Paul Finch - Dead Man Walking

Ramsdale remained blank-faced. ‘I’m hardly likely to, am I?’

That was a fairer comment than it sounded. The walls in these old farm cottages were several feet thick, and at this time of year all doors and windows would be closed, while both Ramsdale’s house, and Bessie’s house next door, were a good fifty or so yards from the parking area at the foot of the Track.

However, Ramsdale’s scathing tone provoked Heck into prolonging the interview. ‘They’d have had to be well off-course, I suppose …’

‘That could never happen, could it?’ Ramsdale scoffed. ‘Bunch of kids left to their own devices. Fucking up.’

‘These weren’t kids, sir.’

‘Oh, excuse me. Twenty-four years old. I bet they’ve seen everything.’

‘It just struck me that if they did get lost and come down this way, it would be the middle of the night … so they might have knocked on the door, asked for shelter.’

‘Nobody did. I just told you.’

‘Maybe a drop of tea … to warm them up?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Or just to ask directions. I’m sure even you wouldn’t have had a problem providing those, Mr Ramsdale.’

Ramsdale smiled thinly. Despite his blustery exterior, he was no bully; he didn’t reserve his anger for those who couldn’t fight back. But he was intelligent enough to know not to get on the wrong side of the Cumbrian Constabulary. ‘Like I say, no one came here. But if you want to do a thorough job, Detective Heckenburg, it might be worth having a word with Longhorn next door.’

‘That’s already in hand, Mr Ramsdale. Just out of interest … you’re not going away anywhere are you?’

Ramsdale looked puzzled. ‘No.’

‘Good.’

‘Why?’

Heck shrugged as he backed away along the path. ‘We’ve got to stay on high alert until these girls are found. That means maintaining contact with all persons of interest.’

‘Persons of interest?’ Ramsdale’s cheeks reddened. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘Do I look like I’m laughing, Mr Ramsdale?’

The tall figure in the cottage doorway diminished into the fog as Heck walked back to the road. There was a thumping CLAP! as the door was slammed closed.

Heck turned in along the next path, and found Mary-Ellen and Bessie Longhorn standing by the side of the house, the exterior of which – mainly whitewashed pebble-dash – had been more recently maintained than Ramsdale’s.

‘This is a right how’d-you-do, isn’t it, Sergeant Heckenburg?’ Bessie said with her characteristic froglike grin. She was about five foot seven and of stocky build, though much of this was running to plump, with a mottled pink complexion and an unruly thatch of thinning gingery hair. As usual when outdoors, she wore an old duffle-coat and a shapeless chequered hat, which Heck suspected might have enjoyed a former existence as a tea-cosy. An electric torch was clutched in Bessie’s mittened hand.

‘Sure is, Bessie,’ Heck replied. ‘You got that right.’

Her cheeks turned a ruddy hue at the sound of her own name on Heck’s lips. It was Mary-Ellen who’d first concluded that their local handywoman liked the ‘tall, dark-haired detective sergeant’, and though it was something he hadn’t noticed before then, the impression was now impossible to shake.

‘I’ve got the keys for you,’ Bessie said, jangling said articles as she turned and led them primly down the cement path, the angled outline of the boathouse materialising ahead of them.

‘Bessie didn’t see or hear anything,’ Mary-Ellen said.

‘Dead quiet round here last night,’ Bessie said over her shoulder.

‘Mr Ramsdale didn’t hear anything either,’ Heck responded.

‘It’s a bad business, isn’t it, Sergeant Heckenburg?’ Bessie chattered as he unlocked the corrugated metal door. ‘If these lasses haven’t come down from the fells by now, something bad must have happened to them.’

Heck didn’t initially reply. There was something vaguely disturbing about that simple and yet undeniable logic.

‘Lots of places up there where they could just have got lost, Bessie,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘It’s not necessarily bad news.’

The door creaked open on the boathouse’s fetid interior. Bessie lurched in first, switching on her torch. The Witch Cradle Tarn police launch was actually a small outboard now adapted for official purposes. Despite it almost never needing to be used, it was old and in degraded condition, its hull scraped, its metalwork tarnished. Only its recently applied turquoise and yellow Battenberg flashes looked new. For all this, it was more than adequate to take them across the tarn to the east shore, which the two missing girls, if they’d followed the route Heck and Mary-Ellen suspected, might well have descended to, or in the worst-case scenario, could have fallen down to. The boat currently sat between two concrete piers, normally in about four feet of mucky brown water, though at present, owing to the heavy autumn rain, the tarn’s level was significantly higher.

Bessie handed the keys to Mary-Ellen, and walked to the end of the starboard pier, where she used a crank-handle to raise the roll-up door at the entry-port for the boat.Mary-Ellen climbed aboard, taking the wheel. Heck untied the mooring ropes, then jumped aboard as well, and the craft rumbled to life.

‘Just give us a knock when you get back, so I can lock up,’ Bessie called as they chugged out into the chill, foggy air.

‘No probs, Bessie!’ Heck called back, to which she no doubt blushed again.

With the tarn already having risen to its winter levels, the normal straight channel they’d follow for about a hundred yards through dense bulrushes before reaching open water was almost hidden. Only the tips of browning vegetation were visible, which made it considerably more difficult to steer along, especially in this monotone gloom. The last thing they needed was to get ropes of rotted herbage meshed around their propeller. But as with so many outdoor pursuits, Mary-Ellen was more than a dab hand. She stood at the helm, keeping them on a dead-straight course as they processed forward. If visibility had been bad on land, it was even worse over frigid water. Within seconds of solid ground disappearing behind them, they found they could see no distance in any direction. The outboard’s headlights were already activated, but Heck turned on the prow spotlight as well. This normally drove a broad wedge of luminescence for several hundred yards, though on this occasion it revealed nothing and in fact was reflected back on them with interest. He turned the spot on its pivot, but wherever it pointed there was a glaring backwash from the semi-liquid whiteness, every tendril of fog, every twist and spiral glowing as if phosphorescent.

‘East shore?’ Mary-Ellen asked, raising her voice over the engine.

‘Yeah, steady as you go though.’

‘Steady as I go.’ She cackled. ‘Aye aye, skip …’

‘You know what I bloody mean.’

Despite the potential seriousness of the situation, Mary-Ellen bawled with raucous laughter. ‘Only funning. Hey you’re my line-manager, Heck … I would never take the piss out of you for real!’

Mary-Ellen might only have been in the job four years, but she was a copper through and through. With a dark sense of humour and generally relaxed persona, she enjoyed her work and didn’t get fazed by its more onerous prospects. She had that all-important burning desire to ‘get up and at ’em!’, as she was fond of saying, and that was something Heck heartily approved of. You couldn’t play at being a copper; to be effective in the job, you had to fully absorb yourself in it. So many learned that on the first day. Those with sense got out quickly; those who hung on, looking constantly for inside work, only made life difficult for all the rest. Not so Mary-Ellen. Her previous beat, Richmond-upon-Thames, was pretty sedate by normal London standards, though it also encompassed both banks of the Thames and boasted over twenty miles of river frontage, so she was no stranger to pulling bodies out of the drink – which gave an additional explanation for her irreverent attitude now. That said, she was still unlikely to have scoured any body of water quite like this one.