by Paul Finch
The real irony though, was that it was his second novel – composed in the peace and isolation of Cragwood Vale, his day job, his wife and his mistress no longer fixtures in his life – which was proving such a headache now.
Primarily because no one would buy it. Not an insignificant problem when your cash reserves were running as low as Bill Ramsdale’s were.
He strolled his cluttered lounge/kitchen/study, dragging on a cig and swilling coffee, his normal state of grumpy frustration even more aggravated than usual because he was awaiting an email from his agent in which she apparently was about to propose a solution, and yet twenty minutes earlier, for no obvious reason, he’d been kicked offline. These internet crashes were only usually a temporary thing, of course, but they were never less than fucking enraging.
Ramsdale stared again at his blank computer screen. It was as grey and featureless as the fog outside. For the third time, he rebooted the system, only to get the same result.
He smoked another cig to try and calm himself, glancing at the window and the motionless gloom beyond. That reminded him about the visit he’d had earlier from that shit-arse cop Heckenburg – another proletarian bully-boy. Not that Ramsdale gave a fuck about the cops, with all the other things he had to worry about. Or those two so-called missing girls. No, they damn well didn’t call here at Lake-End Cottage the previous night. He’d have given them short shrift if they had; stupid idiot bitches, fell-walking in these conditions. He couldn’t help but picture them as a pair of Tamsyn lookalikes: freckle-faced and blue-eyed, with snazzy blonde ringlets – and nothing whatsoever between the ears.
‘Sod it!’
There was no point delaying. He might as well pick up the phone and speak to his agent in person. This wasn’t something he enjoyed doing, as she was an old pro and rarely took his tirades and accusations on the chin. As such, many of their discussions descended into blazing rows; on the last occasion he’d threatened to fire her. But the wolf was increasingly close to the door, and sometimes even Bill Ramsdale knew he had to swallow his pride. Shaking his head, he picked up the phone.
But there was no dialling tone.
It sounded completely dead.
Ramsdale banged the receiver back on the cradle – one, two, three times, and put it to his ear again. Still there was no tone.
‘What the fuck!’
No dialling tone? What the Goddamn hell did that mean? Were the lines down because of a bit of bloody fog? That would be typical, that would! Incompetent bloody Britain at its best! The only country on earth where autumn leaves prevented trains from running, where kids were sent home from school if it snowed, and now where fog brought the fucking telephone lines down!
He tried two or three times more, but there wasn’t a spark of life in the device. Only as an afterthought did he look towards the skirting board, wondering if he might inadvertently have pulled the flex out himself, perhaps if it had got wrapped around the caster of his office chair. But it hadn’t.
Ramsdale stood with hands on hips, seething, unable to think straight, let alone figure out how he might resolve this. If nothing else, he supposed, it explained why he’d lost the internet connection. But who did he speak to about this, and how did he contact them? Mobile phones were no good in the Cradle. Of course, the joke was on him in that respect, as this had been one of the things that had first appealed to him about Cragwood Ho – that he could cut himself off, put himself out of reach of those buffoons and time-wasters who’d so hindered his writing career when it first started.
And then another thought occurred to him – completely out of the blue.
The phone line connected to Lake-End Cottage via a junction box located under the eaves on its southeast corner. Could it have frozen solid? The temperature outside was hovering about two degrees above zero, but it had fallen well below last night. Ramsdale was no electrician, but if the thing was encased in icicles, who knew what impact that could have.
He pulled his scruffy quilted jacket on and left the cottage by its front door.
The fog still swamped everything – it was dense, almost tangible, like a breathable fluid, and it was damp of course and perishing cold, which made it harsh on the throat. It didn’t just restrict his vision down to a couple of feet; it muffled the sound of his footsteps as he made his way along the paved path around the exterior of the house. He passed various windows en route, each emitting only dull, weak light. But the weakest light of all came from the open door next to the northeast corner, the door to the storeroom, which was built into the side of his cottage like a small washhouse.
Ramsdale slowed down as he approached.
The storeroom door stood ajar. Even though the electric light in there wasn’t the strongest – usually emitting little more than a dim, brownish glow – he could see a tall, vertical slice of it in the vapour.
Ramsdale halted, rigid.
His shaggy hair didn’t exactly prickle, though he knew immediately that he wasn’t responsible for the light being on; he hadn’t been into his storeroom any time in the last couple of weeks.
‘Longhorn,’ he said under his breath. ‘Longhorn!’
He dashed forward, blocking the storeroom doorway with his body so there could be no escape. There was no particular reason to assume his dull-witted neighbour would be in the storeroom at this actual moment, nor did he have the first clue why she might have done this in the first place – except that she was the only person who lived nearby. But fleetingly Ramsdale was so incandescent with rage that all logical thought had flown. Only slowly did it occur to him that innocent, law-abiding Bessie was the last person to go pilfering his garden tools, such as they were, or that it was highly unlikely she’d even come near his property after the last time he’d shouted at her.
The storeroom was empty anyway, aside from its usual heap of dingy equipment: bits of rotted garden furniture stacked against the wall, coils of old hose, shovels, rakes, hoes, a long-defunct lawnmower and some rusty, tarry old barbecue kit that Ramsdale had inherited on moving here and was never likely to use. It smelled as it usually did, of dust and grass-cuttings. But there was nobody in there, nor any sign anyone had been – until he noticed something was missing.
His twelve-rung stepladder.
He scanned the junk-laden cubby hole, but the ladder was definitely absent.
Ramsdale backed outside as his mind started to join the dots, lurching on around the house, and heading quickly to its southeast corner. The ladder loomed out of the fog directly in front of him, propped up against that corner of the building, directly underneath the junction box. Ramsdale reached it and gazed up. And now his hair finally did prickle, because he didn’t need to be an expert to recognise the damage that had been done, the various leads and cables hanging severed from a box that had been all but disembowelled.
It seemed too ludicrous to be true, but some bastard had deliberately …
But why? What was to be gained by …?
His thoughts trailed off as he realised the upright object just faintly visible in the fog some ten yards away on his left should not be there. Whatever it was, whoever it was, it was simply standing there, indistinguishable in the murk, watching him. Then it realised he’d seen it, and it turned and scrambled away, vanishing into nothingness.
‘Hey!’ Ramsdale called, his voice morphing into an aggressive bark. ‘Hey, you bastard!’
He ran after it with heavy clomping feet, stumbling out into the middle of his lawn where milky suds of mist swirled around him, absorbing the house almost immediately, bringing him to a tottering halt. He’d only run for a few yards, but the breath was already rasping in his lungs. Ramsdale was a big guy and wasn’t in great health. He did little fitness work, fed himself poorly and of course he smoked and drank way more coffee than was good for him.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he bellowed. ‘You moron!’
But nothing was visible in front of him now, or on either side. He could hear wat
er lapping sluggishly at the tarn’s edge. That was another thirty or so yards away on his left, but suddenly that distance seemed terrible. Were he to venture all the way down there, the refuge of the house wouldn’t feel close. Ramsdale’s rage ebbed. Sure, he was angry – he was bloody furious – but none of this made sense, and that was always enough to create at least a pang of unease. How could someone do this? How could they know where to find the junction box, or to find the ladder with which to get up to it? Why would they do it?
He’d offended a few people during his time here, primarily down at Cragwood Keld. But they were adults and for the most part typical Middle England types; there were no kids or chavs among them who might be responsible for this. He thought again about Bessie Longhorn, the only other person in this vicinity. From this position he could normally see her cottage, but it was currently wrapped in impenetrable grey. She perhaps had more reason than most to damage his property. But at the same time, Bessie was timid. She’d sobbed her heart out when he’d sworn at her.
Then he heard the whistling.
At first he thought he was hearing things, but there was no mistake.
Someone close by was whistling a tune – a clearly recognisable tune. To his disbelief, Ramsdale realised he was listening to a melodious rendition of that famous ditty from the 1960s, Strangers in the Night. He turned in a slow circle, unable to nail the actual direction. ‘Who is it?’ he shouted.
The whistling continued without a blip.
‘Hey, this is not a fucking joke! I need my telephone for work, alright? So what you’ve done is costing me money! That means you hang around here, and you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble! I advise you to piss off right now!’
The refrain rolled on.
Ramsdale felt worse than helpless. He had no option but to backtrack towards the house, all the time shouting, swearing, making gruff, blustery threats. If nothing else, he’d make sure the bastard knew he wasn’t dealing with some effete tosser who lived in fear of his own shadow. Not that Ramsdale was showing himself to be much of an outdoorsman. Thanks to the all-enveloping vapour, though he’d thought he was making a diagonal beeline to the northeast corner of his house, he found himself stumbling through the overgrown rockery at the far north end of his property. ‘Fuck!’ he hissed, turning an ankle, and having to limp due west, before finding the house again and then feeling his way between that and the old Honda Civic parked on his drive. ‘Fucking shit!’
As though in direct response, the whistling which, rather creepily, had sounded as if it was encroaching on him, ceased. Ramsdale spun around again, peevish eyes narrowed. But still he saw no one and nothing behind him.
‘You think you’ve got some kind of upper hand over me? You think because I’m in the middle of nowhere and haven’t got my telephone, I’m going to shit my pants? Why don’t you show your face … we’ll see who shits their pants then! You’ll be shitting blood into yours after I’ve kicked your belly for half an hour!’
He continued to glance backward as he made these promises – but something about the whistling stopping so abruptly had unnerved him. He groped his way along the side of his car, still glancing over his shoulder, half-expecting that featureless shape to re-emerge from the blankness – for which reason his hands detected that his car’s bonnet had been forced open before his eyes did.
Ramsdale gazed down at the severed pipes and bashed-in cisterns of his mangled engine, numbness spreading slowly through his body.
At least he was now at the house’s northwest corner, and could see the dim oblong glow of its open front door. He hobbled hell for leather towards it, coughing brackish phlegm into the icy air, and blundered inside, red-faced, the sweat spraying off him. He stumbled across the room towards the bin alongside his work-station. Somewhere amid all the screwed-up papers that had overflowed down there, he kept a cricket bat, its willow surface notched crimson by a hundred drives to the boundary. But this wasn’t just a fond relic of his days at Harrow. After he’d first split up with Joan, he’d lived briefly in a crummy bedsit in Tottenham, surrounded – or so he’d assumed – by thieves and smackheads. It had been a handy bedside accoutrement in those days, and maintaining it for that role had become a habit ever since, even up here in the leafy Lakes. He rummaged madly through the heaps of crumpled documents before locating the thing, but as his hand closed around its tape-wrapped handle, he heard the thump-click of the front door closing behind him.
Ramsdale spun around, bat in hand, but even after everything that had happened, he didn’t quite expect to see the figure advancing coyly across the interior towards him, hands behind its back, as if it was somehow shy. In truth, he was panicking so much that he only caught a fleeting glimpse of it: it was shorter than he was, but then almost everyone was shorter than he was, but it was broad of build, its stocky frame entirely covered in thick, plasticky waterproofs, its face concealed by what looked like a leather ‘rapist’ mask, a mocking pink tongue poking out through its zippered mouth.
A bellow of combined fear and rage tore itself from Ramsdale’s chest as he lumbered forward and took a wild, two-handed swing.
The two-handed grip was his first mistake of course, because if he missed, it would put him off balance. His second was that he aimed at the head, because that made it much easier for his opponent to duck, which he duly did.
Ramsdale never saw the low, hard counterpunch that caught him in the groin, squashing his genitals, driving the wind from his lungs on a tide of nausea. Nor the second blow, which wasn’t delivered with a gloved fist, but with something made of hard, flat steel, and which smashed upward across his nostrils, breaking his nose and snapping his head backward, filling his eyes with hot, peppery tears.
The one-time professor fell heavily into his swivel chair, thoughts spinning, every inch of anger and belligerence knocked out of him. Pain and sickness cramped his whole body, and yet, through the desperation of necessity, he managed to focus on his assailant, who it was now apparent had stolen something else from the storeroom as well as the gardening ladder.
Unlike most of Ramsdale’s outdoors equipment, his hedge-shears were in good condition, their blades clean and rust-free, their hinges so well-greased they slid open easily to their fullest extent.
‘Wait,’ Ramsdale stammered, as the masked form advanced up to him in a predatory crouch. ‘Please …’
Its only response was a guttural, pig-like chuckle.
Ramsdale coughed, snorting blood. ‘I haven’t got … haven’t got much, but …’ He raised a hand to ward the figure off. ‘Anything you can find, you can have …’
The blades slammed together with an axe-like CHOP!
Four digits fell to earth.
Ramsdale shrieked like a child.
The figure chuckled on, as it drove the blades together again.
And again, and again, and again …
Chapter 8
Cragwood Road was dangerous and difficult enough under a blanket of fog, but that was only the start of the journey from the Cradle down to Kendal. Heck knew the route well enough, but even to his experienced eye, it was astonishing how different everything now looked. To start with, he almost missed the turn at the bottom of Cragwood Road, and found himself shooting across the B5343, which could have been fatal if anyone else had been unwise enough to be out and driving at this remote end of Great Langdale.
The B5343, winding down through the dale, was itself a narrow route, in some parts single lane, so Heck could only edge forward at ten miles per hour or less. Even then, the occasional vehicle coming towards him would materialise through the gloom with only yards to spare, headlights reduced to dim angler-fish orbs. Needless to say, quite a few of these characters were driving too fast. There was much screeching of brakes and squealing of rubber. On one occasion, the other driver – a solid, mannish woman in a jumper, a green quilted doublet and a silk scarf – jumped out of her Toyota Land Cruiser and began to harangue Heck in an accent more Buckinghamshire than Cumbria. His
reaction was swift, simple and to the point. He jumped out as well, displayed his warrant card, pointed at the verge and said: ‘Can you move your Chelsea tractor, ma’am. I’m responding to an emergency and you’re holding me up.’
‘Excuse me,’ she responded, looking only vaguely fazed by this. ‘But I’m perfectly within my rights to …’
‘And I’m within my rights to arrest you for obstructing an enquiry if you don’t do precisely what I say, right now!’
Inevitably there were further delays. When Heck finally got down to Skelwith Bridge and joined the A593, the fog was no less smothering but there was heavier traffic. At Clappersgate village, there’d been an accident. A clutch of vehicles now blocked the carriageway, a Vauxhall Astra having struck a Fiat 500 coming from the opposite direction, a Chevrolet flat-bed having tail-ended the Astra, and a Mini Cooper having shunted the Chevrolet. There was much shouting and arguing in progress, while splintered metal and other bits of debris were scattered across the blacktop. It was clear this wasn’t going to be resolved quickly. With no choice, Heck reported the accident – his radio was receiving signals again, albeit intermittently – then turned his Citroën around and headed south, this time taking the B5285 to Hawkshead and following the shore of Esthwaite Water, beyond which the road began looping like crazy and grew steadily narrower, leading ultimately through Far Sawrey to the Windermere car ferry.
Heck didn’t expect the ferry to be operational on a day like today, and had half a mind to continue south via the back roads until he reached Newby Bridge, though that would be very much the long way around. However, rather to his surprise, the ferry was in service. More to the point, in such foul weather the usual traffic jam awaiting it was absent. In fact, Heck’s Citroën was the only vehicle on board as the barge rumbled slowly across the flat grey sheet that was Windermere’s narrow neck.
Climbing from his car, Heck stood by the barrier and gazed out at nothing. His mobile began buzzing in his pocket – a rare event these days, given that he spent most of his time higher up in the fells where there was no reception. He fished the device out, and was surprised to see the name of the caller.