PART 2

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Paul Finch 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock

Cover design © Andrew Smith 2014

Paul Finch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007551279

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780008116873

Version: 2014-10-21

Dedication

For my children, Eleanor and Harry, with whom I shared many a chilling tale when they were tots, but whose enthusiasm is as strong now as it ever was

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 4

‘Gemma Piper,’ came the voice on the line. It was clipped, efficient. Time hadn’t softened that aspect of his ex-boss’s personality. Not that much ever did.

Time, though. It had actually only been two and a half months since he and Gemma had had the mother of all fall-outs, yet in some ways, it seemed like a lifetime.

‘Ma’am,’ he said.

‘Heck?’ He couldn’t tell whether she was pleased to hear from him or not. The probability was she was more surprised. ‘Where are you calling from?’

‘Cragwood Keld nick, South Cumbria.’

‘Oh … right.’ Perhaps she’d fleetingly wondered if he was back down in London for some reason.

‘Currently buried in the muckiest November fog I’ve ever seen,’ Heck added. ‘The whole of the Lakes is in lockdown at present, ma’am. Nothing’s moving.’

She’d sounded curious about his call, but her patience, as always, was wearing thin, especially now he’d got onto the weather. ‘What can I do for you, Heck?’

‘We’ve just had an attempted double homicide.’

‘I see. Local to your subdivision?’

‘Right on it.’

‘Good job they’ve got you there.’

‘Thing is, ma’am, I think this one may be of interest to you.’

‘You said two attempted homicides. Have you actually had any fatalities?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Doesn’t sound like an SCU job, Heck. Give it to South Cumbria Crime Command in the first instance. That’s what they’re there for …’

‘No … I think it may be of interest to you, as in you personally, rather than SCU.’

‘Okay …?’ Now she sounded cautious, not to say sceptical, but she knew Heck well enough to at least give him a hearing. ‘Go on …’

‘It was a blitz attack, seemingly without motive. Two girls hiking in the Langdale Pikes got themselves lost in the fog. The next thing they know, they’re being followed by someone who attacks them. The first one he beats down with a stone. The second one he shoots.’

There was a lengthy pause. ‘This is news to me. When did it happen?’

‘Last night, around midnight.’

‘Nasty stuff, but I still don’t see …’

‘Two female hitchhikers alone on a dark night? Getting jumped by a single assailant, who takes one of them out ASAP with a lump of rock?’

‘That would be a common sense strategy for any random attacker attempting to overpower two people at the same time.’

‘I’m not sure this is a random attacker, ma’am. While he was stalking them through the fog, the assailant was whistling something.’

‘Whistling?’

‘It was a song you’re quite familiar with … Strangers in the Night.’

Now there was a much longer pause, and the sound of paperwork being shuffled. Heck could picture Gemma filching a pen from her drawer, shoving documentation aside as she opened a fresh daybook on her desk. Gemma was in the habit of starting a new log for every crime that was referred to her personal office. ‘Give me the details, Heck.’

He told her what they knew, which in truth wasn’t very much. Namely, that Tara Cook and Jane Dawson had gone astray while following a challenging route through the Langdale Pikes, at which point they’d been assailed first by that eerie whistling, and then by a strong, stocky figure, whose physical features had not just been concealed by fog, but by a full head mask and heavy outdoor clothing. He’d beaten Jane Dawson savagely – though whether it was to death was as yet unknown, as the sole witness, Tara Cook, had fled, only to be shot from behind. She’d survived the wound, but in a subsequent delirious state, had fallen down a waterfall, finishing up in Witch Cradle Tarn, where Heck had found her only an hour and a half ago.

Gemma listened long and hard, clearly undecided about the import of what he was telling her. While she tried to make her mind up, Heck glanced back from the Cragwood Keld front desk into the rear office, the little bit of floor space in there now taken up by a camping bed, on which the casualty, her more serious wounds dressed and bound, was reclining. Mary-Ellen was crammed in there alongside her, scribbling anything Tara could recollect into her pocketbook. The ambulance scheduled to take the casualty down to the Westmorland General Hospital, in Kendal – the nearest medical facility capable of dealing with a gunshot wound – had still not arrived. Nor had any supervision units from Windermere. In the meantime, they’d done the best they could, bringing Tara Cook directly back to Cragwood Keld in the police launch, which was now tied up down at the public jetty near to The Witch’s Kettle, and applying as much first aid as possible. Their cause was assisted by Tara Cook’s apparent determination to survive. She’d suffered a nasty-looking wound, but in reality the attacker had only winged her, which was understandable in such poor visibility. This started Heck thinking again.

‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘the Stranger was never accounted for, was he?’

‘Heck … that was ten years ago. And I shot him through the left side of his chest. That wound had to be fatal.’

‘But you didn’t see him die. The Stranger taskforce never found his body, and they dragged that mire for days afterwards.’

‘Why would he suddenly reappear now?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d be interested in finding out.’

‘Did he try to rape or rob these girls?’

‘We don’t know what he did with the girl he clobbered. We haven’t been able to get up there yet, and there’s no sign of a body down at this level.’

‘You say he shot the second girl? Well that wasn’t the Stranger’s MO, Heck. He never carried a firearm.’

‘Which he’s probably always considered a big mistake. I mean, it all went swimmingly for him until the night he met a nice-looking chick packing a .38.’

There was another long pause. Gemma was the arch-professional. Not just a top-notch administrator, but a highly organised investigator. She rarely let emotion get in the way of cool-headed logic, but he knew she’d been haunted all her career by the very close call she’d had at the hands of the Stranger back in 2004.

Despite that, she was clearly making an effort to be realistic. ‘Heck, as far as British law enforcement is concerned, the Stranger is dead. Not just because he suffered a deadly wound, but because no further victims were reported.’

‘Suppose he modified his MO. Suppose he didn’t just start carrying a gun when he went on the job, suppose he cleared off to another part of the country to do it. I mean, we know he’s a Scot. Up here in the Lakes, he’s only an hour from the border.’

‘Ten years ago, Heck …’

‘Yeah, but like you say, you shot him. Suppose he survived but was badly damaged. It might have taken a decade for him to recover his health.’

She sighed, though it didn’t sound like a sigh of frustration; more a sigh of puzzlement. ‘Heck … what do you want me to do about this?’

‘Well, now you mention it … nothing.’

‘Come again?’

‘I’m drawing this to your attention, ma’am, because I still respect you. And because I’d like to think we’re still friends to some degree. Plus I thought you might be interested. And you are, I can tell. If you remember, the Stranger taskforce never publicised that intelligence about the Frank Sinatra song.’

This was another key factor in Heck’s thinking. The original investigation team had avoided any public mention of Strangers in the Night. Firstly on the grounds the song was actually irrelevant to the case at the time, but secondly because cranks had a habit of putting themselves forward as serial killer candidates, so it was always useful to withhold one small detail.

‘What’s the current status of the enquiry?’ Gemma asked.

‘It’s not even started. I’ll be accompanying the casualty down to Westmorland General just as soon as the ambulance gets here. And then liaising with DI Mabelthorpe from Windermere nick.’

‘And this assault happened around midnight?’ She sounded unimpressed. ‘That’s almost eleven hours ago. Life moves at a slower pace up there, eh?’

‘Ma’am, we only found Tara Cook an hour and a half ago. And this fog is literally so bad we can’t get a chopper up to examine the main crime scene. In fact, we don’t even know where the crime scene is. Tara Cook reckons they’d been wandering for hours, lost, when they were attacked.’

‘Heck … this couldn’t just be some wandering maniac?’

‘The chances of that are a hundred to one, ma’am. First of all that any such person would exist up here without us already knowing it, especially as he’s armed. Secondly that he could have run into these girls in the fog purely by accident.’

‘You think he’d stalked them from earlier?’

‘Somehow or other he must’ve known where they’d be. I mean, stalking would be the Stranger’s style, wouldn’t it? From what I remember. He used to pick his targets in the pubs around the West Country, followed them for a couple of hours before they’d parked up somewhere and got down to it …’

Gemma went silent again, and this time he heard her fingers hitting a keyboard. The Serial Crimes Unit, which she headed, was one of the busiest offices in Scotland Yard’s elite National Crime Group. It existed solely to investigate or assist in the investigations of series or clusters of connected violent crimes, wherever in England and Wales they might occur. It was a near-certainty she’d have other important tasks to be getting on with as well as this.

‘Anyway, that’s it, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d give you a heads-up …’

‘And this suspect was definitely whistling Strangers in the Night? The witness is quite sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You didn’t prompt that from her in any way?’

‘Definitely not.’ Tara Cook had begun mumbling the moment Heck had carried her out to the boat and laid her on the deck, but they’d been halfway across the tarn, en route straight to the Keld, before he’d realised what she was actually saying. With her reeling senses and battered mouth, it had been difficult getting anything intelligible from her. She’d clutched at him and Mary-Ellen with hands like talons, burbling, weeping, showing remarkable animation for someone so badly hurt. ‘Din’ see his face. No face … but that song. Stran’ in the Ni’. Kept on whistling it while he was creeping after us. Strangers in the Night …’

‘That was the main thing she remembered about him,’ Heck said. ‘The song. Absolutely petrified her. Sounds like he was playing cat and mouse with them for quite a while before he struck.’

As he relayed all this, Heck wondered again about his own experience on the tarn’s east shore, specifically the chuckle he thought he’d heard. Hadn’t Gemma once described her assailant on Dartmoor as having a snorting, pig-like chuckle? Of course, there was no guarantee he’d actually heard anything. He’d been so isolated at the time by the mist and the trees and the icy, ear-numbing silence that his senses had been scrambled.

‘I’m not sure I’ll be part of this investigation once it kicks into action, ma’am,’ he added. ‘But if you’re interested, I’ll try and update you regularly.’

‘Do that by all means … if you wish.’

‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘If I wish?’

‘The song’s most likely a coincidence, Heck.’ By her tone, she was quite decided on that. ‘For all we know, your perp could be some kind of crooner obsessive. And the fact he ran into two girls is exactly how it sounds – he ran into them. He got lucky.’

‘Just like the Stranger did ten years ago, you mean? Having carefully trawled for his victims first.’

‘Heck, it’s more likely some opportunist headcase than a middle-aged madman who survived a bullet wound in the chest and a dunking in a Devonshire swamp, and then suddenly, over a decade later, decided to recreate the best night of his life four hundred miles away on a frozen mountaintop.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you think?’

Heck was unwilling to admit that what she said made pretty good sense. Because still, some deep gut instinct advised him there was much more to this.

‘Like I say, ma’am, I’ll keep you informed.’

‘And like I say, Heck … if that’s what you want.’

‘I thought you liked to get ahead of the game, Gemma?’

‘I’ve always been a believer in the Golden Hour principle.’

‘And what about the JDLR principle? Remember that, from when you were a street cop? Just Doesn’t Look Right.’

She sighed. ‘I’m onside with that too. How could I have tolerated you for so long if I wasn’t? But the thing is, Heck … I’m not your supervisor anymore. You need to address these concerns to this DI Mabelthorpe. If there is something in this for us, I’m sure we’ll get the message through the usual channels.’

‘Okay,’ he said, disgruntled. ‘See you around, ma’am.’

‘Yeah. See you, Heck.’ And she hung up.

When Heck ambled back into the rear office, Mary-Ellen was gazing expectantly up at him. Though she’d only been a kid at the time, she knew all about the infamous Stranger enquiry. There was barely anyone in Britain who didn’t. She hadn’t leapt excitedly a few minutes ago when he’d first mentioned there were possible similarities between that case and this, but she was clearly fascinated to know more.

‘What does Superintendent Piper think?’ she asked.

Heck shrugged. ‘She doesn’t want to know.’

‘But what does she actually think?’

He chuckled without humour. ‘That’s always tougher to ascertain.’

Chapter 5

It might have been a signature of the Stranger that he always destroyed his victims’ eyes by stabbing or gouging, but he wasn’t alone in that, Gemma reminded herself. Okay, it wasn’t a common feature of serial sex murders, but occasionally the eyes had it – so to speak. And yet considering this was such a momentous thing to do, quite often those responsible would offer only garbled explanations as to why.

One had professed an ancient, long-discredited belief that an image of the last thing the victim saw before death would be imprinted on the internal optical structures, allowing identification of the murderer on the pathologist’s slab – though no one had taken it that seriously, given this was the educated twenty-first century. Another had described it as a convoluted act of remorse, saying he’d sought to remove all sense that his victims were human beings. ‘As the eyes go, so goes the soul,’ he’d whined in a voice that almost pleaded for his interrogators’ sympathy. ‘It’s easier to tear and mutilate a doll than a living person.’ A third had adopted the polar opposite viewpoint, coldly claiming his victims’ eyes as trophies, and keeping them in jars on the shelves in the ‘workshop’ located in his cellar. The idea they were somehow sentient had excited him. In his eventual confession, he’d admitted: ‘I was aroused by the thought they were being protractedly tortured, trapped indefinitely in sealed glass containers, unable to vocalise their suffering, unable even to blink away the sight of me, their captor, in my endless triumph.’

Gemma hadn’t memorised any of these details, but then she didn’t need to. Even before Heck had hung up, she’d accessed Serial Crimes Unit Advisory, or SCUA for short – the unit’s own intelligence databank, and now called up one case file after another on the screen in her office. Purely on principle, she would never have let Heck know she was doing this. He’d always been a chancer; he took risks and gambles, but so often they paid off because his instincts were very well-honed. She’d benefited from them hugely, but that didn’t mean she could openly approve of this approach, even indirectly, by attaching undue credibility to it. But it was unfortunate, or maybe fortunate depending on your view, that Heck hadn’t mentioned anything about the assailant up in the Lake District going for his victims’ eyes – if he had, that would have been a smoking gun no one could ignore. In the original Stranger investigation, the aspect of the eyes being attacked had been of crucial importance.

Gemma opened the files in question, for the first time in quite a few years. Immediately, all kinds of memories flooded back. The crime scene photographs ensured that, along with the hundreds of statements taken, the intelligence and analysis reports and the many, many names involved – not just the other officers on the case, but the victims and their families, and the numerous suspects who’d slowly, steadily and very frustratingly been ticked off the list as their alibis checked out. She imagined she could smell again the rankness of the reservoir that stifling hot night, could hear the wind whispering through the thick, dry grass on the Dartmoor ridges, could feel the heat rising from the sun-beaten landscape. But more than anything else, she could clearly visualise that bestial, leather-clad face with its frothing, gammy-toothed mouth. Despite the many awful things she’d seen since then, the small hairs at the nape of Gemma’s neck stiffened at the mere memory.

It didn’t affect her quite the way it used to. She didn’t dream about the Stranger anymore – at the end of the day he had given her a soaring career, so she could hardly complain. But like so many other cases for which no real and satisfactory solution had been provided, the subject came up in conversation with discomforting regularity. There’d never been anything to suggest the killer was still alive, but perhaps deep down it wouldn’t have surprised her if something did. Very little about that enquiry had actually been straightforward. The guy had murdered indiscriminately, yet at times had behaved more like a professional assassin than a sex case, never leaving a trace of physical evidence, covering his tracks with amazing skill. And yet all the way through he’d behaved as if he was on a kind of learning curve, constantly modifying and adjusting his methods – so much so that in the initial stages of the investigation, before Gemma was actually attached, West Country police forces hadn’t immediately been sure they were dealing with a serial killer. Had it not been for the brutal stabbing of all the victims’ eyes after death, which rapidly became the Stranger’s trademark, they might have set up separate enquiries.

With her usual painstaking thoroughness, she now ran back through the primary crime reports.

The first known Stranger attack had involved the death of a lone householder, an elderly man living in a remote cottage on the edge of Exmoor in north Devon. He had died in the armchair in front of his fireplace on a cold February night in 2003, as the result of a flurry of blows to head and body, probably delivered with a stone taken from the wall outside, and several vicious stab-wounds to his neck and chest, one made with a spike-like object that was removed from the scene by the killer, the others caused by the victim’s own household implements – a carving knife and a wood chisel, both of which were left standing in his gaping wounds.

Though there was no sexual interference with this victim and nothing of value had been stolen from the scene, the initial assumption was that a burglar was responsible – that he’d simply not been able to find anything he wanted, and that the post-mortem stabbing out of the old man’s eyes had been a ghoulish act of vindictive anger.

The second attack had occurred on a quiet country lane in Somerset, the following July. It was late at night, and two teenage girls had been hitchhiking home from the Glastonbury Festival. Someone had stopped a car alongside them, but with no intention of offering a lift. This hadn’t been an out-and-out sex attack either, but it was closer to that than the first. One of the two victims, the heavier built of the two, who also, coincidentally, had worn her hair cut very short – which conceivably, in the dark, had led the attacker to mistake her for a male – had been felled with a single skull-crushing blow from behind, delivered with a heavy stone. The other victim had then been dragged into a roadside ditch and forcibly divested of her jeans, though not her underwear, before being subjected to a severe beating, at the end of which she was ripped and slashed with several edged implements. Once again, both girls’ eyes were gouged post-mortem with some kind of steel spike, which forensics examiners concluded was a sharpened screwdriver. If there was any lingering uncertainty they were dealing with the same killer as before, that disappeared when the old man’s DNA was discovered in both female victims’ eye-sockets, implying the same screwdriver had been used in both attacks.

These initial three slayings constituted what investigators would later come to refer to as ‘the first string of murders’, primarily because they hadn’t yet fully adopted the Stranger’s trademark MO.

The ‘second string’ would commence within a few months. These would be more organised and less opportunistic in nature, and as they’d focus primarily on courting couples and doggers, would comprise the crimes for which the Stranger would best be remembered. He was clearly learning fast by this stage, because in these cases all the new victims were stalked beforehand, covertly and professionally. But he was also enjoying himself more – possibly because the females in these cases were ‘dressed for sex’, and because the very isolated locations in which he found them allowed him to take his time. Whatever the reason, the methods used to eliminate these latter victims were increasingly more gruesome, a wider variety of implements used, the females in particular suffering ever greater and more prolonged savagery.

Gemma perused the raw detail with her usual unemotional eye, though even for someone who had been physically present at several of the crime scenes, the final few photographs made harrowing viewing, while the accompanying medical reports were sufficient to put the most experienced homicide investigator off her lunch. Of course, in all this mass of information there were only three obvious connectors to the case Heck had just reported from the Lakes. As he’d said, the unsuccessful assault on the two walkers was vaguely similar to the successful assault on the two hitchhikers near Glastonbury. But that could be coincidental. Likewise the second possible connector, which was the blitz assault with the heavy stone; again, the use of such a crude weapon would not be atypical of the average opportunist offender. But the third connector was more difficult to dismiss.

Strangers in the Night.

The press had only come to dub the killer ‘the Stranger’ when the second string of murders was well underway and he’d settled on his targets of choice: sexual adventurers looking to hook up with strangers. But as far as Gemma was aware, that was the only reason they’d given him such a moniker. By pure chance, the song Strangers in the Night had happened to be on the radio during his final attack – the one in which she had been the intended victim – but the investigation team had never publicised this fact. The only other non-police person who could have known about it was the Stranger himself.

On its own, this fact perhaps wasn’t quite enough to chill the blood, but then Gemma would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit she hadn’t spent at least some part of the last ten years wondering where the Stranger’s body lay.

Or if indeed it lay anywhere at all.

She ruminated on this for several minutes, before standing up, straightening her skirt and leaving her office. The main detectives’ office, or DO, as it was known, was located at the far end of the department’s main corridor and filled with chattering keyboards and idle discussion. As usual, about half the team were on base, and one of these was big, bearded Detective Sergeant Eric Fisher. SCU was not a cold-case unit, but Gemma always believed in keeping half an eye on the past, and it fell within DS Fisher’s remit, along with his many other analytical roles, to regularly review all their open and unsolved cases, particularly in response to new and possibly relevant info flowing in from more current enquiries.

‘Eric, what are you doing?’ Gemma asked.

He glanced up from the nest of paperwork over which he’d been slumped.

‘Homework, ma’am.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m at Winchester Crown tomorrow. Regina v Smallwood.’

‘If you’re giving evidence tomorrow, I’d have hoped you’d be on top of it by now.’

‘So would I.’

‘Yeah, well drop it for the time being.’

Fisher sat back, his swivel chair creaking beneath his vast girth. ‘Ma’am, I …’

‘This won’t take a minute.’ Gemma leaned with folded arms against the filing cabinets alongside him. ‘Strangers in the Night …?’

‘Okay … nice song.’

‘That’s all it means to you?’

‘Well …’ He adjusted his glasses as he pondered this. ‘Believe it was originally part of a movie score. Frank Sinatra released it sometime in the mid-60s …’

‘No comedians today, Eric, please.’

‘Sorry, ma’am.’ He pawed the spillage of paperwork on his desk. ‘Always get nervous when I’m going to Crown. Just trying to lighten the load. Erm …’ He squinted as if it would help him recollect. ‘The Stranger referred to it as his tune, or something like that … on the night you shot him.’

Gemma pursed her lips. ‘Who else knew about that, Eric?’

‘Aside from a select few in the Stranger taskforce, and SCU, no one.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘That intel’s accessible via SCUA and HOLMES 2, but only if you know what you’re looking for beforehand. If I remember rightly, a strategic decision was taken back in 2004 to withhold that specific detail from the public.’

‘That’s correct,’ she said. ‘And no one has reversed that decision at any time since?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Okay, Eric … thanks for that.’ She moved to a big grimy window overlooking Victoria. It was shortly before noon, but the dull, damp greyness of late November pervaded the city. Many shop-fronts were lit, vehicles shunting along Broadway in a river of headlights.

‘Something wrong, ma’am?’ Fisher asked.

‘No, it’s okay.’

She didn’t elaborate, so he shrugged, spun around at his desk and recommenced his homework.

‘But I’m going to be away for a couple of days,’ she added as an afterthought.

He spun back again. ‘Anywhere nice?’

‘Normally, yeah. But at this time of year I’m not so sure. Cumbria.’

He arched a bushy, red-grey eyebrow. ‘You’re not by any chance seeing …?’

‘Don’t ask me that, Eric … okay? Just don’t!’

Immediately, she regretted her curtness. Two and a half months ago, Eric Fisher had only been one of several SCU detectives to express dismay that Heck, in his opinion the most proficient investigator in their team, was transferring north. In fact, despite Gemma having so adversarial a rep inside the National Crime Group that she was quietly referred to as ‘the Lioness’, the normally affable DS Fisher had been so forthright in his view that she’d ‘catastrophically mishandled’ her latest disagreement with Heck that she’d almost suspended him. She’d only resisted that ultimate sanction because she’d known where such impertinence stemmed from – a genuine conviction they were making a big error letting Heck leave.

‘Maybe,’ she admitted. ‘Possibly. Yes alright, probably.’

Fisher nodded, quietly pleased. ‘Cool.’

‘There’s nothing cool about it, trust me,’ she said. ‘I’d much rather stay here.’

‘You going up there alone?’

‘For the moment.’

He seemed puzzled. ‘So … what’s the case?’

‘There isn’t a case just yet. Not for us.’ Understandably, he looked none the wiser. ‘It’s a ghost if you must know, Eric.’ Sensing several others earwigging from different corners of the DO, she lowered her voice. ‘Can you believe that? I’m chasing a bloody ghost.’

Chapter 6

Though it was only a journey of twenty-five miles, it took the ambulance two hours to arrive at Cragwood Keld from Kendal. The last few miles saw it crawling along Great Langdale and uphill into Cragwood Vale at less than a snail’s pace. It was the worst fog any of the ambulance crew had seen, but you didn’t play Lewis Hamilton on these roads even in blazing sunshine. It would be similarly slow progress heading back to Kendal; despite having a seriously injured person on board, there would be no police escort to clear the way – Mary-Ellen’s Land Rover was still at Cragwood Ho, and though Heck intended to travel down to the hospital in his own car at the first opportunity, there were a couple of things he needed to do up here first. But at least Tara Cook would now have health professionals alongside her and could be drip-fed painkillers.

Heck stood in the doorway of the nick and watched as the ambulance pulled slowly away, its tail-lights dwindling like fish-eyes sinking into ocean gloom. Only now, outside in the cold again, did it occur to him that he was still wearing damp, musty clothes. He turned to Mary-Ellen. She’d already got changed. Organised to a tee, there always seemed to be a second uniform pressed and ready in M-E’s wardrobe for occasions such as this.

‘I’m nipping to the Section House to get some dry togs,’ he said. ‘Can you knock on a few doors … get everyone over to the pub?’

‘Sure, but I thought you were going down to Kendal with the ambulance.’

‘I’ll follow the ambulance. I want to speak to everyone else first.’

‘No probs,’ she said, eagerly, still enjoying the unaccustomed action. ‘I’ll get up and at ’em.’ She strode off across the road.

It had often struck Heck as odd that an all-action character like Mary-Ellen had consciously sought reassignment to Cragwood Keld. He didn’t buy into her glib explanation that the moment she heard Heck was being posted here, she wanted to hook up with him because she’d read about his antics in the police press. It was a complex deal, swapping forces; the paperwork alone was off-putting. Heck knew, having done it several times. Plus, he couldn’t imagine what kind of action she’d thought she was going to get up here. Then again perhaps, as she’d also once said, she just loved the great outdoors.

‘I should have been a park-ranger, me, sarge,’ Heck remembered her once sniggering. ‘Gimme a horse, some buckskins and a whole range of empty mountains, and you can shag me any time you want.’

Promises, promises, he thought as he headed down a ginnel opposite the station which connected with the village green. So long as she got the villagers together, that would do for the time being. On the right, at the end of the ginnel, was ‘the Section House’, as they called it – a one-up/one-down built of whitewashed stone, which, as it had had no permanent occupant for years, had been refurbished and taken on a long-term rental by Cumbria Constabulary. As police digs went, the Section House was actually pretty good. Okay, it was a bit compact – split-level, with the lounge, diner and kitchen all crammed into a single space downstairs, while the ‘bedroom’ was actually a timber balcony, accessible only by a loft-type ladder. But it was double-glazed and centrally heated, and it had all the mod cons Heck could need.

He scrambled ‘topside’, as he thought of it, stripped off, towelled down, and then pulled on jeans, trainers and a hooded blue sweatshirt. As a rule, Heck tended not to view himself in mirrors anymore than he needed to. He was only in his late thirties, so he was hardly old, but his face had taken more than its fair share of kicks and punches over the years, and these days looked … well, ‘lived-in’ would be a polite way to describe it. At least he still had a full head of black hair, even if it was its usual unruly mop. He dragged a comb through it, before grabbing his phone, his radio and his cuffs, locked up and crossed the leaf-strewn green to The Witch’s Kettle, in which several of the villagers were already waiting.

Hazel and Lucy stood behind the bar, regarding him curiously. As Hazel was the only person offering bed and breakfast accommodation in the vicinity, Heck had rung her shortly after getting back to the nick with Tara, to check no visitors had arrived unexpectedly. The reply had come in the negative, but he hadn’t had time to elaborate further.

‘We got everyone?’ he asked, approaching the bar.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘Where’s Mary-Ellen?’

‘Here,’ the PC said, coming in after him with another woman. This was Bella McCarthy, a former investment banker from the Home Counties who lived in the Lakes in early retirement with her husband, James. He was already present in the pub. She sat down alongside James at the foremost table, the pair of them in matching green wellies and waxed overcoats.

‘That’s everyone, sarge.’ Mary-Ellen sidled to the bar.

‘Good.’ Heck turned to face the crowd, who were also seated but watching him expectantly.

There weren’t too many of them actually. As well as the McCarthys, Ted Haveloc had arrived, along with Burt and Mandy Fillingham and a pair of spinster sisters, Dulcie and Sally O’Grady.

‘Hello, everyone,’ Heck said. ‘Thanks for dropping what you were doing and getting over here so promptly. By the way, does anyone here not know who I am?’

There was no reply. He was pretty sure he’d spoken to all of these people, for various reasons, over the past two and a half months. ‘Okay … I’ll get right to the point. I’m afraid there’s been an incident. A pretty vicious attack in fact, not too far from here. Two young girls were walking in the Pikes when they were assaulted. Just the other side of the tarn, in fact.’

The crowd listened in stony silence. But already, worried frowns were appearing.

‘I’m not saying there’s a specific threat to this community,’ Heck added. ‘But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least warn you. We’ve no idea who the perpetrator is, but this was fairly serious violence. On top of that, we’ve got reason to believe he may be armed.’

‘You mean with a gun?’ Burt Fillingham said, looking uncharacteristically bewildered. He was a short, squat man in late middle-age, with thinning, straw-blond hair and a curious line in tank-tops, ties and tinted spectacles; he was normally a rather superior, disapproving character, who viewed himself as an authority figure. He certainly knew everybody else’s business, which sort of went with the postmaster territory, Heck supposed, at least in a rural enclave like this.

‘Yes,’ Heck said. ‘We don’t know what kind yet, or how much ammunition he’s got … or even how willing he is to use it. The thing is, this attack occurred sometime last night. On which subject, I don’t suppose anyone heard anything out of the ordinary?’

‘I heard what sounded like a gunshot?’ Sally O’Grady said in a querulous tone. Around fifty, she was the younger of the two sisters by about ten years, and by far the most nervous, but both were physically similar to each other; tall and thin, with short grey hair. ‘It was a long way off though, I thought.’

‘What time would that have been?’ Heck asked. ‘Early hours maybe? Four o’clock? Five?’

‘Oh no, much earlier than that. I’d say around midnight.’

‘Okay.’ Heck threw a discreet nod at Mary-Ellen, who nodded back, acknowledging that he wanted her to take a statement from Sally later.

‘You folks don’t need me to tell you how vast and empty the Lakes can be at this time of year,’ Heck said. ‘I mean, this guy … he could have legged it in any direction. He could be miles and miles away by now. He might even have left the county. We’ve no clue about his transport capability.’

‘If this attack was up in the Pikes in the middle of the night, he must be a robust sort.’ This came from Ted Haveloc, a rugged, sun-wizened character, whose tattoos, broken teeth and chaos of wiry grey hair indicated a life spent largely outdoors and made him look much older than his sixty-two years.

‘We can’t make assumptions about anything,’ Heck replied. ‘We don’t know the first thing about him. We haven’t even had a chance to get up there and look yet.’

‘The attack happened at around midnight, and you haven’t been up there looking?’ Burt Fillingham said.

‘The fog’s impeding our best efforts, but the latest forecast is that it’s due to clear by around midday tomorrow.’

‘That’s twenty-four hours off,’ Bella McCarthy said. ‘What do we do in the meantime?’ She was a tall, trim blonde of around fifty-five, always decked in the latest rural fashions and a famous local sportswoman, playing a prominent role at the Cragwood Boat Club. But at present she sounded so dismayed that her small-statured husband, who despite his dyed brown, crimped hair, was ten years her senior, took her jewellery-coated hand in his. James McCarthy was another boat enthusiast and one-time big noise in the City, and yet was inclined to extreme mousiness in his wife’s presence, which might explain why she seemed less than impressed by his attempts to comfort her.

‘That’s what I’ve gathered you all for,’ Heck said. ‘As I say, I’ve no reason to assume this man will come down to Cragwood Keld. Most likely he’ll be far away by now. But it’s not impossible. I mean, the Cradle Track is the most direct route up into the Pikes. It’s also the most direct route down.’

‘But would he really come this way?’ Mandy Fillingham – Burt’s plain, dumpy wife – asked, evidently seeking reassurance. ‘I mean, knowing there are villages here and people … and that he’s wanted by the police?’

‘I don’t know,’ Heck said. ‘The best advice I can give you at present is to go home and lock your doors and windows. Report anyone wandering the village who you don’t know, and certainly don’t admit anyone to your house. In fact, don’t even open the front door until you’ve looked through your peephole or living-room window and established who it is.’

‘So we’re prisoners in our own homes?’ Bella McCarthy said.

‘Kind of,’ Mary-Ellen agreed.

‘Oh my God!’ Sally O’Grady looked appalled to hear it in such bare terms.

‘Sally!’ her sister said warningly.

‘But only until tomorrow,’ Mary-Ellen added.

‘Assuming the fog clears tomorrow,’ Bella retorted. ‘I mean this is the Lake District, you know. And it is November.’

‘Bella, there’s zero chance of this guy coming here,’ Mary-Ellen said.

‘How can you say that if you don’t know anything about him?’

‘The thing is, Mrs McCarthy,’ Heck said, ‘you’ve got a police office right in the middle of Cragwood Keld. I can’t stress how unusual that is in this day and age. It exponentially reduces the chance of an offender setting up shop here. You’ve got officers right on the spot.’ He indicated Mary-Ellen. ‘PC O’Rourke and I will remain permanently on duty until this guy is arrested or until we can be absolutely sure he’s left the area.’

Some looked relieved by that. There were several murmurs of gratitude. The inhabitants of Cragwood Keld had got quite used to Mary-Ellen in the relatively short time she’d been here; they admired her spirit and enjoyed her sense of humour, but they also liked that she was a toughie who could look after herself and, if need be, them.

However, one person who didn’t seem relieved was Burt Fillingham.

‘But this man’s got a gun,’ he said. ‘If that’s the case, he could force his way into any building. He could force his way into the police station. There’d be nothing you or PC O’Rourke could do then.’

This thought had crossed Heck’s mind too, but the last thing he wanted now was an unofficial evacuation of the village. Despite the limited numbers, it could still turn into a stampede, and in these conditions that would be fraught with difficulty and danger, and it was probably unnecessary in any case.

‘The firearms issue’s being taken care of.’

‘How?’

‘Well … I’m hoping to get a couple of firearms officers posted here for the next day or so. I haven’t had time to organise that yet, but I’m going to sort it at the first opportunity.’

‘We didn’t mention that before because we didn’t want to alarm you,’ Mary-Ellen explained.

‘What about Cragwood Ho?’ Sally O’Grady asked in a shrill tone. ‘That’s much closer to the Cradle Track than we are. And those poor people don’t even know …’

‘We’ve already made contact with Bessie Longhorn and Bill Ramsdale and have given them exactly the same advice we’re giving you,’ Heck answered.

In actual fact, that was a little white lie. They hadn’t yet been able to personally warn the folk who lived at the north end of the tarn. Mary-Ellen had tried to call, but as Bessie Longhorn didn’t even have a landline, she’d been forced to concentrate on Bill Ramsdale – from whom there’d been no reply, despite her trying three times. This wasn’t a cause for knee-jerk concern; Ramsdale was known as a guy who wouldn’t bother answering his phone if he was busy or in a mood. On the third occasion, she’d left a detailed voicemail, with a request that he pass the info on to his neighbour as well.

‘PC O’Rourke will be setting off to Cragwood Ho very soon,’ Heck added. ‘Just to check everyone there is okay.’

This wasn’t quite as much of a lie. First and foremost, Mary-Ellen had to take the police launch back across the tarn, to mark out the one crime scene they so far knew about with tape and a tent, and to preserve any potential exhibits she might find. She then had to return the launch to its shed and retrieve the Land Rover which was still sitting in the car park up at the Ho, so she’d be visiting that end of the tarn in due course anyway. Of course, this would take a little longer than they’d prefer, but there was nothing else they could do.

‘Any questions, guys?’ Heck said.

‘Yeah,’ Hazel said from behind the bar. He turned, looking at her closely for the first time since he’d made the announcement. She had noticeably paled in the cheek. ‘You haven’t told us much about this attack up in the fells. What’s the reason for it?’

‘We don’t know,’ Heck said.

‘You said the victims were two girls. I mean, was … was it sexual?’

‘Yet again …’

‘He doesn’t know,’ Burt Fillingham replied on Heck’s behalf.

‘Whether it is or isn’t, the same rules apply,’ Heck said. ‘Keep your doors and windows locked and everything will be fine.’ He turned to the rest of the pub. ‘If any of you are really worried, there’s nothing to stop you doubling up for the night. You know, sleeping in others’ houses – set up a camp bed downstairs, or whatever. Strength in numbers, as they say.’

They absorbed this quietly, which wasn’t always a good sign. But sometimes there was no alternative but to give people the facts. If there was the slightest danger, the public needed to be put on their guard.

‘We’ve also got these.’ Heck laid a bunch of contact cards on the bar-top. ‘Everyone take one, please. They’ve got direct lines to Cragwood police office and the radio suite down at Windermere. It’s also got mine and Mary-Ellen’s mobile numbers.’

‘Lot of good mobile phones are up here,’ Burt Fillingham grunted, as if the rest of them didn’t already know that.

‘It’s only until tomorrow,’ Mary-Ellen said again. ‘Seriously folks, there’s no need to be upset.’

There was a brief contemplative silence, during which the fire in the hearth crackled and spat. The thick grey mist hung so close to the window it was like a layer of dirty cotton wool pinned on the outside of the glass.

‘Okay,’ Heck said. ‘That’s it.’

With subdued murmurs, the less-than-happy band broke up, some talking together quietly, others shuffling to the door.

‘What now?’ Hazel asked Heck. ‘We can double up for the night, lie low and all that, but what are you going to do?’

‘I’ve got to go down to Kendal,’ he replied. ‘Get a report from the hospital.’

‘Okay.’ She nodded glumly.

‘Hey … M-E’s nearby. I mean, she’s got a few jobs to do first, but she’ll not be too far away. And believe me, she’s as good in a fight as any bloke I’ve ever met. On top of that, I’ll be back by tea-time, I’m sure.’

‘It’s just that I think there may be another problem.’

‘Go on.’

‘You haven’t mentioned Annie Beckwith.’

‘Beckwith?’ The name didn’t ring any bell of familiarity with Heck.

‘Oh shit, yeah,’ Mary-Ellen said quietly. ‘That’s the old lady who lives at the top of the Cradle Track.’

‘Someone lives at the top of the Track?’ Heck was astonished. He had some vague idea there was an old farm building up there, but he didn’t know someone lived in it.

Mary-Ellen nodded. ‘Bit of a local character. At least, she would be if she wasn’t so reclusive. She’s very self-sufficient. Grows her own food, makes her own clothes, keeps a chicken or two. She lives in Fellstead Grange, which was built sometime in the 1700s and hasn’t been renovated since. There’s no power, no phone, no computer, nothing. The Track leads to it, but no actual road. And she’s completely alone.’

Heck wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to respond to this.

Hazel looked even more worried. ‘That puts her in the danger zone, doesn’t it?’

‘How far up the Track does she live?’ Heck asked.

‘About fifteen minutes’ walk. And it’s all uphill.’

‘You say she’s an old lady. How old exactly?’

‘Must be nearly eighty,’ Hazel said.

‘Seriously, and she lives up there alone?’

‘It’s her farm – she came into full ownership when her parents died.’

‘Which was about five decades ago, if I heard rightly,’ Mary-Ellen added.

‘Yeah, and now she won’t leave the place,’ Hazel said. ‘She’s been offered the market value loads of times, but she won’t sell. And why should she, Mark?’

‘Why should she? Well … how about no heating, total isolation, working the land at that age, next to no money …’

‘It’s her life,’ Mary-Ellen shrugged.

‘Well …’ He rubbed his chin. ‘She may not be in as much danger as we think. First of all, like I say, this guy might have left the area. Secondly, he may not even know she’s there. Thirdly, if he does, she may not be his type …’

‘His type?’ Hazel said. ‘So he is going for more victims?’

‘It’s way too early to make that assumption,’ Heck replied.

‘Even though you clearly have?’

‘Hazel, it’s my job to prepare for the worst. Annie Beckwith’s in a vulnerable position, and we’ll get up there at some point to check, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do for her right at this moment.’

‘Why don’t I go up there?’ Hazel suggested.

‘What?’

‘You two have got things you need to do. I know Annie better than you two, anyway. I can drive to the Ho, and walk up the Track.’

‘I’m really not sure that’s a good idea,’ Heck said. He didn’t elaborate, but his head was suddenly full of images from the Stranger enquiry back in the West Country all those years ago: ‘Police Eyes Only’ photos of female victims lying in the back seats of cars, stabbed multiple times, genitals torn, eyes gouged.

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