Dead Man Walking (31 page)

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.

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.

Heck advanced towards it, unsteadily.

He remembered the comments Hazel had made about the ‘ungodly wailing’ she’d heard coming down the length of the Cradle. And what was it he’d said in response? That it would have taken an ‘astonishingly powerful’ pair of lungs to project over such a distance.

Or maybe an astonishingly tortured pair.

It was highly unlikely that sound had issued from Bill Ramsdale – the initial assault to his throat would have been swift and purposeful: to silence him as much as kill him. As always with the Stranger’s male victims, Ramsdale had been despatched quickly and without fuss. But Bessie Longhorn … well, that was a different story.

The girl was now splayed out naked on the table like a frog in a Biology class. Except that no laboratory incisions had ever been as cruel or as jagged, or had criss-crossed each other as repeatedly and crazily as these did. Heck was reminded of the crime scene glossies in the Devon and Cornwall MIR, and how it looked as if the maniac was progressively working himself to such a state with his female victims that he was finally committing acts of human evisceration.

It was anyone’s guess how long this ordeal had lasted. But Bessie – a younger woman, of course, and more the Stranger’s type than Annie Beckwith – had been bound securely in place, her own bootlaces fastening her left and right wrists to the table legs at the head of the table, while a belt, possibly Ramsdale’s, and her own worn-out brassiere, accounted for her feet at the other end – so the perpetrator had been able to drag it out at his leisure. Heck could only hope that the usual gouging of the eyes, done with such viciousness here that the bones of the sockets had been exposed, had occurred well after death.

Heck couldn’t remember the last occasion he’d shed a tear for a murder victim. Neither could he remember the last time he’d used a tea towel, or any piece of material for that matter, to cover a victim’s terribly contorted face. But today they’d reached a point where all the rules of common decency, common sense, and even normal existence no longer applied.

His own phone, of course, had been dunked in the lake and was no longer functioning, so he trekked back across the cottage to the landline, barely concerned that in leaving his own footprints on the carpet of blood, he was again compromising the crime scene. But Heck had just enough mental wherewithal left to dig through the cutlery-crammed drawers in the kitchenette, and find himself an oven glove with which to put the telephone receiver to his ear – only to hear nothing on the other end.

This was more or less what he’d expected.

To say they were isolated here would actually be a euphemism. They were marooned, trapped, cut off from the rest of civilisation, and the maniac in their midst clearly intended to take advantage of every second this afforded him.

Heck slumped onto the only stool at the breakfast bar that wasn’t draped with old clothes or further bits of half-finished manuscripts. His vision was no longer blurred by tears, but he struggled for a further minute to get his thoughts together.

One major problem was that he was receiving mixed messages.

Taken alongside the writing out in the boathouse, there was no question what the atrocity on the dining table signified: the Stranger was back. And yet, other things still didn’t add up. After a disorderly start, the original Stranger crimes in the West Country had fallen into a pattern of Ripper-like sex murders, each individual offence clearly recognisable as such. And yet now, despite the near-evisceration of Bessie Longhorn, the bulk of the offences here seemed to lack any such rhyme or reason. The maniac was showing great industry, but without an obvious remit, eliminating those who were a threat to him, like the police, by shooting, and butchering those whose vulnerability allowed him some leeway to enjoy himself. But it wasn’t like he was on a traditional series, with cooling-off periods in between each attack. It was more like he was on a rampage, and that had definitely
not
been the original Stranger’s style.

Heck glanced at the front door, which, still standing ajar, was a slice of silent blackness. The only movement beyond it were twists of eddying mist. He blundered over there, slammed the door closed and threw its bolts. Then he headed upstairs, where he intended to shower and get changed. It seemed a tad indelicate. It also seemed rash. Again, Heck was thinking of the crime scene. He was always thinking crime scene – preservation was the vital role of any first responder – but on this occasion he was thinking pneumonia as well. And he knew which had the greater priority overall.

Heck stood under a hot spray for five minutes, then towelled down and entered Ramsdale’s sordid bedroom, where, after rummaging through several disordered wardrobes, he pulled out some clean underwear, a fresh pair of jeans, an old moth-eaten jumper and a camouflaged flak-jacket of the sort worn by hunters. They weren’t a perfect fit; Ramsdale had been a physically larger specimen than Heck, but they would do for the time being. He also found a pair of worn-out training shoes. These did fit, which was a relief.

He retrieved his essentials from his own sodden clothes – wallet, warrant card, keys and such, and went back downstairs. It occurred to him that Ramsdale might have some kind of weapon, but he didn’t want to disrupt the crime scene anymore by turning the house upside down in what could be a futile and time-consuming search. He tried the landline one more time, but it was still dead. Heck glanced again at the householder’s corpse still propped in the swivel chair, and then across the room at the dismembered husk of the odd young woman who’d thought he’d never noticed her blushing bright red whenever he favoured her with a smile.

When he left the cottage, he was newly enveloped in cloying vapour. Heck locked the house first – he could take that preservative measure at least – and walked up the garden path. At the top, he turned right across open, frost-speckled turf, and followed the short-cut path to the car park. When he got there, as he’d hoped, both his Citroën and the police Land Rover, plus Hazel’s Laguna, were still parked. The only problem was that all three of their bonnets had been forced open, by the looks of it with a crowbar, and their engines mangled. He gazed into the disordered guts of his Citroën. Sliced pipes and shredded cables lay in a spaghetti-like tangle. It was the same with the Laguna and the Land Rover.

The latter implied even more that Mary-Ellen hadn’t come back across the tarn in the boat. It seemed ever more likely that she had been bushwhacked on the far shore. Even if she was uninjured over there, she was currently out of reach. While Heck himself, incommunicado, had to tramp his way back to Cragwood Keld, all three miles of it, along a narrow, fog-shrouded road, lined down both sides with impenetrable trees and brush.

Talk about ambush alley.

It wasn’t too long, maybe another half-hour or so, before Gemma and Hazel were back on level ground, surrounded by hints of trees and leafless shrubs, all redolent with that loamy autumnal scent: fungus and decay, dankness in every shivering bough. Somewhere to the right, they could hear the faint lapping of water, indicating they were back alongside the tarn.