Dead Man Walking (30 page)

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

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.

‘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.