Paul Finch - Dead Man Walking

It was indeed a body, by the looks of it female, but in a woeful state: much more heavily bloodied than they’d seen from the boat, at first glance lying motionless and face-down in the water, its string-like fair hair swirling around its head. At the very least, its left arm, the one folded backward, was badly broken, while the other was concealed from view because the bedraggled form was wedged on its right side.

Heck leaned down, placing two fingers to the neck. It was ice-cold and clammy; there was no discernible pulse.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He felt around under the face to check the nose and mouth were elevated from the water. Now that it was slopping and splashing, it covered them intermittently, but it hadn’t done this sufficiently to wash away a crust of congealed blood caking the nostrils and lips. Heck scraped what he could of that away, to free the air-passages. ‘I know it’s non-textbook,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got to move her from here right now. If we don’t, she’ll drown. You got a filter valve?’

‘In the first-aid kit,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘Hang on, you’re saying she’s still alive?’

‘Dunno, but she was still bleeding when she washed up here. Here!’ He tossed his phone over to her.

‘Heck, there’s no signal …’

‘Never mind that, get a couple of quick shots – the body and the location where we found it. Every angle. Hurry.’ Mary-Ellen did as he asked. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We can’t drag her, so we’re going to have to lift. Take her legs.’

Mary-Ellen plunged into waist-deep water, and manoeuvring herself into place, wrapped her arms around the body’s thighs.

‘Try and keep her horizontal, okay?’ Heck said, sliding his own hands under the armpits, supporting the casualty’s head against his thigh. ‘Minimum twisting and turning. Her left arm’s bent the wrong way over her back – looks horrible, but it’s best to leave it that way.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Okay … three, two, one …’

The girl’s body lifted easily. She wasn’t particularly heavy. But on raising her above the water, Heck saw something that shook him. The cagoule fabric covering her front right shoulder had burst outward, along with tatters of the woollen and cotton layers worn underneath, and what looked like strands of muscle tissue. Below that was a crimson cavity, from out of which red-tinted lake-water gurgled.

‘Christ!’ he said. ‘I think … I think she’s been shot!’

‘What?’

He craned his neck to survey the back of the victim’s right shoulder, and spotted a coin-sized hole in a corresponding position.

‘She’s been shot from behind.’

Mary-Ellen had turned chalk-white. ‘You serious?’

‘Quick, get her to shore.’

They splashed through the shallows until they mounted a low, shingle embankment a few yards in front of the pines, and laid the lifeless form carefully down. Heck applied the sterile valve and they attempted resuscitation – to no effect. They persisted for several minutes longer, still to no effect. No matter how good a copper you were, unless you also held a medical degree, you weren’t qualified to pronounce death – but this girl was just about as dead as anyone Heck had ever seen. Aside from the gunshot wound, she’d been severely brutalised, suffering repeated contusions to face and skull. That didn’t necessarily mean she’d taken a beating; it might be in accordance with the girl having fallen. The only way down to the tarn from the east fells was via steep gullies and perilous slopes.

Either way, this was now a crime scene.

‘I shouldn’t really do this,’ Heck said, feeling carefully into the girl’s pockets, ‘but on this occasion, establishing ID is pretty vital.’ He extricated a small leather purse containing credit cards. The name on all of these was Tara Cook.

‘So where’s the other one?’ Mary-Ellen wondered, giving voice to Heck’s own thoughts. He glanced at the foggy woods. Thick veils of vapour hung between the trunks. Nothing moved, and there was no sound.

‘Jane Dawson!’ he shouted. His voice carried, but still there was no response.

‘We need to get up on the tops and have a look,’ Mary-Ellen said.

Heck disagreed. ‘Two of us? Covering all those miles of empty fells? In fog like this? Be the biggest waste of police time in history. Besides, this is now a murder scene. We need to preserve it, and start the investigation. We also need to alert the local population – we don’t know if this danger has passed yet.’

‘I hear all that, Heck, but the other girl’s still missing. We can’t just ignore her.’

Heck chewed his lip with indecision. That Tara Cook was dead, a clear victim of homicidal violence, did not bode well for the vanished Jane Dawson. But climbing the fells to look for her – just the two of them – would be a hopeless, pointless task even if there hadn’t been dense fog. To have any hope of getting a result in these conditions would require extensive search teams experienced in mountain rescue, not to mention dogs, aircraft, the lot. But Mary-Ellen was right about one thing – they couldn’t just do nothing about the missing girl.

‘Perhaps check along the shore,’ he said. ‘If Jane Dawson made it down to the tarn as well, she might still be alive.’

Mary-Ellen nodded and disappeared into the trees, while Heck tried his radio again as he stood alongside the corpse, but gained no response, not even a crackle of static. He spent ten minutes on this before finally turning to the trees and calling for Mary-Ellen.

Now she didn’t respond either. He called again.

The maximum depth of the east shore wood could only be fifty yards or so, before the gradient sharpened upward and the mountainous scree became too harsh for any vegetation to have taken root there. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have wandered for a significant distance to the north or south.

‘Mary-Ellen!’ he called again, advancing into the woodland gloom, not liking the way his voice bounced back from the cliff-face towering overhead.

Behind him, the glare of the outboard spotlight penetrated through the trees in a misty zebra-stripe pattern. He moved a few dozen yards north, trying to avoid clattering the loose debris with his feet. That Mary-Ellen hadn’t so much as called back to him was not reassuring. How far could she have ventured in ten minutes? As he sidled away from the boat, the murk thickened. Soon the stanchions of the pines were no more than upright shadows. He halted again to listen – and to wonder for the first time how it was that a female hiker had been shot while rambling in this wilderness, and who by.

‘Mary-Ellen!’ he called, pressing on a little further. At his rear, the glow of the boat’s spotlight had diminished to a ruddy smudge.

He listened again. An incredible silence. Even if the policewoman had been doing no more than mooching about, he’d surely hear her.

But could someone else have heard her too?

Had that person already heard her and taken appropriate action?

As Heck backtracked towards the boat, he tried to calculate how much time had elapsed between now and the gunshot he’d heard the night before. A glance at his watch showed that it was just before nine-fifteen. He’d been disturbed in bed at quarter past midnight or thereabouts. So, nine hours in total. More than enough time for the killer to have long left the area. Assuming he actually wanted to leave.

Heck bypassed the point where the boat was moored. The corpse of Tara Cook lay where they had left it.

It would be impossible to second-guess the killer’s next move, because they had no clue about motive. But just suppose the fatal shot had been fired somewhere much higher up – on Fiend’s Fell for example – and the body had fallen down the cliff-side. With the tarn down here to break the fall, how could the killer be sure the victim was dead? Wasn’t it at least conceivable he would try to get down here, to check out the scene for himself? Heck headed south along the shore, more cold, dark fog embracing him. Even if the killer had clambered down here, nine hours was more than enough to locate the corpse, establish death and high-tail it away again.