Dead Man Walking (27 page)

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.

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.’

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.