Dead Man Walking

by Paul Finch

  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.

  Chapter 21

  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.

  Chapter 22

  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.

  This gave them new heart, Hazel hurrying ahead, albeit with an awkward, limping gait.

  ‘It’s only a few hundred yards to the bridge from here,’ she said.

  ‘No problem.’ But Gemma then glanced over her shoulder, wondering if she’d just heard a crackle of foliage. She flicked her torch on.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Hazel asked.

  Gemma didn’t immediately reply. The pall of rapidly dimming light – her torch’s battery was finally failing – speared into the gloom, but revealed nothing. ‘Let’s keep moving, eh?’

  They walked on, Gemma glancing over her shoulder several times more. The lapping of wavelets soon gave way to an ongoing rumble of rushing water.

  ‘Hear that?’ Hazel said. ‘That’s the Race. There’s actually a barred gate they lower from the bridge to stop people going over the top of it by accident. They only raise it for competitions.’

  ‘Okay …’ Despite her better judgement, Gemma allowed Hazel’s increasingly upbeat mood to affect her. As the torch now emitted little more than a weak, yellow glow, she switched it off and shoved it into her pocket. ‘I don’t suppose anyone lives near the bridge? There are no houses or anything?’

  ‘No. As I say, even from here it’s still a couple of miles to the Keld.’

  The rushing of water was now thunderous, as if it was pouring in a waterfall. The direction from which it emanated appeared to have changed; it no longer came from their right, but from somewhere to their left, just ahead.

  Then Gemma heard something else. And this time there was no error.

  It was another crackle of twigs, from close behind.

  She spun around, by instinct going for her torch and thumbing its button, but the bulb failed; the battery had finally died. She kept hold of it nevertheless, clamping it in her left fist. It wasn’t especially heavy, but anything would do that felt like a weapon.

  Hazel hobbled up beside her.

  They were silent for several seconds, their breaths pluming in milky clouds.

  ‘Do deer ever come down to the water’s edge to drink?’ Gemma asked quietly.

  ‘I suppose … I’ve known sheep do it too.’

  What Gemma would have given at that moment for a loud and reassuring baaa! But the lakeside woods remained silent.

  ‘Keep walking,’ Gemma murmured, turning and steering Hazel along the path. ‘And don’t look back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Go over the bridge if you want to. Act like there’s nothing unusual.’

  ‘You sound like you won’t be with me.’

  ‘Like I say, don’t look back.’ Gemma edged towards the left side of the path. ‘If you hear anything bad, start running.’

  ‘You can’t hide!’ Hazel hissed. ‘Mark said this guy might have some kind of heat-vision device.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about him. We don’t even know if this is him. If it was, I’m sure he’d be whistling his happy tune …’

  ‘So why are you …?’

  ‘Don’t argue, Hazel, okay!’

  They strode on, Gemma still veering casually left and then, without warning, darting away into the fog-shrouded undergrowth. Hazel almost whimpered aloud, but managed to suppress it, and strolled on alone as calmly as she was able.

  In the brush, Gemma dropped to a crouch, and waited. Pine needles and cones were scattered around her feet, but no heavy stone lay close to hand, no broken branch she could wield as a club. She hefted the torch again, this time in both hands, and strained her ears as Hazel’s stumbling footfalls receded.

  Seconds passed as she tried to subdue her breathing, which wasn’t easy – her throat was sore and her lungs ached from the frigid air and constant exertion. She knew she wasn’t particularly well concealed. Only a few clumps of naked foliage separated her from the path. But hopefully she was close enough to hear the footsteps she now confidently expected to come crunching along it. Until it occurred to her that what she’d heard had been the crackling of twigs. Which did not signify someone proceeding along a path – but through undergrowth.

  She spun around. The figure standing directly behind her was a black outline in the gloom. Before she could move or even shout, a torch flicked on and searing light glared over her. If Gemma hadn’t just walked so far and over such rough ground, she might have been able to respond more effectively. As it was, her legs were cramped and cold, so she wasn’t able to leap to her feet and go into her unarmed combat routine. The blinding light rendered her opponent all but invisible anyway, so, though she flung the torch, it flew wide, the figure easily able to step aside.

  ‘Whoah!’ came a sharp voice, with a distinct Irish twang. ‘Do that again, miss, and I’ll break your fucking arms!’

  ‘PC … PC O’Rourke?’ Gemma said warily.

  There was a brief, surprised silence. ‘Who are you? Hey … keep your hands where I can see them!’

  ‘I’m a police officer too … from Scotland Yard.’

  The figure behind the torch regarded her with prolonged suspicion.

  ‘If you’ll let me,’ Gemma said, lowering her right arm again. The wallet containing her warrant card was inside her jacket.

  ‘I said don’t fucking move!’

  The tone was attack-dog aggressive. If this was the famously tough and resourceful Mary-Ellen O’Rourke, she sounded highly on edge. But then, even the most affable officers were likely to be out of sorts tonight. Gemma’s eyes had now adjusted to the bright light. She detected a sturdy stature, black clothing and a luminous slicker of some sort. A pale face hovered just above the torch. By the looks of it, the officer had drawn her extending baton, and held it at her right shoulder, ready to strike.

  ‘You say you’re Scotland Yard …?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gemma kept her arms outstretched. ‘And I’m guessing you’re PC Mary-Ellen O’Rourke, from Cragwood Keld police office. If it helps, my name’s Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper … from the Serial Crimes Unit. I came here at the request of DS Heckenburg.’

  There was another long, near-eerie silence from the figure behind the torch. Then the light was inclined downward, so it no longer shone into Gemma’s face. The newcomer emerged fully into view. It was indeed a policewoman.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’ She offered a hand to assist.

  Gemma waved this away and rose stiffly to her feet. She reached under her coat and produced her ID. Mary-Ellen only gave it a cursory examination.

  ‘Heck mentioned your name, but …’

  With wild shrieks, a third figure lurched from their left, carrying an enormous knotted tree limb, which it swung like a baseball bat. Gemma fell backward and rolled. Mary
-Ellen dodged nimbly aside, the limb whistling harmlessly past the pair of them. Their female assailant staggered, and almost fell herself. Mary-Ellen jumped forward before she could strike again.

  ‘Easy, Hazel! It’s me! Mary-Ellen!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Hazel stammered, half-collapsing. She sank to her knees. ‘I’m sorry … I, I didn’t realise …’

  ‘So one of you is lying in wait for me,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘The other comes at me with a shillelagh. Who needs enemies with friends like you lot?’

  Gemma got slowly to her feet. ‘You can’t totally blame us, PC O’Rourke.’

  ‘What you doing this end of the tarn?’ Mary-Ellen asked.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Gemma retorted. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the east shore, marking out a crime scene?’

  ‘I was there a few hours ago. But I kept hearing noises. Like there was someone circling around. Eventually I went and looked. I couldn’t find anything. I was about a hundred yards away when I heard the bloody boat start up. I ran back there, but by then the sodding thing had gone. So I’ve had to walk it back. It’s taken me ages just making it this far. The east shore’s pretty difficult to negotiate.’ Mary-Ellen displayed torn gloves and skinned fingertips. ‘Had to climb more than a couple of rock-faces. Soon as I got to this end, I heard voices. Didn’t have a clue who it might be, so I hid and followed you. The rest you know.’

  ‘Well … you won’t believe what’s happened to us,’ Hazel said.

  Wearily, in faltering, disjointed fashion, she related their own experiences. Mary-Ellen listened, initially incredulous, her face visibly lengthening, her green eyes losing their lustre when she heard about PC Heggarty’s death.

  ‘Dan Heggarty?’ she said slowly.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Gemma replied.

  ‘Oh, Christ …’ Briefly, the Irish lass sounded too upset to speak. ‘I mean, he wasn’t a bad bloke, Dan Heggarty. Shit … who am I kidding? He was a total prick. But shot, you say? Through the head?’