four hours? And what’s all this “Ms Carter” stuff? I think she’d prefer Hazel.’
‘And I’d prefer it if you weren’t so bloody close to her. We’re doing a job here, not playing out some romantic melodrama.’
‘Hey … she’s just found a friend dead and now she’s being chased by a madman. So cut her some bloody slack, eh!’
‘Watch your tone, sergeant …’
‘I don’t need to watch anything. I’ll defer to your rank … ma’am. But as I’m the one with operational command, you’re not my bloody gaffer. Or anything else.’
But five minutes later, when they slid through another stile and found themselves on a path that ascended sharply, mainly by forming switchbacks through heaps of fallen slate, he began to wonder.
‘Hazel … where are you taking us?’
‘I told you … the hills.’
‘Where in the hills?’
‘Anywhere away from Fellstead Grange, don’t you think?’
‘This is great,’ Gemma said. ‘If we’d stopped and thought, we could probably have worked our way back to the Track, and then it would all have been downhill.’
‘You think we’d have made it, Superintendent Piper?’ Hazel wondered as they tottered upward. ‘We’d have had to go right past the house. What if he’d intercepted us there?’
‘He probably wouldn’t even have seen us,’ Gemma retorted.
‘That’d be a gamble,’ Heck said. ‘He hasn’t had a problem seeing us so far.’
Gemma glanced sideways at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ll be honest, I’m thinking thermal imaging …’
‘Dear God!’ Gemma said. ‘If he’s got something like that, he can spot us up here on the fell-side as easily as he could down in the farmyard.’
‘Agreed. So we’ve got to get a move on …’
Renewed fear fuelled their uphill flight. Lungs working like bellows, muscle-blood pumping hard, they continued up a path which in some sections was more like a stepladder, ascending tier after tier of broken ground, tripping on ruts and loose stones. To make life worse, the path branched several times. On each occasion Hazel dithered, uncertain of the route, but Heck always urged her on. Once they were past the aprons of scree, the fell-side steepened to the point where it became impassable, the path meandering sideways, a ledge hanging above a mist-filled abyss. They scrambled along it in single file, all the while thinking how badly exposed they were, how their foe might be scoping the fog with some hi-tech device. Abruptly, they slid to another halt. Hazel, who was at the front, slammed her torch on.
‘Ms Carter, that’s not a good idea!’ Gemma said.
‘I need to,’ Hazel replied. ‘We’ve already passed so many of these, I don’t know where we are anymore.’
The path had branched again, the right-hand route tilting back downhill, the left-hand route ascending sharply.
‘Which way?’ Heck said.
‘I’m thinking …’
‘Which bloody way?’
‘Stop rushing me, Mark … we could have gone wrong half a dozen times already.’
He glanced over his shoulder. The torchlight limned the vapour with a near-phosphorescent glow. Nothing stirred. He strained his ears, but all he initially heard was the wheezing of his own breath, the thunder of blood in his ears.
‘Left,’ Hazel decided.
‘Uphill again?’ Gemma said wearily.
‘We go back down into the corrie, he could be waiting there for us.’
‘Not if he’s chased us up the path.’ Gemma glanced around at Heck. ‘Any sign we’re being followed?’
Heck motioned for quiet. Still they heard nothing, which gave them no clue either way. It might be the madman was down there somewhere, watching, waiting for them to re-descend. On the other hand, he could have prowled up after them, and even now was stealthily encroaching.
‘If we keep going uphill, we make it harder for him,’ Hazel said, snapping off her torch. ‘Besides, you ever tried running down a scree-track in the dark?’
‘No disrespect, Ms Carter,’ Gemma said. ‘But we need a better plan than this. We know he’s been up in these fells before. He may know them like the back of his hand, he may be perfectly kitted out for them. But we aren’t.’
Hazel considered this. For several seconds, all Heck could hear was the declining rate of her breath. It was undeniable that plunging endlessly on into this blind, frozen wilderness would gain them no obvious advantage when they had no clue who their pursuer actually was, or even whether he was anywhere near – though that latter issue was resolved half a second later when they heard a scraping of slate on the path behind, and then a casual, tuneful whistling.
As always, it was Strangers in the Night.
They stood rigid. Thanks to the crazy mountain acoustics, he could still be over a hundred yards away. Alternatively, he might be much closer.
Heck pushed the women forward. ‘Go, go …’
‘Which way?’ Hazel moaned.
‘It doesn’t matter, just go …’
She took the left-hand path, heading to higher ground again. They were no longer concerned about noise. It was impossible to move quietly anyway. Loose slate clattered under their feet as they grunted and groaned their way up a zigzagging path that was so steep it might have been designed for goats. Only after ten minutes did it level out again, though now the ground ramped up both to the left and right of it, forming a gully. They ran on regardless. Soon walls of sheer rock hemmed them in from either side. After a few minutes, Heck, who was at the rear, stopped to listen – perhaps in some vain hope that merely keeping going would have been enough to put their pursuer off. It was amazing how quickly the clamour of Gemma and Hazel running on ahead faded. But it was equally amazing how the sound of someone advancing up the path behind them – heavy breathing and stumping footfalls – grew.
Heck sped on, thirty yards later running into the back of Gemma, who had halted for some reason, bowling her over.
‘What the hell …?’ he stuttered.
‘We’ve got trouble!’ she said, jumping back to her feet.
Hazel snapped her torch on. Its beam played over the rough surface of a plank barricade, which blocked all further progress along the path.
‘Oh God,’ Hazel said weakly. ‘I forgot all about this.’
The barricade had been painted with crude crimson letters:
DANGER! DO NOT USE VIA FERRATA UNSAFE!
‘What does this mean?’ Heck demanded.
‘It’s a Via Ferrata … don’t you know?’ Hazel was ash-pale in the torchlight; her hair hung in sweat-sodden strands. ‘Via Ferrata … it’s Italian, it means “iron road”.’
‘Oh … bloody hell,’ he said.
Gemma still looked perplexed.
‘They have these in mountains everywhere,’ Hazel added. ‘It’s like a fun thing. You know, for climbers and hikers. Plus it helps them get from one ridge to the next.’
‘You’d know it as a cable-walk or monkey run,’ Heck explained.
‘You mean like a rope bridge?’
‘Bit more solid than that.’
‘Except