Kurt Fletcher was easy to talk to. He and Johnny sat inside the Pheasant and Gun, with the windows steamed up, surrounded by the noise of youths playing pool, the news on the TV and the jukebox. It was a kind of informal job interview really. Johnny knew that Kurt would make an excellent volunteer for the mountain rescue: he had the skills, the knowledge and the attitude. They had a steady stream of applicants, a lot of them from the cities, in love with the romantic notion of being at one with nature, and most of them were rejected. Ex-services were always welcome, and generally did well during the training, which was rigorous.
They’d spoken about it before, and recently Kurt had enquired seriously.
‘No sign of the bloke who went missing up there then?’
‘No. Time’s running out, I don’t need to tell you that,’ Johnny said.
‘I know. It’s easily done if you’re not careful. I bet he’s in a B&B somewhere, next to a roaring fire, with some bird he met, and he didn’t even go hiking.’
‘But his car was at Revelin Moss.’
‘Was it? What day was that?’
‘It was found on Monday.’
‘I saw a couple of cars up there on Sunday night, but I don’t think they were hikers, just kids messing around.’
‘What were you doing up there?’
‘I’d done Grisedale Pike. I go up there when I need to think.’
‘I’m sorry about what you saw, mate. It’s not easy.’
Kurt nodded.
‘The weather came in and I came down sharpish. But it cleared my head.’
Johnny nodded and they sipped their beer. Bursts of laughter echoed around the pub, and the landlord sat at the bar, watching his staff. He could have been a local nursing his half-pint, but Johnny knew better. He also knew that the pub profits would probably improve twofold if the landlord didn’t replenish his glass so often.
‘All quiet on Sunday, was it?’ Johnny asked.
‘Yes. I didn’t see a soul, apart from those kids – though I didn’t actually see them. They were playing music, probably up to other stuff too. I remember it because it kind of ruined my peace a bit, you know? It didn’t sit right with my mood.’
‘Glad I’m past all that.’ Johnny winked. It was true. He didn’t envy the young now. If social media had existed in the seventies and eighties, the shit that could have been posted on Facebook about him could have landed him in serious trouble. Josie spent hours in front of her phone in an effort to catch the perfect shot. She proudly told him, as though it was a fascinating and important fact, that Kim Kardashian took an average of three hundred selfies to capture one perfect post.
‘She must get cold,’ he had said. ‘She’s always starkers.’ Even Josie found that funny.
‘So you’re settling up here permanently then?’ Kurt nodded. Johnny wanted to know how long he could commit for; they ideally preferred a good stint on the job, say five years. He knew that Kurt had always travelled from Manchester to get his fix of the fells, but now he’d bought a little cottage near Keswick.
They’d met on the top of Scafell Pike, when Johnny was helping to carry slate up there to repair the cairn. It was a First World War memorial, and worth the effort. Kurt had offered to help, and had done so for three days. He worked in Manchester as a landscape gardener, but was desperate to relocate to Cumbria.
‘Plenty of demand for your skills, mate,’ Johnny said, his mind already made up.
It was true, and Kurt knew it, but a troubled ex-girlfriend had kept him in the city. He hadn’t said much, but Johnny had worked out that they’d been together for a long time, until her drug addiction took over and he had to be cruel to be kind and dumped her. She’d spiralled out of control and he’d ended up looking after her anyway. Then she’d relapsed again, and Kurt had hinted on a subsequent night out that she was on her last chance.
‘You still together?’ Johnny asked now.
Kurt shook his head. ‘I’ve got to leave her to it. I can’t help her any more.’
‘I’m sorry about that, mate,’ Johnny said.
‘Yeah, it’s fucked up. She was beautiful, look.’ Kurt took his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through his photos, stopping at one and showing it to Johnny. It was true: she was stunning.
‘How old is she there?’
‘That’s five years ago, so she was thirty. This is her a year ago.’ Kurt showed Johnny another photo.
‘Christ.’
‘I know. It’s fucking killing her. I would’ve married her.’
‘Why doesn’t she stop?’
Drug addiction was something Johnny knew little about. They were regularly tested in the army and so he’d never bothered. He believed it was all in the mind, like alcoholics; they could stop if they really wanted to. Kurt shook his head.
‘Imagine wanting something so badly that you’d kill for it. You told me once about thirst. Not regular thirst, say for a pint on a Saturday, but swollen-mouth thirst after being deprived of water for three days. You know what that feels like. What would you do for water then?’
‘Anything. Are you saying it’s like that? But why crave something you know is killing you? Water is vital, it doesn’t kill you.’
‘Because our brains are programmed to give the body everything it wants to remain happy, and when you’re an addict, your brain would rather crave the drug than face withdrawal. She can’t help herself. It’s not a disease like fucking AA says; that’s all bollocks. It’s a basic biological response to introducing a mind-altering substance to the body.’
Johnny thought about what Kurt had said. It sounded very scientific. He’d never given addiction much thought. He saw addicts as losers, not victims; he simply assumed they had poor self-control. He’d never heard it explained like Kurt just had.
They sat in silence, then Johnny offered to get another pint in. The photo of Kurt’s girlfriend’s demise had shocked him, and he thought of Josie: at the beginning of her young life and potentially exposed to chemicals capable of frying her brain. Hard drugs seemed to have become the equivalent of nicking liquor from the drinks’ cabinet in his day: everybody seemed to do it, and no one seemed to notice. Until it caused problems.
Johnny had brought people off the mountains high, spaced, stoned, cabbaged, smacked … or whatever they called it from one fad to the next. He’d had conversations with Josie, who’d laughed it off, saying that she wasn’t interested. But everything changed when trying to impress your mates, and the difference between the two photos that Kurt had showed him demonstrated how quickly the poison took hold and started to rip through the body.
Kelly said drugs were rife in the Lakes. Whether it was a side effect of dealers moving out of the cities to avoid detection, or because there was fuck all else to do, it didn’t really matter. They were out there, and kids as young as primary-school age were being offered them on a regular basis. The Derwent Academy had a reputation for producing zombified teens fit for nothing much but NHS prescriptions. In his day, kids had hung around the bandstand in the local park smoking fags bought in singles; nowadays, even here in the Lakes, it was something injected, and way more serious, and nobody seemed to give a flying fuck.
Kelly said there wasn’t the funding to go after every smackhead in the north of Cumbria, and the sentencing wasn’t worth it: the CPS focused on rehabilitation rather than detention, and they were talking about legalising drugs for private use. It was the dealers they needed to catch, and then the suppliers, but they were like ghosts, and as Kelly had proven before, big fish were slippery fuckers. It was a dark world, centred round tight gangs, capable and skilled at avoiding detection.
‘So you found a place?’ Johnny asked Kurt once he’d sat down with fresh pints.
‘Yeah, I’ve been looking for something quiet. I fancied somewhere out of the way, like Borrowdale or Thirlmere, but then I saw this absolute peach only five minutes from Keswick.’
‘Nice?’
‘Yup. Pub down the road, and a fell at the foot of the garden.’
‘Perfect.’
They sipped their drinks. The pub fell silent and all eyes turned to the TV. The landlord turned the sound on the speakers down and the TV up. There was a piece on the search for Faith Shaw.
‘Concern is mounting for a missing teenager in Keswick, Cumbria. It comes as the news that a man missing in the same area for three days has been found safe and well in a guest house in Thirlwell, near Keswick.’
‘I told you,’ Kurt said.
‘No shit!’ Johnny thought of the time they’d spent searching, but it was good news; just a pity that the girl was still out there.
A photograph of Danny Stanton came up on the screen, and then the link turned to Faith. The screen filled with images of members of the wider Keswick community searching together in the snow. Some had dogs; many wore full waterproofs and others were soaked through; all were downcast and serious. A photograph of the girl accompanied the piece. No one said a word.
A statement released by the police was read out, and Johnny thought about Kelly. It urged people to come forward with information about the girl. The newsreader continued: ‘The community has come together here in this northern market town just before Christmas, but hope is fading that Faith will be found safe and well, as the region has seen a nasty snap of icy conditions recently and no one could survive for long exposed to such inclement weather. The idea that she wandered off or went with someone she knows is the focus of police efforts in Cumbria at the moment, and they still hope that she will make contact.’
A photo of a small faux-leopard-skin backpack appeared on the screen and the news reader explained that it was similar to the one Faith carried. Next, a young girl, slim, with brown hair, modelled a pair of jeans, a long green jumper and a baggy khaki cargo jacket.
‘Police are hoping that these items might jog somebody’s memory. Faith’s family are growing increasingly fearful for their daughter’s safety.’
Like most of the people in the pub, Johnny was thinking of Faith’s family and what Christmas would be like for them if she hadn’t turned up by then. Kurt, though, was thinking of another girl’s family, and the needle in her arm, her blood sticky under his hand as he tried to wake her up.