Dead Man Walking

by Paul Finch

  ‘You stopped paddling, or wha’?’ McGurk said, half glancing around.

  Heck froze. ‘Gimme a second … okay?’

  McGurk looked front again.

  Heck slid the screwdriver loose. As improvised weapons went, it was well-balanced. It wouldn’t be difficult to lean forward and drive it between McGurk’s shoulder blades, penetrating his cardiovascular system, killing him instantly. If only it wasn’t for that one possibility McGurk wasn’t the killer. Heck also had to wonder if recent cases hadn’t brutalised him more than was good for him. Because even if the guy was the killer, bringing him to book by driving a blade through his spine was hardly likely to endear him to the judicial system. Instead, he lowered the screwdriver, and probed the bottom of the boat with its tip, before shifting his hand up its hilt, flattening his palm across its pommel – and leaning on it.

  There was no splintering crunch, just a dull thud as the blade passed through. He wrenched it loose, before driving it down quietly, through the bottom of the boat, twice more.

  ‘Wha’ was that?’ McGurk said. ‘Like a vibration in the …’

  ‘Shit,’ Heck replied. ‘Must’ve hit something.’

  ‘Oh fuck, I told you we were too close … shit, look at this fucking mess!’

  Ice-cold water was already sloshing around their legs.

  ‘Something’s pierced the hull,’ Heck said, rather unnecessarily.

  ‘I wonder what! Jesus, it’s rising like the clappers …’

  ‘Hang on,’ Heck shouted, paddling them sharp-right. ‘The Boat Club jetty’s there.’

  A flat-topped structure loomed through the mist. It was only ten yards away, but the canoe was submerging so fast, the water gurgling up past their thighs, that Heck wasn’t sure they’d even make it that far. As it rose to the gunwales, the two men lurched over the side, McGurk striking madly for the wrought-iron ladder at the end of the jetty, now only three or four yards away. It seemed an unnecessarily panic-stricken measure, Heck thought, treading water. As the boat vanished underneath in a frenzy of brackish bubbles, McGurk ascended the ladder with hard, clattering impacts – his dazed state apparently a thing of the past.

  ‘It’ll be okay!’ Heck shouted up as he breast-stroked in pursuit. ‘There are other boats here.’

  McGurk didn’t reply, and in fact ducked out of sight.

  Heck now swung himself up the ladder urgently, and clambered onto the top of the jetty – to find the guy standing about five yards along it, facing him warily. He’d pulled the canvas off a steel rack alongside him, revealing additional paddles and oars. Despite all his suspicions, it still jolted Heck to see that McGurk had already acquired one of these and was hefting it like a club.

  ‘Just fucking stop pretending,’ the PC said. ‘I know your fucking game.’

  Now would be the ideal moment for Gemma to come strolling down the jetty from the clubhouse, a vague boxy shape visible in the vapour some thirty yards behind them, produce her starter pistol and, as planned, tell the bastard to stick ’em up.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Without warning, McGurk swung the oar at Heck’s head.

  Heck ducked and barrelled forward, slamming the top of his skull into McGurk’s midriff and wrapping his arms around his thick torso. With shouts and struggles, the two of them plunged off the jetty and back into the tarn. At this point it was turning shallow, probably no more than five feet deep, and the violent wrestling match under its surface churned up a black tumult from the bottom. Blinded and gagging, smothered in weed and filth, they tore loose from each other and broke the surface together, staggering shoreward. McGurk seemed keener to make land than Heck did, so Heck jumped onto his back before he got there. They plunged under the surface again, but McGurk was a steely customer. He slammed a vicious elbow into the left of Heck’s ribs, and then again into the side of his head. Heck was thrown off, and for a second was on his back underwater. If McGurk had grabbed the advantage then and jumped down on top of him knees-first, it would all have been over. But McGurk still sought the land.

  He stumbled away, allowing Heck to scramble to his feet and reel after him. The shoreline was now visible. Kayaks, canoes and other boats were drawn up there, so it was impossible for Heck to tell whether or not the craft Gemma had taken was among them. But mainly he was focused on McGurk, who was knee-deep when he turned around again, this time having scooped up a leafy piece of driftwood, which he swung down like a poleaxe. Heck threw himself to one side, and it crashed through the water, shattering on the pebbles underneath.

  Heck circled around him, fists clenched, boxer-style.

  ‘Think you can fucking take me?’ McGurk scoffed, backing away. ‘If my skull hadn’t already been cracked open, I’d beat you into the ground like a tent-peg.’

  ‘You’re going to have to,’ Heck said, lurching onto dry land.

  McGurk copied the manoeuvre.

  ‘Give it up, pal,’ Heck advised him. ‘You’ve had it.’

  ‘You fucking reckon?’ McGurk’s eyes gleamed. With his hulking shape and brutish face slathered in lake-mud, fleetingly he was a genuine monster. He took a threatening step forward. Heck held his ground, only realising at the last second that his opponent was still wielding the driftwood, and that the leafy end of it had broken off, leaving a thick, nobbled club some three feet in length. Raising it in both hands, McGurk aimed it down at Heck’s cranium.

  ‘Drop it!’ came a harsh shout.

  Both went rigid, then risked glancing right towards the clubhouse. Though a dim form in the mist, Gemma was limping across its side-garden, weaving between folded tables and chairs. She climbed stiffly over its low perimeter fence, clearly in pain, but never once lowering the pistol she was training squarely at McGurk’s head.

  ‘Ma’am,’ McGurk said. ‘Thank Christ!’

  ‘I said, drop the club.’

  ‘You don’t understand …’

  ‘Drop it!’

  ‘Why don’t you drop it, ma’am?’ came a different voice.

  This time they glanced left.

  Heck’s mouth sagged open as Mary-Ellen emerged from the vapour coiling beneath the trees. She too was wielding a firearm, but this one didn’t look like a starter pistol.

  ‘No’ before time,’ McGurk said, relieved. He threw away his hunk of wood. ‘You’d better enlighten the superintendent.’

  ‘I will,’ Mary-Ellen said.

  Then she shot him.

  Chapter 33

  The first bullet hit McGurk in the throat, kicking out a divot of flesh and muscle. The second ripped through his forehead, bursting from the back of his skull in a deluge of blood and brains. It wasn’t quite a double-tap, but it did the job.

  He hit the ground like a sack of bones, like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Silence followed. A fine crimson mist hung where he’d stood.

  Heck staggered slowly forward. ‘M-E … what … what the Goddamn hell! We didn’t have any damn proof …’

  ‘Uh-uh, Heck.’

  Heck was so infuriated that he didn’t initially notice the gun had been turned in his direction. Or that it was a very familiar make and model; a Colt Python .357. ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you realise what you’ve just fucking done?’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Mary-Ellen advised him.

  He stumbled to a halt, baffled.

  ‘And don’t even think about raising that gun again, ma’am!’ Mary-Ellen swung her weapon onto Gemma. ‘I know it’s only a toy, but well … I’d feel better if it was on the ground.’

  Gemma had lowered her pistol in disbelief. Almost instinctively, she now made a half-effort to raise it.

  ‘Uh-uh!’ Mary-Ellen cocked her Colt.

  Helpless, with no alternative, Gemma tossed the starter pistol down onto the shingle.

  As she did, Heck’s hand stole into his jacket pocket, but Mary-Ellen spotted this too, and levelled the weapon back on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Heck! I mean what have you got in there
, anyway? You gonna chuck a chisel at me, a screwdriver? Even if you’ve got one, I wouldn’t take the chance …’

  Heck’s face lengthened as he raised his empty hands. ‘You, you can’t be …’

  ‘Okay, the pair of you …’ Mary-Ellen waggled the gun to indicate they should stand together. Reluctantly, they sidled towards each other. ‘Excellent. Now … kneel down. So I can see you better.’

  They complied, stiffly, like automatons, but Heck was still shaking his head. ‘M-E, don’t … don’t tell me you’re involved in this.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ she replied in a vaguely contemptuous tone. ‘You know me, don’t you, Heck?’

  He glanced at McGurk’s crumpled body. ‘I thought I did.’

  She surveyed him, her gaze oddly flat. Her lips puckered into a lifeless half-smile. ‘You really couldn’t see past Mick McGurk once he was in the frame, could you? Did you really think he’d set that police station to blow and then just walk into it … purely to give himself an alibi? You think even some hard-ass ex-squaddie would take a chance like that? Mind you, McGurk got it even more wrong. He thought you were the killer, and with no evidence at all. Purely because someone whispered it into his ear about an hour ago. And as for you guys thinking he might have an accomplice out there, because all this was, like, too good for one man. Well … I guess the real perp would be very flattered to hear that …’

  ‘What have you done with the villagers?’ Heck interrupted. ‘You know, the ones you were supposed to be looking after down at the far end of the tarn.’

  ‘Be fair, Heck. I wasn’t supposed to look after them, I was supposed to send them down the Race. Isn’t that right?’ She feigned concern. ‘That’s what the villagers thought. That’s what you told them. It’ll be a wild ride for sure, but some of them might make it. In fact, I’m counting on that …’

  ‘Irish,’ Gemma said suddenly.

  ‘What’s that, ma’am?’ Mary-Ellen wondered.

  ‘All along I said the Stranger spoke with an off-kilter accent,’ Gemma explained. ‘Not quite Scottish.’

  ‘And definitely not Border Scots, eh?’ Mary-Ellen’s mouth twisted into a full grin, but her eyes remained glassy, almost dead. ‘They always used to say the Munster Irish dialect had some similarities with Scots Gaelic. But I suppose it would take a proper Sassenach to confuse the two. On which subject, I’m surprised at you, Heck! Throwing your lot in with Miss Piggy here, just because she’s a handsome bit of tail. Didn’t she piss on your life as well?’

  ‘Munster,’ Gemma said slowly and disappointedly, as if she couldn’t believe she’d missed such an obvious clue. ‘So who was he, the Stranger … your father?’

  Mary-Ellen’s grin faded. Her mouth trembled as she screwed it shut.

  ‘Your father?’ Heck posed it as a question because he still couldn’t quite accept what he was hearing. ‘Your father was … was the Stranger?’

  ‘That … is a damn … fucking lie.’ Mary-Ellen bared her teeth. ‘My father … my fucking father was the kindest, sweetest man in the world. My mother died giving birth to me, so I grew up with one parent … but he was the best you could hope for. The gentlest, the most caring, the most loving …’

  ‘And a vicious sexual sadist,’ Gemma said.

  Mary-Ellen swung the pistol around, finger tightening on the trigger. ‘Say that one more time, you bitch, and I’ll take those baby blues out while you’re still fucking alive! It isn’t bad enough you shot him dead, now you think you can denigrate his name!’

  ‘So it was your father,’ Heck said, breathing slow and steady, trying to stay calm and at the same time to draw her attention back to him.

  It worked; Mary-Ellen switched again, but slowly. ‘I’m sure even you would like to think that, Heck. A nice easy answer. A nice acceptable answer. Now we know who the Stranger was … that thieving Gypsy bastard who nobody liked. That fucking Irish tinker who even got kicked out by his own people …’

  ‘They had their suspicions too, did they?’ Gemma said.

  ‘Don’t make this worse for yourself, Piper. All my Dada’s life he got picked on, blamed for stuff he didn’t do, and for why … because he was foreign, because he didn’t have any kind of education! And now you think you’re going to pin a series of sex murders on him? When it’s plain as mustard the real killer is still here, doing the same thing all over again …’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us what really happened then?’ Heck said.

  ‘What does it matter to you?’ Mary-Ellen wondered.

  His thoughts raced as he tried to play for time. ‘Hey, if there was a miscarriage of justice, if Gemma shot the wrong person, it’s important we know about it.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference if you know about it, Heck! You won’t be walking away from here!’

  ‘I’m sure if it didn’t matter to you that we know the truth, you’d already be pumping that trigger, M-E.’

  ‘You think I’m not going to, is that it?’

  ‘Hardly. The evidence you’re ready and willing is all around us.’

  ‘Evidence … that’s a great word.’ Mary-Ellen turned back to Gemma with reptile speed. ‘There was never any evidence against my father, was there, Miss Piper? But you put lead in him all the same. You found a scapegoat, someone no one would care about …’

  ‘You said your own people kicked your father out,’ Heck said. ‘If you and he were part of a travelling community, something must’ve gone badly wrong. Those guys are pretty tight.’

  Mary-Ellen’s eyes brimmed with tears, yet her features remained rock solid. When she licked saliva from her lips, it was with tiny, darting strokes of her tongue. These were minor details of course, yet the physical transformation alone was quite fantastic. The affable, energetic young policewoman of earlier had completely gone, replaced by something … well, by just that, something.

  ‘I was a child at the time,’ she said uncertainly, as though she possibly shouldn’t be breaking these confidences. ‘I don’t know the reason they sent him away. I don’t even know where we were … somewhere in Europe maybe. But I didn’t care. It suited me. Just me and him together in our battered old car, in our little caravan. That was the way I liked it. When we came back to Britain, I liked it even better. Felt like I was home. Not that you native Brits ever had much time for us. Even down in the West Country, where our kind were common, Dada couldn’t get work anywhere. When he did, he soon got sacked. The usual thing … accusations of theft, accusations of drunkenness. Always unproved.’

  ‘Never your dad’s fault, eh?’ Gemma said.

  ‘You bitch, Piper! What would you know of life on the road? No one wanting you around, people disliking you on principle. Dada couldn’t even go for a drink at night without men picking fights with him. The number of times he came home late, and I saw him washing blood from his clothes …’

  ‘Never occurred to you where that blood really came from?’ Gemma asked.

  Unexpectedly, Mary-Ellen smiled at this. But it was almost a deranged smile, the corners of her mouth hooking upward, globs of saliva oozing out.

  ‘It never entered your head he might be the Stranger?’ Heck asked. ‘You must have known those murders were going on?’

  ‘Oh, I was very aware of the murders, Heck. I was thirteen in 2003, I was no child. Dada would even talk to me about it, warn me about the sin of going off with lads I didn’t know …’

  ‘Who was he?’ Heck asked. ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘Nice try. But you didn’t get it at the time, and you aren’t getting it now.’

  ‘You understand the circumstances in which he was shot?’ Gemma said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve immersed myself in the case since then, Miss Piper. Buried myself in it. And your account of that night’s events would be very impressive … if you hadn’t completely fabricated it.’

  ‘M-E,’ Heck said. ‘You don’t know anyone fabricated anything …’

  ‘I know enough!’ she hissed. ‘Namely that l
ate one night, when he’d been out for ages, Dada almost crashed his car as he pulled onto the derelict lot where we were camped. I managed to get him out, only to find him filthy with mud and blood, and suffering the most terrible gunshot wound … and then, without saying anything, not even a simple “goodbye”, proceeding to die in my young arms.’

  She paused, breathing harshly, as though it required a momentous effort.

  Neither captive said a word. Neither dared.

  ‘Can you imagine what it was like, Miss Piper … to experience that at such a tender age? Can you imagine the depth of shock and despair? Crying ’til there was no fluid left in my body … for the loss of the man who’d done everything for me since I was a little girl, my guardian, my best pal, the bloke who’d nurtured me, who’d looked after me so lovingly despite the world putting constant obstacles in his path.’

  Heck listened in fascination as Mary-Ellen slipped briefly into a kind of recitation mode. It was almost lyrical, the way she recounted these events – as though she’d revisited them over and over in her head, and had religiously rehearsed the speech by which she’d put them right. Only now did it truly strike him how absorbed by this terrible experience she’d been, how it had come to dominate her life – and worse.

  ‘Trust me, guys, the word “bereft” doesn’t quite cover it,’ Mary-Ellen added. ‘And then, less than two hours later, while I’m still sitting there, rigid with shock, Dada lying in my lap, I hear on the radio that a young policewoman is believed to have lured the Stranger into a trap, and shot him!’

  ‘M-E, you must’ve known what all this meant,’ Heck said. ‘Even in that wretched state, you must’ve known …’

  ‘I knew the Stranger was still alive!’ she replied tautly. ‘I also knew you fuckers were not going to pin his series of murders on my dead father. No, sir.’