by Paul Finch
Perhaps the task she prized most highly was minding the keys to the police launch. This was convenient for all concerned because the boathouse in which the launch was kept was part of Bessie’s property. Approximately the same size and shape as a suburban garage, the boathouse was propped up on stilts and in a generally dilapidated condition, its timbers tinged green by mildew – but it was better than nothing. The cement path leading down to it crossed the middle of Bessie’s neatly-trimmed back garden, so it was always necessary to call on her first.
They halted before walking up Bessie’s front path, and looked towards Ramsdale’s house, his presence indicated by a very dull glow from one of its windows and the pale smoke issuing from its chimney.
‘Wouldn’t have liked to be one of the two girls if they came looking for help and knocked on that miserable sod’s door,’ Mary-Ellen said.
‘Neither would I, now you mention it,’ Heck replied thoughtfully. ‘But it’s a good point.’ He veered back along the road and down the path towards Ramsdale’s house. ‘Go and check with Bessie, would you?’
‘Who the fuck is it?’ came a muffled response to Heck’s full-knuckled knock.
‘Detective Sergeant Heckenburg, Mr Ramsdale,’ Heck replied. ‘Cragwood Keld police station. Can you open up please?’
What Heck always thought of as a guilty silence followed. Whenever you arrived at someone’s house and announced yourself as a copper, it was the same – whether it was some flash manse in the suburbs, or a scumhole bedsit in the urban badlands. Everyone, it seemed, no matter what their station in life, had some itsy-bitsy secret that occasionally kept them awake at night.
A chair finally scraped on a stone floor and heavy feet thudded to the door. It opened, but only by a few inches, and Ramsdale’s big frame filled the gap. He wasn’t just burly, he was tall – at least six-three – and permanently dishevelled, with a head of shaggy, iron-grey hair and an unkempt grey beard, all of which when combined with his tarnished earring, had a distinct air of the scuzzy. Today’s attire did little to offset this: a shapeless white t-shirt stained by tea or coffee, baggy stonewashed jeans torn at the knees, and a pair of floppy, moth-eaten slippers. He also smelled strongly of tobacco. And it wasn’t just the householder who was a less than wholesome sight. Heck caught a glimpse of the room behind. There was a desktop computer on a table and a wall of lopsided shelving crammed with buff folders, while the floor was buried under a mass of disordered paperwork.
‘How can I help, detective?’ Ramsdale asked, regarding Heck over the tops of his reading glasses. His anger had abated a little, but his tone implied hostility.
‘Just a quick one really, Mr Ramsdale. We’ve got two people missing in the Pikes.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘You’ve heard about it already?’
‘No, but it’s the silly season, isn’t it? Same thing every year. First bit of really bad weather and all the idiots come out to play.’
‘Yeah, well … we’re pretty worried about these two. Their names are Jane Dawson and Tara Cook. Young girls, both aged twenty-four. They were last seen yesterday, rambling south from Borrowdale. As far as we know, they weren’t planning to come down into Langdale, but they could easily have got lost up on the tops. Just wondered if you’d seen or heard anyone coming down the Cradle Track late last night?’
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, w
hich 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.
Witch Cradle Tarn was the child of a geophysical fault long predating the glaciers that had broadened out the valley above; it was a cleft in the mountains formed by ancient tectonic forces, and for its size it was astonishingly deep – nearly seven hundred feet – and abysmally cold. Its sides shelved steeply away beneath the surface, but its eastern shore, which was almost flush against the cliff-face, was heaped with glacial scree, which intruded some distance into the water itself, creating semi-invisible shallows comprising multiple blades of rock, none of which were marked by buoys and any one of which could pass through the keel of a boat like a knife through the belly of a fish.
For several minutes they ploughed through turgid mist, Heck only sighting the surface of the tarn if he glanced over the gunwales, where it flowed past as smooth as darkened glass. The fog shifted in bizarre patterns and yet remained impenetrable. The quiet was unearthly. Even the drone of the engine was muffled, and yet whenever they spoke a word, it echoed and echoed.
‘You really thought you heard a shot last night?’ Mary-Ellen asked.
‘I dunno.’ Heck shrugged again. ‘Strange sounds in these mountains. I’ve only been here two and a half months, but I’ve already realised how deceptive things can be.’
‘Sure you weren’t dreaming?’
‘I can’t definitively rule that out, either.’
‘I can make some calls later, if you want,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a list of all licence-holders.’
‘Yeah, do that. Ask some searching questions – like what the hell they thought they were doing discharging firearms in the wee small hours. Go at them hard, M-E. Make it sound like we know they were up to something. Even if they were shooting rats in a barn or something, they’re unlikely to cough unless we press them, and we can’t dismiss them from any enquiry otherwise … unless we find something nasty out here of course, in which case it’s a whole new ball game.’
Heck didn’t hold out much hope for that, but they were now approaching the tarn’s eastern banks, so Mary-Ellen cut the engine and lifted the propeller, letting them drift inshore. There were no proper landing places on this side of the tarn, no quays, no jetties – in fact there were no paths or roads either, though it wasn’t impossible to explore this shore on foot. Further back from the water’s edge, pines grew through the scree, creating a narrow belt of woodland. This was just about visible as Mary-Ellen kept a steady course from north to south, the vague outlines of trees standing spectral in the mist.
‘Jane Dawson! Tara Cook!’ Heck said, putting the loudhailer to his lips. ‘This is the police … can you hear us?’
He waited thirty seconds for a response, but there was nothing. Without the engine, the silence was immense, broken only by the lapping of wavelets against the rocks.
‘Jane Dawson, Tara Cook!’ he hailed again. ‘This is the police. Can you respond please? Even if you’re injured and unable to speak … throw a stone, bang a piece of wood on another piece of wood. Anything.’
The lack of response was ear-pummelling.
‘Can you get us a tad closer inshore?’ Heck said.
‘I’ll try. Just be prepared for the worrying sound of grinding, cracking timbers.’
‘Don’t even joke about that.’
‘Who’s joking?’
They veered a few yards to port. Heck could clearly see the submerged juts and edges, like serrated teeth, no more than a couple of feet below the surface. Meanwhile, the rocks exposed along the waterline were piled on top of each other haphazardly and yet resembled those huge, manmade defences that guarded the entrances to Elizabethan-age harbours.
‘Okay, that’s far enough,’ he said, grabbing the boat-pole.
Mary-Ellen corrected their course. They continued to glide forward, veils of murk opening in front of them. The shore and its rows of regimented pine trunks was a little more visible, but not greatly so.
‘Perhaps start up the engine, eh?’ Heck said over his shoulder. ‘The noise might let them know we’re here.’
Mary-Ellen complied, while he hailed the girls another five times, always leaving thirty-second breaks in between. All they heard in response was the dull chug of the engine, until a few minutes had passed and this was subsumed by the rumble of churning water. Just ahead, the fog cleared around a protruding headland of vertical rock with a greenery-matted overhang about thirty feet above. Thanks to the heavy autumn rain, one of many temporary rivulets descending from the surrounding fells was pouring down over this in a minor cataract. The space beneath the overhang was filled with shadow. Heck directed his spotlight into it, just able to pick ou
t a few clumps of shingle against the innermost wall. Normally, if memory served, there would be a small beach there, but the tarn’s high level had inundated it. Either way, no one was taking shelter.
They pressed on, the cataract falling behind them, its roar dwindling into the all-absorbing vapour. They’d now traversed a quarter of the tarn’s length.
‘Starting to think this is a long shot,’ Mary-Ellen said. ‘Couldn’t we be more use back at the nick, manning the phones?’
‘Let’s go down as far as the Race,’ Heck replied. ‘After that, we’ll come back … hang on, what’s that?’
Mary-Ellen stared where he was pointing, catching a glint of colour in the grey; a flash of orange. It could have been anything, a tangle of bobbing rubbish, a plastic shopping bag scrunched between two semi-submerged rocks – except that you didn’t as a rule find shopping bags or any other kind of rubbish in Witch Cradle Tarn, which normally was far beyond the reach of unconscientious slobs. Of course it could also have been a cagoule, and now they looked closely, they could distinguish a humanoid shape; two lengths of orange just below the surface (legs?), the main bulk of the orange (the torso?) above the water-level, thanks to the two boulders it was wedged between. When they drew even closer they saw that it wasn’t solely orange either, but spattered black and green by moss and dirt, and streaked with crimson – as was the third length of orange (an arm?) folded over the back of it.
‘Christ in a cartoon …’ Heck breathed. ‘They’re here! Or one of them is!’
Quickly, Mary-Ellen cut the engine again. ‘The anchor!’ she shouted.
He scrambled to the back of the craft, took the small anchor from the stern locker and threw it over the side, its chain rapidly unravelling. Other items of kit were also kept in the stern locker, including a zip-lock first-aid bag and two sets of rubberised overalls and boots, which the crew were supposed to don if they ever needed to wade out into deep water. There was no time now for a change of costume, but Heck grabbed the first-aid kit and moved to the gunwale, peering down. Heaped scree could still be discerned below. It wasn’t just jagged and sharp, it would be loose, slimy – ultra dangerous. But again, this was no time to start thinking about health and safety. Heck pulled on a pair of latex gloves, before zipping his phone inside the first-aid kit and then climbing over the gunwale and lowering himself down.