Paul Finch - Dead Man Walking

‘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 climbers, not weekend adventurers.

‘Think we should get the launch out?’ Mary-Ellen asked.

‘Yeah.’ Heck finished his tea at a gulp. ‘I do.’

In times long past, further back than anyone living in the Cradle could remember, Cragwood Ho, at the north end of Witch Cradle Tarn, had been little more than a remote farming community. Back in the day, when no one even maintained the roads leading up to this place, let alone provided gas, electricity and hot water, it must have been a spectacularly isolated spot.

It certainly felt that way today. ‘The Ho’, as it was known locally, was three miles due north of ‘the Keld’, and connected by a single-track lane, which proceeded in a more or less straight line along the tarn’s edge, occasionally looping inward amid dense stands of pine and larch. Always to its left stood the steep, scree-cluttered slope ascending to Harrison Stickle. Though narrow, the road was usually bare of traffic during the off-season, and relatively safe. Though on this occasion, with visibility so appalling, progress was reduced to a torturous crawl. Veils of milk-white vapour reduced their vision to two or three yards, while even full headlight beams failed to penetrate more than a foot or so beyond that.

‘Anyone lost on the fells in this is gonna be in real trouble,’ Mary-Ellen said, zipping her black anorak. The Land Rover was warm inside, but it had a chilling effect just peering into the shifting blankness.

‘Yep,’ Heck muttered.

‘Especially if they’re new to the area.’

He nodded again. The Pikes were not hugely extensive, but they were dominant features even in the dramatic heart of the Lake District; colossal granite pyramids, with deep, wooded glens knifing through the middle of them, and fast becks tumbling and cascading down their rolling, rocky slopes. A playground for the fit and energetic, certainly; but a trackless region too, which required knowledge and athleticism to navigate on foot. And now, of course, something else had occurred to him.

‘I don’t want to overstate the importance of this, M-E, but just after midnight last night I heard what sounded like gunfire.’

She glanced sidelong at him as she drove. ‘Where?’

‘Up in the fells.’

‘Any particular direction?’

‘Impossible to say. It was only one shot too, so … I don’t know, I might have been mistaken.’

Mary-Ellen pondered this.

‘You didn’t hear anything?’ he asked.

‘Nah. Hit the sack well before then. You know me. Sleep like a log.’

They cruised on at a steady six miles per hour, though even then it felt as if they were taking a chance. When a stag emerged from the fog in front of them, they had to jam on the brakes. The majestic beast had simply stepped from the vapour, little more than an outline in the misted glow of their lights, just about identifiable by its tall profile and the handsome spread of its antlers. It stood stock-still for a second, and then galloped off into the roadside foliage.

‘Probably the last living thing we’ll see out here,’ Mary-Ellen commented, easing back onto the gas.

‘Don’t know whether to hope you’re right or wrong,’ Heck replied.

He’d often heard the saying ‘no news is good news’, and couldn’t think of any dictum more worthless. At present, for example, they had almost nothing to go on. Before setting out, he’d checked with Windermere Comms, and had been given an update, which was mainly that there was no update, though they’d also been informed that, owing to the conditions, effective Mountain Rescue operations would be difficult – they might even be suspended – and it was certainly the case that no RAF helicopters could go up. Despite everything, it was deemed unlikely the two girls would have strayed from their intended route as far west as the Cradle, which was kind of encouraging, though the downside of this was that no extra bodies were being sent over here to assist. In the event there was a problem, Heck and Mary-Ellen were pretty much on their own.