Читать книгу Dead Man Walking - Paul Finch - Страница 10

‘It came over the wire during the early hours,’ Mary-Ellen said to Heck as he checked into Cragwood Keld police station at eight the following morning.

It wasn’t a real police station. It was located at the west end of the village, on a residential cul-de-sac called Hetherby Close, and was no more than a detached, whitewashed cottage which had been adapted for police use about ten years ago. It had stood empty for much of that time, only opening a few months back as part of ACPO’s new rural crime initiative. A Cumbria Police noticeboard and an emergency phone stood on the front lawn, and wanted and mis-per posters decked its porch, but though it had a small front desk just inside the glazed front door – which was only open to customers temporarily, as Mary-Ellen had to patrol as well as answer call-outs – there was no facility to hold prisoners. The main office, where Heck and Mary-Ellen’s desks faced each other over about three yards of carpet space, was in the rear of the building, where a large bay-window overlooked what had once been a garden, but was now a covered storage area for rescue and road-traffic equipment.

Heck yawned as he sipped his cup of tea.

Mary-Ellen read on through the email. ‘Ambleside Mountain Rescue got a call from the owner of a campsite up at Watendlath. He’s a bit concerned about two girls – a Jane Dawson and Tara Cook. Seems they checked out of his site a day early, said they were spending the last night of their holiday at Stagshaw View, which is a B&B in Ambleside. Then they set off on foot. He reckoned they must have been planning to yomp it through the northern Pikes. Trouble is, that was before the fog came down. He was already a bit worried, because he’d been observing them during the week and reckoned they were the most unprepared backpackers he’d ever seen. Around ten o’clock, when he saw what a pea-soup we were getting, he called Stagshaw View and was told the girls had never arrived. Called again at midnight, and at two – got the same response. He had emergency numbers for them – their own mobiles, which they weren’t answering, and numbers for their parents back in Manchester. He got in touch with them too, but they hadn’t heard anything from their daughters and didn’t even know they were missing. Now of course, the mums and dads are panicking.’

‘To be fair, we don’t know they’re missing yet,’ Heck said. ‘Not for sure.’

‘They still haven’t shown up.’

‘If they got caught in the fog last night, they might just have camped.’

‘The campsite owner said they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Anyway, this fog’s scheduled to last another day and night at least.’

Heck glanced through the connecting door to the front desk, and beyond that through the glazed front door to the outside, which was still concealed by an opaque grey curtain. It would be pretty nightmarish up on the fells, especially for someone with no experience and poor equipment.

‘If they were headed to Ambleside from Borrowdale, that’s some distance from here,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but Mountain Rescue reckon it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to get turned around in the fog. They’d most likely have tried to come around Ullscarf and Greenup Edge, rather than go over the top. If they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces by then, it would have been easy to mistake High Raise for Calf Crag. If they did, that would bring them over Pavey Ark and down through Fiend’s Fell to the east side of Witch Cradle Tarn. And in reduced visibility, well …’

She didn’t need to elaborate. Heck was no mountaineer, but he’d been up there just to acclimatise himself to the region, and Fiend’s Fell would be no laughing matter in fog. A notch in the White Stones crags, in appearance it was very dramatic – a vast, bowl-shaped grassland, windswept and strewn with boulders, and yet it ended abruptly, the land dropping precipitously away into the Cradle. There were various routes down from there – chimneys, ravines and even waterfalls – but these were strictly the domain of skilled and experienced climbers, not weekend adventurers.

‘Think we should get the launch out?’ Mary-Ellen asked.

‘Yeah.’ Heck finished his tea at a gulp. ‘I do.’

In times long past, further back than anyone living in the Cradle could remember, Cragwood Ho, at the north end of Witch Cradle Tarn, had been little more than a remote farming community. Back in the day, when no one even maintained the roads leading up to this place, let alone provided gas, electricity and hot water, it must have been a spectacularly isolated spot.

It certainly felt that way today. ‘The Ho’, as it was known locally, was three miles due north of ‘the Keld’, and connected by a single-track lane, which proceeded in a more or less straight line along the tarn’s edge, occasionally looping inward amid dense stands of pine and larch. Always to its left stood the steep, scree-cluttered slope ascending to Harrison Stickle. Though narrow, the road was usually bare of traffic during the off-season, and relatively safe. Though on this occasion, with visibility so appalling, progress was reduced to a torturous crawl. Veils of milk-white vapour reduced their vision to two or three yards, while even full headlight beams failed to penetrate more than a foot or so beyond that.

‘Anyone lost on the fells in this is gonna be in real trouble,’ Mary-Ellen said, zipping her black anorak. The Land Rover was warm inside, but it had a chilling effect just peering into the shifting blankness.

‘Yep,’ Heck muttered.

‘Especially if they’re new to the area.’

He nodded again. The Pikes were not hugely extensive, but they were dominant features even in the dramatic heart of the Lake District; colossal granite pyramids, with deep, wooded glens knifing through the middle of them, and fast becks tumbling and cascading down their rolling, rocky slopes. A playground for the fit and energetic, certainly; but a trackless region too, which required knowledge and athleticism to navigate on foot. And now, of course, something else had occurred to him.

‘I don’t want to overstate the importance of this, M-E, but just after midnight last night I heard what sounded like gunfire.’

She glanced sidelong at him as she drove. ‘Where?’

‘Up in the fells.’

‘Any particular direction?’

‘Impossible to say. It was only one shot too, so … I don’t know, I might have been mistaken.’

Mary-Ellen pondered this.

‘You didn’t hear anything?’ he asked.

‘Nah. Hit the sack well before then. You know me. Sleep like a log.’

They cruised on at a steady six miles per hour, though even then it felt as if they were taking a chance. When a stag emerged from the fog in front of them, they had to jam on the brakes. The majestic beast had simply stepped from the vapour, little more than an outline in the misted glow of their lights, just about identifiable by its tall profile and the handsome spread of its antlers. It stood stock-still for a second, and then galloped off into the roadside foliage.

‘Probably the last living thing we’ll see out here,’ Mary-Ellen commented, easing back onto the gas.

‘Don’t know whether to hope you’re right or wrong,’ Heck replied.

He’d often heard the saying ‘no news is good news’, and couldn’t think of any dictum more worthless. At present, for example, they had almost nothing to go on. Before setting out, he’d checked with Windermere Comms, and had been given an update, which was mainly that there was no update, though they’d also been informed that, owing to the conditions, effective Mountain Rescue operations would be difficult – they might even be suspended – and it was certainly the case that no RAF helicopters could go up. Despite everything, it was deemed unlikely the two girls would have strayed from their intended route as far west as the Cradle, which was kind of encouraging, though the downside of this was that no extra bodies were being sent over here to assist. In the event there was a problem, Heck and Mary-Ellen were pretty much on their own.

Perched on the northernmost tip of Witch Cradle Tarn, Cragwood Ho was the archetypical Lakeland hamlet. Of its four houses, only two were occupied full-time. The empty units comprised a stone-built holiday let, once a working stable but still in the ownership of Gordon Clay, a farmer over Coniston way, and at this time of year almost always closed up, while the other, another former farm building, was now used as a second home by a family from south Lancashire. Aside from the Christmas season, this second house also stood unused during the winter months. Both of these premises were located on the west side of Cragwood Road. The hamlet’s only two permanent residents lived on the east side of the road, next door to each other, right on the tarn’s shoreline.

Cragwood Road itself ended in Cragwood Ho. As soon as it passed through the small clutch of houses, it ascended a few dozen yards into a gravelled parking area, where all further progress by normal vehicle was blocked by a dry-stone wall with a gate and a stile. Beyond that, a treacherous footway, the Cradle Track, snaked its way up into the Pikes; at its lower section this was just about wide enough for vehicle use, but most of the time the gate was kept barred. The car park was usually full during the spring and summer, walkers and climbers viewing this as the most immediate access to the Central Lakes massif, while the early autumn saw no shortage of visitors either. But at present, as Heck and Mary-Ellen coasted up into it, the Land Rover’s tyres crunching to a halt against its rear wall, they appeared to be alone.

Visibility was still negligible. They couldn’t even see the entirety of the car park. Further wafts of milky vapour flowed past as they climbed out, pulling on their gloves and woolly hats. As usual, Mary Ellen was in uniform, while Heck, as a CID officer, wore his regulation sweater, canvas trousers and walking boots, though on a day like today both also pulled on hi-viz waterproof overcoats with POLICE stencilled across the back in luminous letters.

‘Quiet as the bloody grave,’ Mary-Ellen said, her voice echoing eerily.

Heck took the loudhailer from the boot. ‘At least if these lasses are stuck somewhere nearby, it shouldn’t be difficult getting them to hear us.’

They set off down the side path which dropped steeply from the car park, and led along the front of the two houses on the water’s edge.

The house on the right was called Lake-End Cottage, and its inhabitant was a certain Bill Ramsdale, a onetime married man and academic who now, in his mid-fifties, had become a reclusive loner and apparently, a writer, though Heck had never seen his name in a bookshop, either online or in the real world. His house was a small, scruffy cottage, the downstairs of which was almost entirely taken up by his study, but it was also surrounded by acres of untrimmed lawn, which rolled impressively down to the waterside and terminated at a private jetty. Given the usual prices in the Lake District, such a plot ought to have cost him a pretty penny. Whether he was rich or poor, Ramsdale was notoriously ill-tempered about his privacy. Twice he’d been spoken to by Mary-Ellen for showing a belligerent and even threatening attitude to hikers who’d strolled down across his land to the tarn’s edge, unaware they were trespassing thanks to most of his perimeter wall having collapsed and his grass being overgrown.

The second resident, Bessie Longhorn, was an altogether more likeable sort. Just turned twenty, she was a little rough around the edges – only poorly educated, and thanks to a lifetime of semi-isolation in the Cradle, minus a fashion sense or any real knowledge about youth culture in general – but she was a friendly kid and always eager to please, especially when it came to Heck. Bessie’s cottage, formerly a farmhouse and so considerably larger than Ramsdale’s, with numerous run-down outbuildings attached, belonged to her mother, Ada, who was only sixty-five but in poor health and residing in sheltered accommodation in Bowness. For obvious reasons, Ada considered it important that Bessie get used to being independent, even though this meant the younger woman didn’t get to visit her old mum as often as they’d both like. For all that, Bessie was a happy-go-lucky character, who filled her time doing odd jobs for the residents of Cragwood Keld at the other end of the tarn. She’d once offered to help Ramsdale by mowing his unruly lawn, but the surly neighbour had responded by telling her to ‘keep the fuck away’, so now Bessie, who was reduced to tears quite easily, did exactly that.

Perhaps the task she prized most highly was minding the keys to the police launch. This was convenient for all concerned because the boathouse in which the launch was kept was part of Bessie’s property. Approximately the same size and shape as a suburban garage, the boathouse was propped up on stilts and in a generally dilapidated condition, its timbers tinged green by mildew – but it was better than nothing. The cement path leading down to it crossed the middle of Bessie’s neatly-trimmed back garden, so it was always necessary to call on her first.

They halted before walking up Bessie’s front path, and looked towards Ramsdale’s house, his presence indicated by a very dull glow from one of its windows and the pale smoke issuing from its chimney.

‘Wouldn’t have liked to be one of the two girls if they came looking for help and knocked on that miserable sod’s door,’ Mary-Ellen said.

‘Neither would I, now you mention it,’ Heck replied thoughtfully. ‘But it’s a good point.’ He veered back along the road and down the path towards Ramsdale’s house. ‘Go and check with Bessie, would you?’

‘Who the fuck is it?’ came a muffled response to Heck’s full-knuckled knock.

‘Detective Sergeant Heckenburg, Mr Ramsdale,’ Heck replied. ‘Cragwood Keld police station. Can you open up please?’

What Heck always thought of as a guilty silence followed. Whenever you arrived at someone’s house and announced yourself as a copper, it was the same – whether it was some flash manse in the suburbs, or a scumhole bedsit in the urban badlands. Everyone, it seemed, no matter what their station in life, had some itsy-bitsy secret that occasionally kept them awake at night.

A chair finally scraped on a stone floor and heavy feet thudded to the door. It opened, but only by a few inches, and Ramsdale’s big frame filled the gap. He wasn’t just burly, he was tall – at least six-three – and permanently dishevelled, with a head of shaggy, iron-grey hair and an unkempt grey beard, all of which when combined with his tarnished earring, had a distinct air of the scuzzy. Today’s attire did little to offset this: a shapeless white t-shirt stained by tea or coffee, baggy stonewashed jeans torn at the knees, and a pair of floppy, moth-eaten slippers. He also smelled strongly of tobacco. And it wasn’t just the householder who was a less than wholesome sight. Heck caught a glimpse of the room behind. There was a desktop computer on a table and a wall of lopsided shelving crammed with buff folders, while the floor was buried under a mass of disordered paperwork.

‘How can I help, detective?’ Ramsdale asked, regarding Heck over the tops of his reading glasses. His anger had abated a little, but his tone implied hostility.

‘Just a quick one really, Mr Ramsdale. We’ve got two people missing in the Pikes.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘You’ve heard about it already?’

‘No, but it’s the silly season, isn’t it? Same thing every year. First bit of really bad weather and all the idiots come out to play.’

‘Yeah, well … we’re pretty worried about these two. Their names are Jane Dawson and Tara Cook. Young girls, both aged twenty-four. They were last seen yesterday, rambling south from Borrowdale. As far as we know, they weren’t planning to come down into Langdale, but they could easily have got lost up on the tops. Just wondered if you’d seen or heard anyone coming down the Cradle Track late last night?’

Ramsdale remained blank-faced. ‘I’m hardly likely to, am I?’

That was a fairer comment than it sounded. The walls in these old farm cottages were several feet thick, and at this time of year all doors and windows would be closed, while both Ramsdale’s house, and Bessie’s house next door, were a good fifty or so yards from the parking area at the foot of the Track.

However, Ramsdale’s scathing tone provoked Heck into prolonging the interview. ‘They’d have had to be well off-course, I suppose …’

‘That could never happen, could it?’ Ramsdale scoffed. ‘Bunch of kids left to their own devices. Fucking up.’

‘These weren’t kids, sir.’

‘Oh, excuse me. Twenty-four years old. I bet they’ve seen everything.’

‘It just struck me that if they did get lost and come down this way, it would be the middle of the night … so they might have knocked on the door, asked for shelter.’

‘Nobody did. I just told you.’

‘Maybe a drop of tea … to warm them up?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Or just to ask directions. I’m sure even you wouldn’t have had a problem providing those, Mr Ramsdale.’

Ramsdale smiled thinly. Despite his blustery exterior, he was no bully; he didn’t reserve his anger for those who couldn’t fight back. But he was intelligent enough to know not to get on the wrong side of the Cumbrian Constabulary. ‘Like I say, no one came here. But if you want to do a thorough job, Detective Heckenburg, it might be worth having a word with Longhorn next door.’

‘That’s already in hand, Mr Ramsdale. Just out of interest … you’re not going away anywhere are you?’

Ramsdale looked puzzled. ‘No.’

‘Good.’

‘Why?’

Heck shrugged as he backed away along the path. ‘We’ve got to stay on high alert until these girls are found. That means maintaining contact with all persons of interest.’

‘Persons of interest?’ Ramsdale’s cheeks reddened. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘Do I look like I’m laughing, Mr Ramsdale?’

The tall figure in the cottage doorway diminished into the fog as Heck walked back to the road. There was a thumping CLAP! as the door was slammed closed.

Heck turned in along the next path, and found Mary-Ellen and Bessie Longhorn standing by the side of the house, the exterior of which – mainly whitewashed pebble-dash – had been more recently maintained than Ramsdale’s.

‘This is a right how’d-you-do, isn’t it, Sergeant Heckenburg?’ Bessie said with her characteristic froglike grin. She was about five foot seven and of stocky build, though much of this was running to plump, with a mottled pink complexion and an unruly thatch of thinning gingery hair. As usual when outdoors, she wore an old duffle-coat and a shapeless chequered hat, which Heck suspected might have enjoyed a former existence as a tea-cosy. An electric torch was clutched in Bessie’s mittened hand.

‘Sure is, Bessie,’ Heck replied. ‘You got that right.’

Her cheeks turned a ruddy hue at the sound of her own name on Heck’s lips. It was Mary-Ellen who’d first concluded that their local handywoman liked the ‘tall, dark-haired detective sergeant’, and though it was something he hadn’t noticed before then, the impression was now impossible to shake.

‘I’ve got the keys for you,’ Bessie said, jangling said articles as she turned and led them primly down the cement path, the angled outline of the boathouse materialising ahead of them.

‘Bessie didn’t see or hear anything,’ Mary-Ellen said.

‘Dead quiet round here last night,’ Bessie said over her shoulder.

‘Mr Ramsdale didn’t hear anything either,’ Heck responded.

‘It’s a bad business, isn’t it, Sergeant Heckenburg?’ Bessie chattered as he unlocked the corrugated metal door. ‘If these lasses haven’t come down from the fells by now, something bad must have happened to them.’

Heck didn’t initially reply. There was something vaguely disturbing about that simple and yet undeniable logic.

‘Lots of places up there where they could just have got lost, Bessie,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘It’s not necessarily bad news.’

The door creaked open on the boathouse’s fetid interior. Bessie lurched in first, switching on her torch. The Witch Cradle Tarn police launch was actually a small outboard now adapted for official purposes. Despite it almost never needing to be used, it was old and in degraded condition, its hull scraped, its metalwork tarnished. Only its recently applied turquoise and yellow Battenberg flashes looked new. For all this, it was more than adequate to take them across the tarn to the east shore, which the two missing girls, if they’d followed the route Heck and Mary-Ellen suspected, might well have descended to, or in the worst-case scenario, could have fallen down to. The boat currently sat between two concrete piers, normally in about four feet of mucky brown water, though at present, owing to the heavy autumn rain, the tarn’s level was significantly higher.

Bessie handed the keys to Mary-Ellen, and walked to the end of the starboard pier, where she used a crank-handle to raise the roll-up door at the entry-port for the boat.Mary-Ellen climbed aboard, taking the wheel. Heck untied the mooring ropes, then jumped aboard as well, and the craft rumbled to life.

‘Just give us a knock when you get back, so I can lock up,’ Bessie called as they chugged out into the chill, foggy air.

‘No probs, Bessie!’ Heck called back, to which she no doubt blushed again.

With the tarn already having risen to its winter levels, the normal straight channel they’d follow for about a hundred yards through dense bulrushes before reaching open water was almost hidden. Only the tips of browning vegetation were visible, which made it considerably more difficult to steer along, especially in this monotone gloom. The last thing they needed was to get ropes of rotted herbage meshed around their propeller. But as with so many outdoor pursuits, Mary-Ellen was more than a dab hand. She stood at the helm, keeping them on a dead-straight course as they processed forward. If visibility had been bad on land, it was even worse over frigid water. Within seconds of solid ground disappearing behind them, they found they could see no distance in any direction. The outboard’s headlights were already activated, but Heck turned on the prow spotlight as well. This normally drove a broad wedge of luminescence for several hundred yards, though on this occasion it revealed nothing and in fact was reflected back on them with interest. He turned the spot on its pivot, but wherever it pointed there was a glaring backwash from the semi-liquid whiteness, every tendril of fog, every twist and spiral glowing as if phosphorescent.

‘East shore?’ Mary-Ellen asked, raising her voice over the engine.

‘Yeah, steady as you go though.’

‘Steady as I go.’ She cackled. ‘Aye aye, skip …’

‘You know what I bloody mean.’

Despite the potential seriousness of the situation, Mary-Ellen bawled with raucous laughter. ‘Only funning. Hey you’re my line-manager, Heck … I would never take the piss out of you for real!’

Mary-Ellen might only have been in the job four years, but she was a copper through and through. With a dark sense of humour and generally relaxed persona, she enjoyed her work and didn’t get fazed by its more onerous prospects. She had that all-important burning desire to ‘get up and at ’em!’, as she was fond of saying, and that was something Heck heartily approved of. You couldn’t play at being a copper; to be effective in the job, you had to fully absorb yourself in it. So many learned that on the first day. Those with sense got out quickly; those who hung on, looking constantly for inside work, only made life difficult for all the rest. Not so Mary-Ellen. Her previous beat, Richmond-upon-Thames, was pretty sedate by normal London standards, though it also encompassed both banks of the Thames and boasted over twenty miles of river frontage, so she was no stranger to pulling bodies out of the drink – which gave an additional explanation for her irreverent attitude now. That said, she was still unlikely to have scoured any body of water quite like this one.

Witch Cradle Tarn was the child of a geophysical fault long predating the glaciers that had broadened out the valley above; it was a cleft in the mountains formed by ancient tectonic forces, and for its size it was astonishingly deep – nearly seven hundred feet – and abysmally cold. Its sides shelved steeply away beneath the surface, but its eastern shore, which was almost flush against the cliff-face, was heaped with glacial scree, which intruded some distance into the water itself, creating semi-invisible shallows comprising multiple blades of rock, none of which were marked by buoys and any one of which could pass through the keel of a boat like a knife through the belly of a fish.

For several minutes they ploughed through turgid mist, Heck only sighting the surface of the tarn if he glanced over the gunwales, where it flowed past as smooth as darkened glass. The fog shifted in bizarre patterns and yet remained impenetrable. The quiet was unearthly. Even the drone of the engine was muffled, and yet whenever they spoke a word, it echoed and echoed.

‘You really thought you heard a shot last night?’ Mary-Ellen asked.

‘I dunno.’ Heck shrugged again. ‘Strange sounds in these mountains. I’ve only been here two and a half months, but I’ve already realised how deceptive things can be.’

‘Sure you weren’t dreaming?’

‘I can’t definitively rule that out, either.’

‘I can make some calls later, if you want,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a list of all licence-holders.’

‘Yeah, do that. Ask some searching questions – like what the hell they thought they were doing discharging firearms in the wee small hours. Go at them hard, M-E. Make it sound like we know they were up to something. Even if they were shooting rats in a barn or something, they’re unlikely to cough unless we press them, and we can’t dismiss them from any enquiry otherwise … unless we find something nasty out here of course, in which case it’s a whole new ball game.’

Heck didn’t hold out much hope for that, but they were now approaching the tarn’s eastern banks, so Mary-Ellen cut the engine and lifted the propeller, letting them drift inshore. There were no proper landing places on this side of the tarn, no quays, no jetties – in fact there were no paths or roads either, though it wasn’t impossible to explore this shore on foot. Further back from the water’s edge, pines grew through the scree, creating a narrow belt of woodland. This was just about visible as Mary-Ellen kept a steady course from north to south, the vague outlines of trees standing spectral in the mist.

‘Jane Dawson! Tara Cook!’ Heck said, putting the loudhailer to his lips. ‘This is the police … can you hear us?’

He waited thirty seconds for a response, but there was nothing. Without the engine, the silence was immense, broken only by the lapping of wavelets against the rocks.

‘Jane Dawson, Tara Cook!’ he hailed again. ‘This is the police. Can you respond please? Even if you’re injured and unable to speak … throw a stone, bang a piece of wood on another piece of wood. Anything.’

The lack of response was ear-pummelling.

‘Can you get us a tad closer inshore?’ Heck said.

‘I’ll try. Just be prepared for the worrying sound of grinding, cracking timbers.’

‘Don’t even joke about that.’

‘Who’s joking?’

They veered a few yards to port. Heck could clearly see the submerged juts and edges, like serrated teeth, no more than a couple of feet below the surface. Meanwhile, the rocks exposed along the waterline were piled on top of each other haphazardly and yet resembled those huge, manmade defences that guarded the entrances to Elizabethan-age harbours.

‘Okay, that’s far enough,’ he said, grabbing the boat-pole.

Mary-Ellen corrected their course. They continued to glide forward, veils of murk opening in front of them. The shore and its rows of regimented pine trunks was a little more visible, but not greatly so.

‘Perhaps start up the engine, eh?’ Heck said over his shoulder. ‘The noise might let them know we’re here.’

Mary-Ellen complied, while he hailed the girls another five times, always leaving thirty-second breaks in between. All they heard in response was the dull chug of the engine, until a few minutes had passed and this was subsumed by the rumble of churning water. Just ahead, the fog cleared around a protruding headland of vertical rock with a greenery-matted overhang about thirty feet above. Thanks to the heavy autumn rain, one of many temporary rivulets descending from the surrounding fells was pouring down over this in a minor cataract. The space beneath the overhang was filled with shadow. Heck directed his spotlight into it, just able to pick out a few clumps of shingle against the innermost wall. Normally, if memory served, there would be a small beach there, but the tarn’s high level had inundated it. Either way, no one was taking shelter.

They pressed on, the cataract falling behind them, its roar dwindling into the all-absorbing vapour. They’d now traversed a quarter of the tarn’s length.

‘Starting to think this is a long shot,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘Couldn’t we be more use back at the nick, manning the phones?’

‘Let’s go down as far as the Race,’ Heck replied. ‘After that, we’ll come back … hang on, what’s that?’

Mary-Ellen stared where he was pointing, catching a glint of colour in the grey; a flash of orange. It could have been anything, a tangle of bobbing rubbish, a plastic shopping bag scrunched between two semi-submerged rocks – except that you didn’t as a rule find shopping bags or any other kind of rubbish in Witch Cradle Tarn, which normally was far beyond the reach of unconscientious slobs. Of course it could also have been a cagoule, and now they looked closely, they could distinguish a humanoid shape; two lengths of orange just below the surface (legs?), the main bulk of the orange (the torso?) above the water-level, thanks to the two boulders it was wedged between. When they drew even closer they saw that it wasn’t solely orange either, but spattered black and green by moss and dirt, and streaked with crimson – as was the third length of orange (an arm?) folded over the back of it.

‘Christ in a cartoon …’ Heck breathed. ‘They’re here! Or one of them is!’

Quickly, Mary-Ellen cut the engine again. ‘The anchor!’ she shouted.

He scrambled to the back of the craft, took the small anchor from the stern locker and threw it over the side, its chain rapidly unravelling. Other items of kit were also kept in the stern locker, including a zip-lock first-aid bag and two sets of rubberised overalls and boots, which the crew were supposed to don if they ever needed to wade out into deep water. There was no time now for a change of costume, but Heck grabbed the first-aid kit and moved to the gunwale, peering down. Heaped scree could still be discerned below. It wasn’t just jagged and sharp, it would be loose, slimy – ultra dangerous. But again, this was no time to start thinking about health and safety. Heck pulled on a pair of latex gloves, before zipping his phone inside the first-aid kit and then climbing over the gunwale and lowering himself down.

The tarn’s gelid grip was beyond cold, but now the adrenaline was pumping. Heck’s boots found a purchase about three feet under. Holding the kit above his head, he pushed himself carefully away from the craft, pivoted around and lurched towards shore. Behind him, he heard Mary-Ellen shouting into the radio, asking for supervision and medical support. It was a futile gesture – there was usually no radio up here, but it had to be worth trying. A second later there was a splash as she followed him over the side. They struggled forward for several yards, closing the distance between themselves and the body – but actually making contact with it wasn’t easy, as it was lodged at the far end of a narrow passage between rocks, the floor of which constantly shifted, threatening to collapse at either side, creating suction currents strong enough to pull a person under. To counter this, they clambered on the rocks along the edges, slick and greasy though these proved to be.

It was indeed a body, by the looks of it female, but in a woeful state: much more heavily bloodied than they’d seen from the boat, at first glance lying motionless and face-down in the water, its string-like fair hair swirling around its head. At the very least, its left arm, the one folded backward, was badly broken, while the other was concealed from view because the bedraggled form was wedged on its right side.

Heck leaned down, placing two fingers to the neck. It was ice-cold and clammy; there was no discernible pulse.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He felt around under the face to check the nose and mouth were elevated from the water. Now that it was slopping and splashing, it covered them intermittently, but it hadn’t done this sufficiently to wash away a crust of congealed blood caking the nostrils and lips. Heck scraped what he could of that away, to free the air-passages. ‘I know it’s non-textbook,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got to move her from here right now. If we don’t, she’ll drown. You got a filter valve?’

‘In the first-aid kit,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘Hang on, you’re saying she’s still alive?’

‘Dunno, but she was still bleeding when she washed up here. Here!’ He tossed his phone over to her.

‘Heck, there’s no signal …’

‘Never mind that, get a couple of quick shots – the body and the location where we found it. Every angle. Hurry.’ Mary-Ellen did as he asked. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We can’t drag her, so we’re going to have to lift. Take her legs.’

Mary-Ellen plunged into waist-deep water, and manoeuvring herself into place, wrapped her arms around the body’s thighs.

‘Try and keep her horizontal, okay?’ Heck said, sliding his own hands under the armpits, supporting the casualty’s head against his thigh. ‘Minimum twisting and turning. Her left arm’s bent the wrong way over her back – looks horrible, but it’s best to leave it that way.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Okay … three, two, one …’

The girl’s body lifted easily. She wasn’t particularly heavy. But on raising her above the water, Heck saw something that shook him. The cagoule fabric covering her front right shoulder had burst outward, along with tatters of the woollen and cotton layers worn underneath, and what looked like strands of muscle tissue. Below that was a crimson cavity, from out of which red-tinted lake-water gurgled.

‘Christ!’ he said. ‘I think … I think she’s been shot!’

‘What?’

He craned his neck to survey the back of the victim’s right shoulder, and spotted a coin-sized hole in a corresponding position.

‘She’s been shot from behind.’

Mary-Ellen had turned chalk-white. ‘You serious?’

‘Quick, get her to shore.’

They splashed through the shallows until they mounted a low, shingle embankment a few yards in front of the pines, and laid the lifeless form carefully down. Heck applied the sterile valve and they attempted resuscitation – to no effect. They persisted for several minutes longer, still to no effect. No matter how good a copper you were, unless you also held a medical degree, you weren’t qualified to pronounce death – but this girl was just about as dead as anyone Heck had ever seen. Aside from the gunshot wound, she’d been severely brutalised, suffering repeated contusions to face and skull. That didn’t necessarily mean she’d taken a beating; it might be in accordance with the girl having fallen. The only way down to the tarn from the east fells was via steep gullies and perilous slopes.

Either way, this was now a crime scene.

‘I shouldn’t really do this,’ Heck said, feeling carefully into the girl’s pockets, ‘but on this occasion, establishing ID is pretty vital.’ He extricated a small leather purse containing credit cards. The name on all of these was Tara Cook.

‘So where’s the other one?’ Mary-Ellen wondered, giving voice to Heck’s own thoughts. He glanced at the foggy woods. Thick veils of vapour hung between the trunks. Nothing moved, and there was no sound.

‘Jane Dawson!’ he shouted. His voice carried, but still there was no response.

‘We need to get up on the tops and have a look,’ Mary-Ellen said.

Heck disagreed. ‘Two of us? Covering all those miles of empty fells? In fog like this? Be the biggest waste of police time in history. Besides, this is now a murder scene. We need to preserve it, and start the investigation. We also need to alert the local population – we don’t know if this danger has passed yet.’

‘I hear all that, Heck, but the other girl’s still missing. We can’t just ignore her.’

Heck chewed his lip with indecision. That Tara Cook was dead, a clear victim of homicidal violence, did not bode well for the vanished Jane Dawson. But climbing the fells to look for her – just the two of them – would be a hopeless, pointless task even if there hadn’t been dense fog. To have any hope of getting a result in these conditions would require extensive search teams experienced in mountain rescue, not to mention dogs, aircraft, the lot. But Mary-Ellen was right about one thing – they couldn’t just do nothing about the missing girl.

‘Perhaps check along the shore,’ he said. ‘If Jane Dawson made it down to the tarn as well, she might still be alive.’

Mary-Ellen nodded and disappeared into the trees, while Heck tried his radio again as he stood alongside the corpse, but gained no response, not even a crackle of static. He spent ten minutes on this before finally turning to the trees and calling for Mary-Ellen.

Now she didn’t respond either. He called again.

The maximum depth of the east shore wood could only be fifty yards or so, before the gradient sharpened upward and the mountainous scree became too harsh for any vegetation to have taken root there. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have wandered for a significant distance to the north or south.

‘Mary-Ellen!’ he called again, advancing into the woodland gloom, not liking the way his voice bounced back from the cliff-face towering overhead.

Behind him, the glare of the outboard spotlight penetrated through the trees in a misty zebra-stripe pattern. He moved a few dozen yards north, trying to avoid clattering the loose debris with his feet. That Mary-Ellen hadn’t so much as called back to him was not reassuring. How far could she have ventured in ten minutes? As he sidled away from the boat, the murk thickened. Soon the stanchions of the pines were no more than upright shadows. He halted again to listen – and to wonder for the first time how it was that a female hiker had been shot while rambling in this wilderness, and who by.

‘Mary-Ellen!’ he called, pressing on a little further. At his rear, the glow of the boat’s spotlight had diminished to a ruddy smudge.

He listened again. An incredible silence. Even if the policewoman had been doing no more than mooching about, he’d surely hear her.

But could someone else have heard her too?

Had that person already heard her and taken appropriate action?

As Heck backtracked towards the boat, he tried to calculate how much time had elapsed between now and the gunshot he’d heard the night before. A glance at his watch showed that it was just before nine-fifteen. He’d been disturbed in bed at quarter past midnight or thereabouts. So, nine hours in total. More than enough time for the killer to have long left the area. Assuming he actually wanted to leave.

Heck bypassed the point where the boat was moored. The corpse of Tara Cook lay where they had left it.

It would be impossible to second-guess the killer’s next move, because they had no clue about motive. But just suppose the fatal shot had been fired somewhere much higher up – on Fiend’s Fell for example – and the body had fallen down the cliff-side. With the tarn down here to break the fall, how could the killer be sure the victim was dead? Wasn’t it at least conceivable he would try to get down here, to check out the scene for himself? Heck headed south along the shore, more cold, dark fog embracing him. Even if the killer had clambered down here, nine hours was more than enough to locate the corpse, establish death and high-tail it away again.

Again though, that question – what if he didn’t want to high-tail it?

And what about the other girl? Heck knew one thing for certain – he’d only heard a single shot. Then of course there was Mary-Ellen – where the hell was she?

He stopped again. In this direction, what looked like straight avenues lay between the ranks of waterside trees, though a little further ahead progress was impeded by several trunks that had fallen over. This wouldn’t have been completely unusual in a wood at the foot of a scree-cliff – heavy chunks of rock would occasionally fall, smashing and flattening the timber; but they made difficult obstacles. He climbed over the first diagonal trunk, and crawled underneath the second, increasingly suspecting that Mary-Ellen would not have gone to so much trouble to make a quick, cursory inspection of the shoreline. Beyond the fallen pines, the woods seemed to close in, the rising ground on the left steepening, and on the right falling away towards the tarn’s edge. Heck veered in the latter direction until he was virtually on the waterline. As before, the smooth surface rolled away from him, flat as a mirror, black as smoke. At this time of year there wasn’t a plop or plink; neither frog, newt nor fish to disturb the peace.

Further progress was impossible in these conditions, he concluded.

He turned back, but it was as he stooped to clamber underneath the first fallen tree that he heard the whisper.

If it was a whisper.

It could have been the wind sighing through meshed evergreen boughs. That was entirely possible too. But it had sounded like a whisper.

Heck whirled around, unable to see very much of anything, until …

Had that been a faint, dark shape that had just stepped out of sight about twenty yards away on his left? Heck’s heartbeat accelerated; his scalp prickled.

Suddenly it seemed like a very bad idea to be here on his own, especially as this character was armed. He set off forward, moving parallel with the tarn, heading back in the direction of the boat, eyes fixed on the spot where he thought he’d spied movement. And now he heard a sound behind him – a snap, as though a fallen branch had been stepped on. He twirled around again, straining his eyes to penetrate the vapour, unable to distinguish anything. When he turned back to the front, someone in dark clothes was standing nearby, leaning against a tree-trunk.

At first Heck went cold – but just as quickly he relaxed again.

Recognising Mary-Ellen, he walked forward. For some reason she’d removed her luminous coat. To lay over a second body maybe? Except that these days you weren’t supposed to do that. And now, having advanced a few yards, he saw that he wasn’t approaching Mary-Ellen after all. A bundle of interwoven twigs and bark hung down alongside the trunk. The outline they formed was vaguely human, but was mainly an optical illusion, enhanced by a shaft of light diffusing through the wood from the boat and exposing the place where the bark had fallen, which had created the impression of a face.

Heck heard another whisper.

This time there was no doubt about it.

He glanced right. It had come from somewhere in the direction of the upward slope. Ten seconds later, it seemed to be answered by a second whisper, this time from behind, though this second one had been less like a whisper and more like a snicker – a hoarse, guttural snicker. Heck gazed into the vapour as he pivoted around, wondering in bewilderment if all this could be his imagination.

For a few seconds, there was no further sound. He took several wary steps towards the upward slope, the rank autumnal foliage opening to admit him – and then closing again. Needle-footed ants scurried across his skin as the fog seemed to thicken, wrapping itself around him, melding tightly to his form. For a heart-stopping second he had the overwhelming sensation that someone else was really very close indeed, perhaps no more than a foot away, watching him silently and yet rendered completely invisible. Heck turned circles as he blundered, fists clenched to his chest, boxer fashion. He wanted to call out, but his throat was too dry to make sounds.

More alert than he’d ever been in his life, Heck backtracked in the direction of the waterline; this at least was possible owing to the slant of the ground. When he got there, he pivoted slowly around – to find someone directly alongside him.

‘Coast appears to be clear, sarge,’ Mary-Ellen said.

Heck did his best to conceal his shock – though he still almost jumped out of his skin. ‘What the … Jesus wept!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Creep up on me, why don’t you!’

‘Sorry … heard you clumping around. I presumed you heard me.’

‘Well, I bloody didn’t!’

‘Getting jumpy in your old age, or what?’

‘Don’t give me that bollocks. Why didn’t you reply when I shouted?’

‘Sorry.’ Mary-Ellen shrugged. ‘Never heard you.’

‘Hmmm. Suppose these acoustics are all over the place,’ he grunted. They trudged back to the boat. ‘You didn’t hear anything else, though? No one farting around?’

‘Farting around?’

‘Whispering … chuckling.’

She looked fascinated. ‘For real?’

‘Shit, I don’t know.’ He glanced back into the opaque gloom. ‘More atmospheric weirdness, maybe. Or the local wildlife. The main thing is there’s no second corpse?’

‘Didn’t find one.’

‘Well we can’t get any help up here to do a proper pattern-search until this weather clears.’

They’d emerged onto the bank, back into the glare of the outboard’s spotlight. Tara Cook lay as before. Heck angled back towards her, and knelt. He didn’t want to disturb the scene more than he already had and would avoid making further contact if possible, but it had belatedly occurred to him to check for any lividity marks, maybe even signs of rigor mortis, as either of those could give a clearer indication how long the girl had been dead. He reached down towards her and suddenly the body twitched. Heck froze. For several helpless seconds he knelt rigid, as, without warning, the ‘corpse’ reached a violently shuddering hand towards his face, and drew five carmine finger-trails down his cheek. Still, neither he nor Mary-Ellen were able to respond.

Tara Cook’s head now lolled onto her shoulder. Her puffy eyes were still swollen closed, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, she opened her mouth. A low moan surged out, along with globs of fresh blood, which spattered down the front of her filthy cagoule.

‘Good Christ!’ Mary-Ellen breathed.

‘Good Christ indeed!’ Heck said urgently. ‘She’s only bloody alive!’

As they worked frantically on the girl, her moan rose in volume and intensity until it was a prolonged, keening screech, which rebounded from the cliffs overhead and all across the misted, semi-frozen lake.