the truth was actually something different. I didn’t expect to see anything; I expected to feel it.

  And as we walked through the downstairs doorway, it happened immediately: the same strange sensation
I’d experienced when walking into Blythe’s house for the first time two days ago. The interiors couldn’t have been more different. Blythe’s house had been his home, and it had reflected his fractured mindset: the odd arrangements of possessions; the sheer disturbed functionlessness of the rooms; the mishmash of material, nothing apparently thrown away and everything stored at random, or according to some unfathomable mental plan. Whereas the downstairs of this old farmhouse was entirely empty. A hollowed-out husk. And yet I felt him there regardless: a presence that lingered in the air as potently as a recently smoked cigarette. It was only because I knew he’d been here, of course, but the sensation was real all the same. We were gaining on him. I could sense him in the distance, like the thud of a heartbeat that was becoming quicker and heavier the closer I got.

  ‘We think he slept upstairs,’ Warren said.

  I looked up at the ceiling and nodded to myself.

  The internal stairs were at the far side of the room. I walked over, drawn to them – not caring whether the others followed, but dimly aware that they did. Open to the elements, the first floor was freezing cold. The stone floor was scattered with a handful of belongings: ragged clothes for the most part; a small portable gas stove lying on its side in the corner. I looked around. No backpack. No sign of a phone or laptop, either. Blythe had clearly left in a hurry, but he still had his wits about him.

  Four SOCOs were working the room, but I ignored them for the moment and walked over to the window instead – if a large square hole in the wall could even be called that. Close to, the bitter wind whipped in. I wondered whether Blythe had been here since abandoning the campsite after he’d heard the news. If so, he was made of sterner stuff than me.

  I stood there for a few moments, staring out of the window, thinking. The view was quite something. I could see the road below, with the line of police vehicles; beyond that, angled shades of green stretched ahead for miles, shadowed by clouds drifting overhead. The window faced in the direction of Moorton, although the village itself was too far away to be visible from here. There was little in the way of civilisation in view. I could imagine Blythe standing here, looking out and feeling completely safe and alone – king of all he surveyed. I was at home in the city. Out here in the wilds was Blythe’s natural territory. He wouldn’t feel unnerved by this isolation; he would welcome it. Not only did it suit his purposes right now, it suited his nature.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Emma asked.

  I glanced behind me and saw that both she and Warren were looking at me strangely. I’d been completely lost in thought. Looking down, I realised I’d been absently stroking the wall below the window ledge – a slow, repetitive upwards motion – and stopped immediately.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  But when I moved my hand, I saw the marks on the stone. They were too pronounced to have been made by me. I crouched down, inclined my head slightly and peered at the dusty white lines that had been carved into the wall. It was as though somebody had been moving a knife against the stone as he stood by the window, contemplating the scene before him. With the woods and mountains behind him, and Moorton somewhere in the distance ahead. . .

  I stood up.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said again.

  Twenty-Three

  Blythe sits on the bank, calmly eating a leftover sandwich as the river rushes past.

  It is still quite wide here – about twenty metres to the far bank. The water flows down from the mountains to the north, narrowing as the course of it snakes and curves along the contours of the land. Here, the ferocity and force of it remain. By the time it runs through the centre of Moorton, it is about half this size. There are old bridges where you can stand and watch it tumble past underneath you, frothing and folding over the rocks and then disappearing away into the distance. He remembers as a boy watching the slick black rats darting in and out of a hole under the bridge. The world beneath the world.

  He must have been very young then, he thinks, taking a bite of the bread and ham. His early childhood is mostly lost to him. Although there are a handful of dim memories here and there, they are random impressions more than anything else, as though someone took a little boy’s life and smashed it on the floor, and only a few pieces were ever deemed worthwhile enough to salvage, most of it swept away instead. He is sure there was fear there once, because all children feel fear to begin with. And there was occasionally a great deal of pain, but you grow used to both things in time. They become ordinary, acceptable, just the way things are. Ultimately, whatever happened to him, pain and fear were not notable or unusual enough for his mind to have bothered imprinting an actual memory of them.

  There were lots of stripped-down homes, and men and women he thought must have been relatives but could never really identify. Everybody was an aunt or uncle, but most likely not even that. There were bruises. Bad nights he won’t think about. Not all of it was terrible, of course. One place he thought was a farm at the time, until a boy at school made fun of him for that, and Blythe broke his nose. Whatever random uncle it was just kept chickens, pecking around in the dirt at the front of a house that was little more than a one-room shack. There were wire mesh cages full of them round the back. One day, Blythe killed a chicken: put a broomstick on its neck, then stood on either side, rocking his weight back and forth while he watched the thing blink up at him stupidly. Women blink like that too eventually, he found out later. He was never caught for killing the chicken, and that memory is a little keener than others. There was a feeling of power there, to the extent that there was a feeling of anything at all.

  But the strongest memories are of the wilds – the campsites and countryside and woodland in which he spent so much time as a child and then a teenager. His isolation seemed the best course of action for everyone. As he grew, he became too strong for the other children to bully, and so they all simply steered clear of him, and that was fine; he neither had friends nor wanted them. His family life was fractured and indifferent, and nobody really noticed or cared when he disappeared for days on end, sleeping rough and teaching himself to hunt. It suited him deep down too. The concentration and patience required to build traps and snares, to start a primitive fire, to fashion a shelter – these were things he could become lost in and not have to think, just as he could when taking apart the old cars in one of his uncle’s garages, methodically stripping them down and building them back up again, already dimly wondering what it would be like to do the same to a human being.

  This spot by the river was one of the places he used to come. It was one of the few areas along the bank north of the village where there was enough space to pitch a tent, and it was secluded enough for him not to be disturbed. Or at least, rarely so. As a boy, he would sit here for hours on end, watching the water roar and roll past him, listening to the unchanging noise of it, his mind entirely empty of thought. The power of the river had always felt endless and uncaring. Sitting beside it was like being dangerously close to a stampede of animals charging past, completely oblivious to his presence. He related to it on a deep level. The world was angry and violent. It didn’t care about people at all, and the river was a visceral reminder of that truth.

  Of course, he had to stop coming here after what happened.

  That makes him think of the Worm again now. Blythe finishes his last mouthful of sandwich and turns his attention back to the laptop. The signal is weak here, but good enough for a steady connection. No emails yet. But he’s confident there will be soon. The last communication said that the Worm would be on his way to Moorton this morning. It’s an act that must go against every desire in his feeble little body, Blythe is sure.

  Because that’s why he’s stayed in the darkness all this time, isn’t it? The Worm – burrowed in the moist earth beneath the feet of better men, trailing them while always remaining hidden, desiring to join them in the sun but being too frightened of the light. It still annoys Blythe that such a weak and timid individual has had any amount of power over him. But it was
his own fault. He made a mistake a long time ago – right here, by the river – acting on impulse, imagining he was alone and that he hadn’t been seen. But he had, and so the Worm has been with him ever since. He is nothing but a parasite. He’s too scared to cause any pain of his own, but still black and dead enough inside to want to feed safely off the pain created by others. Well, Blythe imagines that he isn’t feeling too safe right now. Even though he’s never seen the Worm’s face, he can easily picture the man’s hands on the steering wheel as he drives here now, and they are trembling.

  As they should be.

  Over the years, Blythe has spent a handful of idle moments wondering about the identity of his correspondent. His mind has formed a picture. The Worm is a pudgy, ineffectual man: the sort who would endure the beatings and loneliness of a pitiful childhood rather than take himself off into the wilderness and grow into something more self-sufficient. Hating the world, but too weak to turn his back on it. Not stupid – which in fact Blythe is counting on to get him away from here – but hardly exceptional. Vulnerable. He will have few if any friends, as he will no doubt be a figure of disgust, revolting those who encounter him. And certainly no wife. No, the Worm will live alone, in an average and unremarkable house.

  All of which put together means that few people will notice when he goes missing, and fewer still will care. Assuming Blythe can get away from here, back to wherever the Worm lives, he will have a place of safety and security until he works out his next move. Money, too: the Worm will no doubt have savings squirrelled away, and he can get the details out of him before killing him. The next few hours will obviously be crucial, but if Blythe comes through them then the future is already looking considerably brighter.

  Any number of things can still go wrong, of course, but he remains completely calm. The river has that effect on him. In a hundred years, everybody will be dead, but this river will still be flowing, still ferocious and uncaring. The water is constantly changing, and yet somehow it always stays the same.