Dead Man Walking. Paul Finch

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      Having left the moorland road, they were moving single file along a snaking hillside path. Gemma, who brought up the rear, dug her phone from her pocket. ‘Half past midnight.’

      ‘Christ,’ Hazel groaned. ‘I thought it’d almost be morning. Seems to have been dark for hours and hours.’

      ‘The good old wintertime, eh. At least we’re heading downhill.’

      ‘Yeah.’ Hazel didn’t even sound enthused by that, mainly because the blisters she’d developed over the last mile of rough ground had reduced her progress to an agonised limp.

      ‘You do know where you’re going, don’t you?’ Gemma asked.

      ‘Like I said, we’re now on our way down to the south end of the tarn.’ Hazel stopped and swept with her hand at the general area behind them and to their right. ‘If it wasn’t for this fog, you’d have one of the best views in the Lake District from here.’

      ‘That’s Witch Cradle Tarn down there?’ Gemma asked.

      ‘I’m certain of it.’

      ‘You don’t sound certain.’

      ‘I’m as close to being certain as I can be.’

      They listened, not quite sure what they expected to hear. Calling out to see if their voices echoed would be the dumbest of dumb ideas, given that they were possibly still being hunted. Besides, any sounds that came back to them could just as easily be the result of atmospheric conditions as from some vast gulf.

      None the wiser, they pressed doggedly on. Gemma was used to leading, not following, and it grated on her having to rely on someone else to make all the decisions, but one thing her reluctant guide had said earlier was definitely true. She’d be in a real mess if she was up here on her own. Okay, this was only the Lake District, not the Wild West, but it was astonishing how disorienting a lack of light could be, either artificial or natural, not to mention a lack of shelter, a lack of signposting, even a lack of flat surfaces to walk on. Gemma’s gym-toned body was in good condition, but the strength and dexterity required to traverse this landscape comfortably came from something else – long hours of experience and slow, painful acclimatisation. As things were, her feet were swollen, her ankles aching, the cold and damp leaching into the very marrow of her bones. And of course it would help if she had the first idea where she was and which direction she had to go in. In that regard she had no option but to rely on Hazel, an unlikely Calamity Jane by almost any standards, but someone who, if nothing else, had spent most of her life here.

      ‘So how far do you estimate we have to go?’ Gemma asked.

      ‘It’s probably another mile down to the Race Bridge,’ Hazel said. ‘After that, a mile to the Boat Club. Then another to the Keld.’

      ‘What’s the Race Bridge? Not another death-trap I hope?’

      ‘No, it’s just an arched stone bridge at the tarn’s southern tip. Whenever we have heavy rain, the tarn overflows and it pours downhill in what we call the Cragwood Race. It’s like a fast, steep river with lots of turns and rapids. The Boat Club use it for white-water rafting, kayaking, all that sort of stuff.’

      ‘And where does that lead to? The Race, I mean.’

      ‘Down into Great Langdale. At the bottom, it joins Langdale Beck.’

      ‘How far down into Langdale from the Race Bridge?’

      ‘Another couple of miles.’

      ‘Another couple?’

      ‘Maybe more.’

      ‘Great,’ Gemma said. But the path progressively steepened as they descended, and gravity began to assist. Gemma’s ears popped as the pressure changed. It felt as if they were getting somewhere, at last.

      Heck fell a distance he estimated as being close to a hundred feet.

      As he plummeted through the fog, the quad-bike turning over and over alongside him, engine yowling, heat and fumes pouring off it, it fleetingly struck him that he wasn’t absolutely sure of his location, or what he was descending towards. It could have been another shallow river full of rocks and cobblestones, or even a dry valley bottom, or a moor, or mountainous heap of scree. But he had no time to ponder these dread possibilities before the vapour cleared beneath his feet and the flat, black surface of the tarn came racing up towards him.

      Instinctively, with only a second to spare, Heck straightened his body as much as possible, ankles extended downward, arms raised on high, head turned, chin tucked behind the bulwark of his shoulder.

      He struck clean, toes first, but the impact was phenomenal.

      His body shuddered at the blow, the water all but dragging his clothes over his head as he crashed through a surface hard and yet brittle as glass, and plunged deep, deep into the icy, unlit depths below. He sank at least fifteen feet, maybe more, and the pressure change was shocking; his ear-drums felt as if they’d blow out, his teeth as if they’d explode. At first he was so dazed that all he could do was float in that turgid embrace, his clothes filling with water, ballooning around him, dragging him ever further down into brackish murk – but then it seeped past his lips, and forcefully revived him. Though even then, it took every inch of strength he had, and wild, explosive kicks to propel himself upward.

      When Heck finally broke the surface, he vented his lungs in a single eruption of air, and greedily sucked fresh chestfuls as he wallowed amid seething, hissing bubbles. He was still groggy, with no clue which direction he was supposed to take to find the nearest shore, but then, just to his left, he caught a last glimpse of a fading luminous orb far beneath the tea-coloured surface, before it dwindled entirely from view. Witch Cradle Tarn was seven hundred feet deep, or so he’d been told. Whoever that handy ATV had belonged to, they weren’t going to see it again.

      At least it gave him a marker. The quad-bike had fallen to his left, which meant the cliff was behind him, so the other shore – the populated west shore – was directly in front, albeit a considerable distance away. At first, Heck was so bruised and tired that all he could do was wallow there, gasping, treading water, which now at last was settling, lapping rather than frothing.

      He’d have liked to keep doing this, taking time to rest, but knew he couldn’t risk it. The big problem now was the very low water temperature inducing hypothermia. He remembered hearing in a training session once that the projected survival time for a healthy adult in fifty degrees of water or less was a maximum of about two hours, but of course during that time the body would get weaker, the thinking process turn progressively more muddled. So he couldn’t afford to mess around. It was tempting to head for the unpopulated east shore, as that was closest, but then he’d be exposed to the near-freezing night air in sodden clothes, miles from any kind of shelter. The only real option was to head for the more distant west shore. As such, he rolled over onto his back, and commenced a slow, heavy frog-kick, which propelled him steadily across the tarn. Within minutes his limbs were so leaden it was more like forging through treacle, but with gritted teeth he persisted. Maybe half an hour passed before he felt ribbons of weed billowing around his legs. By this time his scalp was numb. He placed an exploratory hand on it, and was shaken to feel a patina of wafer-thin ice on his hair. He quickly scrubbed it loose, then turned properly to look over his shoulder. The fog still obscured the shore, but not the entrance to the corridor that led through the rushes to the boatshed. It seemed he’d crossed the tarn diagonally rather than heading straight to СКАЧАТЬ