Dead Man Walking

‘Heck!’ Gemma called.

‘Gemma, get Hazel to safety!’

‘Sergeant Heckenburg, get back here this fucking instant!’

‘Go!’ he shouted again, almost overbalancing as another thunderous blow struck the bridge. The flimsy structure lurched to the left, and he had to clamp the cable on the right with both hands. A fog-filled chasm yawned directly beneath him.

What in the name of God was he doing?

It only struck Heck now that if the bridge collapsed while he was near the broken end of it, he’d have far less chance of surviving. Even clinging on, he’d have a much longer distance to travel.

‘Okay … okay!’ he said, forcibly getting hold of himself, suddenly baffled that he could ever have thought this was anything more than the stupidest idea in history.

He might die going the other way, but he’d certainly die going this way.

Fingers locked painfully into rusted steel, he pivoted back around, and began struggling forward again. All around him metalwork shuddered, one massive vibration following another as the suspension cables were assailed.

‘How you guys doing?’ he shouted, no longer able to see the two women.

This time there was no reply, but there was so much noise from the bridge that any responses were likely lost. He advanced with rash speed, leaning precariously to the right but not letting that worry him as he took longer and longer strides. It was still impossible to judge how much distance he was covering; there were no points of reference. With a reverberating CLUNG, the bridge sagged again, tilting even further to the right. Muffled shrieks tore through the fog. Yet the women had to be almost at the other side by now. It might have been Heck’s imagination, but the footway appeared to be sloping upward, as though he’d passed the dip at its centre.

‘Heck, where are you?’ someone called back. It was Gemma. Relief was palpable in her voice. ‘We’ve made …’

‘I’m almost there,’ he shouted, gravity tugging on him as he sidled along, corroded metal burning through his gloves, digging into the muscle and bones of his fingers. The bridge was definitely angling upward now. ‘Couple of min—’

It fell away beneath him.

Heck didn’t even hear the fatal blow.

All he knew was that another sharp vibration rocked the structure and that it flipped all the way to the right, before collapsing in a chaos of whining, whipping wires and cables. Heck’s body plummeted through mid-air, but by sheer instinct his left hand remained wrapped around the cable – and half a second later he wasn’t dropping like a stone so much as swinging like a pendulum.

The Via Ferrata had held its mooring on the far side.

One breathless second later, a granite wall hung with tufts of vegetation came hurtling towards him out of the fog. Heck gazed at it, goggle-eyed, knowing that any such impact would break him to pieces. But all the time he was losing altitude, and now he dropped below the level of the rock-face, heading instead for a steep, bracken-clad embankment. The next thing, he was crashing through layers of dead vegetation with pile-driving force. As well as knocking every ounce of wind out of him, the collision yanked him loose from the mass of twisting, screaming cable, and then he was falling backward downhill, turning head over heels, somersaulting through rotted, semi-frozen foliage, bouncing, spinning, hammering every part of his body on the shifting, ragged-edged rocks underneath, yet still protected by the bracken, which meshed itself thickly around him. Finally, after what seemed like minutes but was probably only seconds, he came to a dizzying, bone-numbing halt.

After that, there was only darkness.

And pain.

Chapter 16 (#ufb45d9e6-46c5-5f8c-8bd2-b0b486d4a788)

Heck had no clue how long he lay there for.

Firstly, because he was only semi-conscious. Secondly, because it was one of those slow disbelief moments, the sort people experience after emerging from terrible car crashes; when it seems somehow unjust that they’ve survived, when they probe gingerly and nervously around their limbs and body, increasingly baffled by the absence of extensive damage. Heck did exactly this, and though he discovered cuts and bruising, nothing appeared to be out of place. His vision was still obscured, but this time by broken stalks and tatters of brown leafage.

Heck rent all this aside as he sat slowly upright. He was still bathed in sweat, in fact his clothes were sodden, and it was noticeably chilling – aside from the warm stickiness caking the left side of his face. When he fingered this, he discovered that his left brow had split open. However, blood was only leaking out¸ suggesting even this wound was superficial. Still groggy, he gradually became aware of the jagged jumbles of rock underneath him, digging into his pummelled body, and of a distant ghostly voice calling his name from somewhere far overhead.

Despite the loose hillside shifting under his trainers, he rose painfully to his feet.

‘Mark!’ a frantic voice called again. ‘Mark!’

It actually sounded like two voices. Hazel and Gemma.

‘I’m okay!’ he tried to holler back, but he struggled to get enough air into his lungs. He took a second to compose himself – his back was hurting, his neck was hurting, his chest was hurting. Every damn part of him was hurting.

‘It’s okay,’ he bellowed, though the mere act felt as if someone had clobbered him in the ribs with a sledgehammer.

There was an abrupt, lingering silence, as they perhaps wondered if they were hearing things. ‘Mark …?’

‘I said I’m … I’m okay.’ Heck shook himself; just craning his head back to gaze upward was enough to send him dizzy, but at least the acoustics of the chasm enabled him to shout and be heard reasonably clearly. ‘Look, I don’t know how far down I am.’

‘You’re actually okay?’ That was Gemma. She sounded incredulous.

‘Think so …’

‘Anything broken?’

‘Not sure. Nothing that isn’t bruised, that’s for certain.’

‘Are you stuck?’

‘Seem to be at the top of a slope. I can probably work my way down from here, but I doubt there’s any way I can get up to you.’ There was another brief silence. He imagined them discussing the situation. ‘Does Hazel know where she is?’ he called up. ‘Can she work her way back into the Cradle?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Hazel replied. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ She didn’t sound as if she believed it either. ‘I thought you’d been killed for sure …’

‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘But you two may be. If he’s got a rifle, you’ll still be in range, so you need to back away from the edge. Make your way into the Cradle on foot. If nothing else, at least he’ll be off your back for the time being.’

‘But what’re you going to do?’

‘Same …’

‘Do you even know where you are?’

‘No, but heading downhill’s got to be a start.’

Chapter 17 (#ufb45d9e6-46c5-5f8c-8bd2-b0b486d4a788)

Hazel and Gemma walked through the fog for at least fifteen minutes after leaving the Via Ferrata, before encountering a rutted, unmade road, which, though Hazel felt she recognised it and said they should follow, seemed to weave a pointless course across the high, desolate fell-tops. Hazel said she thought she knew where it led to, though she wasn’t completely sure. Gemma was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, and followed her without speaking.

For a few moments back then Gemma had seriously thought Heck was dead. Not for the first time since they’d been working together, though on this occasion it had happened in front of her eyes – or at least it would have done, had the fog not screened him from her. It still surprised her how the breath had caught in her throat, how the heart had almost stopped throbbing in her breast. The near light-headed sensation when his voice had come echoing up to them had been startling. The brief tears Gemma had found herself blinking away had been tears of shock more than anything else – but it still peeved her.

Typical bloody Heck. The only bloke, apart from her father, who’d ever been able to make her cry. And he still managed to drive her up the wall even now, though they were based nearly three hundred miles apart. Of course, all this was explainable. They’d been together so long, emotionally as well as professionally. They were so familiar with each other. You couldn’t just switch off those kinds of feelings. But that was all it was now. Heck was a police colleague and a sometime friend. No wonder she’d been horrified to see him drop into that chasm.

This was what Gemma told herself.

Meanwhile, the road they were following didn’t actually seem to lead anywhere except to occasional sets of iron gates built into dry-stone walls, which were always chained and padlocked. On no occasion was there a stile to climb through, which indicated they were well off the hiker/tourist route. On all sides there lay only emptiness, unseen stretches of desolate moorland, swamped in monotonous grey. Inevitably, it took her back to the last time she’d encountered the Stranger. She’d had to get used to wild, dreary moorland on that occasion too. Of course, back then the boot had been on the other foot. That time it was the Stranger facing an imminent demise.

He should have been, after taking her bullet in his chest.