After that, there was only darkness.
And pain.
Heck had no clue how long he lay there for.
Firstly, because he was only semi-conscious. Secondly, because it was one of those slow disbelief moments, the sort people experience after emerging from terrible car crashes; when it seems somehow unjust that they’ve survived, when they probe gingerly and nervously around their limbs and body, increasingly baffled by the absence of extensive damage. Heck did exactly this, and though he discovered cuts and bruising, nothing appeared to be out of place. His vision was still obscured, but this time by broken stalks and tatters of brown leafage.
Heck rent all this aside as he sat slowly upright. He was still bathed in sweat, in fact his clothes were sodden, and it was noticeably chilling – aside from the warm stickiness caking the left side of his face. When he fingered this, he discovered that his left brow had split open. However, blood was only leaking out¸ suggesting even this wound was superficial. Still groggy, he gradually became aware of the jagged jumbles of rock underneath him, digging into his pummelled body, and of a distant ghostly voice calling his name from somewhere far overhead.
Despite the loose hillside shifting under his trainers, he rose painfully to his feet.
‘Mark!’ a frantic voice called again. ‘Mark!’
It actually sounded like two voices. Hazel and Gemma.
‘I’m okay!’ he tried to holler back, but he struggled to get enough air into his lungs. He took a second to compose himself – his back was hurting, his neck was hurting, his chest was hurting. Every damn part of him was hurting.
‘It’s okay,’ he bellowed, though the mere act felt as if someone had clobbered him in the ribs with a sledgehammer.
There was an abrupt, lingering silence, as they perhaps wondered if they were hearing things. ‘Mark …?’
‘I said I’m … I’m okay.’ Heck shook himself; just craning his head back to gaze upward was enough to send him dizzy, but at least the acoustics of the chasm enabled him to shout and be heard reasonably clearly. ‘Look, I don’t know how far down I am.’
‘You’re actually okay?’ That was Gemma. She sounded incredulous.
‘Think so …’
‘Anything broken?’
‘Not sure. Nothing that isn’t bruised, that’s for certain.’
‘Are you stuck?’
‘Seem to be at the top of a slope. I can probably work my way down from here, but I doubt there’s any way I can get up to you.’ There was another brief silence. He imagined them discussing the situation. ‘Does Hazel know where she is?’ he called up. ‘Can she work her way back into the Cradle?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Hazel replied. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ She didn’t sound as if she believed it either. ‘I thought you’d been killed for sure …’
‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘But you two may be. If he’s got a rifle, you’ll still be in range, so you need to back away from the edge. Make your way into the Cradle on foot. If nothing else, at least he’ll be off your back for the time being.’
‘But what’re you going to do?’
‘Same …’
‘Do you even know where you are?’
‘No, but heading downhill’s got to be a start.’
Hazel and Gemma walked through the fog for at least fifteen minutes after leaving the Via Ferrata, before encountering a rutted, unmade road, which, though Hazel felt she recognised it and said they should follow, seemed to weave a pointless course across the high, desolate fell-tops. Hazel said she thought she knew where it led to, though she wasn’t completely sure. Gemma was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, and followed her without speaking.
For a few moments back then Gemma had seriously thought Heck was dead. Not for the first time since they’d been working together, though on this occasion it had happened in front of her eyes – or at least it would have done, had the fog not screened him from her. It still surprised her how the breath had caught in her throat, how the heart had almost stopped throbbing in her breast. The near light-headed sensation when his voice had come echoing up to them had been startling. The brief tears Gemma had found herself blinking away had been tears of shock more than anything else – but it still peeved her.
Typical bloody Heck. The only bloke, apart from her father, who’d ever been able to make her cry. And he still managed to drive her up the wall even now, though they were based nearly three hundred miles apart. Of course, all this was explainable. They’d been together so long, emotionally as well as professionally. They were so familiar with each other. You couldn’t just switch off those kinds of feelings. But that was all it was now. Heck was a police colleague and a sometime friend. No wonder she’d been horrified to see him drop into that chasm.
This was what Gemma told herself.
Meanwhile, the road they were following didn’t actually seem to lead anywhere except to occasional sets of iron gates built into dry-stone walls, which were always chained and padlocked. On no occasion was there a stile to climb through, which indicated they were well off the hiker/tourist route. On all sides there lay only emptiness, unseen stretches of desolate moorland, swamped in monotonous grey. Inevitably, it took her back to the last time she’d encountered the Stranger. She’d had to get used to wild, dreary moorland on that occasion too. Of course, back then the boot had been on the other foot. That time it was the Stranger facing an imminent demise.
He should have been, after taking her bullet in his chest.
But it had been a momentous incident for all kinds of reasons, not least because it had seen Gemma commence her meteoric rise through the police ranks. Up until then she’d been a no-nonsense, hard-working detective constable; one among hundreds, no more likely a high-flier than so many others. But that night, she’d really made her name.
Of course, there’d been other after-effects too; a less savoury kind of fallout.
The case seemed such a long time ago now, ten years. But there was no point in pretending it hadn’t happened. And in this place, it seemed she had nothing but time with which to mull over it, no matter how reluctant she might be …
The Stranger taskforce occupied an entire floor at Newton Abbot police station. The MIR was its central hub, though there were numerous smaller side-offices connected to this. One of these was allocated exclusively to the decoy units, who completed each shift by typing up and logging all their observations from the night before, even the most seemingly insignificant of which they would then send to the Document Reader, who would assess them in detail before attaching them to a Policy File that now had more entries than the unabridged Gideon’s Bible.
Given the events of the previous shift, there were no decoy units on duty today. In fact the only person present in the small side-office was Gemma, scrubbed of her ‘war-paint’ – as DSU Anderson had referred to it – and dressed sensibly in a sweater and jeans. Oddly, she felt more shaken now than she had done when she’d first come off Dartmoor; she was tired and slightly nauseous, but she had a report to complete nonetheless, and it was already a couple of hours late.
The