The first bullet hit McGurk in the throat, kicking out a divot of flesh and muscle. The second ripped through his forehead, bursting from the back of his skull in a deluge of blood and brains. It wasn’t quite a double-tap, but it did the job.
He hit the ground like a sack of bones, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Silence followed. A fine crimson mist hung where he’d stood.
Heck staggered slowly forward. ‘M-E … what … what the Goddamn hell! We didn’t have any damn proof …’
‘Uh-uh, Heck.’
Heck was so infuriated that he didn’t initially notice the gun had been turned in his direction. Or that it was a very familiar make and model; a Colt Python .357. ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you realise what you’ve just fucking done?’
‘Stay where you are!’ Mary-Ellen advised him.
He stumbled to a halt, baffled.
‘And don’t even think about raising that gun again, ma’am!’ Mary-Ellen swung her weapon onto Gemma. ‘I know it’s only a toy, but well … I’d feel better if it was on the ground.’
Gemma had lowered her pistol in disbelief. Almost instinctively, she now made a half-effort to raise it.
‘Uh-uh!’ Mary-Ellen cocked her Colt.
Helpless, with no alternative, Gemma tossed the starter pistol down onto the shingle.
As she did, Heck’s hand stole into his jacket pocket, but Mary-Ellen spotted this too, and levelled the weapon back on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Heck! I mean what have you got in there, anyway? You gonna chuck a chisel at me, a screwdriver? Even if you’ve got one, I wouldn’t take the chance …’
Heck’s face lengthened as he raised his empty hands. ‘You, you can’t be …’
‘Okay, the pair of you …’ Mary-Ellen waggled the gun to indicate they should stand together. Reluctantly, they sidled towards each other. ‘Excellent. Now … kneel down. So I can see you better.’
They complied, stiffly, like automatons, but Heck was still shaking his head. ‘M-E, don’t … don’t tell me you’re involved in this.’
‘Of course I’m not,’ she replied in a vaguely contemptuous tone. ‘You know me, don’t you, Heck?’
He glanced at McGurk’s crumpled body. ‘I thought I did.’
She surveyed him, her gaze oddly flat. Her lips puckered into a lifeless half-smile. ‘You really couldn’t see past Mick McGurk once he was in the frame, could you? Did you really think he’d set that police station to blow and then just walk into it … purely to give himself an alibi? You think even some hard-ass ex-squaddie would take a chance like that? Mind you, McGurk got it even more wrong. He thought you were the killer, and with no evidence at all. Purely because someone whispered it into his ear about an hour ago. And as for you guys thinking he might have an accomplice out there, because all this was, like, too good for one man. Well … I guess the real perp would be very flattered to hear that …’
‘What have you done with the villagers?’ Heck interrupted. ‘You know, the ones you were supposed to be looking after down at the far end of the tarn.’
‘Be fair, Heck. I wasn’t supposed to look after them, I was supposed to send them down the Race. Isn’t that right?’ She feigned concern. ‘That’s what the villagers thought. That’s what you told them. It’ll be a wild ride for sure, but some of them might make it. In fact, I’m counting on that …’
‘Irish,’ Gemma said suddenly.
‘What’s that, ma’am?’ Mary-Ellen wondered.
‘All along I said the Stranger spoke with an off-kilter accent,’ Gemma explained. ‘Not quite Scottish.’
‘And definitely not Border Scots, eh?’ Mary-Ellen’s mouth twisted into a full grin, but her eyes remained glassy, almost dead. ‘They always used to say the Munster Irish dialect had some similarities with Scots Gaelic. But I suppose it would take a proper Sassenach to confuse the two. On which subject, I’m surprised at you, Heck! Throwing your lot in with Miss Piggy here, just because she’s a handsome bit of tail. Didn’t she piss on your life as well?’
‘Munster,’ Gemma said slowly and disappointedly, as if she couldn’t believe she’d missed such an obvious clue. ‘So who was he, the Stranger … your father?’
Mary-Ellen’s grin faded. Her mouth trembled as she screwed it shut.
‘Your father?’ Heck posed it as a question because he still couldn’t quite accept what he was hearing. ‘Your father was … was the Stranger?’
‘That … is a damn … fucking lie.’ Mary-Ellen bared her teeth. ‘My father … my fucking father was the kindest, sweetest man in the world. My mother died giving birth to me, so I grew up with one parent … but he was the best you could hope for. The gentlest, the most caring, the most loving …’
‘And a vicious sexual sadist,’ Gemma said.
Mary-Ellen swung the pistol around, finger tightening on the trigger. ‘Say that one more time, you bitch, and I’ll take those baby blues out while you’re still fucking alive! It isn’t bad enough you shot him dead, now you think you can denigrate his name!’
‘So it was your father,’ Heck said, breathing slow and steady, trying to stay calm and at the same time to draw her attention back to him.
It worked; Mary-Ellen switched again, but slowly. ‘I’m sure even you would like to think that, Heck. A nice easy answer. A nice acceptable answer. Now we know who the Stranger was … that thieving Gypsy bastard who nobody liked. That fucking Irish tinker who even got kicked out by his own people …’
‘They had their suspicions too, did they?’ Gemma said.
‘Don’t make this worse for yourself, Piper. All my Dada’s life he got picked on, blamed for stuff he didn’t do, and for why … because he was foreign, because he didn’t have any kind of education! And now you think you’re going to pin a series of sex murders on him? When it’s plain as mustard the real killer is still here, doing the same thing all over again …’
‘Why don’t you tell us what really happened then?’ Heck said.
‘What does it matter to you?’ Mary-Ellen wondered.
His thoughts raced as he tried to play for time. ‘Hey, if there was a miscarriage of justice, if Gemma shot the wrong person, it’s important we know about it.’
‘It won’t make any difference if you know about it, Heck! You won’t be walking away from here!’
‘I’m sure if it didn’t matter to you that we know the truth, you’d already be pumping that trigger, M-E.’
‘You think I’m not going to, is that it?’
‘Hardly. The evidence you’re ready and willing is all around us.’
‘Evidence … that’s a great word.’ Mary-Ellen turned back to Gemma with reptile speed. ‘There was never any evidence against my father, was there, Miss Piper? But you put lead in him all the same. You found a scapegoat, someone no one would care about …’
‘You said your own people kicked your father out,’ Heck said. ‘If you and he were part of a travelling community, something must’ve gone badly wrong. Those guys are pretty tight.’
Mary-Ellen’s eyes brimmed with tears, yet her features remained rock solid. When she licked saliva from her lips, it was with tiny, darting strokes of her tongue. These were minor details of course, yet the physical transformation alone was quite fantastic. The affable, energetic young policewoman of earlier had completely gone, replaced by something … well, by just that, something.
‘I was a child at the time,’ she said uncertainly, as though she possibly shouldn’t be breaking these confidences. ‘I don’t know the reason they sent him away. I don’t even know where we were … somewhere in Europe maybe. But I didn’t care. It suited me. Just me and him together in our battered old car, in our little caravan. That was the way I liked it. When we came back to Britain, I liked it even better. Felt like I was home. Not that you native Brits ever had much time for us. Even down in the West Country, where our kind were common, Dada couldn’t get work anywhere. When he did, he soon got sacked. The usual thing … accusations of theft, accusations of drunkenness. Always unproved.’
‘Never your dad’s fault, eh?’ Gemma said.
‘You bitch, Piper! What would you know of life on the road? No one wanting you around, people disliking you on principle. Dada couldn’t even go for a drink at night without men picking fights with him. The number of times he came home late, and I saw him washing blood from his clothes …’
‘Never occurred to you where that blood really came from?’ Gemma asked.
Unexpectedly, Mary-Ellen smiled at this. But it was almost a deranged smile, the corners of her mouth hooking upward, globs of saliva oozing out.
‘It never entered your head he might be the Stranger?’ Heck asked. ‘You must have known those murders were going on?’
‘Oh, I was very aware of the murders, Heck. I was thirteen in 2003, I was no child. Dada would even talk to me about it, warn me about the sin of going off with lads I didn’t know …’
‘Who was he?’ Heck asked. ‘What was your father’s name?’
‘Nice try. But you didn’t get it at the time, and you aren’t getting it now.’
‘You understand the circumstances in which he was shot?’ Gemma said.
‘Oh, I’ve immersed myself in the case since then, Miss Piper. Buried myself in it. And your account of that night’s events would be very impressive … if you hadn’t completely fabricated it.’
‘M-E,’ Heck said. ‘You don’t know anyone fabricated anything …’
‘I know enough!’ she hissed. ‘Namely that late one night, when he’d been out for ages, Dada almost crashed his car as he pulled onto the derelict lot where we were camped. I managed to get him out, only to find him filthy with mud and blood, and suffering the most terrible gunshot wound … and then, without saying anything, not even a simple “goodbye”, proceeding to die in my young arms.’
She paused, breathing harshly, as though it required a momentous effort.
Neither captive said a word. Neither dared.
‘Can you imagine what it was like, Miss Piper … to experience that at such a tender age? Can you imagine the depth of shock and despair? Crying ’til there was no fluid left in my body … for the loss of the man who’d done everything for me since I was a little girl, my guardian, my best pal, the bloke who’d nurtured me, who’d looked after me so lovingly despite the world putting constant obstacles in his path.’
Heck listened in fascination as Mary-Ellen slipped briefly into a kind of recitation mode. It was almost lyrical, the way she recounted these events – as though she’d revisited them over and over in her head, and had religiously rehearsed the speech by which she’d put them right. Only now did it truly strike him how absorbed by this terrible experience she’d been, how it had come to dominate her life – and worse.
‘Trust me, guys, the word “bereft” doesn’t quite cover it,’ Mary-Ellen added. ‘And then, less than two hours later, while I’m still sitting there, rigid with shock, Dada lying in my lap, I hear on the radio that a young policewoman is believed to have lured the Stranger into a trap, and shot him!’
‘M-E, you must’ve known what all this meant,’ Heck said. ‘Even in that wretched state, you must’ve known …’
‘I knew the Stranger was still alive!’ she replied tautly. ‘I also knew you fuckers were not going to pin his series of murders on my dead father. No, sir.’
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,’ Heck 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 …’
‘By sticking him with you we signed his death warrant?’ Heck said, wonderingly. ‘You had no choice?’
Briefly, her mouth slammed shut, her jaw trembling violently. A fresh tear snaked a zigzag course down her left cheek.
‘Careful, M-E,’ he said. ‘You’re moving off script.’
‘The Stranger killed Ted Haveloc,’ she said tightly. ‘Everyone will see that. And I’ve had enough of this bullshit!’ She focused on Gemma again, raising the gun until it was level with her face. ‘The Stranger’s plan was to break you, DSU Piper, to ruin you professionally … but I’m sure he’ll be equally happy to see you dead …’
‘Course he will!’ Heck butted in. ‘He’s the lowest of the low, a sadistic pipsqueak!’
‘Shut up, Heck,’ she shouted. ‘You’re next, but how you get it is my choice.’
‘You know what a scrote he was better than anyone, don’t you, M-E!’
Fleetingly, Mary-Ellen was distracted between the two of them; more tears poured profusely; tears of rage, regret, angst … who knew?
‘All those lonely years in that dirty, decrepit caravan,’ Heck said. ‘Just him and his perverted fantasies. And you of course. The little girl with the perfect dad.’
‘I said, shut the fuck up!’
‘Except no one could ever have been that perfect, Mary-Ellen. Especially not someone with a track record for sexual violence. Like I say … you know that better than anyone!’
Her eyes flared like pits of burning oil as she swung the Python around, at which point Gemma snatched her own firearm from the shingle and levelled it with both hands. ‘Drop that weapon, PC O’Rourke! Right now!’
Heck had been counting on this. Only a few seconds earlier, he’d glanced again at Gemma’s gun, and had suddenly thought its chunky black outline and big cylindrical barrel all wrong for a harmless starter pistol.
Mary-Ellen smirked at Gemma with disbelief. ‘You on crack, ma’am? Thinking you can take me down with that silly toy?’
Gemma locked gazes with her. ‘Don’t make me do it, Mary-Ellen.’
And only now did Mary-Ellen seem to recognise that something might be wrong. That somehow or other she might not be fully in control of this situation.
‘You sneaky bitch!’ She swung the Colt Python back around.
But Gemma fired first.
The ‘starter pistol’, which was actually a single-shot flare gun, bucked in her hand, a ball of blistering light flashing the twenty yards between them, hitting the policewoman clean on her left side and engulfing her in flame; igniting her like a Roman Candle. With flames roaring up her legs and the whole left side of her body, Mary-Ellen ran headlong into the tarn, uttering muffled, incoherent shrieks, but still managing to get three thunderous shots off before the waters enveloped her in clouds of steam. Thanks to her frantic, stumbling flight, and the massive recoil of the Python, all three slugs went wide, though the two cops still threw themselves to the ground.
As the tarn roiled and hissed, Heck snatched Gemma’s hood and yanked her to her feet. ‘This way,’ he said, hauling her along the shingle towards the clubhouse.
‘Tell me you got all that?’ Gemma shouted.
Heck stuck his hand into the same pocket as before, where the Dictaphone was still running on ‘Record’. He hit the ‘Off’ switch through the sealed evidence bag.
‘Just hope it picked up something,’ he said. ‘It’s a souped-up model, so it ought to have. Good job these bags are airtight too. Otherwise, this thing would have died when the canoe went down …’
They scrambled over the Boat Club fence, but there now came a squawk of outrage behind them. Whatever the fire had done to Mary-Ellen, they couldn’t tell – despite glancing back, in the murk and the smoke and the steam they had no detail. But she hadn’t relinquished her Python and now appeared to be kneeling upright in the water, levelling the weapon with both hands. Two more deafening shots followed, an entire plate-glass window on this side of the clubhouse disintegrating.
Heck and Gemma ducked sideways, struggling and tripping between tables and chairs. The next thing they were on slick timber decking. Ahead of them, the Boat Club jetty tapered off into the fog.
‘You bitch!’ Mary-Ellen screeched behind them. ‘He’ll do you for this!’
At that shrill pitch, her voice barely sounded human; it was frothy and distorted. It was easy to picture the effects of the flames on her face and mouth. Not that she’d lost any of her demented rage. She was armed with a revolver, which only contained six shots. She’d now fired five. But if she was concerned about using her last, it didn’t show. The Python roared again, and the wooden handrail alongside them exploded.
‘You fucking bitch, Piper!’ Again, it was a barely human sound, as if her mouth was stuffed with sand.
It was a near-certainty that having raided the strong-box in the firearms car, she’d have another weapon to hand, and indeed, as Heck and Gemma started along the jetty at a faltering, hobbling gait – not only was Gemma injured, but neither of them really knew where they were going – she opened fire again, and instead of the deafening bang of the Magnum, this time they heard the duller, flatter blam of a police-issue Glock nine millimetre. The shot whistled past, with inches to spare.
‘Heck, where the hell are we going?’ Gemma stammered. ‘I can’t even stand up, never mind swim …’
‘There are other boats along here.’
‘Another bloody boat!’
‘You got a better idea?’
The only boat they found was about two-thirds of the way along the jetty, on its starboard side. It was a canoe, smaller than the previous one but with two paddles inside it. Quickly, Heck untied its line, and lowered Gemma down the ladder. Behind him, heavy feet were advancing along the jetty, along with a hoarse, raw breathing.
He’d expected Mary-Ellen to open fire again by now, but they had a good fifty yards on her, and presumably, her thermal-imaging device had died either in the fire or the tarn.
‘You sodding bastards,’ she blathered. ‘He’ll scalp you for this … he’ll scalp you and he’ll fucking skin you …’
Heck contemplated lying flat on the top of the jetty, hoping she’d have come alongside him before she realised he was there. He felt he could take her. Even with Mary-Ellen hurt, it would be a hell of a fight, but he’d have the element of surprise. However, when she started shooting again, blindly and indiscriminately, he changed his mind. With boards erupting and splintering around him, he rolled over the edge and swung himself down the ladder like an ape.
‘Nice touch with the flare gun,’ he said, as he paddled them away. Gemma was attempting to help, but was in so much pain that her efforts were sluggish and uncoordinated. ‘Just get comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this.’
The Glock detonated thirty yards behind, and a slug slapped into the water a few feet to their left.
‘Are you kidding!’ Gemma said through gritted teeth. She struck hard with her paddle. ‘It’s two of us or none at all.’
Heck didn’t argue. He was already breathing hard, feeling the strain in his chest and shoulders, though the canoe was moving swiftly and smoothly, cutting cleanly out into the south-central waters of the tarn. He still didn’t know where they were going, the fog slithering on all sides, masking everything. ‘Anyway, like I say, nice touch with the flare …’
‘Yeah, I heard you the first time.’
‘Better than a starter pistol.’
‘I couldn’t find the sodding starter pistol! But the flare gun was in an emergency kit in the club’s first-aid locker. I trashed the Club Secretary’s office in the process!’
‘That’ll be the least of his problems when the new season starts.’
There was another bark of gunfire. A bullet whizzed closely past.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Heck said, glancing over his shoulder.
Another boat was already on the water behind them. Barely visible, but gaining.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Gemma said. ‘She’s back in her kayak.’
‘Looks like she’s in yours, the single-hander. Doesn’t give up easily, does she?’
‘How can she afford to?’
‘I’ve met some headcases in my time …’
‘It’s about survival now, Heck.’
‘Call it what you want, she’s mad as a hatter!’
They’d now managed to find a mutual rhythm, though Gemma winced with the pain and effort. Ahead of them, the fog seemed to be shifting. Heck had the feeling they were approaching a landmass of some sort; the southeast shore maybe.
‘Just think about it,’ he panted. ‘All this time, she’s been waiting her chance. I mean, it might never have come. But she was patient, infinitely patient, just biding her time … month after month, year after year.’
‘Yeah, yeah … just keep that tape recording safe …’
‘It may be classified as unreliable evidence, don’t you think?’
‘Improperly obtained,’ she replied, ‘but real enough. I think they’ll admit it …’
The Glock barked again. But they barely heard. A rising rumble from somewhere ahead now drew all their attention. The fog broke apart like dim, dusty curtains, to reveal rising slopes clad with trees, and yet directly in front, a cleft in this hillside, and across that at ground level, a stone footbridge. The steel grating of the gate was raised, a cloud of spume hanging over it.
Gemma grabbed the gunwales as she felt the current take them. ‘You think we can handle the Race?’
‘If the others made it, why can’t we?’
‘We don’t know whether they made it or not.’
‘We will in a few minutes …’
They ducked down as they were sucked under the bridge. The white-water boomed in their ears. And then they were dropping, nose-diving downward into a chaos of noise and spray and rolling, tumbling waves.