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‘I could say the same about yours … now get out!’
He leapfrogged into the recess, and scrambled forward on hands and knees, poking his head out and seeing a lower section of slanted roof about five feet below, covered in broken, lichen-covered slates. Hazel was already halfway down it on her backside. She’d shortly reach the eaves, from where it would be no more than a seven-foot drop. Heck scrabbled out in pursuit, landing hands-first on the sloped surface, shattering a dozen more tiles, hearing the woodwork crack underneath, but now rolling sideways, coming up hard against Hazel’s back, causing her to yelp.
He glanced backward and up. ‘Gemma?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, appearing in the window. ‘Just go!’
Heck and Hazel leapt from the roof side-by-side, Gemma following half a second later. Without stopping to talk, they ran forward and away from the house. Heck looked back once, seeing a black aperture where the hatch to an old coal-cellar had been pried open – which clearly explained how the killer had first gained access to the property. Not that there was time to ponder this. They ploughed through icy fog, which seemed even denser than earlier, keeping their torches switched off; the gunman would hear them easily enough without them leaving him a beacon. And yet almost immediately they came unstuck. Within a few dozen yards, they were staggering across strips of ground cordoned by knee-high net-wire fencing, some planted with rows of vegetables, others filled with rubbish and old straw. Beyond these, they stumbled between chicken-sheds and other dilapidated structures which they had to veer around or scrabble over. As such, they lost all sense of direction, only keeping together because they clung on to each other.
From behind them, there was an echoing thump.
‘Front door,’ Heck breathed. ‘He’s coming after us. Keep moving.’
But now they hesitated. Low sheds lay on all sides. Alleys led in various directions.
‘Which way?’ Gemma said. ‘We can’t just run blind. If we come to that beck, or to a scree slope or something, and he’s right behind us …’
‘Keep heading away from the house in a straight line,’ Hazel advised, panting.
‘How do we know it’s a straight line?’
‘As long as all these paddocks and farm structures are here, we know we’re crossing Annie’s farmyard. Most of them are directly behind her house.’
‘And then what, Ms Carter?’ Gemma asked.
‘There’s a path up into the hills.’
‘You mean the Track?’ Heck said.
‘No, a smaller one. Annie once told me she didn’t like it when walkers used it, as it brought them down into the corrie behind her house.’
‘How steep is this smaller path?’ Gemma wondered.
‘It’s just as steep for him as it is for us,’ Hazel replied tartly.
With no option, they hurried on, coming to a broad thoroughfare of beaten earth running straight through the middle of the allotments.
‘This is the main passage across the yard,’ Hazel almost shouted. ‘It leads straight to the hills.’ She took off quickly, the other two hurrying in pursuit.
‘And what do we do when we get up into these hills?’ Gemma asked Heck quietly. ‘How is that going to help us exactly?’
‘Hazel’s a local,’ he answered. ‘She knows her way around.’
‘She’s a pub landlady, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Yeah, but she’s been up here thirty-eight years, whereas I’ve been here two and a half months, and you’ve been here … what, 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 that this one’s closed,’ Hazel said. ‘It’s been closed for about five months. The pins will have rusted or the cables frayed, or something.’
‘So … is that it?’ Gemma asked, incredulous. ‘This is as far as we go?’
Heck turned his torch on and shone it up the canyon walls on either side, but they were sheer, offering no visible escape.
A shot was fired.
It was difficult to say how far back along the passage it was fired from. And thankfully it wasn’t a clear shot, caroming from the left-hand wall and ricocheting from the right, before smashing a hole through the planking on the left of them. Both Gemma and Hazel dropped to crouches, the latter just managing to suppress a scream. Heck spun to face the barricade.
‘Either he can’t see us, or he’s a crap shot, or both!’ he said, tearing with his fingers at the splintery-edged bullet hole, then stepping back and kicking with his right foot. ‘Either way, we’ve no choice now!’
‘You’re going across the bridge?’ Hazel said, eyes bugging.
‘Not just me,’ he responded.
Gemma joined him, ripping and rending, pulling the planks apart until there was space for a body.
‘Go!’ Heck ushered her through, then leaned down and grabbed Hazel by the arm.
‘I’m not going through there,’ she said hoarsely.
‘Hazel … if this guy’s who I think he is, he used to open women up like tins of dog-meat.’
‘But it’s not safe …’
‘We’ve got to try.’ He yanked her to her feet and hauled her through the shattered barricade after him.
On the other side, they crossed an open flat area like a small plateau, before hitting a rusty iron safety-barrier, which was the only thing stopping them pitching over an edge into a terrible gulf.
‘Here!’ Gemma said, emerging from the fog on their left.
They felt their way along the barrier, the plateau narrowing until soon they were on another ledge. This narrowed too until it was replaced by a timber catwalk. The safety-barrier now gave way to a row of upright steel pegs, each about three feet tall, equidistant from each other and connected by chains, though both the pegs and the chains were corroded, and in some cases missing. The footing comprised loose, uneven planking, which creaked and shifted. Just thinking about the bottomless mist underneath it stiffened Heck’s hair. Again, they could only progress in single file and now did so by hugging the left-hand rock-face, which though it sloped as it ascended away from them, was rubbed smooth by the numberless hands and bodies that had sidled along it, offering no purchase if the structure suddenly collapsed – which it threatened to constantly, shaking, shuddering, pins swivelling in their holes.
Some fifty yards later, they reached a chunk of timber decking jutting from the cliff-face. This at least felt secure, though it was small, no more than four feet by four. From here, the only progress possible lay out across the chasm courtesy of the Via Ferrata. In appearance, it was a V-shaped bridge constructed entirely from steel cables so old and rotted they were crabbed with rust. Two cables in particular served as hand-rails, one on either side at roughly waist-height, connected by occasional lengths of wire to the single cable serving as the footway. This was thicker than the other two, but any person walking along it would have to tread with care, each foot planted crosswise as though he were traversing a tightrope. By the foggy light of their torches, the structure protruded no more than ten yards before this too was hidden in fog.
They stood there, paralysed.
‘If this thing’s unsafe,’ Hazel said in an eerie monotone voice, ‘we surely can’t risk it all at the same time. I mean, the combined weight …’
Immediately, the wires and cabling along the ledge behind began to vibrate. Heck stared at Hazel, then at Gemma – even she wore an expression glazed by fear. The metallic vibrations resolved themselves into repeated heavy clanking: the sound of footfalls approaching. Still none of them moved.
