by Paul Finch
She relapsed into silence. More harsh breathing followed. Her eyes streamed copious tears.
‘So let me guess,’ Heck said, ‘… you buried him?’
‘Bang on, Heck. I buried him. Somewhere no one would ever find him. Along with his name, just to make sure you couldn’t besmirch it further, Miss Piper.’
‘You knew the truth,’ Gemma said coolly. ‘You were just deluding yourself … by the looks of it to a point where you went stark staring mad!’
‘There are lots of reasons why people go mad, Miss Piper. I’m sure you know plenty of them. But not me. No, I made an effort to keep it together. Even during the months after, when I was living rough on the streets of Plymouth. Even when I got arrested as a teenage vagrant. Just in case you’re wondering, Heck, I gave them a very convincing sob-story. About parental abuse in the itinerant community, about how I’d run away from home because anything was better than that. I even gave myself a new surname – O’Rourke – just to make sure they wouldn’t get any joy when they checked it all out. Not that they tried very hard, I’m certain.’
‘Mary-Ellen,’ he said. ‘None of this …’
‘I also kept it together in the British care system!’ she snapped. ‘Can you fucking believe that, Heck? Five years in those fucking pits of Hell. Something else I owed to my Dada, because one thing he did teach me was how to look after myself. Oh, I put the word out at an early stage, you can bet … “Anyone fucks with me and it’s your fucking life!” They believed me.’
‘I’m sure,’ Heck replied.
‘It helped me at school too. Particularly on the sports field …’
‘I suppose you had to divert all that pent-up hatred somewhere …’
‘Oh no, Heck.’ Despite her tears, she grinned again. Broadly. Showing rows of pearly teeth. ‘No … I had to reserve that. Can you guess who for, Miss Piper?’
‘Never in a month of Sundays,’ Gemma said.
‘You see, by then I’d read all about you in the papers. What a hero you were. How you lay in wait for the Stranger, how you put yourself in the most terrible danger, and how you shot him in self-defence. After that, I followed your career with fascination. All your promotions, all your big arrests. Apparently you inspired a lot of young girls to join the police service. Well … you certainly inspired me. I joined the Met in 2010, but then they stuck me in Richmond, which put me a bit out of the way. I could have sought a transfer to one of the inner-city boroughs … to get closer to you, ma’am. But, I wouldn’t really have got close, would I? You, cosseted in that ivory tower they call Scotland Yard, me working the streets … no more important than the shit on your shoes, if we’d ever by any chance attended the same crime scene. So I stayed at Richmond, planning it out. I knew something would show up, some opportunity. And eventually, lo and behold, Heck came along – on his usual tide of destruction.’ Mary-Ellen’s grin spread even more as she focused back on him. ‘I heard all about you refusing your commendation for the Nice Guys business, Heck. About you transferring out of NCG. And when I saw where you’d finished up … well, how could I resist sharing a piece of that cake?’
‘So you really did transfer up here because you were following me?’ he said.
‘Put my papers in straight away. It was still risky. I requested Central Lakes, and ended up in Ulverston, but it wasn’t difficult to push for the Langdales. No one else wanted it …’ She gave a burst of guttural, raucous laughter. ‘Come on, Heck, you never thought all this was coincidence, did you?’
‘I knew it couldn’t be that.’
‘Timing was always going to be crucial,’ she added. ‘But it started well. Me and you both arrived in the early autumn, set up the new office. As the year waned, I knew the weather would deteriorate. I was waiting for the first snow, just like you suspected back in the pub. But then, when a severe fog blotted out the district, I saw an early chance. And when I spotted that email about the two missing hikers in the Pikes, well … it was a sure sign the time had come.’
‘You went all the way up onto Fiend’s Fell to attack two lost girls?’ he said.
‘No … no, don’t get it fucking wrong, Heck, when you were doing so well. I went up there to observe.’
‘To observe? Observe who?’
‘Who do you think, knobhead? … The fucking Stranger!’
‘The Stranger …?’
‘He was the one did those two hikers. Just like he did those hikers back near Glastonbury all those years ago …’
‘M-E, think what you’re saying …’
‘I know perfectly well what I’m saying.’ Her grin never faltered, as though it was fixed in wax. ‘You see I’m very familiar with the Stranger. I’ve made it my business to get to know him. He’s the other end of you, Heck. Determined. Dangerously obsessive. There’s nothing he won’t do, no distance he won’t cross, no amount of time he won’t wait.’
‘And no limit to the softness of the targets he’ll tackle, eh?’ Heck said, increasingly torn between the urge to sympathise with the abused child and either humour or hate the soulless maniac she’d grown up into.
‘Heck … he’s a serial killer. What do you expect?’
‘Did he kill Jane Dawson?’ Gemma asked. ‘She was the one we couldn’t account for.’
Mary-Ellen gave this apparent serious thought. ‘My understanding, ma’am, is … yes. I believe her body’s lying in a rocky cleft up on Fiend’s Fell somewhere.’
‘And how did the Stranger find her and Tara Cook in the first place?’ Gemma wondered. ‘In all that fog?’
‘I suspect he had one of these.’ Mary-Ellen produced her mobile phone, at the same time snapping a small plastic fitting to the back of it. ‘Familiar with this, Heck? You ought to be. You’ve mentioned it often enough.’
‘Thermal imaging?’
‘Bang on again. For two hundred quid you can buy this specially adapted iPhone case with a thermal camera on the back. In the worst fog you can imagine, this’ll do the business for you. Mind you, it isn’t perfect. I mean, you ever tried walking around looking through a phone? You think that’s bad, you want to try hitting targets while you’re staring through one. But if nothing else, this kind of gimmick clearly helped the Stranger keep tabs on the rest of us while we were all blundering around like kids in blindfolds, eh?’
‘He didn’t keep tabs on Tara Cook?’ Gemma said.
‘Seriously, DSU Piper?’ This time Mary-Ellen roared. ‘Seriously? I thought you were the ace homicide detective, not a fucking Barbie doll. And you can’t even second-guess a guy you once hunted for months across the moors of the West Country?’
‘He foxed me the first time. Is it a surprise he did it again?’
‘Oh, spare me your fucking excuses, Barbie. Surely you understand how important it was that at least one of those girls survived? Someone had to set the ball rolling, spread the word about Strangers in the Night. Mind you, that tape-recording and the heat camera are the only bits of tech he needed. Good old Heck did the rest. Reported straight to you … made such a song and dance about the Stranger that you couldn’t resist rushing up here and seeing for yourself, could you? It couldn’t have gone better.’
‘He certainly did his homework on us,’ Heck said.
‘And how!’ Mary-Ellen chuckled. ‘But don’t beat yourselves up too much. You kept him well busy … when he wasn’t sinking the police launch, he was otherwise engaged around Cragwood Ho. Had quite a bit of work to do there.’
‘Yeah, really came into his element at the Ho,’ Heck commented.
‘That was quite a challenge, I’d imagine,’ Mary-Ellen agreed. ‘Of course, it was made a tad easier for him by a certain local policewoman pretending she’d made telephone calls warning the Ho’s occupants about the killer on the loose, and actually having done no such thing.’
Heck nodded sagely. ‘Like minds, our killer and this local policewoman.’
‘Not that a message wasn’t left in due course.’
‘Yeah, we got that,�
�� Heck said. ‘Bessie Longhorn’s blood, was it?’
‘More likely Bill Ramsdale’s.’
‘I see … well at least that’s one way Bessie wasn’t violated. Because let me tell you, Mary-Ellen, only a complete fucking lunatic could’ve been responsible for what happened to that poor kid.’
Mary-Ellen’s smile tightened. ‘I guess he felt the notice on the boatshed wall just wasn’t enough … that it was vital you knew who you were dealing with. Much, much more important than the lives of a few Lake District bumpkins.’
‘And just out of interest, M-E, how did you divest yourself of the rest of these bumpkins’ blood? It must have been all over you.’
‘Not me, Heck … I wasn’t there. But I’d imagine the Stranger washed off in the tarn. It’s so conveniently close. Plus, if he was mainly wearing waterproofs …’
‘Like you are, you mean?’
‘Whatever, it worked … more or less.’
‘“More or less” seems to be the way this whole thing has gone,’ Gemma said. ‘It’s almost morning, most of the villagers have escaped … and we’re still alive.’
Mary-Ellen shrugged. ‘My reading is that it’s never been as simple as killing everyone, Miss Piper. Sure, bit-players like Dan Heggarty could croak it, but I doubt the Stranger wanted you dead. Not initially. Look at the moment when you and I first ran into each other at the south end of the tarn. He was so very close to us then. That was probably the first time he’d seen you in the flesh since you last met on Dartmoor. For a few seconds he must have been sooo tempted … but at the end of the day, the plan was that you’d be the only one he didn’t kill. Don’t you see it? Famous Scotland Yard detective, now famous for all the wrong reasons … especially after that Nice Guys debacle. I mean, okay you got the Nice Guys, but the broadsheets didn’t think much of you and your team, did they? All those dead people on Holy Island … and then imagine, a load more dead people over here in the Lakes. On your watch again, with you on site in fact … and you the only survivor.’ Mary-Ellen’s smile took on a ghoulish intensity. ‘I think “national humiliation” and “career suicide” are the phrases you’re looking for.
‘But of course, all this could only happen after he’d run you around a bit … like the set of blue-arsed flies you surely are. Keeping you on the move, never letting you rest. Just like my father couldn’t rest that last night of his life on Dartmoor, staggering soaking wet for miles through the dark and the cold before he finally made it to his car, suffering, slowly bleeding out, no one to turn to …’
‘Who are you trying to kid, M-E?’ Heck scoffed. ‘Keeping us on the run? Only killing selectively? The Stranger’s a total fuck-up. He’s been firing shots at us all night, trying to kill us at every turn. What about that incident on the Via Ferrata?’
‘That’s easily explained,’ she said. ‘I guess neither you nor Hazel were quite as important as Gemma. He must have seen you crossing the bridge, Gemma at the front, and thought chopping it down would nicely take care of the two at the back – plus it might look like an accident, which could be an advantage when all this was over. As it happened, the bridge was probably sturdier than he expected. And of course everything they say about you is true, Heck … you don’t kill easily.’
‘Sorry about that …’
‘Don’t be. It’s made things more interesting. You see, after that, the Stranger was really up against it. First he had to get back to the Ho, disable the cars – pain in the arse doing the police Land Rover, I’d imagine, but he had to start thinking about putting himself in the clear. Not to mention me. I mean, what did I have to do with all this? The main thing is, he had the quad-bike by then, which helped him skedaddle down to the Keld to do the vehicles and phones there, then dash off to the south end of the tarn on foot, to try and intercept us ladies on our way back. Tough shit for the firearms team he met en route. They’d arrived from Penrith at just the wrong moment. Mind you, getting rid of that evidence wasn’t quite as tough – all he had to do was drive the car into the undergrowth.’
‘If it was all going so well, why blow up the police station?’ Heck asked.
Again, Mary-Ellen paused. ‘I’d imagine he’d prepped that explosive the moment he learned about the two hikers on the fells.’
‘He just walked into a police station cellar and turned it into a giant bomb?’
‘Why not? It was unlocked. We were all of us tucked up in bed. A bit lax of me, I’ll admit. May get a ticking off for that.’
‘And why would he turn it into a bomb?’ Gemma wondered.
‘A kind of insurance policy. If things weren’t going totally his way, he’d probably think it couldn’t hurt to keep closing down your resources. Claim a few more lives in the process, remove another safe haven for you and the villagers – which is basically what happened.’
‘That must’ve been the trickiest part of the operation, M-E,’ Heck said. ‘You must have had to get your timings smack-on.’
‘Not me, Heck.’
‘It was also damn clever of you to support me when I suggested we shouldn’t wait for the firearms lads but should go out and get a couple of cars. That would prove you were one of the good guys, wouldn’t it?’
‘I was one of the good guys,’ she said. ‘You should actually thank me. I drew the bastard’s fire at the top of Truscott Drive. I kept you alive.’
‘Well, it certainly wouldn’t have suited you if I’d died at that stage,’ Heck replied. ‘I know you wanted me dead earlier, but not then. I mean, if I’d died then I couldn’t have gone back to the pub and told everyone how brave you’d been. You looked equally brave when we got distracted by Ted’s curtain twitching. Whether you actually saw that curtain twitch or not, you knew Buster would be in there, so you’d have an excuse when we finally forced entry and only found the cat. The main thing was it gave you a few minutes away from me. Just enough time to nip across the road to the police station, climb through the cellar window, hit the breakers, open the propane tanks, and then climb out again. Done and dusted inside what … three, four minutes? Course, the real stroke of genius came a few minutes after that, when you shot the road surface alongside us.’
‘Now you’re just being silly,’ she said, but her fixed grin had hardened into a kind of sneer.
‘The gun was up your sleeve, I suspect,’ Heck said. ‘And that’s why you used a silencer. I’m guessing that, earlier on, the sound of roaring gunfire suited your plan. Had to keep us running scared, like you said. But I’d never have fallen for an unmuffled gunshot when the weapon was in your hand and you were right next to me. Of course, while we were both supposedly lying low in the trees, all you had to do to draw our attention to the ambushed firearms car was nip up there and switch its beacon on. A tight schedule, I agree, and it’s kept you on your toes, M-E, but ultimately all very manageable.’
‘You’re so wrong,’ she said. ‘It was the Stranger. It’s been the Stranger from the beginning.’
‘You think saying that over and over will make it true?’ he asked her.
‘Ultimately, Heck … it won’t matter what you believe.’
‘Or what you believe, M-E. Because they’ll still go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, and at some point they’ll uncover the truth.’
‘Which is that all the evidence implicated Mick McGurk, isn’t it?’
‘Neatly planted evidence, I’ll give you that. I guess you snaffled the wristband while you were applying first aid to McGurk back in the pub. It’s also telling that only after that did you mention the quad-bike to us. You were certainly thinking on your feet, love. Which led neatly to the next stage of the operation … you sending me around the side of the McCarthy house where you knew there was a closed gate. That would give you just enough time to plant the wristband on the quad-bike, wouldn’t it?’
‘Aren’t you forgetting I was with you and all the other villagers when the Stranger whistled to us from the fog, Heck?’
‘That Dictaphone was neatly planted too,’ H
eck said. ‘Except I wasn’t meant to find that, was I?’
Mary-Ellen gave a low whistle. ‘You see, Miss Piper. Heck’s luck strikes again. You really were a fool to let him leave SCU.’
‘Winners make their own luck,’ Gemma replied. ‘For Heck’s luck, check no further than his habit of chasing a lead to its very end, of doing the job more thoroughly than anyone else. And that’s what’s undone you, isn’t it, Mary-Ellen? The discovery of the Dictaphone meant you had to complete your mission at any cost.’
‘Yeah,’ Heck said. ‘After that, you couldn’t just cut your losses and run. You couldn’t simply lead the villagers down the Race and then bask in the safety of their innumerable testimonies that you’d been such a friend. Maybe letting so many of them go wasn’t your plan in the beginning, but I bet you had half an eye on it as a contingency when you saw time was running out. I mean, enough damage had been done to this place to register it as a disaster on the seismic scale, and the senior officers on site would get dragged over the coals for it. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would keep your ass out of a sling. And you could go after your real foes again at a later date. But no … once we had possession of the Dictaphone, which was covered in your prints and DNA, all that went by the wayside. You had to come back here and finish us.’
Mary-Ellen shrugged innocently. ‘My decision to come back here was entirely the right one, DS Heckenburg, for all sorts of reasons … even though it won’t have a happy outcome. Thanks to you confiding in Hazel about Mick McGurk, no one will ever now query my own witness statement, which will be that I got worried about you guys and came back with Ted Haveloc to the Boat Club – only to discover that McGurk had already killed you two, and that in the ensuing fight he killed Haveloc as well … before I managed to get his gun and use it on him.’
Heck shook his head. ‘So you’ve killed Ted Haveloc too?’
‘No Heck, you killed him!’ Mary-Ellen barked, froth spurting from her lips. ‘By fucking things up for everyone. By allocating Ted to my kayak. I told you, you fuck, by this time I was happy to send the rest of that rabble down the Race. Ted could have gone too, but by sticking him with me you signed his death warrant. What choice did I have …’