now taken up by a camping bed, on which the casualty, her more serious wounds dressed and bound, was reclining. Mary-Ellen was crammed in there alongside her, scribbling anything Tara could recollect into her pocketbook. The ambulance scheduled to take the casualty down to the Westmorland General Hospital, in Kendal – the nearest medical facility capable of dealing with a gunshot wound – had still not arrived. Nor had any supervision units from Windermere. In the meantime, they’d done the best they could, bringing Tara Cook directly back to Cragwood Keld in the police launch, which was now tied up down at the public jetty near to The Witch’s Kettle, and applying as much first aid as possible. Their cause was assisted by Tara Cook’s apparent determination to survive. She’d suffered a nasty-looking wound, but in reality the attacker had only winged her, which was understandable in such poor visibility. This started Heck thinking again.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘the Stranger was never accounted for, was he?’
‘Heck … that was ten years ago. And I shot him through the left side of his chest. That wound had to be fatal.’
‘But you didn’t see him die. The Stranger taskforce never found his body, and they dragged that mire for days afterwards.’
‘Why would he suddenly reappear now?’
‘I don’t know, but I’d be interested in finding out.’
‘Did he try to rape or rob these girls?’
‘We don’t know what he did with the girl he clobbered. We haven’t been able to get up there yet, and there’s no sign of a body down at this level.’
‘You say he shot the second girl? Well that wasn’t the Stranger’s MO, Heck. He never carried a firearm.’
‘Which he’s probably always considered a big mistake. I mean, it all went swimmingly for him until the night he met a nice-looking chick packing a .38.’
There was another long pause. Gemma was the arch-professional. Not just a top-notch administrator, but a highly organised investigator. She rarely let emotion get in the way of cool-headed logic, but he knew she’d been haunted all her career by the very close call she’d had at the hands of the Stranger back in 2004.
Despite that, she was clearly making an effort to be realistic. ‘Heck, as far as British law enforcement is concerned, the Stranger is dead. Not just because he suffered a deadly wound, but because no further victims were reported.’
‘Suppose he modified his MO. Suppose he didn’t just start carrying a gun when he went on the job, suppose he cleared off to another part of the country to do it. I mean, we know he’s a Scot. Up here in the Lakes, he’s only an hour from the border.’
‘Ten years ago, Heck …’
‘Yeah, but like you say, you shot him. Suppose he survived but was badly damaged. It might have taken a decade for him to recover his health.’
She sighed, though it didn’t sound like a sigh of frustration; more a sigh of puzzlement. ‘Heck … what do you want me to do about this?’
‘Well, now you mention it … nothing.’
‘Come again?’
‘I’m drawing this to your attention, ma’am, because I still respect you. And because I’d like to think we’re still friends to some degree. Plus I thought you might be interested. And you are, I can tell. If you remember, the Stranger taskforce never publicised that intelligence about the Frank Sinatra song.’
This was another key factor in Heck’s thinking. The original investigation team had avoided any public mention of Strangers in the Night. Firstly on the grounds the song was actually irrelevant to the case at the time, but secondly because cranks had a habit of putting themselves forward as serial killer candidates, so it was always useful to withhold one small detail.
‘What’s the current status of the enquiry?’ Gemma asked.
‘It’s not even started. I’ll be accompanying the casualty down to Westmorland General just as soon as the ambulance gets here. And then liaising with DI Mabelthorpe from Windermere nick.’
‘And this assault happened around midnight?’ She sounded unimpressed. ‘That’s almost eleven hours ago. Life moves at a slower pace up there, eh?’
‘Ma’am, we only found Tara Cook an hour and a half ago. And this fog is literally so bad we can’t get a chopper up to examine the main crime scene. In fact, we don’t even know where the crime scene is. Tara Cook reckons they’d been wandering for hours, lost, when they were attacked.’
‘Heck … this couldn’t just be some wandering maniac?’
‘The chances of that are a hundred to one, ma’am. First of all that any such person would exist up here without us already knowing it, especially as he’s armed. Secondly that he could have run into these girls in the fog purely by accident.’
‘You think he’d stalked them from earlier?’
‘Somehow or other he must’ve known where they’d be. I mean, stalking would be the Stranger’s style, wouldn’t it? From what I remember. He used to pick his targets in the pubs around the West Country, followed them for a couple of hours before they’d parked up somewhere and got down to it …’
Gemma went silent again, and this time he heard her fingers hitting a keyboard. The Serial Crimes Unit, which she headed, was one of the busiest offices in Scotland Yard’s elite National Crime Group. It existed solely to investigate or assist in the investigations of series or clusters of connected violent crimes, wherever in England and Wales they might occur. It was a near-certainty she’d have other important tasks to be getting on with as well as this.
‘Anyway, that’s it, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d give you a heads-up …’
‘And this suspect was definitely whistling Strangers in the Night? The witness is quite sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t prompt that from her in any way?’
‘Definitely not.’ Tara Cook had begun mumbling the moment Heck had carried her out to the boat and laid her on the deck, but they’d been halfway across the tarn, en route straight to the Keld, before he’d realised what she was actually saying. With her reeling senses and battered mouth, it had been difficult getting anything intelligible from her. She’d clutched at him and Mary-Ellen with hands like talons, burbling, weeping, showing remarkable animation for someone so badly hurt. ‘Din’ see his face. No face … but that song. Stran’ in the Ni’. Kept on whistling it while he was creeping after us. Strangers in the Night …’
‘That was the main thing she remembered about him,’ Heck said. ‘The song. Absolutely petrified her. Sounds like he was playing cat and mouse with them for quite a while before he struck.’
As he relayed all this, Heck wondered again about his own experience on the tarn’s east shore, specifically the chuckle he thought he’d heard. Hadn’t Gemma once described her assailant on Dartmoor as having a snorting, pig-like chuckle? Of course, there was no guarantee he’d actually heard anything. He’d been so isolated at the time by the mist and the trees and the icy, ear-numbing silence that his senses had been scrambled.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be part of this investigation once it kicks into action, ma’am,’ he added. ‘But if you’re interested, I’ll try and update you regularly.’
‘Do that by all means … if you wish.’
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘If I wish?’
‘The song’s most likely a coincidence, Heck.’ By her tone, she was quite decided on that. ‘For all we know, your perp could be some kind of crooner obsessive. And the fact he ran into two girls is exactly how it sounds – he ran into them. He got lucky.’
‘Just like the Stranger did ten years ago, you mean? Having carefully