was released, saw an arm slide out of sight, heard a distinctive click. Tara knew very little about guns, but she’d seen enough of them on the television to recognise when a firearm was being cocked.
That was the tipper. The moment the adrenaline broke her paralysis.
She twirled around, fighting back along the crooked defile into open space, and there barked her shins against low, unseen edges. She barely felt the pain; the main problem was that she fell sideways, winding herself, another sharp stone digging into her hip. From here, she scrambled along on her hands and knees, sensing rather than seeing the humanoid form emerging from the defile behind her. She knew it would be pointing the gun in her general direction. Tears streamed down her face as she jumped to her feet and started running again, blindly but desperately, putting as much distance as possible between them: ten yards, twenty, thirty, forty. Surely she was out of sight now? He couldn’t see her to shoot. Fifty yards, sixty …
Heck’s eyes flirted open.
A first he wasn’t sure what had disturbed him. Then he realised: a distant noise like a reverberating boom.
A gunshot … maybe.
He pushed the quilt aside, sat up and took his watch from the bedside table. Its neon numerals read: 00.18.
He hadn’t been asleep long. He got up, wandered across the bedroom and shifted the thin curtain. It was impossible to see anything out there. The fog was like grey sediment swirling in liquid.
‘What is it?’ Hazel asked sleepily.
‘Dunno. I thought … Did you hear something?’
‘Outside?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Like what?’
‘Not sure. Gunfire perhaps.’
She yawned. ‘That wouldn’t exactly be unusual around here.’
‘No,’ Heck conceded. He was still getting used to the idea that a much higher percentage of the population of this rural county held shotgun licences than they did back in the cities where he’d formerly worked. ‘Bit late at night though, isn’t it?’
‘Car backfiring?’
‘Perhaps.’ He hung around at the window a few moments, until a gentle susurration from the pillow indicated Hazel had gone back to sleep. Eventually, wondering if he’d dreamed it, he drifted back to bed.
Tara covered another fifty yards before she realised she’d been shot.
Initially it had been like a blow on the back of her shoulder. A hard one, of course. It had driven the wind out of her, but sheer terror kept her on her feet, kept her motoring forward. Now however, very suddenly, her strength was draining, an intense pain spreading through the top right quarter of her body. The arm itself had turned numb – she had no sensation below the elbow. Under her clothing, that whole side of her body swam with hot fluid.
‘Please,’ she mumbled as she lost the coordination of her limbs. Her balance was all out, her legs wobbling. She realised the darkness filling her eyes was no longer just the darkness of night and fog. When she tottered over the precipice, she could hardly be blamed, because she hadn’t even seen it.
Only vaguely aware she was falling, Tara spun downward for half a second, caroming outward from a jutting overhang made spongy by grass and rotted ferns, turning somersaults though icy emptiness, before hitting another shelf. This blow was phenomenal in its force, but again cushioned by sodden vegetation. Instinctively, she tried to grapple with it, but in mid-somersault all this did was wrench her left shoulder out of its socket and snap her humerus. In freefall again, she was engulfed by roaring, ice-cold water, and then hit by mud and rocks angled sharply downward, so that she slid on her back, until a heavy stone caught her feet and flipped her forward. Craggy edges tore at her ribs and rent her face, and then she was in mid-air again, descending through icy spume, the ear-pounding thunder of which overwhelmed all her senses.
‘It came over the wire during the early hours,’ Mary-Ellen said to Heck as he checked into Cragwood Keld police station at eight the following morning.
It wasn’t a real police station. It was located at the west end of the village, on a residential cul-de-sac called Hetherby Close, and was no more than a detached, whitewashed cottage which had been adapted for police use about ten years ago. It had stood empty for much of that time, only opening a few months back as part of ACPO’s new rural crime initiative. A Cumbria Police noticeboard and an emergency phone stood on the front lawn, and wanted and mis-per posters decked its porch, but though it had a small front desk just inside the glazed front door – which was only open to customers temporarily, as Mary-Ellen had to patrol as well as answer call-outs – there was no facility to hold prisoners. The main office, where Heck and Mary-Ellen’s desks faced each other over about three yards of carpet space, was in the rear of the building, where a large bay-window overlooked what had once been a garden, but was now a covered storage area for rescue and road-traffic equipment.
Heck yawned as he sipped his cup of tea.
Mary-Ellen read on through the email. ‘Ambleside Mountain Rescue got a call from the owner of a campsite up at Watendlath. He’s a bit concerned about two girls – a Jane Dawson and Tara Cook. Seems they checked out of his site a day early, said they were spending the last night of their holiday at Stagshaw View, which is a B&B in Ambleside. Then they set off on foot. He reckoned they must have been planning to yomp it through the northern Pikes. Trouble is, that was before the fog came down. He was already a bit worried, because he’d been observing them during the week and reckoned they were the most unprepared backpackers he’d ever seen. Around ten o’clock, when he saw what a pea-soup we were getting, he called Stagshaw View and was told the girls had never arrived. Called again at midnight, and at two – got the same response. He had emergency numbers for them – their own mobiles, which they weren’t answering, and numbers for their parents back in Manchester. He got in touch with them too, but they hadn’t heard anything from their daughters and didn’t even know they were missing. Now of course, the mums and dads are panicking.’
‘To be fair, we don’t know they’re missing yet,’ Heck said. ‘Not for sure.’
‘They still haven’t shown up.’
‘If they got caught in the fog last night, they might just have camped.’
‘The campsite owner said they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Anyway, this fog’s scheduled to last another day and night at least.’
Heck glanced through the connecting door to the front desk, and beyond that through the glazed front door to the outside, which was still concealed by an opaque grey curtain. It would be pretty nightmarish up on the fells, especially for someone with no experience and poor equipment.
‘If they were headed to Ambleside from Borrowdale, that’s some distance from here,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but Mountain Rescue reckon it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to get turned around in the fog. They’d most likely have tried to come around Ullscarf and Greenup Edge, rather than go over the top. If they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces by then, it would have been easy to mistake High Raise for Calf Crag. If they did, that would bring them over Pavey Ark and down through Fiend’s Fell to the east side of Witch Cradle Tarn. And in reduced visibility, well …’
She didn’t need to elaborate. Heck was no mountaineer, but he’d been up there just to acclimatise himself to the region, and Fiend’s Fell would be no laughing matter in fog. A notch in the White Stones crags, in appearance it was very dramatic – a vast, bowl-shaped grassland, windswept and strewn with boulders, and yet it ended abruptly, the land dropping precipitously away into the Cradle. There were various routes down from there – chimneys, ravines and even waterfalls – but these were strictly the domain of skilled and experienced