by Gwen Moffat
They came round the seaward end of the Old Man and the fins of the killer whales moved away, cleaving the water. Despite the awesome and unexpected presence of the animals, Miss Pink’s eyes went to the slab where they’d first seen the climbers yesterday afternoon.
The stack was bare: empty of people — but a rope hung from the overhangs below the slab, and one end was in the sea. The other dangled free from the point where the rope was snagged and it swayed gently in the air.
“Jesus!” Marcus breathed.
They’d brought a dinghy and Clive drew it alongside and stepped in. Ian followed and Marcus cast off the painter. The three in the launch watched in a hard silence as the dinghy approached the rope that disappeared below the surface. Ian reached out and grasped it. There was nothing on the end except a knot.
“Ha!” Marcus barked. “Lost their rope: typical! Couldn’t get it down, so they went off and left it; just what you’d expect from these modern gymnasts: no good in emergencies.”
He had turned as he spoke and he and Miss Pink looked at the cliffs under Farrid Head. The fixed ropes showed clean and white against the red rock: two of them, in line. The third: the one that had hung down the gully from the top of the cliff away to the right, was gone.
They said nothing. Absently, reluctantly, Miss Pink’s eyes came round to the whales. These had grouped together some hundred yards distant. The dinghy approached and Clive held the launch’s gunwale frowning back at the cliff.
Miss Pink, who had now climbed on the deck to achieve some extra height, said carefully: “There’s something that looks like a seal on the beach. Give me the glasses, Marcus; they’re in my sack.”
They looked up at her and then at the beach. Without waiting for her verdict Clive pushed off from the launch and started to row shorewards. Miss Pink lowered the glasses and climbed into the well, absently accepting MacKenzie’s hand.
“It’s a body,” she said. “He’s wearing a white helmet. That’s Stark, isn’t it?”
Marcus nodded. “Where’s Pincher, then?”
MacKenzie said: “I thought he was on the end of that rope.” He gestured towards the stack.
“We all did,” Miss Pink murmured, her eyes almost shifty as she tried to avoid looking at the whales.
“The fixed rope came unstuck,” Marcus hazarded, ignoring the stack and still staring at the shore. “He’s virtually underneath it, or where it was. He must have fallen on Pincher who’d be waiting below. Of course, he’d knock him off, too. There’ll be two bodies on the beach.”
“I looked, but I only saw one. But then there are innumerable crannies. Not much chance of Pincher being alive though. It must be all of two hundred feet — more like three if Stark fell from near the top. Then that rope,” she turned and stared at the stack, “is only a coincidence.”
MacKenzie followed her glance. “I don’t understand it.”
“No one understands climbing accidents at first sight,” Marcus told him, sounding a trifle pompous. It was the shock coming out. “But the explanation’s always quite simple once you know it.”
“Why, how very odd!” Miss Pink exclaimed. “Where are the slings?”
“What slings?”
“On the slab.” She pointed. “That’s where he placed the three slings as a handhold. But where are they?” She focused the binoculars. “The piton’s gone too but I can see where it was; there are marks . . .”
“What are those birds?”
A pair of ravens had floated off the cliff. Below them, Clive and Ian were landing on the beach. No one answered Marcus as they watched the two men on the shore stoop and examine the thing at their feet.
“Can you go in a bit closer, Mr MacKenzie?” Miss Pink asked.
The launch was taken farther in and anchored. It was blissfully quiet after the engine stopped and they could hear pebbles scrunching as Ian came down to the dinghy. He rowed out and ferried the others ashore.
Miss Pink was no stranger to violent death and she regarded Stark’s body with objective interest. It was soaking wet, and, draped over nearby rocks, was a rope. As every climber would do in such circumstances, she looked up. The gully was, as someone else had said, bottomless; in other words, there was a gully in the top section of the cliffs but below that it was discontinuous and the rock was overhanging for two hundred feet.
Although the body could have been moved by the sea at high tide there seemed to be no doubt that it had fallen from the gully. With the efficiency of a mortuary attendant the water had washed away earth and blood to reveal the gashes and splintered bone of ‘multiple injuries’. It had been a long fall.
“At least,” Clive said beside her, “it was instantaneous.”
She nodded and picked up one end of the rope. It was unknotted and still bore the manufacturer’s whipping. She started to coil it. About thirty feet from where she started, a jumar clamp was still clipped to the rope, a webbing loop attached to it.
“One,” Clive said, detaching it. “Where’s the other?”
She finished coiling the rope and glanced at the second end as it came in. This, too, was whipped but not knotted. The rope was complete.
“So the rope didn’t break,” she remarked. “I thought it must have done.”
“Here’s the other jumar,” Clive called, picking it out of a pool by its sling. “Nothing wrong with this either.”
“No. The knot in the fixed rope must have come undone — or did you or Ian untie any knots when you got here?”
“We didn’t touch any equipment. I turned the body over, that was all. The rope is just as it fell — or as the sea left it.”
“The water couldn’t undo a knot.”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Where can the other body be?”
“Not far away. This one’s scarcely been moved by the tide. Pincher must have landed farther out from the cliffs and the current’s taken him round — perhaps to the cave.”
The others had gone towards the stack so Clive and Miss Pink went in the opposite direction. It was simple to cover the ground as far as the mouth of the cave. There were no horizontal slits as there are at the base of some cliffs, and the only place where a body might lodge was behind the boulders but there they found only scoured planks, the occasional carcass of a bird, and weed.
They came to a platform at the side of the great cave. Its roof must have been at least forty feet above them and the water in the mouth was a good thirty feet across. They couldn’t see the bottom.
Inside the cave water dripped from the roof, striking little spouts of light from the surface but all lesser sounds were lost in the weird high crooning of the birds on the ledges. Snaky necks weaved on the cavern walls, the sea rose and fell like a monster breathing, but so far as they could see, Pincher wasn’t here.
“He’d have come out with the tide,” Clive said, “but I think I’d better go in and see.”
They retreated to the dinghy.
He dropped Miss Pink on the small beach beyond the cave where Hector had put them down two days ago, and himself rowed towards the table blocks.
“Do the inside of these rocks, will you?” he shouted back.
She waved acknowledgement and turned, with an air of reluctant acceptance, to a new field of boulders but this, too, was soon searched, for, westwards, the cliffs dropped straight to the water, but before she turned to the table blocks, she looked up the line of the climb called Tangleblock. At its foot the first hold was perfectly placed: about ten inches from the ground. It was a knob of pale pink sandstone the size of a fist. On its top was a tiny piece of compressed mud. She stared at this but didn’t touch it.
She was thoughtful as she searched behind the table blocks. She found nothing there. She came to the cave: the opposite side from where she’d been with Clive some time ago, and she sat down to wait. She could hear the sound of oars in the darkness, magnified and hollow. For a while she watched the birds, then bows gleamed in the light and the dinghy came towards
the entrance. Clive raised his eyebrows and she shook her head.
“If you can climb down from your perch, we’ll go and see if the others have found anything.” He sounded uncommonly cheerful; they might have been exploring for fun.
The other three were wandering idly about the plinth. It was obvious that they had found nothing.
“Well, what do you think?” Clive asked MacKenzie as he held the boat at the side of what was now a dry channel. The crofter squinted out to sea.
“It’s difficult,” he confessed. “He could have gone either way from here; if he drifted south a bit, he’ll be taken into Kinloch, but if he went out too far, he’d go north and probably come into the bay. I’m after thinkin’ myself at this time of year and savin’ a storm, he’ll come ashore in Kinloch.”
“He wouldn’t float?” Marcus suggested.
“No.” MacKenzie was abrupt. “Not till later.”
“What do you think about the whales, Ian?” Clive asked.
The naturalist looked unhappy. “I can’t say. They’re certainly hanging about but then they’d come and investigate anything fresh: it doesn’t have to mean —”
Miss Pink asked calmly: “Does it make any difference to our procedure? If they did — worry the body, would it come up sooner?”
Clive looked at her thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t come up at all. It rises because of gases and they couldn’t accumulate if the whales attacked the body.”
“It’s probably immaterial anyway,” she went on. “It’s only that the relatives usually want it recovered.”
*
“Why are you so certain that Pincher’s dead?”
The question hung in the air with every syllable clear as if crystallised and tangible. Why . . .? Three people stared at Miss Pink; they frowned, flinched, sat frozen with parted lips.
“Why —” Marcus repeated, and stopped.
It was Bridget, who hadn’t been along with them, who responded sensibly. “Why not?” she asked, and looked at her uncle.
Clive asked of Miss Pink: “Are you suggesting we’ve jumped to conclusions? Is it only an assumption? But surely it’s logical. Look at it this way: what makes you doubt that he’s dead?”
“Because in the last two days someone has climbed Tangleblock.”
“Climbed Tangleblock!” Marcus echoed her again.
“What makes you think that?” Clive asked quietly.
Leila came in with a tea tray.
“There’s mud on one of the holds,” Miss Pink said. “On Tangleblock,” she explained to Leila: “Someone’s been up it.”
“Yes?” Leila said on a rising inflection.
“Pincher could have gone up there,” Miss Pink told them. “Had you considered it?”
Clive said as if to himself: “If Pincher had climbed out that way last night, what happened, and in what sequence?”
“But if he’s alive,” Bridget said, “why hasn’t he shown up?”
Of course there was an answer, but the possibility of Pincher being still alive was, at the moment, merely another piece thrown on the heap of jigsaw pieces which had been accumulating since they came round the end of the stack and saw the snagged rope.
Stark’s body had been brought back in the launch and it was now in the stables awaiting the arrival of an ambulance. The police had been informed. Miss Pink had broken the news to Rita (they had been assuming that Pincher was dead; it was only with the others that the older woman allowed herself to speculate on the significance of the muddy hold on Tangleblock). The girl had been shocked, frightened, and then had become acquiescent. They hadn’t known what to do with her but Bridget solved that problem by asking her to help in the kitchen. Now Leila poured tea in the drawing room and sat down to join them.
There was a curious air of relaxation among the friends which had not been apparent for days, not since she’d arrived, Miss Pink remembered: before Stark appeared. They considered the fate of Pincher with the objectivity they might have accorded an academic question.
“Where does one start?” Bridget asked. “I mean, if we assume he climbed the cliff?”
“No, that’s not an assumption.” Then Miss Pink corrected herself: “It is an assumption that Pincher was the climber, but a fact that it was climbed; the mark was unmistakable.”
“But if we assume it was Pincher,” Bridget insisted, “where do we start?”
“On the stack. They must have been there because they’ve left the rope. Presumably they’d reached the top of the Old Man and were coming down because they’d removed the piton and the slings, then the rope jammed so they had to leave it.”
Clive was following his own thread: “If Pincher climbed Tangleblock, what were his movements after they descended the stack? Do we assume that Stark went straight to the fixed ropes and left Pincher to his own devices, or did they wander about looking for another way up and Pincher liked the look of Tangleblock better?”
“It would be a serious wander,” Miss Pink said. “The water at the cave mouth had to be crossed.”
Bridget cried: “I know! Pincher was just behind Stark in the gully — as we’d thought originally: or rather, he was at the bottom of the last fixed rope, waiting for Stark to reach the top of the cliff, then Stark came off, but he missed Pincher. There’s no reason why Stark should knock him off; the gully isn’t so steep just there that Pincher couldn’t have thrown himself aside as Stark came down. Then Pincher would have no way of reaching the top, would he? The fixed rope had come down, so he’d retreat all the way to the shore down the other ropes, and then look for another way up. That’s when he’d find Tangleblock. He’d have swum across the cave because by that time things were serious and he didn’t mind getting wet. If Stark had been able to swim they would have approached the stack that way — or at least looked to see if there was a feasible way down on the other side of the great cave.”
“So where is Pincher?” Marcus asked.
“We ought to go and take a look at Tangleblock,” Clive said. “We’ve got time before the light goes.”
*
The first sign of Stark and Pincher was their rucksacks, looking peculiarly abandoned on Farrid Head at the place that marked the original site of the fallen rope: two rucksacks, so if Pincher was alive, he hadn’t taken his.
The piton was still in place, and the snap link which had secured the rope. These showed no signs of failure. They hadn’t expected any; the fallen rope had been unknotted. The fault lay there.
Beyond the great cave a monolithic block stood some fifteen feet back from the edge. They had brought ropes and now Clive stooped and threaded a sling through some hidden hole under the block. A rope was uncoiled, he tied on, and donned a pair of leather gauntlets. Marcus, his small elderly face self-conscious under a large yellow helmet, tied on the end of the rope and, at a nod from the other, lowered himself rather stiffly over the edge. The rope ran through the gauntlets and Clive wore the tense but absent air of a man whose senses are concentrated in his hands and ears. Bridget sat cross-legged on the turf, looking out to sea.
“The sun’s warmer today,” she said, “and the air is lighter. I had to go and look at him — to make sure. I can’t feel anything except relief. I know that’s inhuman but he hadn’t any sense of humanity. It’s a shock about the cannabis though. I never dreamed . . . Rita told me. I’m sorry for her — she needs a friend so much but I can’t get involved with Pincher’s death — if he’s dead. I’m so relieved about the other.” She looked at her uncle with an apology in her eyes. “I can talk about him now he’s dead; I couldn’t before. I felt too humiliated.”
He met her eye but most of his attention was still on the rope. “We all make mistakes. He was the nastiest piece of work I’ve ever come across and we’re well rid of him. Twenty feet!” he yelled suddenly.
They listened but there was no reply from below.
“Deaf,” he muttered. “Tie on, one of you, and see what he’s doing.”
Belayed by Bridget, Miss P
ink went out to the edge, lay down and peered over. She was looking through a bright slit between black walls. A boulder was jammed far out in the chasm and she looked under this to green waves crawling shorewards several hundred feet below. She could see the rope for fifty feet but there was no sign of Marcus.
“Fifteen!” Clive called.
“Fifteen feet,” she shouted.
“Oh,” — quietly from below, then: “Right!” louder. “Fifteen feet left,” she heard him muttering. “I’ve got a belay; tell him to start down.”
She retreated. “May I give you a top rope?” she asked Clive politely.
“That’s kind of you, Melinda, thank you. When I reach Marcus, he can descend a hundred feet farther and then he can get out on the wall and see to the bottom. There’s no need to go all the way down.”
As the rope ran out the women talked quietly.
“If he’s not here, what do you think?” Bridget asked.
“That he reached the top and made off for reasons of his own — that someone else climbed the gully.”
“For reasons of his own. I don’t like that.” She shook her head as if to drive the thought away. “But if someone else climbed the gully, that leaves Pincher in the sea, as we thought at first.”
“What other possibility could there be?” Miss Pink asked abstractedly, her eyes on the moving rope.
Bridget shivered. “The wind’s backing, d’you not feel it?” She looked at the horizon. “There’s a front coming in. Clive will say we need the rain.”
“We can’t grumble,” Miss Pink said automatically.
Bridget glanced at her in surprise at the idiom and saw that her attention was elsewhere.
“You’ve paid out too much.”
“What?”
“The rope.”
“Oh.” She blushed and hurriedly pulled in the slack until she could feel Clive on the end again.
*
Back at the house Marcus said: “The trouble with your theory of Pincher climbing Tangleblock was that if the two men had climbed Farrid Head together and Pincher retreated when Stark fell, they would have taken up the fixed ropes behind them, so he’d have nothing to retreat down. He’d be stranded with no rope in front and none behind.”
