by Paul Finch
From some distant place, the woman heard a new song on the radio. A rich American voice poured through the nicely central-heated car.
Wondering in the night what were the chances …
A beastly chuckle, hideous and pig-like, snorted from the leather-clad face. Still dazed, the woman strained to see through the greenish, pain-hazed gloom. Frank Sinatra, she recalled. One of her father’s favourites. Old Blue Eyes, The Voice, the Sultan of Swoon …
‘Looks like they’re playing my tune,’ the intruder said, as the final button snapped open and his coat flaps fell apart. If she’d had any doubts before, she had none now.
Strangers in the night …
He hadn’t spoken before. Not a single word – not to her knowledge. But then who would know? The weird sex-murderer who’d begun his crimes by attacking anyone he encountered who was out after dark, but had then begun stalking lovers’ lanes and dogging spots all over Devon and Somerset, had not left a single living witness. All those he’d targeted had been eliminated with precision, ruthlessness, and great, great enjoyment; the men with skulls crushed and/or throats cut, the women sexually mutilated in a ritual that went far beyond everyday sadism. Each one of them, man and woman alike, subjected to one final desecration, when their eyes were stabbed and gouged until they were nothing but jelly.
We were strangers in the night …
‘Definitely my tune.’ He chuckled again, using his left hand to fondle the array of gleaming implements in his customised inner coat lining: the tin-opener, the screwdriver, the mallet, the hacksaw, the razor-edged filleting knife.
The woman could barely move, yet her eyes were now riveted on his eyes: moist baubles framed in leather sockets; and on his mouth, the saliva-coated tongue and broken, stained teeth exposed by a drawn-back zipper. But that voice – it could only have been a whisper in truth, a gloating guttural whisper. But she would remember it as long as she lived.
It was Scottish.
The Stranger was a Scotsman.
The key thing now, of course, was to ensure that she did live.
Perhaps he was too busy drawing out that first instrument of torture – the tin-opener, an old-fashioned device with a ghastly hooked blade – to notice her right hand working frantically through the debris littering the footwell.
As he raised the tin-opener to his right shoulder – not to plunge it down as much as to tease her with the terror of it – her fingertips found something she recognised.
He kept her pinned in place with his other hand, a grip so hard in that soft, sensitive spot that it was now agony, as he crooned along to the tune.
They’d first dubbed him ‘the Stranger’ in the West Country press because of the sex-with-strangers scene he’d so viciously crashed. It now seemed even more appropriate. ‘You’re a taunting, godless bitch,’ he added matter-of-factly, still in that notable accent. ‘A whore, an exhibitionist slut, a prick-teasing slag …’
‘And a police officer,’ she said, pointing her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 straight at his face. ‘Move one muscle, you bastard … open that filthy yap of yours one more time, and I’ll put a bullet straight through your fucking skull!’
The expression on his face was priceless. At least it probably would have been, had she been able to see it. As it was, she had to be content with his sudden almost-comical paralysis, the whites of his eyes widening in cartoon fashion around his soulless black pupils, his gammy mouth sagging open between zippered lips.
‘Yeah … that’s right,’ she said, thumbing back the pistol’s hammer. ‘The fun’s over. Now drop that sodding blade.’
Of course, it couldn’t be over in reality, and her heart pounded harder in her chest as this slowly dawned on her. He couldn’t let it end like this – so abruptly, so unexpectedly; or in this fashion: trapped like a rabbit by one of the frail, sexual creatures he so brutally despised. Warily, she transferred the .38 from her right hand to her left, keeping it levelled at him as she lay there. With her empty right hand, she again reached into the footwell. Her radio was down there somewhere, but she was damned if she could find it. All the time, he sat motionless, nailing her with that semi-human gaze, strands of spittle hanging over his leather-covered jaw. And now she saw his mouth slowly closing, those discoloured teeth clamping together in a final, hate-filled grimace. He wasn’t frozen with shock anymore, she realised; he was taut with tension – like a spring set to uncoil.
‘Don’t you do it!’ she warned, but it was too late; he arched down with the tin-opener, intent on ripping her wide apart with its wicked, hooked point.
BANG!
The slug took him in the left side of his upper chest, just beneath the collar bone, flinging him backward out of the car and down onto the tarmac, where he lay silently twisting alongside the prone form of Detective Constable Maxwell.
She found the radio and slammed it to her lips as she threw herself forward through the cordite. ‘All units, this is DC Piper! Converge on Halfpenny Reservoir! Repeat, converge on Halfpenny Reservoir …’
Her words tailed off as a stocky figure rose to its feet outside. For a half-second she tried to kid herself that this was Maxwell, though she knew it couldn’t be. The DC’s head had struck the tarmac with a hell of a whack.
Without a word, the figure swayed around and blundered across the car park.
‘Repeat, this is DC Piper! Decoy unit Alpha. One shot fired. Suspect suffering a chest wound, but on foot and mobile.’
There was a scrabble of static-ridden responses, but even as Piper watched, the lumbering form of the Stranger scrambled over the car park’s low perimeter wall, the dark blot of his outline swiftly ascending through the furze on the other side. He was hurt badly; that was clear – he lurched from side to side, but kept going in a more or less straight line, uphill and away from her.
‘Suspect heading west … away from the reservoir, over open ground,’ she added, clattering onto the tarmac in her tall, strappy shoes. ‘We need an ambulance too.’ She dropped to one knee to check the carotid at the side of Maxwell’s neck. ‘DC Maxwell is severely injured … he’s received a massive shock from some kind of stun-gun and what looks like a head trauma. Currently in a collapsed state, but breathing, and his pulse feels regular. Get that ambulance here, pronto! In the meantime, I’m pursuing the suspect, over.’
She hurried across the car park, but once she was over the wall into the furze, her heels sank like knife-blades in the soft earth. She kicked the shoes off as she ran, flinching as twigs and sharp-edged stones spiked the soles of her feet, and thorns and thistles raked her naked legs. Very briefly, the Stranger appeared above her as a lopsided silhouette on the night sky. But then he was gone again, over the ridge.
‘Get me that back-up now!’ she shouted into her radio.
‘Gemma, you need to hold back,’ came a semi-coherent response. ‘DSU Anderson’s orders! Wait for support units, over!’
‘Negative, that!’ she replied firmly. ‘Not when we’re this close.’
She too crested the ridge. The starlit moor unrolled itself: a sweeping georama of grass and boulders, obscured by patches of low-lying mist but rising distantly to soaring, tor-crowned summits. On lower ground now, but a hundred yards ahead of her at least, a dark blot was struggling onward.
The ground sloped steeply as she gave chase, ploughing downhill through soft, springy vegetation, shouting that he was under arrest; that he should give it up.
Perspectives were all askew, of course, so she wasn’t quite sure where she lost sight of him. Though he wasn’t a vast distance ahead, curtains of mist seemed suddenly to close around him. When she reached that point herself – now hobbling, both feet bruised and bleeding – she found she was on much softer ground, plodding through ankle-deep mud. He ought to have left a recognisable trail, but it was too dark to see and she had no light with which to get down and make a fingertip search.
Further terse orders came crackling over the airwaves.
Again, she ignore
d them. It occurred to her that maybe the suspect was wearing a vest and therefore not as badly injured as she’d thought. But if that was the case, why had he fled … why not use the advantage to go straight on the attack, ripping and mauling her in the car? No – she’d wounded him; she’d seen the pain in his posture. If nothing else, that meant there’d be blood.
Unless rain came before the forensics teams did.
‘We need the lab-rats up here ASAP!’ she shouted, cutting across the frantic exchanges of her colleagues. ‘At least we’ll have his DNA …’
There was a choked scream from somewhere ahead.
She slowed to a near-halt. Fleetingly, she couldn’t see anything; liquid mist, the colour of purulent milk, drifted on all sides. But had that cry been for real? Was he finally succumbing to his wound? Or was he trying to lure her?
There was another scream, this one accompanied by a strangled gurgling.
She now halted completely.
This was Dartmoor. A National Park. A green and hazy paradise. Picturesque, famous for its pristine flora and fauna. And notorious for its bottomless mires. The third scream dwindled to a series of choked gasps, and now she heard a loud sploshing too, like a heavy body plunging through slime.
‘Update,’ she said into her radio, advancing warily. ‘I’m perhaps three hundred yards west of the reservoir parking area, over the top of the ridge. Suspect appears to be in trouble. I can’t see him, but it’s possible he’s blundered into a mire.’
There was further insistence that she stop and wait for back-up. Again she ignored this, but only advanced five or six yards before she found herself teetering on the brink of an opaque, black/green morass, its mirror-flat surface stretching in all directions as the mist seemed to furl away across it. She strained her eyes, but nothing stirred out there; not so much as a ripple, let alone the distinctive outline of a man fighting to keep his head above the surface.
There was no sound either, which was worrying. Dartmoor’s mires could suck you down with frightful speed. Their bowels were stuffed with sheep and pony carcasses, not to mention the odd missing hiker or two. But all she could identify now were the twisted husks of sunken trees, their branches protruding here and there like rotted dinosaur bones.
Even Detective Constable Gemma Piper, of the Metropolitan Police – wilful, fearless and determined – now realised that caution was the better part of valour. Especially as the mist continued to clear on the strengthening wind, revealing, despite the darkness of night, how truly extensive this mire was. It lay everywhere; not just ahead of her but on both sides as well – as though she’d strayed out onto a narrow headland. It was difficult to imagine that even a local man could have lumbered this way, mortally wounded, blinded by vapour, and had somehow avoided this pitfall. And if nothing else, she now knew their suspect was not a local man – but, by origin at least, from the other end of the country.
As voices sounded behind her, torches spearing across the undulating landscape, she sank slowly and tiredly to her haunches. The delayed shock of what had nearly happened back in the Porsche was seeping through her, leaving her numb. In some ways she felt elated; she’d almost nailed the bastard … but not quite. It was like a no-score draw after a football match. It was a result of sorts, but it was difficult to estimate how much of one.
Within an hour, the Devon and Cornwall Police, with assistance from Scotland Yard, had cordoned off this entire stretch of moor, were searching it with dogs, and had even brought heavy machinery in to start dredging the mire and its various connected waterways. At the reservoir car park, the conscious but weakened form of DC Maxwell was loaded into the rear of an ambulance. Gemma Piper meanwhile sat side-saddle in the front seat of a police patrol car, sipping coffee and occasionally wincing as a medic knelt and attended to her bloodied feet and swollen face. At the same time, she briefed Detective Superintendent George Anderson.
The hard-headed young female detective, already impressive to every senior manager who’d encountered her, had just assured herself a glowing future in this most challenging and male-dominated of industries. But of the so-called Stranger, the perpetrator of thirteen loathsome torture-murders – as reported in the Dartmoor Advertiser: ‘These crimes are abhorrent, utterly loathsome!’ – there was no trace.
Nor would there be for some considerable time.
Chapter 1
Present Day
There was no real witchcraft associated with this part of the Lake District. Nor had there ever been, to Heck’s knowledge.
The name ‘Witch Cradle Tarn’ had been applied in times past purely to reflect the small mountain lake’s ominous appearance: a long, narrow, very deep body of water high in the Langdale Pikes, thirteen hundred feet above sea-level to be precise, with sheer, scree-covered cliffs on its eastern shore and mighty, wind-riven fells like Pavey Ark, Harrison Stickle and Great Castle Howe lowering to its north, west and south. It wasn’t an especially scary place in modern times. Located in a hanging valley in a relatively remote spot – official title Cragwood Vale, unofficial title ‘the Cradle’ – it was a fearsome prospect on paper, but when you actually got there, the atmosphere was more holiday than horror. Two cheery Lakeland hamlets, Cragwood Keld and Cragwood Ho, occupied its southern and northern points respectively. For much of the year the whole place teemed with climbers, hikers, fell-runners and anglers seeking the famous Witch Cradle trout, while kayakers and white-water rafters were catered for by the Cragwood Boat Club, based a mile south of Cragwood Keld, near the head of Cragwood Race; a furiously twisting river, which poured downhill through natural gullies and steep culverts before finally joining the more sedately flowing Langdale Beck.
The single pub at the heart of Cragwood Keld only added to this homely feel. A rather austere-looking building at first glance, all grey Westmorland slate on the outside, it was famous for its smoky beams and handsome oak settles, its range of cask ales, its crackling fires in winter and its pretty lakeside beer garden in summer. Its name – The Witch’s Kettle – owed itself entirely to some enterprising landlord of decades past, who hadn’t found The Drovers’ Rest to his taste, and felt the witch business a tad sexier, especially given that most visitors to the Cradle were always awe-stricken by the deep pinewoods hemming its two villages to the lakeshore, and the rubble-clad slopes and immense granite crags soaring overhead. Its inn-sign was a landmark in itself, depicting a rusty old kettle with green herbs protruding from under its lid, sitting on a stone inscribed with pagan runes. It was just possible, visitors supposed, that current landlady, Hazel Carter, might herself be a witch – but if so, she was a far cry from the bent nose and warty lip variety.
At least, that was Heck’s feeling.
He’d only been up here two and a half months, but was already certain that whatever magic Hazel wove, it was unlikely to be the sort he’d resist easily. Not that he was thinking along these lines that late November morning, as he entered The Witch’s Kettle just before eleven, made a beeline for the bar and ordered himself a pint of Buttermere Gold. It was early in the day and there were few customers yet. Only Hazel was on duty. Like Heck, she was in her late thirties, but with rich auburn hair, which she habitually wore very long. She was doe-eyed, soft-lipped, and buxom in shape, a figure enhanced by her daytime ‘uniform’ of t-shirt, cardigan and jeans.
They made close eye-contact but only uttered those words necessary for the transaction. However, as she handed him his pint and his change, the landlady inclined her head slightly to the right. Heck pocketed the cash and sipped his beer, before glancing in that direction. Beyond a low arch lay the pub’s vault, which contained a darts board and a pool table. One person was in there: a young lad, no more than sixteen, with tousled blond hair, wearing a grey sweatshirt, grey canvas trousers and white trainers. He looked once, fleetingly, in Heck’s direction as he worked his way around the pool table, ignoring him thereafter. All the youth had seen, of course, was a man about six feet in height, of average build, with unruly black
hair and faint scars on his face, wearing jeans, a sweater and a rumpled anorak. But he’d probably have paid more attention had he known that Heck was actually Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg of the Cumbria Constabulary, that he was based very near here, at Cragwood Keld police office, and that he was on duty right at this moment.
To maintain his façade of recreation, Heck found a seat at an empty table, pulled a rolled-up Westmorland Gazette from his back pocket and commenced reading. He checked his watch as he turned the pages, though this was more from habit than necessity. He felt he was following a good lead today, but there was no great pressure on him. Ever since being reassigned from Scotland Yard to Cumbria as part of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ new Anti-Rural Crime Initiative, Heck had been well-placed to work hours of his own choosing and at his own pace. Ultimately of course, he was answerable to South Cumbria Crime Command, and in the first instance to the CID office down at Windermere police station; he was only a sergeant, when all was said and done. But as the only CID officer in the Langdales – the only CID officer in twenty square miles in fact – he was out here on his own as far as many colleagues were concerned: ‘Hey pal, you’re the man on the spot,’ as they’d say. There were advantages to this, without doubt. But it was never a nice feeling that reinforcements were always a good forty minutes away.
Heck’s thoughts were distracted as two other people came down the stairs into the taproom. It was a man and a woman, the former in his mid-thirties, the latter in her mid-twenties, both carrying bulging backpacks. The woman had short, mouse-brown hair, and wore a red cagoule, blue cord trousers and walking boots. The man was tall and thin, with short fair hair. He too wore cord trousers and walking boots, but his blue cagoule was draped over his narrow, t-shirted shoulders. Neither of them looked threatening or in any way unwholesome; in fact they were smiling and chattering brightly. At the foot of the stair, they separated, the man heading to the bar, where he told Hazel he’d like to ‘settle up’. The woman turned into the vault and spoke to the youth, who pocketed his last ball and grabbed up a backpack of his own.