The Fell Walker (24 page)

Hector paused at the edge, breathless, exhilarated. He looked down. It was a steep drop from the summit, but not as sheer as it was further down. Something had stopped the man’s fall about 50 feet below him. He lay quite still on the steep slope.

Adrenalin pumping, Hector looked all around to see if anyone was about. He then lowered himself over the edge, and carefully scrambled down to where the man lay.

His face was covered in black marks and red abrasions and loose dirt. His clothes were spattered with some of the stones he had loosened during the fall. He lay on his back, moaning. His eyes were open.

Hector placed one foot on either side of his body, and looked down on him. A feeling of great power surged through him. He lowered himself until he sat on the man’s abdomen. The man gasped and tried to protest. Hector punched him on the side of his face.

‘Shut up...little man,’ he snarled.

Then he just sat there for a while, enjoying the feeling of power, wondering what to do next. His initial uncontrollable rage had cooled down. Now he was in control. Now he had time to think how he could really make this man’s punishment fit the crime. The man could see the coldness in his eyes. He looked terrified. Hector loved that.

Just for a moment, Hector closed his eyes and deliberately recalled the horror of Leni’s death. He wanted to know again the agony she had suffered, he had suffered. He was looking for inspiration.

In that quiet moment, he found it. He saw again the shattered eye, the ripped flesh; the dangling ear. Close by, disturbed by the man’s fall, lay a jagged, pointed stone. He picked it up and showed it to the man. The man’s eyes widened with terror, and made a bigger target as Hector stabbed it into his left eye. The man screamed. Hector put his hand over his mouth, and thrust the stone in again…and again, harder. And again, harder still, feeling the bones crunching, watching the sinuous blood ebbing the ‘greenie’s’ life away, taking his own pain away.

He turned the stone to find the sharpest edge, and attacked the man’s left ear. With cold anger he hacked repeatedly at the joint to the head, until the ear lay flapping, held only by a thin, raw sinew of flesh.

Hector stopped, heart pounding. The deed was done. Leni had been avenged. He removed himself from the man’s abdomen, and sat above him on the steep slope. He rummaged through the man’s jacket, found his wallet, and pocketed it. Then he placed his feet against the man’s side and thrust with his legs until the man started to roll over. Two more thrusts and the body had impetus. It continued to roll until it arrived at the sheer drop, where it disappeared over the edge to certain death.

Hector scrambled back to the summit of An Caisteal and looked all around. Nothing stirred in the vast emptiness. Slowly, his pounding heart slowed down, and he started to relax. Then he realised that, for the first time in months, he felt good. He felt renewed, and refreshed, as though some great burden had been lifted from him. He also felt strangely hollow inside, as if his stomach had been removed. Something basic had left him, he knew.

Finding the bloody stone still in his hand, he looked around and found a marshy piece of ground. There, he threw the stone in, and watched it sink beneath the boggy surface. In the peaty water, he started to wash the blood from his hands. Now he was aware that his desire for suicide had gone. Somebody else had died for Leni: the right person, the one who had caused Leni’s death. It had never really been his fault.

*

Three days later, with the new power still coursing through him, he had stopped Vilma from leaving to catch her plane. He couldn’t bear the thought of living on his own again, of having no one to care for. Even ugly little Vilma was better than nothing, better than an empty house, a lonely life. She would have to be Leni’s substitute.

At first he had asked her, then pleaded with her, to stay with him. When she had refused and tried to leave, he had grabbed her, and tied her up with rope, and put tape across her mouth to stop her screaming.

Days later, when the police came looking for her, at the request of her mother, he told them she had left to catch her scheduled flight, using public transport to get to Thurso, and then to Inverness airport, and that he hadn’t seen her since that day.

The police had taken his word for it, one of them commenting that she had probably taken the opportunity to stay in Britain, probably in London, and that she would probably become just another illegal immigrant statistic.

If the police had asked to search the house, Hector had taken the precaution of hiding her, bound and gagged, down a drainage sump in the old sheep shed. Weeks later, when things had settled down, he brought her into the house and chained her to an old iron bed in the second bedroom.

In the meantime, he had been called out by the mountain rescue team to look for a missing walker called Ian Baxter, a name he had found on the driving licence in the greenie’s wallet. The team had offered to let him stand down because of his recent loss, but he told them it would do him good to get out and take his mind off things. In fact, he found it incredibly exciting to think that he would get a second look at the man he had killed.

When they eventually found Baxter at the foot of An Caisteal crag, Hector, as the team’s photographer, discovered a new pleasure when taking a close-up of the man’s facial injuries.

Now, kneeling in the studio, he looked at it again. It was the first of nine framed photographs, each one placed directly below one of Leni’s photographs. It was the only male face to be seen in the line up, Hector having later switched to females to get a better match.

Hector’s eyes scanned around the walls of the studio. He stopped at the empty frame below the tenth photograph of Leni. Only one more to go! Would it stop then? Would the killing be over? In the quiet sanity of that moment, he hoped so. But then, he always hoped so after the event; after the irresistible need had been met; after the rage had calmed. Realistically, he doubted if he had the strength to stop it. It was, after all, the thing that kept him alive.

He left those questions to time, as he rose from his knees, having finished his daily homage to Leni. With one last look at photograph ten, and with tears in his eyes, he left the studio. He stopped at the control room to turn off the violin concerto, and returned upstairs to the main lounge.

In that large, high-ceilinged, echoing room, surrounded by furniture covered with dust covers, Hector poured some whisky, sat in the rocking chair, and put on his headphones.

The music that started probably sounded normal to most people, but Hector had noticed, and liked its strangeness immediately. Only later, when reading about it, did he learn that Schumann had written his piano concerto in A-minor when out of his mind. Today, however, Schumann didn’t fit his mood. He had things to do, plans to make.

He switched the music off, removed his headphones, and started to plan in his mind. But gradually, in the stillness of that ghostly room, his thoughts were drowned by a palpable silence. Ever since Vilma had gone, the silence had grown louder. Even though he hadn’t been able to hear her moving in the sound proof studio below, the thought of her being there had been sufficient to create a sound in his mind, to keep him company, to dissipate the loneliness. He must get a replacement for Vilma soon, before the silence got too loud.

He had already selected a favourite candidate for the position, and done some initial interviewing. From the shelter of the trees surrounding Scarness Manor, he had watched her walking down the lane, to the village and back. Although she wasn’t young, she was better than Vilma to look at, with a nice, kind face, and a lovely smile. He was sure she was right for the job. All he had to do now was to invite her for a final interview, and make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Chapter 33

The search for a chemical industry closure, caused by the actions of an environmental organisation was still on. Ben had been at it for over a week, and was becoming increasingly anxious. It wasn’t that the information was hard to find; the environmentalists were good at publicising their victories. He was anxious because each day that passed was another day of freedom for the killer, another day in which he might strike again.

He had painstakingly searched through old newspapers and library records without finding anything significant. More recently, he had concentrated on surfing the environmentalist’s web sites. He had been amazed at how many green organisations existed, apart from the big boys such as Greenpeace. Many of them included the word ‘earth’ in their names.

So far, he had ploughed through the ‘success stories’ of The Earth Charter, Earth Force, Lovearth Network, Earth Action Network, Dept. of the Planet Earth, United Earth Alliance. He had also covered many others where the word ‘earth’ was replaced by ‘eco’ or ‘conservation’ or ‘green’. Most of their ‘successes’ had been minor, such as a re-writing of local legislation, or the improvement of local waterways by diverting pollution. None had shown any ‘victories’ in chemical plants in Scotland about four years ago.

Now, he was returning to the web sites of the big boys - Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything on his first visit to their sites, which had proved fruitless.

Greenpeace was still attacking Dow Chemicals, claiming they had not yet cleaned up the mess at Bhopal where 2,000 people died from lethal gas at their pesticide plant. They claimed quite a few successes against chemical companies, but again, none had resulted in the closure of a plant in the right time period. They were currently fighting nine world wide campaigns, mostly to do with global warming, genetically modified crops, the nuclear industry, and forest preservation.

Friends of the Earth, who claimed over a million activists in 62 countries, started their web site with the headline ‘Stop Esso’, and featured a recent success in halting the construction of a new incinerator at La Hague in France.

However, a second search through their previous ‘successes’ did not come up with a chemical plant closure four years ago. They were currently involved with 12 worldwide campaigns, mostly to do with their anti-nuclear stance. Ben noticed that they shared the same jargon as Greenpeace, their ‘Mission Statement’ being ‘Bringing an end to Nuclear Power.’ Under this heading, the word ‘Sellafield’ caught Ben’s eye, so he read on.

It was nothing more than a paragraph about Greenpeace divers collecting sediment in the Irish Sea in 1998. Tests had shown it to be radioactive, proving, they claimed, that Sellafield was pumping radioactive effluent into the sea.

Although this wasn’t relevant to Ben’s search, it reminded him of his trip to the Sellafield Visitor Centre, where he had learned that most of the processes at the plant involved the use of chemicals. He should, therefore, have included the nuclear industry in his search for chemical plant closures.

Sighing resignedly at the prospect of even more screen gazing, he took hold of the mouse, which by now felt like an organic part of his hand, and started to look for the ‘successes’ of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace in the nuclear industry. And, just in case the successes were lost in the text of lengthy articles, he decided to read everything written under a promising heading.

After a long, two strong coffees, reading spell, he finally realised that their ‘successes’ in the nuclear industry had been confined to little more than breaking through security barriers, and attaching their names to the tops of buildings, thus gaining publicity for their cause ‘Greenpeace evades pathetic security at Nuclear Port’ was a heading that summed it all up.

Ben’s disappointment was tangible; it had been a long slog without results. But, at least, he was now hardened to it, he had been there before. He knew that he had no alternative but to keep plodding on.

With a resoluteness inherited from his mother, as well as being born of necessity, he returned to his long list of smaller environmental organisations and started to put them through the nuclear industry search.

After another long spell, interrupted by a coffee and a walk around the garden, he had covered half of the list, but found nothing. Now he moved on to the many ‘Greens’, a group which, interestingly, included Green Cross International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993.

Again, he found nothing, and was about to move on, when he realised he had not seen any Green
political
parties on his list. Presumably their web sites came under ‘political parties’ rather than ‘environmental organisations’. He would check on them later, after finishing all the smaller organisations left on his list.

Later turned out to be almost 24-hours later, as Tribune work and domestic essentials took priority for a while. Helen had mentioned in passing - she would never nag - that the lawns were getting long, and the dust was getting thick, and the windows needed cleaning. He had to take care of them to prevent her asking why they were being neglected.

Back on the Internet, he brought up the Green political party on the screen. He glanced at the various international addresses, then clicked on Great Britain. The site was dominated by Scottish addresses, five in all. At the same time as he started his search for their ‘success’ stories, something began to stir at the back of his mind.

Then, suddenly, it was there in front of him, something he should have remembered. A whole page was given over to the Scottish Green Party’s success in persuading the Scottish parliament to close part of the Dounreay Plant, and to adopt a policy of lobbying the British parliament in Westminster to close the Faslane nuclear submarine base, and all nuclear power stations in Scotland.

It had created quite a stir at the time, Ben rem-embered. It had caused many English MPs to renew their call for Scottish MPs not to have the right to vote on English as well as Scottish legislation.

He should have remembered; it wasn’t all that long ago. Maybe, if he hadn’t been looking for chemical plants all the time, he would have remembered sooner. No - that didn’t do it - he still wanted to kick himself. He checked the date. Almost exactly four years ago. Right on the button - just before the killings had started in Scotland. He tried to ignore the now-familiar inflation of excitement, knowing how quickly it could revert to deflation.

A quick visit to Dounreay’s web site told him that Dounreay had close links with Sellafield, and had been in the same business as Sellafield at that time, both coming under the auspices of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. In other words it was also involved in chemical processing.

It was all there - the right time, the right kind of closed plant, the right location, close to where the first killings took place, the Assynt region. He must not get too excited. All he had done was find support for one theory. The theory might be wrong. All this could be meaningless coincidence.

The telephone rang - Sue Burrows. ‘Are you going to have that feature in tomorrow, Ben?’

Her tone was unusually abrupt and cold. It was the first time she had ever rang to remind him of his commitments. He couldn’t blame her. With so much on his mind, he had been very lax in recent weeks.

It took only a micro-second to switch his brain to the meaning of her question, but she must have sensed the hesitancy. ‘You’re not going to let me down Ben, are you?’

‘No…of course not,’ Ben rushed, now fully in tune with the situation. ‘I’m well on with it...I’ll finish it in the morning, and I’ll bring it in just after lunch...okay?’

‘Glad to hear it…see you tomorrow.’ There were none of the usual pleasantries.

Ben banged the phone down. ‘Damn...damn... damn!’ Not only was he responsible for a nice person like Sue becoming strident, but he was also having to abandon his trail again, just when it might be warming up.

He had, of course, lied to her. He hadn’t written a single word of the feature she was chasing. It was quite unusual for a small weekly paper like the Tribune to incorporate centre-page feature articles. But when something big came up, which attracted national attention, like the recent discovery of the naked Filipino woman, Sue Burrows’ policy was to try to keep her readers as well informed of developments as the readers of the nationals.

Normally, this involved Ben in a certain amount of ‘legal plagiarism’, extracting facts from the pages of the national papers, combining them with local interviews of interested parties, and mixing the whole thing up into a centre page feature.

He now had only 11 waking hours in which to do this. There was no time in which to obtain interviews, but he would phone the police press officer in the morning for the latest developments, and incorporate them.

In the meantime, he would work his way through the pile of national newspapers he had collected since the incident, and try to concoct a half decent article, based on facts rather than opinions.

The sooner this thing was over the better as far as he was concerned. And he knew Helen wouldn’t be sorry to see the tottering pile of newspapers removed from the corner of what had once been their ‘pretty’ guest’s bedroom.

Reluctantly, he switched off the computer, grabbed his notebook and the pile of newspapers, and went downstairs to work in the conservatory. When there was no computer work to be done, he preferred working in the conservatory where the light was better and the garden and the wildlife were in close proximity.

As he entered the conservatory, and laid the pile of newspapers on the floor beside an armchair, he heard a familiar pecking at the window. Freddy, the dominant pheasant, was begging food as usual. Ben took a scoop of pheasant food from a sack in the corner of the conservatory and, opening the double glass doors, threw it out on to the lawn. He allowed himself a few minute’s break as he watched Freddy run to it, and start his robotic pecking action, all the while making his satisfied chortling sound, like a cat purring.

Then it was back to work. He settled in the armchair with his notebook, and turned the pile of newspapers upside down, wanting to start with the oldest issue and work his way forward.

As usual, he had bought two tabloids and two broadsheets each day, never failing to be staggered at the diversity of their reporting of the same story. Normally, he had no time for the tabloids, but in a case like this, which was their bread and butter, they sometimes stuck with it longer than the broadsheets, and could, therefore, be a source of more up to date information.

The first few issues contained nothing that he didn’t already know. Then he came to the issues that had clearly resulted from the press conference he had missed. He started to make notes:

‘Confirmation of woman’s name/nationality – Vilma Tapales/Filipino.

Age - 32. Single (according to parents).

Found with steel chain attached to ankle by vehicle exhaust bracket/bolt. Other end of chain - same bracket/bolt arrangement attached to steel ring embedded in chunk of concrete.

Forensic report states - length of hair, condition of skin, nails, eyes and other organic factors indicate that she had been confined indoors for a period of at least three years.

Cause of death - Trauma to head and body probably caused by impact from passing vehicle. Vehicle may contain evidence of impact and is subject of police hunt.

Background - Sales Representative in Manila. Came to Britain four years ago to attend funeral of friend Leni Gonzalez who lived at Strathy Point, near Thurso, in Sutherland.’

‘Know it well,’ Ben thought, as he wrote it down, allowing himself a moment’s fond recollection of unforgettable holidays. There was nothing else worth extracting from that day’s ‘press conference’ editions, so he moved on.

He went through three more day’s issues without finding any more facts worth noting. The broadsheets appeared to have dropped it altogether, while the tabloids carried the usual tasteless articles, featuring photographs of chained nubile women, under headings such as:
‘How Common Is Bondage Today’
; none of which contained any facts pertinent to the case.

In the next day’s issues, Ben was surprised to see that one of the broadsheets had picked it up again. Inside the front-page a headline announced:
‘Filipino ‘Slave’ Case - Search for best friend’s husband’.
Beside the headline was a photograph of a typical Sutherland croft house, and underneath it the caption:
‘Last known location of Vilma Tapales’.
Clearly, the reporter had spent a few days in Sutherland gathering information.