by Paul Finch
But neither of them believed that.
‘You know … she’s gonna catch us if we stay on this river,’ Gemma gasped.
‘I’m open to suggestions.’
‘How far …’ She’d hunched sideways against the port gunwale, both hands clawed into fists. ‘How far to the next village?’
‘That would be Chapel Stile. A few miles. But it’s only a church and a handful of cottages.’
‘You think the others will have got there?’
‘Bella McCarthy will most likely have headed there.’ Heck was guessing, but it seemed reasonable. They hadn’t seen any trace of the others yet; no wreckage or bodies, which had to be a good sign, but no beached craft either, which meant they were all still on the water. ‘She knows the owner of the Wainwrights’ Inn, which is a popular pub around here. She might be there already. Trouble is, Chapel Stile’s not necessarily any refuge. We could call for help from there, but Mary-Ellen will have killed everyone by the time it arrives.’
‘You really think she’d go that far?’
‘Count on it. Like you said, it’s all or nothing for her now. She’s not gonna start this whole thing again somewhere else at some later date.’
‘If Bella and the others have made it to Chapel Stile, they might’ve called for help already. M-E’s going to get caught … she must know that.’
‘I doubt she cares about herself anymore,’ Heck said. ‘She’s been planning all this time to punish you, Gemma – if not ridicule you in the eyes of the nation, to kill you. Brutally, slowly. And now look … you’ve got most of the villagers away, plus you’ve survived. Not only will you be a hero, you’ll be a live hero.’
He glanced behind – just in time to see the distant blip of Mary-Ellen’s vessel come veering around the bend into the beck, its passenger working furiously with her two-bladed paddle. Again, even though there was maybe eighty yards between them, he could see that she was gaining ground. In normal circumstances, two to one, they ought to be outpacing her with ease, but Gemma was too stiff with pain to help in any way. On top of that, Mary-Ellen was the ace athlete and an experienced kayaker.
Heck looked around frantically. They were currently passing leafless trees on the north bank and quiet waterside meadows on the south, but some thirty yards back from the river on this latter side, vaguely misted by vapour but still identifiable, stood a row of four hollow, half-built structures. Holiday maisonettes almost certainly, being adapted from more ancient farm buildings. The area around them was cluttered with prefab cabins, cement mixers, piles of building materials, hand-tools and the like, the ground muddy and slashed by caterpillar tracks.
Without conferring on the matter, Heck turned the blade of his paddle, bringing them towards the south bank, the canoe grounding itself on sand and shingle.
‘What’re we doing?’ Gemma asked.
‘Sorry, but you’re right.’ He took her by the elbow and helped her out. ‘Once she gets close, we’ll be sitting ducks on this river …’
‘Is there somewhere here we can hide?’ Gemma asked, as he hustled her forward.
‘We’ll see …’
The maisonettes swam fully into view, their river-facing side covered with scaffolding and hanging plastic.
‘Hell, Heck … what is this, a bloody building site?’
‘It’ll do!’
‘Just so you …’ Gemma’s bottom lip was bloodied, she’d bitten it so hard. Though he dragged her forward mercilessly, she could barely even hobble. ‘Just so you know … I can’t go much further …’
‘With luck, you won’t need to.’ He forced her under the site’s single boundary rope.
‘Maybe … maybe there’s a security guard who can make a call,’ she stuttered.
‘Nope. They tend not to need security up here.’
The gaunt shadow of the maisonettes fell over them.
‘Course not,’ she replied. ‘Not a bad ’un for miles, eh?’
Chapter 35
The Stranger’s scorched uniform clung to her in tatters, adhering to the blistered, purulent flesh underneath. She couldn’t imagine what she looked like, but for the moment that mattered no more than the pain itself: it was something she could deal with later. If there was going to be a later. Not that she cared one way or the other, so long as she finished the task she’d set herself.
Pointed statements had been made about her earlier on: that she was scum, a sadistic pipsqueak.
Well, she couldn’t deny it. What she was and what she did revolted her. This very night alone she’d several times puked as her innate self-loathing had threatened to overwhelm her. But they were far past the stage of backing out now. The task was everything – to show the world she was here, she was back, that she’d never gone away, that they couldn’t attribute her work to anyone else, no matter how hard they tried, no matter how blind they were to the innocence of those they despised, especially that one whose life they’d so callously taken. The one known only as ‘Dada’, with all the wonderful things that had entailed: the affection, the care, the shield against a hostile world, the endless, unconditional love. So what if he’d had demons inside him that he’d needed to extinguish? All men did.
The Stranger herself did.
And she was about to extinguish them right now.
She stooped under the rope and limped into the building site. She’d only caught a fleeting glimpse of them before they’d dodged out of sight. But they couldn’t have gone far. She might be hurt, but she had the edge on them in everything: fitness, aggression, guile. She’d toyed with Heck, the strongest among them, all night, running rings around him in the fog, chasing him along the Cradle, knocking off his friends and helpers one by one, even blowing up his police station. Oh, that had been a hoot.
But this was no time for dwelling on past victories.
The Stranger stood and listened, but heard only her own breathing as it rasped between her teeth. The echoing structures of the half-built maisonettes with their vast exoskeleton of scaffolding, were the obvious place to start. They might contain a hundred niches where two injured, weary creatures could hide. But before she could commence searching, she heard something: a low mumbling.
She flattened herself against a stack of polythene-covered house-bricks to listen.
There was no question: it was voices. A man and a woman conversing quietly.
At least, they thought it was quietly. Their heads were probably still ringing after their violent trip down the Race. In addition, they’d have no clue how much an animal of the night the Stranger was – how superior she was in the dark, how sharp her senses, how acute her hearing. How this was her hunting ground, her natural home.
She slid to the first corner of the bricks and glanced up. The voices emanated from one of the higher floors of the maisonettes, the first or second storey. The Stranger had no idea whether there’d be stairs inside the big, half-built structures. But a stair would be a risk anyway; using the most obvious route up would make her an easier target than she cared for. Of course, there was another way to approach.
She nipped across the open ground at the foot of the scaffolding, and stepped underneath it to avoid being seen from overhead. The maisonettes were open at the front, so from here she could see right through to the back of them. They were indeed empty shells, nothing but bare, grey concrete inside their outer carapace of Lakeland slate, their floors and walls blank except for the odd builder’s chalk-mark, their only contents a few heaps of cement sacks in the far corner of the ground floor beyond the brand-new fireplace. She glanced upward again. Nothing was clearly visible: too many cross-beams, wood and metal interspersed, too much polythene sheeting. But she could still hear that subdued conversation, so clearly she could even distinguish the man and the woman’s individual voices.
The Stranger checked the Glock she’d used on the way down the Race; its magazine carried seventeen shots, and she’d fired at least twelve. The five remaining might not be enough to ensure she’d take Heck d
own, so she ejected the clip, slammed another into place and tucked the Glock into her belt. Reaching back under her burned jacket, she drew out a second Glock, another gift from the armed police car. This one was already fully loaded. She’d reserve that one for Piper, she thought, tucking it into her belt alongside the first, and beginning to climb, ascending slowly and painfully through the framework, the bars and pins creaking, juddering, but all the way hearing that unbroken conversation overhead.
It sounded as if Piper was in pain. The Stranger smiled; the bitch didn’t know the meaning of real agony yet. Seventeen rounds from a Glock would change all that, starting from the legs up.
She reached the first timber catwalk, which lay roughly parallel with the first floor of the maisonettes, and paused to listen. Still they were muttering together. She glanced around. About ten yards behind, a ladder slanted up to the next catwalk, vanishing through a hatch. She hobbled down to it, halting at the bottom, listening. Their tones were fraught. Drawing the first Glock, she clamped it between her teeth. It hurt appallingly – just opening her blistered mouth was torture, but anything was endurable at this stage. She started up slowly, watching the hatch overhead like a hawk, but from the ongoing murmur she was confident they hadn’t yet realised she was here.
The Stranger emerged through the hatch, unscathed. They were very close – she could now hear them clearly.
‘Try and relax,’ Heck said. ‘It may be you’ve just slipped a disc …’
‘Are you a doctor?’ Gemma replied sharply. ‘How can you damn well tell?’
At the extreme end of the catwalk hung a sheet of opaque polythene. The voices were on the other side. A pistol in either hand, the Stranger zeroed in.
‘Why have a go at me?’ Heck protested. ‘I’ve kept you alive this long, haven’t I?’
‘You’ve kept me alive? That’s a good one!’
‘Hey, it’s time you were told what’s what …’
The Stranger grinned again. The timber walk seemed loose beneath her feet. In fact the entire scaffold wobbled, but that didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered now.
She yanked the polythene curtain back.
And found herself confronting not Heck and Gemma, but a builder’s sawhorse, and standing on top of it, a Dictaphone.
‘You’re such a smartarse,’ Gemma’s voice intoned.
‘You think you’re someone special,’ Heck’s voice added, ‘but in fact you’re a demented little nobody who’s totally lost the plot …’
Taking his cue from Mary-Ellen’s screeches of birdlike outrage, Heck stepped out from the ground-floor room, shook off a layer of cement dust from the bags he and Gemma had been hidden under, and swung with a sledgehammer at the nearest scaffolding support, the one whose nuts and bolts he’d already carefully loosened.
Three heavy blows were all it took, and the support fell away.
Heck leapt backward into the interior of the building, as the entire scaffolding structure began to collapse in on itself. It seemed to happen in slow motion, and yet resulted in a monumental deluge of smashing wood and twisting, screaming steel.
Mary-Ellen didn’t fall straight away. The catwalk beneath her collapsed immediately, but she snatched at a parallel bar and hung there, some thirty feet up. However, her gloves had no real grip, plus more and more pieces of metalwork plummeted past from above, several clouting her en route, so at last she dropped with them, vanishing without a sound into the dust-enshrouded mass of clattering poles and booming, shattering timber. Even then it didn’t end; section after section crashing down, each landing on top of the one before with shuddering force, sparks flying, fountains of mud and dirt exploding as the earth was brutally gouged.
When Heck and Gemma finally emerged from their shelter several minutes later, wafting at dust, it was only when they were sure the avalanche of steel was over. They beheld a building site flattened beneath mounds of contorted wreckage, which seemed to stretch as far in every direction as the diminishing fog would allow. It took several more minutes for Heck to locate Mary-Ellen, and pick his way through to her.
She wasn’t so much submerged beneath the heavy, broken materials, as mangled by them; beaten, torn, hammered into the churned, bloody ground. The mere glimpses of her body permitted by the tangled metal told him all he needed to know.
Ironically, the only part of her untouched by falling steel was the only part properly exposed, which was her face, and yet the earlier fire had already scoured this clean. All her female features had gone. A sexless, skinless visage stared unblinkingly up at Heck as he sat alongside her. Initially there wasn’t a lot he could say. But then he spotted something lying nearby. He rooted through the debris and produced the Dictaphone, which he was pleased to dust off and find was still in working order.
‘Lucky …’ Her voice was a hoarse croak; the mere act of trying to speak inducing a choked cough; thick, purplish syrup oozed from her gash of a mouth. ‘Lucky again, uh … Heck …?’
‘Winners make their own luck, M-E, haven’t you heard? But let’s not waste anymore time when there are so many people in need of assistance this morning.’ He hit the ‘Record’ switch and held it down to her. ‘Do you want to make a dying declaration?’
‘Just this … he’s still out there …’ More bloody ichor dribbled down her blistered jaw. ‘He’ll always … always be out there …’ She gave a throaty gurgle, which Heck didn’t at first identify as a chuckle.
‘Okay, I hear that,’ he said. ‘How about your father then? Anything you can tell me about him. His name, where you buried him …?’
‘That … won’t do you any good.’
Gemma now appeared, looking weak and pale, leaning on a broken scaffolding pole. ‘It’s the best chance you’ve got to put things right, M-E.’
‘And you … you needn’t look so happy, Miss Piper …’
‘Nothing I see here is making me happy,’ Gemma said.
‘Saint Barbie, eh?’ Mary-Ellen treated them to a ghastly jack-o-lantern smile. ‘The … gun-toting Barbie doll whore. This isn’t over …’ Her lidless eyes rolled in agony. ‘Not … for you …’ More brackish red gunk welled from Mary-Ellen’s mouth as her breathing faltered. Her voice had fallen to a hoarse, barely audible whisper. Heck almost had to touch his device to her mouth. ‘The Stranger … is still … out there … in the dark. That’s … where he lives. You’ll try to avoid it, Gemma … I know. But sometime … in the future, you too will be out there … on your own. And then … then you’ll learn.’ She looked away, but her crooked smile remained unnaturally fixed, as if the dying nerve-ends had locked it in place.
Gemma shook her head. ‘You silly, vindictive child.’
‘No wisecracks, sarge …?’
Heck sighed. ‘If you’ve genuinely nothing to offer this world but hatred, M-E, you’re probably better off out of it.’
‘Doesn’t look like … like … got much choice …’
At which point Mary-Ellen’s fire-damaged eyes glazed over, her grinning mouth froze, and the last breath exhaled slowly and foully from her dismembered body.
Chapter 36
The fog had cleared by two o’clock.
Not a wisp of it remained, not even on the highest peaks. Once it had gone, the eerie, almost mystical atmosphere went with it, leaving behind another drab November day, cold and damp, autumnal-brown hillsides lowering under a slate-grey sky. Yet this was still the busiest afternoon in Cragwood Keld’s history, at least as far as Hazel could remember.
Helicopters lofted by overhead, while search teams – police, military and civilian – were trawling the surrounding fells. Rescue and emergency vehicles of every description were parked in numerous parts of the village, though mostly in those areas that hadn’t been taped off by groups of men and women in forensics garb. The air crackled with radio static and echoed to the yipping of police dogs. Hazel didn’t think she’d ever seen as many officers, either uniformed or in plainclothes, at one time. It all seemed terribly c
haotic, though she supposed there must be some level of organisation.
It still seemed incredible to her that all this appalling mayhem – life-changing events in so many ways, afflicting so many people – could have taken place in just twenty-four hours. At roughly this same time yesterday morning she’d arisen as usual, yawning, stretching, expecting another easy, uneventful day in the Lake District off-season. If it wasn’t for the grim detritus littered on all sides of her, it was possible she could still be persuaded that it had been an unreal dream.
That was evidence perhaps that she was still in shock, although she’d been looked over by a senior paramedic first thing that morning. She’d assured him she didn’t need it, and that she didn’t feel too bad – in fact that she didn’t feel anything at all. His response had been that this was abnormal and that in due course she’d realise this and would take the pills he recommended.
Maybe. For the moment though, she continued to wander what remained of the village, finally finding Heck at the bottom of the crater where Cragwood Keld police office had once stood. Both the Bomb Squad and the Fire Brigade had now cleared it for inspection, and apparently Heck had been one of the first ones down there. That had been half an hour ago, and he was still burrowing through the rubble.
The scraping of bricks as she descended alerted him to her presence. He turned, brushing his grubby hands on his sweatshirt, and half-smiled when he saw the big ginger tom-cat in her arms.
‘Gemma’s in hospital, I hear,’ Hazel said.
‘Damaged disc. No surgery required. Just rest. She’ll be fine.’
‘And how are you?’
‘The usual … bit frazzled round the edges, but I think I’ll be okay. How’s Buster?’ he asked, indicating the cat. With Ted Haveloc gone, it would now be minus one very caring owner.
‘Lost … a bit sad.’ In truth, the cat didn’t look either of those things, snuggling against her bosom as she squeezed him. ‘Not to worry, we’ll house him at the pub from now on.’
