PART 3

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: 9780007551286

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780008116880

Version: 2014-10-21

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Read an extract from Hunted

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 14

‘Kill the lights!’ Heck shouted, as he charged along the landing, snapping his own torch off in the process. He met Hazel at the top of the stairs. She’d heard the shot and tried to grab hold of him, but he thrust her in the direction of the bedroom. ‘In there with Gemma, lie low …’

Before she could reply, he was galloping down the stairs and across the darkened lounge towards the open front door.

For half a second, he expected a black-clad figure to emerge through it, pistol levelled. But Heck reached it first, banging it closed with his shoulder, then scrabbling around for a lock. Rather to his surprise, his fingers alighted on a central bolt, which he rammed home with no difficulty. When he felt around the top of the door, there was one there too, which also moved freely and easily.

Heck threw himself to one side, flattened against the jamb.

Even through the thick farmhouse walls, he could hear the whistling. Though he’d been half expecting it, and though he’d heard it so many times before, Strangers in the Night had never sounded so menacing. Yet the song was fading – as if the whistler was already departing the scene. Half a minute later, sweat trickling down his face, Heck risked glancing from the window. Nothing moved out there, though the crumpled form of Dan Heggarty lay where he’d fallen, a dark pool spreading sluggishly around him.

Heck switched his torch back on, but kept its beam lowered as he crossed the lounge to the stairway passage, passing the staircase itself, and darting from one ground-floor room to the next. Most were dank and uninhabitable, draped in webs and crammed with all manner of aged junk. But currently he was more concerned about their doors and windows, and in the main these were securely locked, including the back door.

Overall, the house looked secure, though there was no guarantee of that.

He trotted up the stairs and back along to the bedroom. ‘It’s me,’ he said as he entered. The two women were well away from the window, crouched in separate corners. They waited expectantly while he squatted down. ‘I’m pretty sure Heggarty’s dead.’

Gemma nodded. ‘His body’s still out there … it hasn’t moved.’

There was a brief contemplative silence.

‘So …?’ Hazel had again been struggling to choke back sobs, but now sounded shocked. ‘You’re just going to leave him?’

‘Do you want to go out?’ Heck asked her. ‘The bastard’s probably working on the basis at least one of us will try.’ He mopped a sweaty hank of hair back from his brow. ‘He’s obviously been watching this place closely. Cragwood Vale, Fellstead Grange … he must have done that in order to identify Annie as a possible target.’

‘And?’ Hazel wondered again, sensing something else was coming.

‘Think about it,’ Heck said. ‘There are two bolts on the front door. They work properly. There’s no sign that door was broken open any time recently. Nor with the back door. I’ve checked all the windows too. They aren’t in brilliant condition, but no one has smashed any of them to get in here.’

Hazel shook her head. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying whoever this guy is, when he first got in here a couple of days ago, he didn’t have to break and enter.’

‘Annie may have left the door unlocked.’

‘She may have done,’ Gemma said, picking up on Heck’s thought process. ‘But how likely is that, living all the way out here on her own? Especially given that she was in bed when this attack took place.’

Hazel looked horrified. ‘You mean there’s another way in?’

‘Shit, this is not good.’ Heck’s voice was taut. ‘He’s up here in the hills. Watches Annie pottering around the farm. Sees her coming and going, identifies an entry point. Uses it when Annie’s in bed. Murders her, most likely while she’s asleep.’

‘Oh my God …’

‘It’s worse, I’m afraid. Somehow or other he knew we’d end up coming up here. Don’t ask me how …’

‘And that’s why he left the front door unlocked,’ Gemma interrupted. ‘To get us all into the house.’

‘Yeah.’ Heck felt fresh sweat on his brow. ‘To make us fish in a barrel.’

‘If you’re right,’ Hazel whimpered, ‘that means he could be here …’

Heck nodded. ‘I know … now!’

The door burst open, slamming the wall as a dim figure forced its way through.

‘Everyone down!’ Gemma shouted, throwing the shotgun to her shoulder. Heck dived to the floor, dragging Hazel with him. BOOM – the payload spread as it crossed the room, shredding the woodwork to either side of the entrance, and hitting the figure full-on, hurling it backward onto the landing.

Heck scrabbled after it on all fours, wafting at dust. He levered himself to his feet and flattened his body against the fragmented jamb, angling his head to peek around.

And seeing something incredible.

There wasn’t one body lying out there. There were two, one on top of the other.

The one on top was dead, though it would be more accurate to say it had never lived. It was the mannequin from downstairs. The shotgun blast had broken it in half. One of its arms had become detached. However, the body underneath it was fully intact, and far more animated. Even as Heck watched, it kicked aside what remained of the dummy and lurched quickly to its feet. Heck ducked back into the room, but caught a fleeting glimpse of heavy boots, dark waterproofs, a full-head leather mask, and in its gloved right hand, a six-shooter.

The bedroom door was only partially intact, and when Heck banged it closed, it came loose around the hinges, which had been mangled by shot.

‘The bed! Get me the sodding bed!’

The women jumped to their feet, though Hazel was too frozen with shock and horror to do much more. She goggled at the sight of Gemma unceremoniously throwing Annie Beckwith’s corpse to the floor, and inserting herself behind the heavy cast-iron bedframe as she tried to shove it across the room.

‘Give me a hand!’ Gemma gasped.

Belatedly, Hazel joined her. The bed screeched forward, its un-wheeled feet chewing through floorboards. Heck added his strength too, and they slid it into place, ramming it against the door – and not before time. Half a second later, there were three detonations, and a trio of holes was punched through the planking. Three corresponding impacts struck the far wall, knocking out fist-sized chunks.

‘Heck … I may have killed us here,’ Gemma panted. ‘I wasted our last cartridge.’

‘We’re not bloody beaten yet!’ He pivoted around, grabbed at the curtains and yanked them down in a mass of dust and rotted fabric.

The window beyond was deeply recessed, set into a stone wall that was at least three feet thick. But its four panes of glass, though heavy and grimy, relied on a central cruciform frame that was badly decayed.

‘Both of you get down,’ he said, tearing off his jacket and wrapping it around his fist. Behind him meanwhile, the door was assailed. Kicks and blows rained down with anger and exertion, then three more gunshots followed, ripping through the jamb.

‘He must have ammo to spare!’ Gemma shouted.

‘This whole thing’s been well planned.’ Heck drove his padded fist hard at the window, which exploded out in a cascade of jangling shards. A few teeth of glass remained in the aged frame, but he knocked these out too. ‘Okay … quickly!’

Hazel hung back like a frightened rabbit. ‘What … what’s on the other side?’

He didn’t answer, just grabbed her around the waist, lifted her up and placed her on all fours in the window embrasure, pushing her bottom until she vanished and he heard the double-thud of her feet alighting on a hollow surface.

‘You next, Gemma.’

‘No … you next,’ she said. ‘I’m the senior rank, and I screwed up. So it’s my arse.’

‘It’s your arse I’m thinking about. Be a hell of a shame to lose it.’

‘I could say the same about yours … now get out!’

He leapfrogged into the recess, and scrambled forward on hands and knees, poking his head out and seeing a lower section of slanted roof about five feet below, covered in broken, lichen-covered slates. Hazel was already halfway down it on her backside. She’d shortly reach the eaves, from where it would be no more than a seven-foot drop. Heck scrabbled out in pursuit, landing hands-first on the sloped surface, shattering a dozen more tiles, hearing the woodwork crack underneath, but now rolling sideways, coming up hard against Hazel’s back, causing her to yelp.

He glanced backward and up. ‘Gemma?’

‘I’m okay,’ she said, appearing in the window. ‘Just go!’

Heck and Hazel leapt from the roof side-by-side, Gemma following half a second later. Without stopping to talk, they ran forward and away from the house. Heck looked back once, seeing a black aperture where the hatch to an old coal-cellar had been pried open – which clearly explained how the killer had first gained access to the property. Not that there was time to ponder this. They ploughed through icy fog, which seemed even denser than earlier, keeping their torches switched off; the gunman would hear them easily enough without them leaving him a beacon. And yet almost immediately they came unstuck. Within a few dozen yards, they were staggering across strips of ground cordoned by knee-high net-wire fencing, some planted with rows of vegetables, others filled with rubbish and old straw. Beyond these, they stumbled between chicken-sheds and other dilapidated structures which they had to veer around or scrabble over. As such, they lost all sense of direction, only keeping together because they clung on to each other.

From behind them, there was an echoing thump.

‘Front door,’ Heck breathed. ‘He’s coming after us. Keep moving.’

But now they hesitated. Low sheds lay on all sides. Alleys led in various directions.

‘Which way?’ Gemma said. ‘We can’t just run blind. If we come to that beck, or to a scree slope or something, and he’s right behind us …’

‘Keep heading away from the house in a straight line,’ Hazel advised, panting.

‘How do we know it’s a straight line?’

‘As long as all these paddocks and farm structures are here, we know we’re crossing Annie’s farmyard. Most of them are directly behind her house.’

‘And then what, Ms Carter?’ Gemma asked.

‘There’s a path up into the hills.’

‘You mean the Track?’ Heck said.

‘No, a smaller one. Annie once told me she didn’t like it when walkers used it, as it brought them down into the corrie behind her house.’

‘How steep is this smaller path?’ Gemma wondered.

‘It’s just as steep for him as it is for us,’ Hazel replied tartly.

With no option, they hurried on, coming to a broad thoroughfare of beaten earth running straight through the middle of the allotments.

‘This is the main passage across the yard,’ Hazel almost shouted. ‘It leads straight to the hills.’ She took off quickly, the other two hurrying in pursuit.

‘And what do we do when we get up into these hills?’ Gemma asked Heck quietly. ‘How is that going to help us exactly?’

‘Hazel’s a local,’ he answered. ‘She knows her way around.’

‘She’s a pub landlady, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Yeah, but she’s been up here thirty-eight years, whereas I’ve been here two and a half months, and you’ve been here … what, four hours? And what’s all this “Ms Carter” stuff? I think she’d prefer Hazel.’

‘And I’d prefer it if you weren’t so bloody close to her. We’re doing a job here, not playing out some romantic melodrama.’

‘Hey … she’s just found a friend dead and now she’s being chased by a madman. So cut her some bloody slack, eh!’

‘Watch your tone, sergeant …’

‘I don’t need to watch anything. I’ll defer to your rank … ma’am. But as I’m the one with operational command, you’re not my bloody gaffer. Or anything else.’

But five minutes later, when they slid through another stile and found themselves on a path that ascended sharply, mainly by forming switchbacks through heaps of fallen slate, he began to wonder.

‘Hazel … where are you taking us?’

‘I told you … the hills.’

‘Where in the hills?’

‘Anywhere away from Fellstead Grange, don’t you think?’

‘This is great,’ Gemma said. ‘If we’d stopped and thought, we could probably have worked our way back to the Track, and then it would all have been downhill.’

‘You think we’d have made it, Superintendent Piper?’ Hazel wondered as they tottered upward. ‘We’d have had to go right past the house. What if he’d intercepted us there?’

‘He probably wouldn’t even have seen us,’ Gemma retorted.

‘That’d be a gamble,’ Heck said. ‘He hasn’t had a problem seeing us so far.’

Gemma glanced sideways at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll be honest, I’m thinking thermal imaging …’

‘Dear God!’ Gemma said. ‘If he’s got something like that, he can spot us up here on the fell-side as easily as he could down in the farmyard.’

‘Agreed. So we’ve got to get a move on …’

Renewed fear fuelled their uphill flight. Lungs working like bellows, muscle-blood pumping hard, they continued up a path which in some sections was more like a stepladder, ascending tier after tier of broken ground, tripping on ruts and loose stones. To make life worse, the path branched several times. On each occasion Hazel dithered, uncertain of the route, but Heck always urged her on. Once they were past the aprons of scree, the fell-side steepened to the point where it became impassable, the path meandering sideways, a ledge hanging above a mist-filled abyss. They scrambled along it in single file, all the while thinking how badly exposed they were, how their foe might be scoping the fog with some hi-tech device. Abruptly, they slid to another halt. Hazel, who was at the front, slammed her torch on.

‘Ms Carter, that’s not a good idea!’ Gemma said.

‘I need to,’ Hazel replied. ‘We’ve already passed so many of these, I don’t know where we are anymore.’

The path had branched again, the right-hand route tilting back downhill, the left-hand route ascending sharply.

‘Which way?’ Heck said.

‘I’m thinking …’

‘Which bloody way?’

‘Stop rushing me, Mark … we could have gone wrong half a dozen times already.’

He glanced over his shoulder. The torchlight limned the vapour with a near-phosphorescent glow. Nothing stirred. He strained his ears, but all he initially heard was the wheezing of his own breath, the thunder of blood in his ears.

‘Left,’ Hazel decided.

‘Uphill again?’ Gemma said wearily.

‘We go back down into the corrie, he could be waiting there for us.’

‘Not if he’s chased us up the path.’ Gemma glanced around at Heck. ‘Any sign we’re being followed?’

Heck motioned for quiet. Still they heard nothing, which gave them no clue either way. It might be the madman was down there somewhere, watching, waiting for them to re-descend. On the other hand, he could have prowled up after them, and even now was stealthily encroaching.

‘If we keep going uphill, we make it harder for him,’ Hazel said, snapping off her torch. ‘Besides, you ever tried running down a scree-track in the dark?’

‘No disrespect, Ms Carter,’ Gemma said. ‘But we need a better plan than this. We know he’s been up in these fells before. He may know them like the back of his hand, he may be perfectly kitted out for them. But we aren’t.’

Hazel considered this. For several seconds, all Heck could hear was the declining rate of her breath. It was undeniable that plunging endlessly on into this blind, frozen wilderness would gain them no obvious advantage when they had no clue who their pursuer actually was, or even whether he was anywhere near – though that latter issue was resolved half a second later when they heard a scraping of slate on the path behind, and then a casual, tuneful whistling.

As always, it was Strangers in the Night.

They stood rigid. Thanks to the crazy mountain acoustics, he could still be over a hundred yards away. Alternatively, he might be much closer.

Heck pushed the women forward. ‘Go, go …’

‘Which way?’ Hazel moaned.

‘It doesn’t matter, just go …’

She took the left-hand path, heading to higher ground again. They were no longer concerned about noise. It was impossible to move quietly anyway. Loose slate clattered under their feet as they grunted and groaned their way up a zigzagging path that was so steep it might have been designed for goats. Only after ten minutes did it level out again, though now the ground ramped up both to the left and right of it, forming a gully. They ran on regardless. Soon walls of sheer rock hemmed them in from either side. After a few minutes, Heck, who was at the rear, stopped to listen – perhaps in some vain hope that merely keeping going would have been enough to put their pursuer off. It was amazing how quickly the clamour of Gemma and Hazel running on ahead faded. But it was equally amazing how the sound of someone advancing up the path behind them – heavy breathing and stumping footfalls – grew.

Heck sped on, thirty yards later running into the back of Gemma, who had halted for some reason, bowling her over.

‘What the hell …?’ he stuttered.

‘We’ve got trouble!’ she said, jumping back to her feet.

Hazel snapped her torch on. Its beam played over the rough surface of a plank barricade, which blocked all further progress along the path.

‘Oh God,’ Hazel said weakly. ‘I forgot all about this.’

The barricade had been painted with crude crimson letters:

DANGER! DO NOT USE VIA FERRATA UNSAFE!

‘What does this mean?’ Heck demanded.

‘It’s a Via Ferrata … don’t you know?’ Hazel was ash-pale in the torchlight; her hair hung in sweat-sodden strands. ‘Via Ferrata … it’s Italian, it means “iron road”.’

‘Oh … bloody hell,’ he said.

Gemma still looked perplexed.

‘They have these in mountains everywhere,’ Hazel added. ‘It’s like a fun thing. You know, for climbers and hikers. Plus it helps them get from one ridge to the next.’

‘You’d know it as a cable-walk or monkey run,’ Heck explained.

‘You mean like a rope bridge?’

‘Bit more solid than that.’

‘Except that this one’s closed,’ Hazel said. ‘It’s been closed for about five months. The pins will have rusted or the cables frayed, or something.’

‘So … is that it?’ Gemma asked, incredulous. ‘This is as far as we go?’

Heck turned his torch on and shone it up the canyon walls on either side, but they were sheer, offering no visible escape.

A shot was fired.

It was difficult to say how far back along the passage it was fired from. And thankfully it wasn’t a clear shot, caroming from the left-hand wall and ricocheting from the right, before smashing a hole through the planking on the left of them. Both Gemma and Hazel dropped to crouches, the latter just managing to suppress a scream. Heck spun to face the barricade.

‘Either he can’t see us, or he’s a crap shot, or both!’ he said, tearing with his fingers at the splintery-edged bullet hole, then stepping back and kicking with his right foot. ‘Either way, we’ve no choice now!’

‘You’re going across the bridge?’ Hazel said, eyes bugging.

‘Not just me,’ he responded.

Gemma joined him, ripping and rending, pulling the planks apart until there was space for a body.

‘Go!’ Heck ushered her through, then leaned down and grabbed Hazel by the arm.

‘I’m not going through there,’ she said hoarsely.

‘Hazel … if this guy’s who I think he is, he used to open women up like tins of dog-meat.’

‘But it’s not safe …’

‘We’ve got to try.’ He yanked her to her feet and hauled her through the shattered barricade after him.

On the other side, they crossed an open flat area like a small plateau, before hitting a rusty iron safety-barrier, which was the only thing stopping them pitching over an edge into a terrible gulf.

‘Here!’ Gemma said, emerging from the fog on their left.

They felt their way along the barrier, the plateau narrowing until soon they were on another ledge. This narrowed too until it was replaced by a timber catwalk. The safety-barrier now gave way to a row of upright steel pegs, each about three feet tall, equidistant from each other and connected by chains, though both the pegs and the chains were corroded, and in some cases missing. The footing comprised loose, uneven planking, which creaked and shifted. Just thinking about the bottomless mist underneath it stiffened Heck’s hair. Again, they could only progress in single file and now did so by hugging the left-hand rock-face, which though it sloped as it ascended away from them, was rubbed smooth by the numberless hands and bodies that had sidled along it, offering no purchase if the structure suddenly collapsed – which it threatened to constantly, shaking, shuddering, pins swivelling in their holes.

Some fifty yards later, they reached a chunk of timber decking jutting from the cliff-face. This at least felt secure, though it was small, no more than four feet by four. From here, the only progress possible lay out across the chasm courtesy of the Via Ferrata. In appearance, it was a V-shaped bridge constructed entirely from steel cables so old and rotted they were crabbed with rust. Two cables in particular served as hand-rails, one on either side at roughly waist-height, connected by occasional lengths of wire to the single cable serving as the footway. This was thicker than the other two, but any person walking along it would have to tread with care, each foot planted crosswise as though he were traversing a tightrope. By the foggy light of their torches, the structure protruded no more than ten yards before this too was hidden in fog.

They stood there, paralysed.

‘If this thing’s unsafe,’ Hazel said in an eerie monotone voice, ‘we surely can’t risk it all at the same time. I mean, the combined weight …’

Immediately, the wires and cabling along the ledge behind began to vibrate. Heck stared at Hazel, then at Gemma – even she wore an expression glazed by fear. The metallic vibrations resolved themselves into repeated heavy clanking: the sound of footfalls approaching. Still none of them moved.

‘How far to the other side?’ Heck asked dry-mouthed.

Hazel swallowed, as though about to vomit. ‘Two hundred yards … maybe.’

He gazed down into the mist. ‘And how far to the bottom?’

‘Rough guess … a thousand feet.’

Chapter 15

‘Mark, you cannot be serious!’ Despite the clattering approach of those heavy feet, Hazel hung back. ‘We haven’t got harnesses or safety-lines.’

‘Hazel, we’ve no choice,’ Heck said. ‘Look, let Gemma go first. I’ll bring up the rear.’ He caught Gemma’s disbelieving eye. ‘Gemma … you know this guy’s going to kill us all. He wanted to do that before – that’s why he lured us up to Fellstead. We’re the protectors of this place, so he needed to eliminate us first. But now he really has to do that. Listen to me, he can’t afford to let us live!’

Gemma clearly couldn’t believe what he was asking of her. But by the same token, she knew he was right. Abruptly, she took a breath and, turning back to face the bridge, tucked her torch into a side-pocket and zipped it tight, so that it shone ahead. Planting a firm grip on its two hand-rails, she slowly, extremely tentatively, set her first foot on the cable-walk. A second step followed, and a third, and now she was out over the abyss. The bridge shuddered and sang and appeared to sag. There were deep groans from the network of lesser cables connecting it to the cliff-side. But conversely, the approaching footfalls fell silent.

Gemma glanced back. Heck did the same, expecting a gun-toting figure to emerge from the wall of blankness behind them.

It made no sense that one didn’t.

What was the bastard waiting for? Did he want them to try and cross the bridge? That didn’t bode well. Was he thinking he could make this whole thing look like an accident? Either way, they couldn’t hang around.

‘Go, Gemma,’ Heck said. ‘Just go!’

She went, foot over foot, hand over hand, moving further and further from the platform. The flimsy metal structure shuddered and thrummed.

‘Now you, Hazel.’ Heck placed his hand in the small of her back. Hazel was rigid, like a post. She resisted the pressure, so he increased it, pushing her gently but firmly forward. ‘Come on, now … there’s no other way.’

Seeming to get hold of herself, she ventured onto the bridge. As it didn’t immediately fall apart in a welter of lashing, snapping cables, she was able to steel herself further, going forward in pursuit of Gemma, who had now almost vanished into the vapour. They were both of them stiff as pegs, hands clamped around the safety-rails like talons. Swallowing a lump of bile-flavoured saliva, Heck stuck his own torch into his belt, and started after them, trying to ignore the perilous drop beneath his feet, but already fighting to keep his balance. It went against all the rules of logic of course. Every bone in his body told him this was a bad idea.

Danger! Unsafe!

A wooden barricade had been erected to prevent people doing exactly this.

But the alternative could be worse, particularly for the two women.

He glanced back, sweat beading his face. With his torchlight angled upward, the platform behind was already shrouded in darkness. A figure could have appeared there by now, it could be gazing silently after them, and they wouldn’t know. That said, if whoever it was had a thermal imager, he could still pick them off with ease, which thought goaded Heck to greater efforts, sending him blundering on along the slender cable, gloves sopping with sweat as he slid them over rusted, twisted steel. The bridge juddered in response, dipping and bouncing the further over the gulf he proceeded.

A thousand feet down.

Heck did his damnedest not to think about that – and in some ways it was easier than expected, because this was close to the most unreal experience of his life. On all sides, above and below as well, hung only swirling mist – it was like a studio set, partly negating that gnawing sense of vertigo. Ahead, he could no longer see the two women, could merely hear the clunking of metalwork, the vibrations passing backward with a force he felt through the rubber soles of his trainers. He tightened his own grip as he swayed from side to side. A small whimper floated back to him.

‘Stick with it, Hazel!’ he shouted. ‘Couple of minutes and this’ll be over.’

He didn’t know if that was true. What rate of progress were they actually making? Could they really cover two hundred yards in two minutes?

He tried to increase his speed, but a couple of times his feet slipped, shooting downward either left or right, leaving him dangling, lopsided. Though he never let go of the hand-rails, these were moments of the purest terror – yet thanks to the unseen presence behind, he always levered himself to his feet and pushed on with reckless speed.

Were they out in the middle of it yet? It seemed unlikely, but it was impossible to judge. When a yelp of horror came echoing back, Heck initially froze, but then stumbled forward as fast as he dared, the bridge swaying and tilting horribly. Two seconds later, he came up behind Hazel. Gemma was just in front of her, but she too had lost her footing, and was in the process of slowly, carefully raising herself up.

‘We can’t fart around,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’

Gemma threw him a baleful glance. It looked as if she was about to voice some very choice words, but then came a shuddering impact from their rear, a mighty THUNG resounding through the entire structure.

‘What was that?’ Hazel said, in a tone so querulous Heck barely recognised it.

‘Don’t bloody know,’ he muttered.

Another impact followed, and another. A horrendous realisation dawned on the two cops at the same time.

‘He’s trying to de-anchor us,’ Heck said. ‘Trying to tip us into the valley. Quickly, forward … forward!’

The women needed no second telling. Gemma lurched her way along at the front, the bridge swinging wildly.

‘He can’t cut through those cables, surely?’ Hazel said, breathless.

‘Let’s not wait to find out,’ Heck replied.

She turned to push herself on, only to shriek deafeningly as both feet slid off the cable-walk together. She dropped hard on her crotch and tilted to the right, legs pumping against nothing. For several seconds Heck thought she was going to pitch clean through and plummet into the chasm. He jerked his right arm down and grabbed her hood, though this meant he only had one hand in place himself. For several spine-freezing seconds they were locked together in the middle of nothing, wrestling to maintain their mutual balance, Heck’s left arm straining hideously under the combined weight. Slowly, barely breathing, he managed to haul her upright again.

All the time, shocks were passing through the bridge, repeatedly, getting increasingly heavy.

‘He can’t … can’t cut those cables,’ Hazel stuttered again, teeth chattering.

‘I don’t know whether he can or can’t,’ Heck replied. ‘But a lot of those pins were loose. How many does he have to knock out before gravity does the rest?’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Don’t think about it, just keep going!’

A deeper impact sounded behind them, followed by a squeeeaaal of splintering metal and then a reverberating whip-lash as the bridge lurched downward several feet. Hazel shrieked again. Twenty yards ahead, Gemma dropped to a crouch, arms rigid as she clutched the rails. She glanced back, white-faced.

‘Keep moving!’ Heck shouted. ‘It can’t be too far.’

‘We’re miles away,’ Hazel moaned, lunging desperately on.

Further thudding impacts shuddered past them.

Heck held his position, a crazy thought spinning. Slowly, he shuffled around and began to retrace his steps backward. It was several seconds before Hazel noticed.

‘Mark!’ she screeched. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘If he’s busy trying to de-anchor this thing, he might not be watching,’ Heck called back. ‘I might be able to get on top of him!’

‘Mark, for God’s sake!’

‘Just get moving … get to the other side!’ Heck pressed on back. The reality was they couldn’t have progressed more than a hundred yards. It seemed highly unlikely they’d make it to the other side if someone didn’t do something to distract the bastard.

‘Gemma, stop him!’ Hazel cried.

‘Heck!’ Gemma called.

‘Gemma, get Hazel to safety!’

‘Sergeant Heckenburg, get back here this fucking instant!’

‘Go!’ he shouted again, almost overbalancing as another thunderous blow struck the bridge. The flimsy structure lurched to the left, and he had to clamp the cable on the right with both hands. A fog-filled chasm yawned directly beneath him.

What in the name of God was he doing?

It only struck Heck now that if the bridge collapsed while he was near the broken end of it, he’d have far less chance of surviving. Even clinging on, he’d have a much longer distance to travel.

‘Okay … okay!’ he said, forcibly getting hold of himself, suddenly baffled that he could ever have thought this was anything more than the stupidest idea in history.

He might die going the other way, but he’d certainly die going this way.

Fingers locked painfully into rusted steel, he pivoted back around, and began struggling forward again. All around him metalwork shuddered, one massive vibration following another as the suspension cables were assailed.

‘How you guys doing?’ he shouted, no longer able to see the two women.

This time there was no reply, but there was so much noise from the bridge that any responses were likely lost. He advanced with rash speed, leaning precariously to the right but not letting that worry him as he took longer and longer strides. It was still impossible to judge how much distance he was covering; there were no points of reference. With a reverberating CLUNG, the bridge sagged again, tilting even further to the right. Muffled shrieks tore through the fog. Yet the women had to be almost at the other side by now. It might have been Heck’s imagination, but the footway appeared to be sloping upward, as though he’d passed the dip at its centre.

‘Heck, where are you?’ someone called back. It was Gemma. Relief was palpable in her voice. ‘We’ve made …’

‘I’m almost there,’ he shouted, gravity tugging on him as he sidled along, corroded metal burning through his gloves, digging into the muscle and bones of his fingers. The bridge was definitely angling upward now. ‘Couple of min—’

It fell away beneath him.

Heck didn’t even hear the fatal blow.

All he knew was that another sharp vibration rocked the structure and that it flipped all the way to the right, before collapsing in a chaos of whining, whipping wires and cables. Heck’s body plummeted through mid-air, but by sheer instinct his left hand remained wrapped around the cable – and half a second later he wasn’t dropping like a stone so much as swinging like a pendulum.

The Via Ferrata had held its mooring on the far side.

One breathless second later, a granite wall hung with tufts of vegetation came hurtling towards him out of the fog. Heck gazed at it, goggle-eyed, knowing that any such impact would break him to pieces. But all the time he was losing altitude, and now he dropped below the level of the rock-face, heading instead for a steep, bracken-clad embankment. The next thing, he was crashing through layers of dead vegetation with pile-driving force. As well as knocking every ounce of wind out of him, the collision yanked him loose from the mass of twisting, screaming cable, and then he was falling backward downhill, turning head over heels, somersaulting through rotted, semi-frozen foliage, bouncing, spinning, hammering every part of his body on the shifting, ragged-edged rocks underneath, yet still protected by the bracken, which meshed itself thickly around him. Finally, after what seemed like minutes but was probably only seconds, he came to a dizzying, bone-numbing halt.

After that, there was only darkness.

And pain.

Chapter 16

Heck had no clue how long he lay there for.

Firstly, because he was only semi-conscious. Secondly, because it was one of those slow disbelief moments, the sort people experience after emerging from terrible car crashes; when it seems somehow unjust that they’ve survived, when they probe gingerly and nervously around their limbs and body, increasingly baffled by the absence of extensive damage. Heck did exactly this, and though he discovered cuts and bruising, nothing appeared to be out of place. His vision was still obscured, but this time by broken stalks and tatters of brown leafage.

Heck rent all this aside as he sat slowly upright. He was still bathed in sweat, in fact his clothes were sodden, and it was noticeably chilling – aside from the warm stickiness caking the left side of his face. When he fingered this, he discovered that his left brow had split open. However, blood was only leaking out¸ suggesting even this wound was superficial. Still groggy, he gradually became aware of the jagged jumbles of rock underneath him, digging into his pummelled body, and of a distant ghostly voice calling his name from somewhere far overhead.

Despite the loose hillside shifting under his trainers, he rose painfully to his feet.

‘Mark!’ a frantic voice called again. ‘Mark!’

It actually sounded like two voices. Hazel and Gemma.

‘I’m okay!’ he tried to holler back, but he struggled to get enough air into his lungs. He took a second to compose himself – his back was hurting, his neck was hurting, his chest was hurting. Every damn part of him was hurting.

‘It’s okay,’ he bellowed, though the mere act felt as if someone had clobbered him in the ribs with a sledgehammer.

There was an abrupt, lingering silence, as they perhaps wondered if they were hearing things. ‘Mark …?’

‘I said I’m … I’m okay.’ Heck shook himself; just craning his head back to gaze upward was enough to send him dizzy, but at least the acoustics of the chasm enabled him to shout and be heard reasonably clearly. ‘Look, I don’t know how far down I am.’

‘You’re actually okay?’ That was Gemma. She sounded incredulous.

‘Think so …’

‘Anything broken?’

‘Not sure. Nothing that isn’t bruised, that’s for certain.’

‘Are you stuck?’

‘Seem to be at the top of a slope. I can probably work my way down from here, but I doubt there’s any way I can get up to you.’ There was another brief silence. He imagined them discussing the situation. ‘Does Hazel know where she is?’ he called up. ‘Can she work her way back into the Cradle?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Hazel replied. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ She didn’t sound as if she believed it either. ‘I thought you’d been killed for sure …’

‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘But you two may be. If he’s got a rifle, you’ll still be in range, so you need to back away from the edge. Make your way into the Cradle on foot. If nothing else, at least he’ll be off your back for the time being.’

‘But what’re you going to do?’

‘Same …’

‘Do you even know where you are?’

‘No, but heading downhill’s got to be a start.’

Chapter 17

Hazel and Gemma walked through the fog for at least fifteen minutes after leaving the Via Ferrata, before encountering a rutted, unmade road, which, though Hazel felt she recognised it and said they should follow, seemed to weave a pointless course across the high, desolate fell-tops. Hazel said she thought she knew where it led to, though she wasn’t completely sure. Gemma was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, and followed her without speaking.

For a few moments back then Gemma had seriously thought Heck was dead. Not for the first time since they’d been working together, though on this occasion it had happened in front of her eyes – or at least it would have done, had the fog not screened him from her. It still surprised her how the breath had caught in her throat, how the heart had almost stopped throbbing in her breast. The near light-headed sensation when his voice had come echoing up to them had been startling. The brief tears Gemma had found herself blinking away had been tears of shock more than anything else – but it still peeved her.

Typical bloody Heck. The only bloke, apart from her father, who’d ever been able to make her cry. And he still managed to drive her up the wall even now, though they were based nearly three hundred miles apart. Of course, all this was explainable. They’d been together so long, emotionally as well as professionally. They were so familiar with each other. You couldn’t just switch off those kinds of feelings. But that was all it was now. Heck was a police colleague and a sometime friend. No wonder she’d been horrified to see him drop into that chasm.

This was what Gemma told herself.

Meanwhile, the road they were following didn’t actually seem to lead anywhere except to occasional sets of iron gates built into dry-stone walls, which were always chained and padlocked. On no occasion was there a stile to climb through, which indicated they were well off the hiker/tourist route. On all sides there lay only emptiness, unseen stretches of desolate moorland, swamped in monotonous grey. Inevitably, it took her back to the last time she’d encountered the Stranger. She’d had to get used to wild, dreary moorland on that occasion too. Of course, back then the boot had been on the other foot. That time it was the Stranger facing an imminent demise.

He should have been, after taking her bullet in his chest.

But it had been a momentous incident for all kinds of reasons, not least because it had seen Gemma commence her meteoric rise through the police ranks. Up until then she’d been a no-nonsense, hard-working detective constable; one among hundreds, no more likely a high-flier than so many others. But that night, she’d really made her name.

Of course, there’d been other after-effects too; a less savoury kind of fallout.

The case seemed such a long time ago now, ten years. But there was no point in pretending it hadn’t happened. And in this place, it seemed she had nothing but time with which to mull over it, no matter how reluctant she might be …

The Stranger taskforce occupied an entire floor at Newton Abbot police station. The MIR was its central hub, though there were numerous smaller side-offices connected to this. One of these was allocated exclusively to the decoy units, who completed each shift by typing up and logging all their observations from the night before, even the most seemingly insignificant of which they would then send to the Document Reader, who would assess them in detail before attaching them to a Policy File that now had more entries than the unabridged Gideon’s Bible.

Given the events of the previous shift, there were no decoy units on duty today. In fact the only person present in the small side-office was Gemma, scrubbed of her ‘war-paint’ – as DSU Anderson had referred to it – and dressed sensibly in a sweater and jeans. Oddly, she felt more shaken now than she had done when she’d first come off Dartmoor; she was tired and slightly nauseous, but she had a report to complete nonetheless, and it was already a couple of hours late.

The door stood open, admitting the usual chaos of raised voices and trilling phones in the MIR, though this morning, perhaps understandably, there was a more jovial atmosphere than previously. In fact, part of the delay on Gemma’s paperwork was down to a succession of well-wishers from the rest of the squad breezing in to see her, first to check she was okay, then to congratulate her, and then to mug her for all the juicy details. So it was a bit unexpected when someone bothered to knock.

She glanced up and was surprised to see Heck standing there. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning, but by the looks of it, he’d come straight off nights and then driven all the way from London. His jacket was crumpled, his tie hanging loose.

‘Any chance I can come in?’ he asked.

She smiled and sat back. ‘Sure.’

He crossed the room for the customary affectionate peck. Her mouth was bruised and swollen, so she offered him her cheek. Reluctantly, he indulged her on that, then dragged one of the other office chairs to her desk and slumped down into it.

‘So … what are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I happened to be passing?’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Seriously … what do you think I’m doing here?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘As you can clearly tell.’

‘You seen a dentist?’

‘Yep. At the hospital last night. Front two teeth got knocked loose, but they’ll soon firm up. They may be a teensy bit crooked, but I’m reliably informed some guys find that sexy.’

‘Okay. And aside from that?’

‘I told you I’m fine. In fact, I’m bouncing.’ Sensing that he didn’t think she looked to be bouncing, she added: ‘I got him … didn’t I?’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Damn sure.’

‘No body,’ he reminded her.

‘No body yet.’

‘No blood.’

‘It was pouring rain by this morning.’

‘What if he was wearing body-armour?’

‘I have a gut feeling he wasn’t.’

‘No disrespect, Gem, but it’s his gut feeling that counts. If there’s a bullet in it, the job’s a good ’un. If there isn’t, because it’s stuck in a Kevlar vest, this whole thing could kick off again.’

She shrugged. ‘If that’s the case, we’ll find out soon enough.’

‘You should have gone for a head-shot.’

‘Hey, I’m really sorry! But it was dark and it all happened in the blink of an eye!’

‘Whoa, whoa …’ He raised his hands. ‘Just winding you up.’

She sniffed as she resumed typing. A second passed while Heck stood up and strode to a noticeboard on the left. It had been pasted with crime scene glossies, the three first-string murders along the top; the ten second-string murders along the bottom.

‘Do you really need these in here?’ he asked.

‘They’re a reminder, apparently.’

‘You girls needed reminding?’

‘Of what could happen to us if we got this thing wrong.’

‘Or of what very nearly happened to you anyway.’

She eyed him warily. ‘You know, Mark … many other-halves would have driven all the way down here to the West Country to offer their congratulations.’

‘That’s one of the reasons I came here … the main reason, in fact. But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared and shaken when I heard what nearly occurred.’

‘Not as scared as me.’ She went back to her keyboard.

‘You realise I was only informed about it this morning?’ he said. ‘When it was all over?’

‘Of course. You aren’t part of the enquiry.’

‘Gemma, we’ve spoken on the phone nearly every day since you came down here. Would it have hurt to tell me you’ve spent the last couple of weeks on decoy duty?’

‘You’d only have worried. What would be the point?’

Heck turned away, hands jammed into his pockets. Frustrated, he reassessed the display. Devon and Cornwall photographic had captured the victims from just about every angle, in unstinting detail and deluxe colour. The first string was somewhat less graphic. A variety of household items had been used: pliers, scissors, tin-openers, hammers. But in most cases death had resulted quickly, without prolonged sexual torture. However, in the second string – the slayings of the young couples – it was a different story. Okay, the men had all been despatched with speed, usually by having their skulls battered, but the women, who were beaten half-senseless first (or if they were lucky, until they were completely unconscious), had been stripped of their clothes and underwear and laid out as though on a dissection slab. The usual wholesale slashing and stabbing had followed, no part of their bodies left unravaged, though extra attention had always been paid to the abdomen and genital area. Even then, towards the end of the series, progressively more recognisable bloodlust was visible, the maniac attacking each new victim with ever greater savagery, to the point, in the final couple of cases, where full evisceration had resulted. Even with the eye of an experienced and detached investigator, it was difficult not to flinch back from these glossy, brightly coloured images of young women spread-eagled and sliced open.

Whatever part of the process had actually killed them, the madman had always completed each task with his usual coup de grâce: a brutal blow to either eye, delivered with a specially sharpened screwdriver, and with such force that it penetrated through to the brain. In fact, the two cavernous holes in the slashed, bloody face of Sarah Bunting, the last female victim before the Stranger had attacked Gemma, revealed that he’d plunged his steel four or five times through either socket.

‘God knows what he’d have done to you if you hadn’t got that shot off,’ Heck muttered, his stomach churning.

‘Well I did, didn’t I?’ Gemma replied primly, still typing. ‘So there’s nothing to be upset about.’

‘How’s Maxwell?’

‘Single fracture to the skull …’

‘Small change for letting himself get zapped the moment the bastard showed up.’

‘But there are no complications …’

‘He’d have another one by now if your pic was being added to this gallery.’

She glanced up hard. ‘So he’s going to be alright … I’m sure that’s the answer you were actually looking for.’ She sat back and folded her arms. ‘Let’s cut to the chase, Mark … what’re you really doing here? You don’t think I should have volunteered to be a decoy, do you?’

‘It’s not just that …’

‘Oh, it’s not just that?’

‘Look … I don’t like the way, every time one of these sex maniacs cuts loose, we respond by finding every female detective we’ve got, sticking her in a short skirt and sussies, and sending her out on the streets to see if she can pull him.’

‘I wasn’t wearing sussies. You’d be so lucky.’

‘This isn’t a joke, Gemma!’

‘What … you’re telling me that?’

‘There must have been a dozen other ways you and the rest of the girls could have been more useful in this enquiry.’

‘And do you really believe that, Mark? Or is it actually the case that you mean there were a dozen other ways I could have been more useful?’

He shrugged, awkward. ‘Obviously you mean more to me than the others …’

‘Thirteen victims, Mark. And no main lines of enquiry. And on top of that, a decreasing cooling-off period between each attack. It was needs must.’

In truth, Heck couldn’t dispute that.

‘You didn’t want me to take this Devon and Cornwall attachment in the first place, did you?’ she said. ‘Even before there was any talk of us using decoys.’

‘Because the moment I heard D&C were checking with other forces for female officers who were authorised and experienced with firearms, I knew the long-term plan was to put them out there as bait …’

‘No, you didn’t. You thought it might. But even that was enough to give you the willies.’

‘Am I not supposed to be concerned about you?’ he said. ‘I mean, throw your mind back nine months – when I cornered that nutter who’d been chucking acid in people’s faces. I chased him across the railway bridge at Mile End, remember, even though he’d threatened me with a butcher’s knife as well as the usual jar of concentrated sulphuric. I managed to nab him. And what happened when I got back to the nick? You slapped me across the bloody face!’

‘You saw him and recognised him. We could have picked him up afterwards, team-handed. In perfect safety. He’d have been bang to rights.’

‘He could have gone to ground, he could have stayed on the streets for days. Besides, I was confronted by him in the course of an investigation. A split-second decision, and I had to chase …’

‘Everything okay in here?’ the squat, bull-like shape of DS Harry Jenks wondered from the open doorway.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Heck snapped.

Jenks glared at him, unconvinced.

‘Seriously, Harry,’ Gemma said. ‘Everything’s okay.’

‘Hmmm.’ Unconvinced and clearly unwilling, Jenks withdrew.

‘The point is, Gemma,’ Heck said, ‘you didn’t get this decoy gig thrust on you, you weren’t railroaded into it. You volunteered after careful consideration. You consciously put yourself in extreme danger.’

Gemma heard this out in a growing fury, but by the same token she could tell that Heck was upset; he was pale-cheeked, almost breathless. She’d come close to getting hurt many times in the job; it happened regularly to all of them, but he’d never responded this way before – and now she had an inkling why.

‘Of course I volunteered,’ she said slowly. ‘Would you have expected the married women on the team to step forward? The women with families?’

‘Isn’t that what we were planning?’ he said.

Stoically, she resumed typing.

‘Gemma, seriously … is it so wrong of me not to want my wife-to-be volunteering for this kind of duty again?’

She shook her head. ‘You can’t lay those kinds of stipulations on me, Mark.’

‘I’m not saying I don’t want to be married to a hotshot lady detective. Of course, I do. You’re a force of nature, Gemma. That’s what I love about you. But I don’t want the mother of my kids sitting in anymore cars at midnight, or standing on street corners, providing a honey-trap for homicidal maniacs …’

‘That is so unfair!’ she said, hot-faced. ‘We face risks on a daily basis, but you more than most …’

‘Look, I’m …’

‘Please don’t say it, Mark … that you’re the man and I’m the woman. Or, let’s put it into the correct parlance, you’re the bloke and I’m the bird. I suppose it sounds slightly better that way.’

‘I’m … not saying you can’t make arrests,’ Heck said patiently. ‘Or that you can’t run down violent offenders. I just don’t like what happened last night.’

‘It happens once in a blue moon, and you know it. But you want me inside, don’t you – in a nice warm office, checking process cards all day. Maybe working Area somewhere, showing kids across the road, holding hands with little old ladies.’

‘That isn’t true, Gemma … but we can’t both be buried in this job to the point where our lives and health are on the line. That’s hardly a basis for starting a family.’

‘Good job we’ve got no immediate plans, then, isn’t it?’ When Gemma hit the keyboard this time, it had an air of finality. She didn’t shift her eyes from the screen.

A second passed, then Heck walked to the door. ‘Well done on last night’s takedown,’ he said. ‘An extremely fearless piece of work. You’ve got guts of steel, love.’

‘Careful, Mark … you almost sounded as if you meant that well.’

He turned in the doorway. ‘Look, Gem … there’s a refs room down the corridor. Let’s go and have a coffee.’

‘No.’

‘Just so we can have a quick …’

‘No. I’ve too much work to do. And I’m sure you have too … soon as you get back to Bethnal Green and get on with it.’

That hadn’t been the end of them, Gemma reflected, as she and Hazel trudged on. But it had been the beginning of the end. She’d pondered it long and hard ever since, wondering if she could have handled it differently. Sure, Heck had done his usual thing, come crashing in feet first, leaving wreckage all around, but, though he could have been a lot more considerate given what she’d just been through, his concerns had only been those any genuinely caring partner would have felt. It had continued to enrage her until long after she’d been promoted and thus was raised beyond the reach of such sordid escapades as decoy work, but maybe she ought to have been more touched by his attitude at the time than she actually was.

He’d certainly been right about one thing. If both of them were to run a daily gauntlet of risk, that was hardly the ideal start-point from which to raise a family. But she knew Heck intimately well – better than anyone else in the job – and she was all too aware he’d never be the one to step back from the more menacing demands of his work. His was a positive, pathological need to remain on the front line. He’d turned down an offer of promotion once because he wanted to stay on the streets rather than ‘spend his days administrating’. It was unhealthy, with Heck. It went beyond courage or a sense of duty, into self-destructive obsession. The acid-attacker had been a good case in point. Only someone with no concern for his own safety would have tackled the suspect in that situation – on a narrow footbridge over a railway line, the only angle of approach from directly in front, the madman armed to the teeth with his ‘instruments of vengeance’, as he’d told the press in his rambling, spidery letters. Yet Heck had gone at him full-on, at a hundred miles an hour. And by some miracle had emerged unscathed, with collar in hand.

Too right she’d slapped his face afterwards. She’d slap it again for the same reason, if she thought it would do any good.

But ultimately, what was she supposed to do? This wasn’t just her job, it was her life. Gemma’s father had been a copper too; he’d died in the line of duty. Maybe, as such, she was a tad on the obsessional side herself – her mother had always said she and Heck were perfectly designed for each other – but Gemma was in this for the long haul. She always had been, with no turning back. How could she progress if she only opted for the safe work, the indoors work, the boring work?

Even now, Gemma still wondered if she could have been nicer to him that day. A bit more understanding that he too had been badly shaken. It had passed without either of them really noticing at the time, but he’d said something revealing – ‘that’s what I love about you’. Up to that point, though they’d loosely been planning a future together, he’d never used words like ‘love’ and ‘you’ in the same sentence. Neither had she, for that matter. It wasn’t that they weren’t very close; they’d been exceedingly close. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy together; they’d been happy, too. That said, Gemma had often wondered if that happiness might ever become strained if she, as she hoped and expected, had begun to rise through the ranks, while Heck – thanks to his always playing fast and loose with the rulebook – had progressed more slowly. Even so, after a few months of seeing each other, she was more than willing to move in with him, and not just for the sex. She’d shared all her confidences with him, her thoughts, her desires. Oh yeah, she’d been smitten, and was more than content to play those games that only real lovers play, sometimes even falling out with him to test him, teasing him in the process, tormenting him, but always ultimately rewarding him. She’d cheerfully indulged in all those highs and lows and in-betweens of feeling – and soon she’d known she was ready to build a life with him.

Maybe it was just that words like ‘love’ had still seemed incongruous in that rather tough environment. Incongruous, maybe even melodramatic. And perhaps a little risky – because, like it or not, people had a habit of dying in their line of work.

Of course knowing that, the fact the word had slipped out of Mark in the honest heat of the moment had made it all the more credible. Little wonder that forever after Gemma had wondered how she’d have responded if she’d picked up on it at the time; whether she would have moderated her exasperation enough to save the situation. But it was too late now, as she kept on reminding herself. It was way too late now.

Struggling to suppress a sigh, Gemma clambered over their fourth farm-gate of the night. ‘You certain you know where you’re going, Hazel? We seem to have been following this road for ages.’

‘I think so,’ Hazel replied, waiting on the other side.

‘We’ve not by some chance stumbled upon the one place on earth where roads actually lead nowhere?’

‘If it’s the road I’m thinking of, it leads to the other end of the Cradle. There’s a path from there, which dips down to the south end of the tarn. We should be able to get back to the Keld that way. It’s a long walk, mind.’

‘And do you think that too?’ Gemma wondered. ‘Or in this case do you actually know?’

Hazel shot her a look. ‘I’m doing the best I can, Superintendent Piper. I haven’t been up on these fells for quite a few years.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be a local?’ Try as she may, Gemma couldn’t keep the weary irritation from her voice.

‘You’re a Cockney … do you know every backstreet in London?’

‘No … but the difference is I wouldn’t go wandering them in the dark when there’s a madman loose with a pistol.’

They plodded wearily on.

‘You don’t like me very much, do you?’ Hazel eventually said.

‘I think you probably mean well.’

‘Oh … “probably”?’

‘Well, let’s not beat around the bush. Let’s say what we think. Going up to Annie Beckwith’s farm on your own was extremely reckless, and as a result one police officer is dead and the rest of us are in a raft of trouble.’

‘Was I supposed to ignore Annie’s plight?’

‘From what I saw, you people had done a pretty good job of ignoring her up ’til now.’

‘I …’ Hazel hesitated. ‘I can’t deny it, but I don’t think that’s the reason you dislike me. You were Mark’s girlfriend once, weren’t you?’

‘So he’s been talking, has he?’

‘No fury like a woman scorned, eh?’

Gemma glanced around. She opened her mouth, but a second passed, and thinking better of speaking, she strode on.

Hazel made sure there was a yard or so between them as she followed. ‘I see you’re not trying to deny it.’

‘You supposedly know where you’re going. Why don’t you concentrate on that, Ms Carter? And in the meantime do us both a favour, and zip it!’

‘Zip it?’ Despite her growing fatigue, Hazel was startled. ‘How bloody dare you! It may be such a new predicament for you that you can’t grapple with it, but I’m not under your command … okay? I’m not some junior bloody officer you can boss around all day just because it’s your time of the month.’

Gemma threw her another sharp glance, this one so threatening that Hazel edged away from her, though she continued her tirade.

‘Who do you think you are anyway … a queen? Because I’ve got news for you, Ms Piper … out here, you’re nothing. A spring lamb would have more chance surviving in this wilderness than you. So you can kick the bully-boy act. It might have worked with Mark … in fact it did work with him. He’s a lovely guy, but he’s miserable as sin up here. Which by the looks of it, is exactly what you wanted …’

‘Have you quite finished?’ Gemma asked, rounding on her.

Hazel held her ground defiantly.

‘Have you?’ Gemma asked again. ‘Because you’re making an awful lot of noise and not actually saying anything. Let me tell you what I know about Mark, shall I! Up here – in this bloody wilderness – is exactly where he needs to be. You understand that, I hope. He is in totally the right place. You see, once upon a time Heck was consistently the most productive officer in my department. But he was extremely difficult to manage, even for me. He doesn’t do subtle, he doesn’t do discreet, he doesn’t do politics … not even the office variety. He’s a wild-card and a supervisor’s nightmare. And where he is now, king of a castle no one else cares about, is the inevitable result of that.’ Gemma jabbed a finger. ‘And you can pretend to be outraged all you want, but the fact remains we almost died tonight, thanks to you. If you were under my command, Hazel, you can be damn sure I wouldn’t have left things at “zip it”!’ She turned and stalked on.

Hazel followed, disconsolate rather than angry. ‘And are you going to take him back with you? Because that’s what he wants.’

Gemma snorted with contempt.

You’re not my bloody gaffer. Or anything else.

‘You could’ve fooled me,’ she said.

Chapter 18

The vegetation Heck was now trying to climb down through, though it was mostly dead, was still luxuriant, not to mention littered with fragments of cable from the collapsed bridge. In addition, the scree surface underneath it made treacherous footing. It could have been worse of course. Had the entire structure simply dropped, rather than swung over to this side of the canyon, he would have plummeted a thousand feet. He didn’t even like to contemplate the odds stacked against him when the aged metal had first given way. To say he’d been fortunate would be the understatement of all time.

That said, though it was a broad slope, so there was no danger of falling over a precipice, the descent was trickier than he’d anticipated. Heck had no light with which to guide himself, his torch having flown from his belt during the fall, and so ended up on his backside at least six times before the gradient at last began to flatten out. Long before he reached level ground, he heard the trickling of a beck, but only actually located it after descending a couple of hundred metres. It was clear and shallow and about twenty yards in breadth as it meandered along the valley bottom, weaving between embankments crammed with mature pines.

Heck was cold and aching all over, but he also had a raging thirst. He picked his way across loose, heavy cobblestones cluttering the water’s edge, and scooped it up in cupped hands. The icy refreshment cut sharply down his phlegmy throat. He threw a couple of handfuls over his head as well, washing the wound on his temple, and mopping back his hair. It probably wasn’t the most sensible move; the temperature was only just above freezing, after all. But the only real solution to any of this was to get back down into the Cradle as quickly as possible. Heck still didn’t have the first idea where he was, but following the course of the beck seemed like a plan. At present it only progressed in loops and whorls, but it was bound to spill into the tarn eventually. He tried his phone as he limped along, though that was an act of hope rather than realism, and as usual hope proved ill-founded.

Then he heard the whistling.

It was that same song, the one Heck now knew he’d never forget for the rest of his life. He darted to the nearest pine trunk, slamming his body upright against it. The whistling came from somewhere to his left; it sounded distant and higher up than he was. Could the lunatic still be perched on the platform, whistling his deranged tune to no one in particular? Or had he seen that Heck was alive down here and was he seeking to torment him again? Heck held his position for several minutes, fresh sweat forming in globules on his brow, stinging his wounded temple. Slowly, the whistling dwindled, as though the whistler was moving off into the distance. That didn’t prove anything of course – it certainly hadn’t done the last time.

It still seemed likely the guy had some kind of thermal-imaging device. It was too much of a risk to assume anything else. Holding his breath, Heck dashed away from the tree, determinedly following the course of the beck. His body was briefly re-flushed with adrenaline, which helped him overcome his bumps and sprains, but the stony ground along the water’s edge proved difficult. He slipped and tripped, turning his ankles repeatedly. The beck snaked constantly from side to side, at some points narrowing, at others broadening until he couldn’t see the far bank. The fog was burdensome beyond description, hanging in dingy drapes. Again, it dulled Heck’s senses, reducing his ability to read position or distance. He’d been lumbering along the waterside for what seemed like minutes now, but with no idea how far he might have travelled, or how far he might still have to go. Again thirsty, he moved back to the water’s edge and knelt down to drink, at which point what he first thought was a twisted rock form on the far side appeared to resolve itself into a human outline.

Heck went rigid, his hair prickling.

Then he relaxed a little. He’d been caught out like this before, of course. Such conditions as these were ideal for optical illusions. He swigged another handful of water, then blinked twice, focusing on the shape again, trying to discern exactly what it was. And slowly turned numb as he realised he’d been right the first time.

Someone was standing on the other side of the beck. A strong, stocky figure, clad head to foot in black. Even as he gazed at the figure, it raised its right hand as though to point at him – but it wasn’t pointing a finger.

The muzzle-flash was blinding; the sound of the shot thundered between the valley walls, the impact on the tree beside Heck cacophonous as a slug kicked out a wad of splinters. He ducked away, running blindly, zigzagging through the trees. A second shot followed, equally loud. The missile whipped past, ricocheting from a boulder.

There was a loud splashing as someone waded across the beck.

Heck glanced over his shoulder. Briefly the fog screened them from each other. He changed direction, haring back towards the water, plunging in to his knees and wading in the opposite direction, barely breaking speed as he stumbled up onto dry ground again. On this side, the hillside was near enough sheer, so he had no option but to keep following the beck. At least the going here was softer, pillows of pine needles silencing his footfalls. A third shot roared behind him, but Heck couldn’t tell where this bullet went. The bastard might have thermal vision, but he clearly wasn’t the best marksman.

Not that it would matter if he managed to get close.

There was a renewed splashing. The guy was also coming back across, by the sounds of it at speed.

Heck lengthened his own stride. Now the strip of land he was following broadened out, the upward slope on his left furling away. The cover of the trees fell behind, and suddenly he was heading downhill onto open moorland. But even here there was no easy escape. The ground undulated, and was covered in tussocky grass that was slick with icy dew. He slid to a halt, desperately trying to get his bearings. His heart thudded in his chest, drowning out all other noise. He spun first to the left, then to the right, scanning the grey emptiness and seeing nothing. But this killer was adept at stealing up on people. It was impossible to imagine he wasn’t somewhere close by.

Heck dropped to a crouch.

And heard the whistling again.

That haunting, old-time melody drifted through the dead air, emanating from somewhere to his rear, perhaps thirty or forty yards away. Instead of running on in a straight line, Heck went left, keeping low. Some sixty yards further on, he stopped and sank down again.

The whistling had ceased, which somehow was even more eerie.

Heck scampered on, and half a second later the squat, angular outline of a single-storeyed building loomed into his path. He skidded to a halt.

It was actually less than single storey, and built in the familiar dry-stone style, indicating it was a farm outbuilding of some sort. He groped his way around its exterior. On the far side there was a small enclosure, a corral about twenty yards by thirty, fenced with old planking. A sheep fold, Heck realised. From this side, the building, which was nothing more than a shelter, stood wide open. He vaulted the fence and entered, digging out his phone to try and make use of its fascia light, wondering if he might be able to put his hand on a weapon: a pitchfork or scythe, though neither seemed likely, given that up here it was mainly sheep-farming.

What he did find, however, was even better.

In the dim green glow, there were two large, bulky objects shrouded by musty canvas. He lugged the first sheet away, exposing the tarnished metal frame of an ATV, or quad-bike. It was battered and dinted all over, caked with mud and grass-pulp, suggesting it was used for working rather than posing. But even at first glance he could identify a powerful model, most likely with a four-stroke engine. When he tore the second sheet away, there was a similar machine.

Even more useful, keys hung from both their ignition ports.

Chapter 19

The road trailed interminably on as Hazel and Gemma slogged heavy-footed along it. They’d barely exchanged a word since the argument about Heck, but were now so drained that even feeling hostile towards each other felt like too much of an effort.

‘You hungry, by any chance?’ Hazel delved into one of her jacket pockets.

Gemma shrugged. ‘Nothing a chicken dinner with all the trimmings wouldn’t fix.’

‘All I’ve got is this.’ Hazel handed over a thick white slab wrapped in blue and silver foil.

Gemma took it from her. ‘Kendal Mint Cake … haven’t had this since I was a kid.’

‘It’s icky-sweet, but it’s good energy food.’

Gemma nibbled at it. It was ultra-sugary and strongly flavoured with peppermint, but it went down well. Remarkably quickly, she felt stronger, even sturdier on her feet. She took another two large bites. ‘You always carry this around?’

‘It’s not a bad idea, living up here,’ Hazel said.

Gemma wrapped what remained of the confection in its foil, and handed it back.

There was an awkward silence, and then she said: ‘Despite everything that’s happened tonight, you seem like a nice lady, Hazel. If things work out between you and Heck, I’ll be very happy for you.’

Hazel didn’t initially reply. She wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t ultimately hope for that. Like Mark, she’d entered this arrangement in adult, open-minded fashion. They’d been attracted to each other, they’d enjoyed the mutual company, the no-strings sex. They’d neither been looking for much more than that. But the better you got to know someone, the more your emotional relationship to them changed.

‘You honestly don’t have feelings for him yourself?’ Hazel asked.

‘Heck makes that difficult,’ Gemma replied.

‘That isn’t answering the question.’

‘Look …’ Gemma shrugged. ‘I know it sounds terrible, but … Heck would like to come home each night after a long, tough day at work, to find his beautiful wife wearing heels and a miniskirt while she cooks him an excellent supper. Not because he’s sexist or a chauvinist. He isn’t. But because that’s the only thing that’s going to take his mind off the job. And …’ she shook her head, ‘that just isn’t me.’

‘It isn’t me either,’ Hazel said defensively. ‘I have a career just like you … maybe more like you than you think.’ Conscious of Gemma’s sceptical glance, she added: ‘I run The Witch’s Kettle because I love it, not because it pays a load of money … which it doesn’t anyway. What I mean is … oh hell, whatever I say, you’re just going to see me as another silly, inconsequential woman, aren’t you?’

‘I never made that comment,’ Gemma replied.

She might not have done, but Hazel certainly felt silly and inconsequential with her smudged make-up and tousled hair, especially in the presence of this handsome, athletic policewoman, who even now was only wearing a light sweat, whose lustrous blonde locks, though messed up after all the running around they’d done, appeared to be reverting to a fetchingly curly state, whose aloof, supercool attitude would have been reassuring had it not been so intimidating.

‘You know, Mark’s spoken about you a lot since he’s been up here,’ Hazel said. ‘He holds you in the highest regard as a fellow officer. He just feels you betrayed him, that’s all.’

‘Maybe I did, when all’s said and done.’ Gemma sensed Hazel glancing around at her. ‘There, I’ve admitted it … you happy? I hope so, because I haven’t been … not since it happened.’

‘Well, they say confession’s good for the soul. Personally, I’m not so sure.’ They plodded on side-by-side. ‘Anyway, I wonder where he is now?’

Gemma laughed without humour. ‘Wherever it is, it’ll mean a shed-load of paperwork for someone.’

The two quad-bikes frequently rode neck and neck as they chased each other across the open moor.

Heck had no idea which direction he was travelling in, or even how fast. Both riders had hit their headlight switches, but this revealed nothing in front except vapour. His speedo was coated in grass and dried mud, and he hardly dared spare a hand to scrape it clean; but surely they’d reached forty miles per hour by now at least. It had never been his plan for the killer to mount the other ATV in the sheep fold and come racing after him. Heck had even taken its key and jammed it into his pocket. But somehow or other, his opponent, who was nothing if not versatile, had managed to get it started and had come ploughing in pursuit.

Torn turf sprayed behind the duo as they roared back and forth, twisting and turning across the glistening, dew-slick fell-side. Every manoeuvre Heck made, his opponent copied it. A couple of times, when they were close together, he glanced around, and on each occasion saw the masked figure pointing a pistol at him. Heck lowered his head, though this wasn’t easy – he was already lying forward until he was almost flat, like a MotoGP racer, and yet weirdly, no shots were fired. Only now did it start to occur to him that this guy – this maniac, this madman – was actually enjoying himself. This whole thing was great sport for him; possibly it had turned out better than he could ever have hoped for.

On the third occasion the gun was turned his way Heck spun his machine left, the twosome spreading apart, engines grinding. Heck throttled down a sharp descent, at the bottom of which he hurtled along a deep furrow. The ground down there was soft and boggy, liquid mud spurting every which way as he slewed across it. This slowed him somewhat, so he hit the gas harder – just as his opponent came veering down the right-hand slope, attempting to head him off.

Heck took such swift evasive action that he found himself running on two wheels, the vehicle about to tip. He fought the handlebars desperately until he was able to bring it back onto all fours. As he swung up the left-hand slope, his opponent aped the manoeuvre. They blazed along neck and neck again, their flanks almost touching, clods and divots spinning from their wheels as the surface dipped and rose. Heck glanced across, saw the black rapist mask, the strange fierce eyes in its leather sockets fixed on him with eerie intensity. Seconds seemed to pass as they sped along in this mesmeric embrace, neither of them watching where they were going. The pistol, a chunky Colt Python revolver with a four-inch barrel, was still in the killer’s right hand, but now clamped against the handlebars as he kept a tight grip on them. Of course, just because he wasn’t able to shoot at present, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take a chance very soon – especially not if Heck gained some kind of advantage. There was no option but to try and outpace the son of a bitch, but that was proving difficult. They ran on and on, still not watching the ground ahead. Not that this made a great deal of difference, as they couldn’t see more than a few yards anyway in the fog – until the terrain to the left tilted sharply up onto another ridge. Heck swayed in the saddle as he rocketed up, the killer again copying his action. The ground on top was dry, but rutted and uneven, and now the duo found themselves jolting and bouncing across rocks. And boulders too, large ones.

As they swerved to avoid these, they were funnelled together into a natural passage, which very quickly became a ravine, maybe a hundred yards long and with no visible exit at the end. Heck throttled up, though he knew this was a terrible risk. They were touching sixty now, easily, and still he couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead. When he struck a heavy stone with his front nearside tyre, it was a massive blow, which lifted his ATV sideways off the ground – for a second or two he was sailing through mid-air. He landed with brutal force, but managed to stay upright, and yet there was worse to come. They were on open ground again, still blistering forward – at which point Heck’s opponent seemed to brake, to swing his machine violently sideways, as though he’d suddenly had enough of the whole thing.

Heck wondered what the guy had seen, or knew about in advance. And then he saw it himself.

But only at the last second, as it came rushing out of the fog.

Another dry-stone wall, built completely transverse to his angle of approach – aside from a small gap where the old stones had tumbled down in heavy weather. The gap was four feet across at the most; Heck wasn’t sure if that was even wide enough, but he aimed for it all the same, veering crazily so that he could meet it head-on, at the same time realising he’d at last gained the edge.

Only to abruptly realise something else.

In what might be his last moment of coherent thought, he understood why the maniac had pulled away. Because they weren’t just on any old moorland here, he realised – they were on Fiend’s Fell. Heck thought about braking, but knew it was too late. Now all he could do was slam his head down and throttle his machine to the absolute max. He shot through the gap in the farm wall, roaring up the naturally ramped ground beyond it, and sailed far out into the abyss over Witch Cradle Tarn.

Chapter 20

‘What time is it now?’ Hazel asked, glancing over her shoulder.

Having left the moorland road, they were moving single file along a snaking hillside path. Gemma, who brought up the rear, dug her phone from her pocket. ‘Half past midnight.’

‘Christ,’ Hazel groaned. ‘I thought it’d almost be morning. Seems to have been dark for hours and hours.’

‘The good old wintertime, eh. At least we’re heading downhill.’

‘Yeah.’ Hazel didn’t even sound enthused by that, mainly because the blisters she’d developed over the last mile of rough ground had reduced her progress to an agonised limp.

‘You do know where you’re going, don’t you?’ Gemma asked.

‘Like I said, we’re now on our way down to the south end of the tarn.’ Hazel stopped and swept with her hand at the general area behind them and to their right. ‘If it wasn’t for this fog, you’d have one of the best views in the Lake District from here.’

‘That’s Witch Cradle Tarn down there?’ Gemma asked.

‘I’m certain of it.’

‘You don’t sound certain.’

‘I’m as close to being certain as I can be.’

They listened, not quite sure what they expected to hear. Calling out to see if their voices echoed would be the dumbest of dumb ideas, given that they were possibly still being hunted. Besides, any sounds that came back to them could just as easily be the result of atmospheric conditions as from some vast gulf.

None the wiser, they pressed doggedly on. Gemma was used to leading, not following, and it grated on her having to rely on someone else to make all the decisions, but one thing her reluctant guide had said earlier was definitely true. She’d be in a real mess if she was up here on her own. Okay, this was only the Lake District, not the Wild West, but it was astonishing how disorienting a lack of light could be, either artificial or natural, not to mention a lack of shelter, a lack of signposting, even a lack of flat surfaces to walk on. Gemma’s gym-toned body was in good condition, but the strength and dexterity required to traverse this landscape comfortably came from something else – long hours of experience and slow, painful acclimatisation. As things were, her feet were swollen, her ankles aching, the cold and damp leaching into the very marrow of her bones. And of course it would help if she had the first idea where she was and which direction she had to go in. In that regard she had no option but to rely on Hazel, an unlikely Calamity Jane by almost any standards, but someone who, if nothing else, had spent most of her life here.

‘So how far do you estimate we have to go?’ Gemma asked.

‘It’s probably another mile down to the Race Bridge,’ Hazel said. ‘After that, a mile to the Boat Club. Then another to the Keld.’

‘What’s the Race Bridge? Not another death-trap I hope?’

‘No, it’s just an arched stone bridge at the tarn’s southern tip. Whenever we have heavy rain, the tarn overflows and it pours downhill in what we call the Cragwood Race. It’s like a fast, steep river with lots of turns and rapids. The Boat Club use it for white-water rafting, kayaking, all that sort of stuff.’

‘And where does that lead to? The Race, I mean.’

‘Down into Great Langdale. At the bottom, it joins Langdale Beck.’

‘How far down into Langdale from the Race Bridge?’

‘Another couple of miles.’

‘Another couple?’

‘Maybe more.’

‘Great,’ Gemma said. But the path progressively steepened as they descended, and gravity began to assist. Gemma’s ears popped as the pressure changed. It felt as if they were getting somewhere, at last.

Heck fell a distance he estimated as being close to a hundred feet.

As he plummeted through the fog, the quad-bike turning over and over alongside him, engine yowling, heat and fumes pouring off it, it fleetingly struck him that he wasn’t absolutely sure of his location, or what he was descending towards. It could have been another shallow river full of rocks and cobblestones, or even a dry valley bottom, or a moor, or mountainous heap of scree. But he had no time to ponder these dread possibilities before the vapour cleared beneath his feet and the flat, black surface of the tarn came racing up towards him.

Instinctively, with only a second to spare, Heck straightened his body as much as possible, ankles extended downward, arms raised on high, head turned, chin tucked behind the bulwark of his shoulder.

He struck clean, toes first, but the impact was phenomenal.

His body shuddered at the blow, the water all but dragging his clothes over his head as he crashed through a surface hard and yet brittle as glass, and plunged deep, deep into the icy, unlit depths below. He sank at least fifteen feet, maybe more, and the pressure change was shocking; his ear-drums felt as if they’d blow out, his teeth as if they’d explode. At first he was so dazed that all he could do was float in that turgid embrace, his clothes filling with water, ballooning around him, dragging him ever further down into brackish murk – but then it seeped past his lips, and forcefully revived him. Though even then, it took every inch of strength he had, and wild, explosive kicks to propel himself upward.

When Heck finally broke the surface, he vented his lungs in a single eruption of air, and greedily sucked fresh chestfuls as he wallowed amid seething, hissing bubbles. He was still groggy, with no clue which direction he was supposed to take to find the nearest shore, but then, just to his left, he caught a last glimpse of a fading luminous orb far beneath the tea-coloured surface, before it dwindled entirely from view. Witch Cradle Tarn was seven hundred feet deep, or so he’d been told. Whoever that handy ATV had belonged to, they weren’t going to see it again.

At least it gave him a marker. The quad-bike had fallen to his left, which meant the cliff was behind him, so the other shore – the populated west shore – was directly in front, albeit a considerable distance away. At first, Heck was so bruised and tired that all he could do was wallow there, gasping, treading water, which now at last was settling, lapping rather than frothing.

He’d have liked to keep doing this, taking time to rest, but knew he couldn’t risk it. The big problem now was the very low water temperature inducing hypothermia. He remembered hearing in a training session once that the projected survival time for a healthy adult in fifty degrees of water or less was a maximum of about two hours, but of course during that time the body would get weaker, the thinking process turn progressively more muddled. So he couldn’t afford to mess around. It was tempting to head for the unpopulated east shore, as that was closest, but then he’d be exposed to the near-freezing night air in sodden clothes, miles from any kind of shelter. The only real option was to head for the more distant west shore. As such, he rolled over onto his back, and commenced a slow, heavy frog-kick, which propelled him steadily across the tarn. Within minutes his limbs were so leaden it was more like forging through treacle, but with gritted teeth he persisted. Maybe half an hour passed before he felt ribbons of weed billowing around his legs. By this time his scalp was numb. He placed an exploratory hand on it, and was shaken to feel a patina of wafer-thin ice on his hair. He quickly scrubbed it loose, then turned properly to look over his shoulder. The fog still obscured the shore, but not the entrance to the corridor that led through the rushes to the boatshed. It seemed he’d crossed the tarn diagonally rather than heading straight to the other side. A longer and more indirect route, but at least he could get help in the Ho. Bill Ramsdale had a landline.

Heck turned onto his front and breast-stroked his way along the corridor. The fog was still so thick that the shed only materialised when he was almost at the end of it, at which point he stopped in the water, bobbing there, regarding the open entrance in bewilderment. It was too dark to be absolutely sure, but it looked as if the police launch had been returned, and yet now was sitting extremely low in the water – so low, in fact, that it had to have sunk.

Heck poked his toe at the lake-bed, but it was out of reach. He covered the final twenty yards at a front-crawl, before seeking the floor again and this time finding it. Chest-deep, he waded forward into the shed, edging his way around the launch’s starboard gunwale. When he peeked over the top, the craft was indeed full of murky water. Various items – bits of wood and weed, but also materials from the first-aid kit – were floating in there.

The loss wasn’t a complete disaster. The boat was old, and most of the time they barely had cause to use it. But more of a worry was how this had happened. It was possible Mary-Ellen had accidentally holed it earlier on, when she went back to mark out the crime scene, but if that was the case, how had she brought it back?

He reached up, fitting both palms on top of the starboard pier, and with a grunt, levered himself out of the water, swinging around and planting himself on his backside. He slouched there for almost a minute, regaining his breath, which came in ragged gasps – not that there was any time now for taking five.

Concern for his fellow officer was nagging at him badly.

By the looks of it, the boat had been taken possession of elsewhere – the far side of the tarn maybe. Whatever had happened, it must have been some time ago, because the killer had then gone straight up the Cradle Track in pursuit of Hazel. But what had he done with Mary-Ellen before then? Had the bastard simply stolen the boat while she was busy securing the crime scene, effectively marooning her over there? Or had he attacked her too? It seemed highly improbable the ruthless killer they were dealing with tonight would miss the opportunity to add to his tally. Heck felt queasy at the mere thought of Mary-Ellen – who, for all her confident athleticism, was still only a young lass – having to face this guy on her own.

With such fears in mind, it was probably not the ideal time for him to spot the writing on the far wall of the boathouse interior. This only happened slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the deep gloom, but once the piece of crude graffiti had swum properly into view, he jumped to his feet.

Now that he was fully out of the water, it was bitterly cold. Ice felt as if it was forming inside his clothes, but fleetingly Heck was too distracted to notice that. He limped around the interior to the far pier, so that he could examine it up close.

REMEMBER ME?

There was no question about who’d written it or what it meant. In the dimness he was colour-blind, so though he didn’t immediately realise that the sentence had been inscribed in blood, the idea struck him hard when he dabbed at it with a fingertip, and it felt both slimy and congealed.

He backed away a couple of steps, heart thumping.

This didn’t necessarily mean Mary-Ellen had been attacked. The blood might have come from one of the two hikers. Even from Annie Beckwith. Of course, standing here ruminating wasn’t going to help. And nor was it going to warm him up. Heck’s joints were now stiffening; the dampness in his hair turning again to flaky ice. Realising he was in dire need of dry clothing and a hot drink, he plodded quickly out of the boatshed and across the sloping lawn to the rear of Bessie Longhorn’s house. He banged on the rear door for several minutes. But there was no response. It was pitch-dark inside.

Frustrated, but hoping Bessie had gone down to the Keld to seek the company of others, he circled the house, crossed the garden and climbed through the rockery and over the barbed wire fence onto Ramsdale’s property. The lights in this building were still on, and when Heck made his way around its exterior, the front door stood wide open. He halted, uncertain, at any moment expecting the householder to emerge. But as the seconds ticked by and no one emerged, new alarm bells began sounding. It was a foggy, frozen night at the start of the winter … and this guy was prepared to leave his front door wide open?

No chance. No chance at all.

Chapter 21

When Heck ventured inside Bill Ramsdale’s cottage, the first thing he saw was the blood-caked figure seated upright in the office swivel chair. Unsurprisingly, it was dead, its throat hacked wide open. Equally unsurprisingly, its eyes had been stabbed to jellied ruin. Despite these ghastly mutilations, and the cataract of congealing gore that had resulted, Heck was still able to identify the scruffy jeans and t-shirt that Bill Ramsdale had been wearing the previous day.

But now his attention was drawn somewhere else – to a large item of furniture on the far side of the room, just to the left of the foot of the staircase. In any normal household it would be a dining table, though in this one it was cluttered with old papers, bits of food-crusted crockery, a few items of discarded stationery – and something else.

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