At last, a pleasant early morning running route through central Leeds, courtesy of those helpful chaps on the Runners World forum. The Leeds-Liverpool Canal passes almost beneath my hotel and oozes straight through the centre of the city. Why didn’t I think of it before? The towpath is wide and springy, and takes the runner past some scintillating industrial architecture, and beneath several wonderful bridges. From the path you can hear the traffic in the distance but can’t see or smell it. In my 3.8 miles I saw 4 runners, 3 cyclists and a solitary angler. The water was dark, almost black, but not dirty. The atmosphere is unusual. Like that stretch of canal in Huddersfield that I ran along a few months ago, there was something slightly intimidating and ‘serious’ about the canal here, quite unlike the Kennet and Avon at home, which is rustic and green and idyllic and safe. These towpaths have secrets. The Leeds-Liverpool is about work, not play, and this provides some extra dimension of grandeur and nobility to the simple act of a pre-breakfast plod.
As I ran, it struck me that this canal towpath would be an excellent place to be murdered. It’s central, providing super opportunities for your attacker to make good his escape, yet remote enough to muffle your screams, and to make it difficult for paramedics to locate your expiring body. If your assailant had the time, he could also use the canal itself as a hiding place for your weighted carcass. It might be months before it floated to the surface where, inevitably, it would be “discovered by an early morning jogger” as most murder victims seem to be these days.
(PS After I wrote the above, I read that police hunting the guy suspected of murdering 4 people in Yorkshire over the past week, announce that he is known to frequent canal towpaths.)
