Dead Man Walking

‘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.