Chapter 3
THREE
Detective Morgan Brookes had spent the entire night tossing and turning.
Her dream had been vivid, turning into a full-blown nightmare about finding Cain’s partner Angela.
She had been stuffed in a cupboard and left bleeding to death.
Angela’s eyes had opened, and she’d pleaded with her in a raspy, sad voice for her to save her.
‘Please don’t let me die, Morgan.’ She could hear the words as clear as if Angela had spoken them directly in her ear.
When the shrill ring of Ben’s phone had pierced through her nightmare, waking her, she’d breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn’t been real.
Ben’s hand snaked out from underneath the duvet, feeling around for the offending phone.
‘Matthews.’ His voice was rough, thick with tiredness, and Morgan looked at the bedside clock. It was almost four in the morning. This was bad news for the pair of them.
‘Where?’
She knew the control room inspector would be explaining the location they wanted Ben to attend; and if he was going, then she was too.
Getting out of bed she peered through the blinds and turned to look at Ben, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed running his fingers through his slightly tousled hair.
He hung up.
‘What’s up?’
‘A teenage girl has been found at the old summer camp near to Buttermere. She’s hysterical and hypothermic. They’re taking her to the hospital.’
‘Why do they need us?’
‘She told the guy who found her that her two friends are missing, said some girl they almost ran over came out of the mist with a bat of some kind and attacked them. She ran away and hid, hearing her friends screaming.’
‘Dear God, that’s awful. Where are her friends?’
‘She doesn’t know.’
Ben didn’t say anything else, and she let that sit with her for a minute – missing, in this weather up on the side of an exposed fell.
That was not good for the two teenagers.
She was up and tugging on her clothes, no time to waste.
Ben was doing the same; they worked in complete synchronicity, and the irony wasn’t lost on Morgan how they both went to bed with a fresh set of clothes laid out ready to get dressed in situations like this.
Always prepared. She had learned this the hard way.
Neither of them spoke and by the time they left the house they were wrapped up in thick winter coats, hats, scarves and gloves.
Morgan knew there was an abandoned summer camp halfway up on the side of Buttermere Fell, but had never actually visited it.
Back in her school days, she had heard tales suggesting it was haunted, and it was quite the topic of conversation amongst her friends.
They were always saying they were going up there one of the nights; they never did thankfully.
It was a hotspot for bored teens, but when she was a teenager, she didn’t have access to a car until she got a job and saved up for one.
None of her friends did either, so at least they kept themselves out of trouble.
She paused, they hadn’t though, had they?
She and her friends had got into worse trouble instead.
They had gone up to Rydal Caves with alcohol and got drunk, leading to her best friend Brad falling to his death.
A cold shudder ran down her spine, and she had to stop her mind from dwelling in that dark place where she kept those memories locked away.
The moment they stepped out of the front door the mist was swirling around their legs, and Ben had no choice but to drive at a snail’s pace, following the satnav’s instructions to get to the fell where the teens were reported missing.
The visibility was terrible and was no doubt hampering the search efforts to locate the girl’s friends, who she was praying were just lost and not injured in any way, or worse.
Morgan couldn’t help but think this place was lonely and eerie as fuck in the thick mist that swirled around them as she and Ben got out of the car.
‘Benno, over here.’
Madds’s voice shouted to them and a beam of light waved up and down guiding them towards him.
Morgan was glad it hadn’t been Scotty’s; she did not want to even think about how much of a close call it had been when she’d been convinced he was a killer just a few months ago.
She had kicked his front door in. She still felt terrible; the guilt gnawing at her.
‘What’s happening, Madds?’ Ben asked; his voice was still a little hoarse.
‘Chaos, it’s too dangerous to do a full search in this. I don’t want any of my officers plummeting off the side of the fell or falling into the lake. The girl who rang it in was hysterical, couldn’t get much sense out of her.’
‘Do you not think she’s being serious?’
‘Do I think that out here in the middle of the night someone attacked her friends? Maybe she is hallucinating because of the hypothermia. I mean, when the core body temperature drops your brain function declines, which could have made her confused. She was already disorientated if she was hiding out and didn’t know where she was.
‘There is a vehicle parked along the way which PNCs back to seventeen-year-old Dawson Turner, and no sign of him up to now. I’ve sent officers to his home address to check if he’s there. His car could have broken down hours ago and they’ve got separated in the fog.’
Morgan nodded. ‘True, but why was… what’s her name?’
‘Tori Mather.’
‘Why were Tori and her friends here in the first place, in this weather?’
A creeping sensation of being watched made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, and she slowly turned around, not that she could see barely ten steps in front of her. If someone was watching them, they had the perfect cover, and this thought unsettled her more than ever.
‘I think she’s telling the truth. I think they came out here for whatever reason and were attacked.
It’s not the kind of thing someone makes up for the fun of it, especially if she was found terrified and half frozen out here.
I mean it’s so eerie, even I wouldn’t have been tempted to do what they were doing. ’
Ben was nodding and she knew he was thinking that she had a point. ‘We can’t not search the area; they might be lying there injured. If we don’t, they could die of exposure.’
‘Mountain rescue is on the way with a search dog. It’s the best I can do without risking anyone’s safety.’ Madds sounded irritated by her criticism.
‘Who else is out here?’ Ben asked.
‘Amber and Brett are getting a statement off the caretaker.’
‘Caretaker?’ Morgan asked.
‘Yep, heard a girl screaming and went out to investigate, found her just before we arrived on scene.’
‘He must know this place like the back of his hand. Let’s get him to help us search and stop wasting time.’
Ben said it before she could and she was a little relieved that he had.
Madds grunted. ‘Be my guest, he’s over in the old recreation hall where they found the girl.’
He pointed in the distance, and Ben began walking that way. The fog was starting to lift a little, and Morgan could make out the steep pitched roof of the wooden building.
She followed behind, not that she could see his outline very clearly, but she had this sinking feeling deep inside of her gut that something awful may have happened.