Bessie handed the keys to Mary-Ellen, and walked to the end of the starboard pier, where she used a crank-handle to raise the roll-up door at the entry-port for the boat.Mary-Ellen climbed aboard, taking the wheel. Heck untied the mooring ropes, then jumped aboard as well, and the craft rumbled to life.
‘Just give us a knock when you get back, so I can lock up,’ Bessie called as they chugged out into the chill, foggy air.
‘No probs, Bessie!’ Heck called back, to which she no doubt blushed again.
With the tarn already having risen to its winter levels, the normal straight channel they’d follow for about a hundred yards through dense bulrushes before reaching open water was almost hidden. Only the tips of browning vegetation were visible, which made it considerably more difficult to steer along, especially in this monotone gloom. The last thing they needed was to get ropes of rotted herbage meshed around their propeller. But as with so many outdoor pursuits, Mary-Ellen was more than a dab hand. She stood at the helm, keeping them on a dead-straight course as they processed forward. If visibility had been bad on land, it was even worse over frigid water. Within seconds of solid ground disappearing behind them, they found they could see no distance in any direction. The outboard’s headlights were already activated, but Heck turned on the prow spotlight as well. This normally drove a broad wedge of luminescence for several hundred yards, though on this occasion it revealed nothing and in fact was reflected back on them with interest. He turned the spot on its pivot, but wherever it pointed there was a glaring backwash from the semi-liquid whiteness, every tendril of fog, every twist and spiral glowing as if phosphorescent.
‘East shore?’ Mary-Ellen asked, raising her voice over the engine.
‘Yeah, steady as you go though.’
‘Steady as I go.’ She cackled. ‘Aye aye, skip …’
‘You know what I bloody mean.’
Despite the potential seriousness of the situation, Mary-Ellen bawled with raucous laughter. ‘Only funning. Hey you’re my line-manager, Heck … I would never take the piss out of you for real!’
Mary-Ellen might only have been in the job four years, but she was a copper through and through. With a dark sense of humour and generally relaxed persona, she enjoyed her work and didn’t get fazed by its more onerous prospects. She had that all-important burning desire to ‘get up and at ’em!’, as she was fond of saying, and that was something Heck heartily approved of. You couldn’t play at being a copper; to be effective in the job, you had to fully absorb yourself in it. So many learned that on the first day. Those with sense got out quickly; those who hung on, looking constantly for inside work, only made life difficult for all the rest. Not so Mary-Ellen. Her previous beat, Richmond-upon-Thames, was pretty sedate by normal London standards, though it also encompassed both banks of the Thames and boasted over twenty miles of river frontage, so she was no stranger to pulling bodies out of the drink – which gave an additional explanation for her irreverent attitude now. That said, she was still unlikely to have scoured any body of water quite like this one.
Witch Cradle Tarn was the child of a geophysical fault long predating the glaciers that had broadened out the valley above; it was a cleft in the mountains formed by ancient tectonic forces, and for its size it was astonishingly deep – nearly seven hundred feet – and abysmally cold. Its sides shelved steeply away beneath the surface, but its eastern shore, which was almost flush against the cliff-face, was heaped with glacial scree, which intruded some distance into the water itself, creating semi-invisible shallows comprising multiple blades of rock, none of which were marked by buoys and any one of which could pass through the keel of a boat like a knife through the belly of a fish.
For several minutes they ploughed through turgid mist, Heck only sighting the surface of the tarn if he glanced over the gunwales, where it flowed past as smooth as darkened glass. The fog shifted in bizarre patterns and yet remained impenetrable. The quiet was unearthly. Even the drone of the engine was muffled, and yet whenever they spoke a word, it echoed and echoed.
‘You really thought you heard a shot last night?’ Mary-Ellen asked.
‘I dunno.’ Heck shrugged again. ‘Strange sounds in these mountains. I’ve only been here two and a half months, but I’ve already realised how deceptive things can be.’
‘Sure you weren’t dreaming?’
‘I can’t definitively rule that out, either.’
‘I can make some calls later, if you want,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a list of all licence-holders.’
‘Yeah, do that. Ask some searching questions – like what the hell they thought they were doing discharging firearms in the wee small hours. Go at them hard, M-E. Make it sound like we know they were up to something. Even if they were shooting rats in a barn or something, they’re unlikely to cough unless we press them, and we can’t dismiss them from any enquiry otherwise … unless we find something nasty out here of course, in which case it’s a whole new ball game.’
Heck didn’t hold out much hope for that, but they were now approaching the tarn’s eastern banks, so Mary-Ellen cut the engine and lifted the propeller, letting them drift inshore. There were no proper landing places on this side of the tarn, no quays, no jetties – in fact there were no paths or roads either, though it wasn’t impossible to explore this shore on foot. Further back from the water’s edge, pines grew through the scree, creating a narrow belt of woodland. This was just about visible as Mary-Ellen kept a steady course from north to south, the vague outlines of trees standing spectral in the mist.
‘Jane Dawson! Tara Cook!’ Heck said, putting the loudhailer to his lips. ‘This is the police … can you hear us?’
He waited thirty seconds for a response, but there was nothing. Without the engine, the silence was immense, broken only by the lapping of wavelets against the rocks.
‘Jane Dawson, Tara Cook!’ he hailed again. ‘This is the police. Can you respond please? Even if you’re injured and unable to speak … throw a stone, bang a piece of wood on another piece of wood. Anything.’
The lack of response was ear-pummelling.
‘Can you get us a tad closer inshore?’ Heck said.
‘I’ll try. Just be prepared for the worrying sound of grinding, cracking timbers.’
‘Don’t even joke about that.’
‘Who’s joking?’
They veered a few yards to port. Heck could clearly see the submerged juts and edges, like serrated teeth, no more than a couple of feet below the surface. Meanwhile, the rocks exposed along the waterline were piled on top of each other haphazardly and yet resembled those huge, manmade defences that guarded the entrances to Elizabethan-age harbours.
‘Okay, that’s far enough,’ he said, grabbing the boat-pole.
Mary-Ellen corrected their course. They continued to glide forward, veils of murk opening in front of them. The shore and its rows of regimented pine trunks was a little more visible, but not greatly so.
‘Perhaps start up the engine, eh?’ Heck said over his shoulder. ‘The noise might let them know we’re here.’
Mary-Ellen complied, while he hailed the girls another five times, always leaving thirty-second breaks in between. All they heard in response was the dull chug of the engine, until a few minutes had passed and this was subsumed by the rumble of churning water. Just ahead, the fog cleared around a protruding headland of vertical rock with a greenery-matted overhang about thirty feet above. Thanks to the heavy autumn rain,