Dead Man Walking. Paul Finch

from the locals’ point of view. And yet by the duo’s body language, the man was the more dominant. He stood while she sat. He bought the drinks while she disported her charms, leaning backward against the bar, her exposed cleavage inviting the most brazen stares.

      ‘Got a right couple, here!’ Harold Hopkinson, portly landlord of The Grouse Beater, said from the side of his mouth. ‘Talk about putting his missus on show.’

      ‘She’s loving every minute of it,’ Doreen, his foursquare wife, replied.

      ‘Bit old to be making an exhibition of themselves like that, aren’t they?’

      ‘Bit old? They’re just the right age. Where do you think they’ll be off to next?’

      Harold looked surprised. ‘You don’t mean Halfpenny Reservoir?’

      ‘Where else?’

      ‘But surely they know? I mean …’ Harold frowned. ‘Nah, can’t be that. Look, she’s a bonnie girl, and he likes showing the world what he’s got.’

      Doreen pulled another pint of Dartmoor IPA. ‘You really believe that?’

      Briefly, Harold was lost for words. It all made an unpleasant kind of sense. Halfpenny Reservoir wasn’t Devon’s number one dogging location – it was a long way from anywhere of consequence – but it was well-known locally and it got busy from time to time; at least, it used to get busy before the panic had started. He eyed the fulsome couple again. The woman still perched on her bar stool, sipping a rum and lemonade. Now that he assessed her properly, he saw finger and toenails painted gold, a chain around her left ankle decorated with moons and stars. That was a come-on of sorts, wasn’t it? At least, it was according to some of his favourite websites. Of course, it wouldn’t have been unusual at one time, this. The swinger crowd would occasionally trawl the local boozers en route to Halfpenny Reservoir – somewhat more covertly than this, admittedly, but nonetheless ‘displaying their wares’, as Doreen liked to call it, looking to pick up the passing rough that seemed to be their stock-in-trade.

      Things were markedly different now, of course. Or they should be.

      ‘They must be out-of-towners,’ Harold said. ‘They obviously don’t know.’

      ‘They’d have to be from another planet not to know,’ Doreen replied tersely.

      ‘Well … shouldn’t we tell them?’

      ‘Tell them what?’

      ‘I don’t know … just advise them it’s a bad idea at the present time.’

      She gave him her most withering glance. ‘It should be a bad idea at any time.’

      Harold’s wife had a kind of skewed morality when it came to earthy pleasures. She made her living selling alcohol, and yet she had a problem with drunks, refusing to serve anyone she suspected of sampling one too many, and was very quick to issue barring orders if there was ever horseplay in the pub. Likewise, though she consciously employed pretty local girls to work behind her bar, she was strongly antagonistic to ‘tarts and tramps’, as she called them, and was especially hostile to any women she identified as belonging to the swinger crowd who gathered for their midnight revels up at the reservoir – so much so that when ‘the Stranger’ had first come on the scene, targeting lone couples parked up late at night, she’d almost regarded him with approval.

      Until the details had emerged, of course.

      Because even by the standards of Britain’s most heinous murders, these were real shockers. Harold couldn’t help shuddering as he recalled some of the details he’d read about in the papers. Though no attack had been reported any closer to The Grouse Beater than a picnic area near Sourton on the other side of the moor, twenty miles away as the crow flew, the whole of the county had been put on alert. Harold glanced around the taproom, wondering if the predator might be present at this moment. The pub was full, mainly with men, and not all of the ‘shrinking violet’ variety. Devon was a holiday idyll, especially in summer – it didn’t just attract the New Age crowd and the hippy backpackers, it drew families, honeymooners and the like. But it was a working county too. Even up here on the high moor, the local male populace comprised far more than country squire and Colonel Blimp types in tweeds and gaiters; there were farm-labourers, cattlemen, farriers, hedgers, keepers; occupations which by their nature required hardy outdoor characters. And hadn’t the police issued some kind of statement about their chief suspect being a local man probably engaged in manual labour, someone tough and physically strong enough to overpower healthy young couples? Also, he was someone who knew the back roads, so was able to creep up on his victims unawares, making his getaway afterwards.

      There were an awful lot of blokes satisfying those criteria right here, right now.

      The more Harold thought about it, the more vulnerable the young couple looked in the midst of this rumbustious crowd. Even if the Stranger wasn’t present, the woman ought not to be displaying herself like that. The man should realise that several of these fellas had already had lots to drink, especially those who were openly ogling; he should know that temptation might get the better of them and that it would be so, so easy just to reach out and place a wandering hand on that smooth, sun-browned thigh. If that happened there might be trouble, swingers or not, and that was the last thing Harold wanted.

      ‘We have to say something,’ he muttered to Doreen, after they briefly stepped away together into the stock-room.

      ‘What?’ she sneered. ‘Casually tell them all the local dogging sites are closed? How do you think that’ll go down? They might just be show-offs. Might just have come out for a drink.’

      ‘But you said …’

      ‘Just leave it, Harold. We don’t need you making a fool of yourself. Again.’

      ‘But if they are swingers, and they go up there …?’

      ‘They’ll be taking a chance. Like they always take chances. Good God, who in their right mind would go looking for sex with strangers in the middle of nowhere?’

      ‘But darling, if they don’t know …’

      ‘They’re adults, aren’t they! They should make it their business to know.’

      Three minutes later – much to Harold’s relief – ‘the adults’ left, the woman swaying prettily to the pub door, heads again turning to watch, the man digging a packet of cigarettes from his slacks as he idly followed. In some ways it was as if they weren’t actually together; as if the man was just some casual acquaintance rather than a partner, which was a bit confusing. Still, it was someone else’s problem now.

      Harold edged to the diamond-paned window overlooking the pub car park.

      The duo stood beside the Porsche, the man smoking, the woman leaning on the car with her arms folded, her bag dangling from her shoulder by its strap. They chatted together, in no apparent rush to go anywhere – perhaps they were just a dressy couple out for a few drinks after all? Harold felt a slow sense of relief. Probably a nice couple too, when you got to know them; it was hardly the woman’s fault she was hot as hell.

      It was approaching nine o’clock now and the sun was setting, fiery red stripes lying across the encircling moorland. Maybe they were all set to go home? But then, when the man was only halfway through his cigarette, he stubbed it out on the tarmac and placed it in a nearby waste-container. And when they climbed into the Porsche together and drove away, it wasn’t along the B3387 to Bovey Tracey, or even back through the village towards Dunstone and ultimately Buckfastleigh – it was along the unnamed road that ran due northwest from the pub. The next inhabited place it came to was Beardon, some fifteen miles away.

      But long before then, it passed Halfpenny Reservoir.

      It had been a vintage August day in the West Country, but the heat was finally seeping from the land, the balminess of the evening receding. An indigo dusk layered the hills and valleys of Dartmoor.

      By the time they reached the reservoir it would be near enough pitch-black.