Dead Man Walking (17 page)

At present, both men sported black body-armour under their hi-viz anoraks.

‘We can’t get anyone up onto the fells at present,’ Mabelthorpe said. ‘Even if we had a load of spare bodies available – which we don’t at this short notice – the conditions won’t allow it. Way too dangerous. Mountain Rescue were prepared to chance it on foot, but I’ve pulled them back too – with guns on the plot, we can’t authorise civvie involvement until we know exactly what we’re dealing with. However, I know you could use some help at Cragwood Keld, Heck, so for the time being you’ve got these two. They’re on an extended shift until midday tomorrow. Use ’em any way you see fit.’

‘Okay, good,’ Heck replied. ‘You lads got your own wheels, only I can’t take you back up to the Cradle straight away?’

‘No worries, sergeant,’ Heggarty replied. ‘We’ll take the patrol car.’

‘An officer from Kendal nick will be babysitting the casualty while she’s in Recovery,’ Mabelthorpe added. ‘Whoever it is, they’ll be briefed to keep their ear open for a dying declaration, though from what I hear, that’s not going to happen. And I’ve passed your request for firearms support up the chain of command too. You should have a unit with you by the end of today. They’ll want to check out the crime scene on the lakeside too, just to make sure there’s no unexploded ordnance lying around.’

‘All the better,’ Heck said. It had been worth the difficult journey down from the Cradle just to hear that. Suddenly it felt as if the odds had tipped a little way back in their favour.

Though Oxenholme railway station was only a few minutes’ drive from Westmorland General, it was rush-hour, so the fog-clogged streets were additionally gridlocked with grumbling, slow-moving cars.

It took Heck fifteen minutes longer to get to the station than he’d anticipated, and when he arrived, Gemma was already waiting on the forecourt. It looked as if she’d headed straight to Euston from the Yard, as she was wearing her normal office attire of skirt, blouse, heels and beige overcoat, while the only piece of luggage she had with her was a blue zip-up holdall. Like most good SIOs, she kept a grab-bag permanently at hand, containing a change of clothes, toiletries, waterproofs, forensics gear, clean notebooks and so forth, so she could be ready to respond in an instant. Like now.

‘See what you mean about the fog,’ she said, throwing her bag into the back and sliding into the front passenger seat, not wasting time on a ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’

‘Wait ’til you get into the hills,’ Heck said, pulling away from the kerb. ‘On top of that, they reckon it’s going to freeze again tonight …’

He drove them back across the west side of the town, having to negotiate yet more log-jammed traffic, though the only vehicles actually visible were those in the Citroën’s immediate vicinity. The lights of shops were little more than smudges in the murk; pedestrians were filmy shadows flitting past. Overhead, the streetlamps infused the grey canopy with a sodium-yellow tinge, but themselves were invisible.

It took another half-hour to break free of the Kendal conurbation. Even on the B5284 heading towards Windermere, no noticeable acceleration was possible. The road rose and dipped as it ascended the Crosthwaite fells, and every so often the traffic would slow and the glaring red eyes of tail-lights abruptly emerge in front. Heck stole a covert glance at his passenger. Gemma didn’t look much different from the last time they’d met, and why should she? He had to keep reminding himself it had only been two and a half months. That said, there were some slight alterations. Her fair hair was longer now, cut to shoulder length and styled in a neat bob, which he was forced to admit was rather fetching.

If she was aware he was appraising her, she didn’t respond, merely gazed into the turgid gloom.

‘How’s life at the Yard?’ he asked, before the silence became awkward.

‘We’ve got a couple of interesting cases,’ she said. ‘But nothing that requires my attention hands-on.’

‘Well, this one doesn’t either, if I’m honest … ma’am.’

She was a little slow to respond. ‘Not the impression you gave on the phone.’

‘I could have been a bit previous with that call.’

‘Now you tell me.’

‘Don’t get me wrong. Nothing new has come up. We still haven’t found the missing girl. The one we did find is in critical care, incommunicado ’til tomorrow at the earliest. But the local factory are a bit surprised you’re here.’

‘Wasn’t it ever thus. Who’s SIO?’

‘At present, Don Mabelthorpe, DI at Windermere nick. He’s alright, to be honest. I tried to explain the situation, but … like I say, he was a bit surprised.’

Gemma produced her mobile. ‘Give me his number and I’ll put him in the picture.’

‘You’ll be lucky to get a signal up here.’ But Heck gave her the number anyway, and drove on while she fiddled with her phone for several seconds before silently acknowledging he was right by putting it away again.

‘Well, whether there was any point to it or not, I’m here now,’ Gemma said. ‘So you might as well tell me what you know. And don’t leave anything out.’

Point by point, Heck reiterated everything that had happened, embellishing it here and there with his own thoughts and theories.

‘The gunshot Tara Cook suffered,’ Gemma interrupted. ‘Have you retrieved the slug?’

‘No, it passed clean through.’

‘No bullet fragments left in the clothing or wound?’

‘No results on that yet.’

‘So thus far we’ve no clue about the make or model of the firearm?’

‘None whatsoever. If it was the same gunshot I thought I heard, I’m guessing a high calibre.’

‘Loud?’

‘Very loud, but there’s no guarantee even about that. The sound effects up here, especially in the mountains, can get seriously distorted.’

‘What about publicity?’

‘Thus far the case has only been publicised in the immediate environment.’

‘Nothing to the press?’

‘South Cumbria Crime Command are taking charge of that. They’ll be getting some search parties out tomorrow too. Mountain Rescue can deal with the peaks, but there’s a lot of lower ground to cover as well.’

‘Any reason why there’s no one up there now?’ Gemma wondered.

‘Apart from the conditions, which would make even a ground-level search next to impossible, and would also mean we’d have no air-cover, there is the potential presence of firearms. It’ll be a risk sending out civvie search parties in daylight, even though it’s one we’ll have to take … but deploying them in darkness and fog is too horrific a prospect, I suppose.’

She considered this. ‘At the risk of asking a painfully obvious question … this
is
the countryside. This girl couldn’t have been shot by accident?’

‘I’m hoping Mary-Ellen’s been making some calls about that.’

‘Mary-Ellen?’

‘Mary-Ellen O’Rourke. My PC up at Cragwood Keld. But the girl herself was quite adamant she and her mate were attacked.’

‘And is that statement reliable? I mean, was she semi-conscious, delirious maybe?’

‘What she told me wouldn’t stand up on its own. That’s why I want to speak to her tomorrow, get a proper statement before local plod gets too involved.’

‘
You’re
local plod now, Heck.’ Gemma said this flatly, without emotion, without so much as glancing at him.

‘Yeah,’ he grunted. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’

They descended into Bowness, where, alongside Windermere’s frigid waters, the fog was even thicker and the evening traffic snarling itself up again, the flow of which was further hampered by various shunts and collisions. The hold-ups this caused were endless, so Heck opted to head towards Ambleside and the road around the north end of the lake, rather than chance the ferry again.

‘
I’ve
got a question, ma’am, if you don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Sure.’

‘Why are you here?’

Despite her previous comment, which had felt like a deliberate barb designed to irritate him, Heck was more curious about her interest in this case than hostile. He supposed he
ought
to feel hostile. At the end of the day, he was the one who held the moral high ground. At least, in his own mind he did.

‘Surely the real question is, why did you contact me?’ she replied.

‘As a courtesy.’

She peered through the windscreen. Fog eddied past. ‘Since when have you shown me any courtesy, Heck?’

‘Just seemed the right thing to do, to let you know what was going on. And … well … I was maybe thinking about picking your brains.’

‘You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?’ Gemma pursed her lips in that stern, humourless way of hers when approaching a problem she’d already figured out. ‘That tone you used on the phone. I’ve heard it before. About a thousand times. It was your tally-ho tone.’

‘My what?’

‘Your eager-beaver tone, your raring-to-go tone, your “we’re onto something here, ma’am” tone.’

‘Well if it was … I’ve had more time to think about it since.’

‘So now you
don’t
think we’re dealing with the Stranger?’

‘That was my first idea, but I’m still undecided. You must admit, it seems unlikely.’

‘Well, just in case it’s worrying you, I still won’t consider this a wasted trip. This is what we do in Serial Crimes, Heck … I didn’t think you’d have forgotten so soon. One of the criteria for the murder cases we consult on is
odd
. You know … unusual, weird. And now we’re looking at what … a dead man walking? They don’t come much weirder than that.’

‘This isn’t officially a murder case.’

‘Do
you
believe it isn’t?’

‘No ma’am, I certainly don’t believe
that
.’

Tara Cook’s description of the attack on her friend, Jane Dawson, had been pretty graphic, even if her view of it had been obscured by fog. She’d talked about repeated blows with a heavy stone. She’d also placed special emphasis on that eerie whistling, which she’d said had persisted for ages as they were trailed across the fell. It was difficult to imagine that had all been part of some workaday mugging.

‘Doesn’t matter anyway,’ Gemma said. ‘I’ve already spoken to Detective Chief Superintendent Wilcox. I called him while I was on the train.’

Heck realised he ought to have expected that. Alan Wilcox was senior supervisor at Cumbria Crime Command. It was typical of Gemma to go straight to the top.

‘He doesn’t see that me being on the plot can hurt the investigation,’ she added.

‘So long as SCU are writing your cheques, eh?’

‘See … you do have a grasp of the job’s political dimensions, after all.’

‘It still begs the question, ma’am, why
you’re
here? As in you personally. I mean, if this was just another SCU dig-out, you’d have sent some of your minions. Gary or Shawna, or whichever DS you’ve got in to replace me.’

‘I got no one in to replace you, Heck. As of now, that post is still open.’

For some reason that pleased him, though he didn’t quite know why. Several weeks ago he’d finally – after a few days of introspective self-brutalisation – admitted to himself that he was missing the Serial Crimes Unit. Not just the action, but the whole thing: the chaos, the noise, the frenetic atmosphere of life at the sharpest tip of British law enforcement. But he was damned if he was going back to the bastards, cap in hand.
He was bloody damned if he was!
As far as Heck was concerned, his absence from Scotland Yard was punishing Gemma. It wasn’t the other way around.

‘The question stands,’ he said.

‘Does it really?’ She glanced sidelong at him. ‘You were more aware than most, Heck, that I was one of the investigators on the Stranger taskforce? That I got closer to him than anyone else – intimately, in fact. Bearing that in mind, would it make sense to send someone else instead? Someone who wasn’t even there?’

Regardless of this eminently reasonable explanation, Heck persisted. ‘I was wondering if it was more to do with this being the one that’s always bugged you … you know, if this was the one that got away?’

‘Rather like you and the Nice Guys, you mean?’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, yes.’

The whole crux of Heck’s bitter argument with Gemma two and a half months ago had concerned the hunt for the Nice Guys. A team of ex-military personnel with severely blotted copybooks, the Nice Guys had set themselves up as a professional rape club. Heck had hunted them down on two different occasions, obsessively refusing to give up the chase until he’d put an end to their operations in the UK, several times flouting the very laws he’d first joined the police to uphold. But now he was fascinated to know if Gemma had a few obsessions of her own.

‘The Stranger can’t be regarded as anything other than the one who got away,’ she grudgingly said. ‘As you’re perfectly well aware, I shot him in the chest. From point-blank range. It’s a mystery he made it any distance at all, let alone completely vanished.’

‘A mystery it’s long been your personal ambition to crack, eh?’

‘It’s a bit more than just personal ambition, Heck. This was one of the worst murder cases in British history, and though it’s now officially closed, not many of us who worked on it actually feel that way.’

‘You suspected he was still alive then?’

‘No … I just didn’t know where he was, or what had happened to him. None of us did. It was a very dissatisfying way for the enquiry to end.’

‘All that work, eh? All that worry and risk … for no tangible result?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘If only you’d been given a bit more time and space to look it over, eh? To see if there was something you’d missed? Some way to bring closure?’

She shrugged, and they drove on in silence. Having reached the north end of Windermere, they were back on the A593, heading west towards Clappersgate and Skelwith Bridge. The scene of the major accident earlier had been cleared, but a sprinkling of glass and other detritus sparkled in their headlights as they rumbled past.

‘You know, Gemma,’ Heck said slowly, ‘you hauled me over the sodding coals because I felt exactly the same way about the Nice Guys Club …’

‘It’s not the same thing, Heck! Now stop right there!’ She aimed a warning finger at him. ‘You went AWOL on two occasions to catch the Nice Guys. That’s two occasions more than any other police officer in this country would get away with. And I covered your back both times.’