Gently to the Summit

by Alan Hunter

  ‘I’ll wait, then. I thought I’d speak to you before I had him on the carpet.’

  Overton also wanted a word. He’d been measuring Gently’s build and dress.

  ‘I don’t know what you have in mind, but I’d recommend making the ascent from here.’

  ‘We’re taking the route from Pen-y-Pass.’

  ‘Of course, if that’s the one you want. Though if you aren’t used to scrambles of this sort you’ll find the Llanberis … well, less dramatic.’

  ‘Thank you for the advice.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m trying to come the “old hand”. But if you could borrow a pair of boots … and possibly a haversack and a sweater …’

  They set out again in two cars, the one from Caernarvon and Overton’s Vauxhall. In the boot of the former was a pile of gear which the Llanberis inspector had lent them. Gently had said nothing to Heslington or Askham – in fact, he’d said very little at all. Now he sat poker-faced and hunched, with even his pipe lying cold in his pocket.

  * * *

  At the Gorphwysfa Hotel at the head of Llanberis Pass they parked the cars beside a cart-track where the route to the Wyddfa began. As an introduction the road had been impressive. Mountains had risen steadily on each side of it. Particularly to the right, which was the Snowdon side, had the rock cliffs towered dizzyingly overhead. And now they were come to the top of the pass a wide valley opened below them, a vast concavity of sunlit space in the bottom of which there glittered a river. On the other side a road slanted to the south and seemed to have been scribed there with a tilted rule.

  Evans had rung the hotel from Llanberis, so packs of sandwiches had been prepared for them. Gently donned his boots in the lounge. They were a formidable pair and were a size too large for him. His raincoat and sweater went into the haversack along with his sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. He felt, as he clumped outside again, a little ridiculous with his paraphernalia.

  ‘Listen to me for a moment, then we’ll be on our way.’

  He could feel Overton eyeing him critically: his boots were probably laced up wrongly. Heslington’s expression was faintly contemptuous, Askham was staring at the ground. Evans, in an undertone to Williams, was still laying plans for the apprehension of Mrs Kincaid.

  ‘As you’ve been told, we’re going to reconstruct what happened on the Wyddfa on Monday, or get as near to it as we can on the available information. We shall ascend by the route used by the majority of the club members and at the summit we shall re-enact what I think took place there. We are obviously short of some important people.’ Gently paused to give emphasis. ‘We’re short of the victim, Arthur Fleece, and the man who has been charged with his murder. For that reason there will be stand-ins. Fleece I shall represent myself. And the place of Reginald Kincaid will be taken by Henry Askham.

  ‘That’s all. I would like you to lead the way, Mr Overton.’

  Askham was facing him squarely now, if Gently wanted to catch his eye. He took a half-step forward, as though intending an angry protest. But Gently ignored him. He wouldn’t even look. Settling his haversack on his shoulders, he tramped off heavily after Overton. Askham was left standing indecisively until a tap from Evans made him jump.

  ‘You heard what the superintendent said, man?’

  Askham got going with a toss of his head.

  The cart-track was unsensational and appeared to descend rather than rise, giving no indication of how it was to reach the invisible summit. To the left the ground fell away without urgency into the valley, and ahead of them and to the right were grassy slopes on which sheep were feeding. A toy-like power station lay beneath them, fed by a plunge of organ-like pipes, and these alone, in their perfect recession, suggested a more impressive terrain beyond.

  Their order of march seemed to fix itself immediately. Overton went striding away in the lead. Gently came next, slouching in his mighty nailed boots, followed by Heslington, Askham, and the two local policemen. Heslington was keeping his distance deliberately; he dawdled along to prevent himself from catching up. In a similar way Askham was spacing himself behind Heslington, and behind him Evans and Williams went side by side. As odd a collection, surely, as ever climbed up Snowdon: and for as odd a reason as would ever be given.

  Soon the track bore to the right and circled round Llyn Teryn, a small pool beside which stood some tumbledown cottages; then it bore right again, up a bit of steeper going, and then at last they had a prospect of what Snowdon kept in store for them. Overton waited for Gently and gave him a breakdown of the scene. The gaunt peak to the left of centre was indeed the mysterious Wyddfa. It was bounded on one side by the dark Lliwedd with its springlike veins of white quartz, and on the other by Crib Goch, a saw-edged razor against the sky. Under these lay Llyn Llydaw, a lake of long, wavy reaches, crossed below them by a granite causeway which had probably served the old copper mine. The ruins of the latter stood over the water. They looked grim and forlorn, a shattered venture.

  ‘On the other side, you’ll see, we shall begin to make some ground. We’ve been toying with it till now. We began at eleven hundred feet.’

  Gently grunted, glad to rest his boots: he’d begun to wish he’d stuck to his brogues. The others were coming up the rise in a straggle with Evans and Williams well to the rear. They were talking animatedly together; Evans was making gesticulations.

  ‘Is our time the same as yours was on Monday?’

  Overton checked with his watch. ‘A bit behind it, I’d say.’

  ‘We’d better get on, then. I want the timing close.’

  ‘It’ll be all right. We started later on Monday.’

  He lit a cigarette and then started off again. Gently followed. He let Overton lead by the same distance as before. Across the causeway they went, along the shore, past the desolate mine buildings; over increasing deserts of fallen rock and up a steady sharpening of the incline. Then again the swing to the right, getting brutally steep this time, with below to the left a whitened torrent that foamed down from the lonely Glaslyn. They were certainly making ground; Gently could scarcely keep pace with Overton. The shattered rocks were taking it out of him and making the sweat roll down his brow. And beneath them the llyn was falling away, and beside them the empty space grew emptier, encroaching upon his plainsman’s resolve not to be intimidated by the mountains …

  He was aware of feet scattering the rocks behind him and he turned to find Askham hard on his trail. The young man was also streaming with sweat and he had an expression which was far from happy. By a tremendous effort he got level with Gently. He turned to him an angry but apprehensive face.

  ‘Why – why have we got to go up this way …?’

  They were both of them breathing very heavily. Gently’s boots were grinding and crashing as they laboured over the loose rocks.

  ‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come. They say … listen! They say it’s worse further on. And the other way … why can’t you listen? You could drive a car up the Llanberis track …’

  Gently said nothing. He kept his face turned forward. Askham struggled to get ahead of him so that he could look at him by twisting his head back.

  ‘It’s stupid, I tell you … it’s dangerous this way. People have been killed. There’ve been accidents here. And it’s entirely unnecessary, you know it is! This isn’t the way Kincaid went up …’

  Gently’s eyes remained averted. ‘But it was Fleece’s way,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t.’ Askham was furious. ‘He used the Pyg Track, and you know it.’

  ‘It joins this one higher up.’

  ‘So does the track from Llanberis! This is dangerous, I tell you; it’s only for people who’re used to climbing …’

  He lurched a little towards Gently; was it by accident that he was on the inside of him? A hundred feet or more below them the Glaslyn torrent curled over its rocks. But no, Gently pounded on his way, insensible and never wasting a glance; completely ignoring the desperate fear in the eyes that fought to eng
age his own. Askham stumbled, sobbing for breath.

  ‘I won’t – I won’t come any further! I haven’t got a head for heights … it makes me dizzy, I shall be sick. And you won’t listen. It’s no use talking to you. Oh, my God, why won’t you listen? And you’ve dragged me into it for nothing … only because I tried to help you …’

  He stumbled again, almost falling this time. He recovered his balance in a panic, shrinking closer to the wall of rock that hemmed the track at that point. There could be no doubt that he was really frightened; it wasn’t a clever simulation. About his movements there was a tense automatism that betrayed the presence of physical fear.

  ‘It’s crazy … it’s utterly pointless!’

  Gently himself had a feeling of uneasiness. Somewhere, at a boundary that had passed unnoticed, the mountains had withdrawn their picturesque benevolence. They had begun to be wild, with an undertone of savagery; they seemed poised in a sinister potential of violence. Wherever one looked there were crushing rock-falls, unscalable cliffs, and hypnotic precipices. One experienced a sensation of being there on trial, of being small and alien and distinctly vulnerable …

  ‘If anything happens, then you’ll be responsible!’

  Gently dashed at the sweat that lay heavy on his lids. Above them, standing easily with hands on hips, Overton rested and watched them as they laboured in the toils. One more bout and they would be there, another slam at that vicious incline! But already Gently’s thigh muscles were crying for mercy, after only a foretaste of the scramble impending.

  ‘If I get stuck you’ll have to bring me down …’

  Gently saved his breath and kept on slogging.

  ‘I’ll sue you, my God … I’ll sue you!’

  One last, killing stretch, and he stood shakily by Overton.

  And then it was nearly worth getting up to that high vantage, worth it to peer into the inner recess which the mountain held concealed there. Level, shallow, grey, peaceful, the Glaslyn extended across its plateau, its ripples fretting the gentlest of music against its harsh rocky shore. Straight above it soared the Wyddfa, now more threatening than ever, its hollow cliffs of reddish grey exposed from their foot to their summit; and supporting them were high, frowning ridges that circled round the calm lake, leaving this rent through which spilled the torrent to join Llydaw, pale below.

  ‘I’d sit a minute if I were you.’

  Gently plumped down on a boulder. All right; he was turned fifty and not accustomed to these larks. Askham had already dropped prone and lay gulping his breath in fierce little gasps. Overton, casual and apparently sweatless, was lighting a fresh cigarette.

  ‘Now you can see just where it happened. There’s the Pyg Track. Can you make it out?’

  Across the flank of the rightward wall one saw a scratched white line. Along there Heslington, and then Fleece, had taken their way to the ridge ahead, moving like tiny upright ants to the man who watched from the Glaslyn shore. Then up the ridge to the staring summit, that humpty cone with its sudden conclusion, the Tarpeian Rock: and the mortal cry as the human starfish floated down …

  ‘You can see that apron-like projection? That’s where he struck and started rolling. There was blood on it, quite plain. He couldn’t have known anything after that. But he kept on tumbling down until he got there, where I’m pointing; and as you can judge, it was quite a feat to get across to him without equipment.’

  ‘For God’s sake stop it!’ Askham sat up, his eyes burning at Overton. ‘Don’t you understand? Isn’t it enough for me to be dragged up to this place …?’

  Overton turned to him in surprise. ‘No offence intended, old man.’

  ‘There is offence. I can’t stand it. This bloody mountain is driving me crazy!’

  He jumped to his feet and jerked away from them, to throw himself down again at a distance. Overton stared bewilderingly at Gently. He was wholly taken aback by the explosion.

  ‘What’s needling the youngster?’ he wanted to know.

  Gently gave a lift of his shoulder. ‘It’s just the mountains,’ he replied. ‘They have an effect on some people.’

  Had he ever been as tired and perhaps so fundamentally frightened? He didn’t know and daren’t think about it, caught in the dizzying web of the Zigzags. After the first few hundreds of feet he had begun to feel a slow panic, and all the way after that he’d had to fight it with his will. It was absurd. There was no danger, it was only the scale of the thing that sapped at him. The side of the ridge was no steeper than a house roof and was gnarled with helpful outcrops of rock. If he’d slipped and fallen he wouldn’t have rolled far, would perhaps have come off with the shock and some bruises; while at the worst – say, a broken leg – he had experienced companions to come to his aid. Yet still he couldn’t get rid of that panic, he could only oppose it and keep it under: by not looking back, down seven hundred feet; by not looking up, another five hundred. From minute to minute, just the rock-rim ahead …

  Overton, mercifully, was staying down close to him. He was gruesomely enjoying this swing up the ridge. He climbed with a relaxed and familiar rhythm and apparently took nothing out of himself at all. He could even find time to make a little conversation. The Wyddfa, it seemed, resembled Everest in miniature. The chasm below them would represent the Western Cwm, the Crib-y-ddysgl Lhotse, and the ridge the South Col.

  ‘And under snow the resemblance must be even more striking. In January now … I’ve a good mind to try it in January.’

  But Overton, roving on in front, then dropping back to keep touch, wasn’t sticking so near to Gently as was Henry Askham. The latter had made his attachment permanent and went beside Gently like his shadow; grey of face, drenched with sweat and his hair plastered damply over his brow. He hadn’t ventured a word since that outburst down below. He’d kept his distance while the others arrived and while Gently had given a few instructions. But directly the party moved he had scrambled up to join the detective, his eyes averted and mouth gone small, his head and shoulders drooped a little. And so he had stuck, a spaniel at heel, enduring the terrors of the Zigzags …

  Of the others, Gently noticed that Heslington had dropped his earlier aloofness. He was now accompanying Evans and Williams and was seemingly on terms not uncordial. Gently saw them below him, now strung out, now proceeding together in a knot, and twice he heard Evans’s laugh and the sudden lilting rise of his voice. They were used to it of course, the three who followed on behind. Two of them were born in the shadow of Snowdon; this was like a stroll up their own backyard.

  ‘Here would be about the spot, Super.’

  Overton halted by a marker cairn. He took his bearings across the void with a callous sang-froid that made Gently shiver.

  ‘You see? There’s Crib Goch just on a level, and the Moel Siabod in line beyond it; roughly we’re on the twenty-eight hundred mark. I was near a marker when I heard the cry.’

  Gently dropped on his hands and knees and seated himself before looking; to rest his legs, it might have been, they were surely in need of it! Then he braced himself for the survey, taking a firm grip on his nerves. Below his boots he caught sight of the Glaslyn, now turned hard and very steely-looking …

  ‘Do you hear those choughs. The way they echo?’

  He could hear them all right, and he wished he couldn’t. Two wavering black dots passing slowly across the summit, their choking cries seemed to rake at his viscera.

  ‘So now you can imagine—’

  ‘There’s no need to be explicit.’

  And Askham too was clearly of Gently’s opinion. He was lying face inwards, his hands grasping the rock, and he gave a whimpering kind of groan as he heard Overton’s commencement.

  ‘How are we doing for time?’

  ‘We’ll be up there soon after one. You wouldn’t like me to speed it up a bit, would you?’

  Gently echoed Askham’s groan. ‘I was born in a flat country!’

  ‘You’ll like it when we get on the ridge. You’ll find it
a different world up there.’

  A minute of rest, no more: not even time for their sweat to dry, though the sun was falling hotly on the south-facing slope; then they were up and on again, pursuing the goat-like stride of Overton, with the loose rock scuttling from underfoot and the live rock making them check and stagger. Was there no end to those punishing Zigzags, no ultimate rock-rim above which was no other; were they doomed now until life was extinct to continue agonizedly climbing into a perpetual extension? Askham’s distress was even greater than his own. He had got to a state where he no longer dared to rest. He simply kept going in a panic-triggered scramble, with the knowledge of the void behind him staring from his eyes. The problem had gone to the mountains again, and the mountains were ready with their answer …

  And finally they could see it, the true ridge-top fretted above them; about a hundred feet higher and the last fifty of them sheer and smooth. But Overton was bearing to the right now; he was making a long, shallow traverse, bringing them safely to a low gap by which the ridge-top was easily attained. He stood watching them clinically as they came over; he had a caustic look for Askham. The youngster dropped as though he were shot as soon as he staggered out of the gap. Gently’s knees were shaking too; the relief of getting up there was tremendous! But he managed to clump a few steps from the gap before he permitted those knees to collapse. Then he sat motionless, his arms hanging limp, drinking in the sweet, cold breeze of the top.

  ‘There you are. How’s that for a prospect?’

  Overton was ruthless, he was a bundle of springs. He pointed to Llanberis, Caernarvon, Anglesey, Tremadoc Bay, and the ghost of Liverpool.

  ‘Isn’t it something, though you only get this far?’

  Gently accepted the disparagement without a murmur. Askham to all intents was dead to the world. He lay with closed eyes and his cheeks had a leaden colour.

  And so they were mustered for the last lap, on what seemed the backbone of the world: the titanic ridge that climbed from Llanberis up to the highest level of all. To right and left the great spaces fell away in soaring chasms of light and colour, leaving their knife-edge rising inexorably, straight and firm towards the summit. Heslington went first, as he had done on the Monday, his manner and step determinedly jaunty; Gently came next with Askham at his elbow, and the other three silently followed behind. Silently, because there was an atmosphere somehow, a peculiar tenseness that quelled their chatter; so that even Evans, now confessedly in opposition, was catching the faint echo of a drama unexpressed. After all, was there more in Gently’s whims than met the eye …?