‘Well,’ I pointed out, ‘when a person dies in strange circumstances they do tend to get their name in the papers. I bet you hear it a few times more in the next few days.’
‘Ah, but the first time was unrelated to his death.’
‘That’s true. We must have put the mockers on him. Is foul play suspected?’
‘No, I don’t think so. According to Nigel they’re looking into it because of Crozier’s background. He lived near the river…enjoyed a drink or eight…Splash.’
‘Nige will sort it. Have we time for a snifter before this lecture starts?’
CHAPTER FIVE
The talk was brilliant. Or the pictures were. For nearly an hour he showed us breathtaking shots, gathered over his early years, of some of the most beautiful places on Earth. You could imagine a climber being content to sit down on some of the peaks and freeze to death rather than turn away from the view and drop back down into humdrum normality. We saw vast snowfields, hanging by a breath on the mountain sides; jagged arêtes leading to unnamed peaks; ranges that stretched away forever into China and Tibet; tiny coloured specks of humanity dwarfed into insignificance on immense rock faces.
And then the mood changed. We were on Everest, it was late in the day and the weather was turning. He was climbing with his best friend, called Jeremy Quigley, but Jeremy was having trouble and dropped back at the Hillary Step, a 40-foot rock wall within spitting distance of the summit. Krabbe summited, took the pictures, then got down as fast as he could to camp IV, expecting Jeremy to be already there.
But he wasn’t, and Krabbe never saw him again.
He made it sound like some sort of an epiphany. He brooded on the death of his friend for weeks, mooching around Kathmandu, witnessing the trend towards teams of well-heeled armchair adventurers and their guides heading towards the mountain, recognising the way things were changing. He costed the flash gear they brought for the Sherpas to carry for them and contrasted it with the dire poverty of the local people. At base camp he surveyed the mess: the discarded food packets; oxygen bottles; climbing gear and gas cylinders. Human faeces were everywhere, waiting for the brief summer to reduce them to something less offensive.
He was disgusted, and ashamed of the part he’d played in the desecration of the area. He loved the mountains, but didn’t want to climb anymore. He decided to do what he could to help the people who lived there; to help clean up the mess that richer people had imposed on them; to raise money to improve the health and education of the children. That’s why he was there, that night, talking to us.
Dave bought the book. It cost £28 and weighed about the same.
‘Are you going to introduce yourself?’ he asked as we hovered on the edge of the small crowd waiting for a signature. Krabbe hadn’t changed much in the intervening 30-odd years. We grow older, but the essence of a person always remains. Or perhaps the brain of the viewer makes compensations, subconsciously adjusting to allow for greying and receding hair, wrinkles and the effects of gravity.
‘Hmm, no, I don’t think so,’ I replied.
But Dave had other ideas. Krabbe scrawled his name across the title page of Kingdoms of the Gods, underlined it with a flourish and pushed the tome back across the table, saying: ‘Thanks. I hope you enjoy it.’
Dave said: ‘I’m sure I will. Do you remember this fellow?’
Krabbe looked up, puzzled. He was as handsome as ever, I noted, still with rakishly long hair. Our eyes met, blue to blue: his the colour of glacial pools; mine, I’m told, more of a cornflower hue; then his craggy, tanned face split into a grin and he said: ‘Well I’ll be damned, Charlie Priest.’
His handshake nearly maimed me. His fingers were thick with scar tissue and calluses, and as powerful as hydraulic grabs. They had to be. His life had depended on their strength throughout his career. ‘Hello, Tony. How’re you keeping?’ I gasped, flinching.
‘Fine, Charlie. Fine. This is a surprise. Are you still playing footy?’
‘Um, no. I gave that up long ago.’
‘That’s a shame. I thought you had what it takes. I always envied you, playing in goal. You’re a cop, aren’t you. It’s coming back to me. I read about you in the papers – you caught that bastard who murdered the girls. God, that must have given you some satisfaction.’
I said: ‘Well, we can’t all climb Mount Everest. Some of us have more modest ambitions.’ The woman behind us coughed impatiently and we stepped aside so she could have her book signed. I told Krabbe that the talk was brilliant and thought-provoking and wished him well with his campaign.
‘Listen, Charlie,’ he said. ‘We ought to have a chat sometime.’ He patted his pockets, saying he didn’t have a card on him. ‘I’ll be around for the next few weeks. Why don’t you pop into the shop? You should catch me there, most mornings.’
‘The shop?’ I queried.
‘Art of Asia, in Heckley Mall. We import ethnic artefacts. It’s all part of the mission, trying to earn foreign currency for them at a fair rate.’
‘I know it, but I didn’t realise it was yours. Yes, I’ll call in.’
We exchanged handshakes again and Dave thanked him for the talk and the book. Ten minutes later, when we were seated in a quiet corner of the Spinners Arms, fondling our drinks, Dave said: ‘He’s a nice bloke, don’t you think?’
‘Hmm,’ I agreed. ‘Very nice.’
Jeff said: ‘It must be a fantastic feeling, standing on top of Everest, the highest point on Earth. The views across into Tibet were incredible. I know he disapproves of these expeditions where you pay, but I’d go on one if I could afford it. What’s £30,000 for something you’d remember for the rest of your life?’
‘Especially if the rest of your life was about two hours,’ I commented.
‘How much did he say they charged for a permit? £15,000 was it?’
‘That’s right, or was it dollars? The Nepalese regard the mountain as a natural resource, and exploit it to the full. Some countries got the oil, they got a mountain. God help ’em, they didn’t get much else. Let’s have a look at the book, please, Dave.’
He passed it to me, two-handed, and my arms sank under its weight. I sat with it on my knees, not wanting to put it on the table with its beer-rings, and opened it near the middle.
A photography geek at the lecture had asked what sort of camera he’d used, but didn’t get the answer he wanted. Krabbe said that conditions were either so bad you couldn’t take photos or so good, up there above the clouds, that you could take decent pictures with a pinhole camera. The only thing you had to do was have the camera acclimatised, so it would keep working at those temperatures and altitudes. The geek went home disgruntled, deprived of a long dissertation on f-stops and focal lengths. The rest of the audience sighed in relief.
Whatever he’d used, the photos took your breath away. I like the outdoors, enjoy being in high places, and thumbed through Krabbe’s book with undisguised envy. It’s all about dedication, I told myself. Krabbe had wanted these things, had made sacrifices to attain them. He’d probably turned his back on a career, perhaps ruined his home life, because he wanted to climb more than anything else he knew about. I’d drifted into being a cop, but I enjoyed it, most of the time, and it paid the rent.
Dave and Jeff were wittering on about the dangers of avalanches on the Khumbu glacier and the merits of prusiks and Jumars. Krabbe had won at least two converts. I was looking at the brown faces of two children in woolly hats, grinning at the white man’s camera like a pair of idiots, although the hunger never left their bellies. I turned to the book’s jacket to read what it said about the man himself. It was modest enough, mentioning his OBE and the fact he’d climbed Everest. I looked at the list of reviews and saw that all the broadsheets had lavished praise on it. I half expected to see one from the Dalai Lama – ‘If you have two loaves, sell one and put it towards a copy of this book’ – but was disappointed.
The very last page had a list of companies and individuals who had sponsored
Krabbe throughout his career. All the big names that you see on anoraks and boots and skis were there, plus a list of local businessmen who had presumably chipped in for the next expedition, when asked, providing a much-needed box of Kendal mint cake or simply a new set of tyres for his car. It was Krabbe’s way of saying thank you to them.
Jeff was telling Dave about the death zone when I interrupted him.
‘What, Chas,’ he replied.
‘Coincidences,’ I stated. ‘Remember what you were saying earlier, about a name cropping up twice, close together, for different reasons?’
‘You mean Joe Crozier?’
‘Yes. It’s just happened again. There’s a list of Tony Krabbe’s sponsors here, on the very last page of the book. They’re in alphabetical order, just to show that he values the smallest of them as much as the largest. The final one on the list is someone else we’ve heard of, associated with Crozier: Peter Wallenberg Esquire, spinster of this county.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Dave said, reaching for the book, and I passed it to him. He studied the list for a while, head down, brow furrowed, before saying: ‘This is starting to look fishy to me.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Mmm. I wonder what he wanted in return. If this becomes part of an enquiry, will I be able to claim the book on expenses?’
We didn’t stay long in the pub. Dave was driving and it was my weekend to be senior detective on call. It comes round every six weeks, starting at 10 p.m. Friday, and I was expected to remain alert and lucid. We dropped Jeff off at his local, where he would probably imbibe freely until loss of the use of his limbs indicated to him that he’d had enough, or his audience deserted him, whichever came first. Dave took me home and came in for a coffee.
It was nearly ten thirty and we were well into a discussion on investments and pensions when the phone rang. I gave him the here-we-go smile and picked it up. A uniformed constable had been called to a body lying in the garden of a house just outside Heckley and he’d radioed in to say it was a murder. Now they needed a senior detective to confirm things and set the wheels rolling.
‘What makes him so sure it’s a murder?’ I asked.
‘Well, the deceased has a pickaxe embedded in his head,’ I was told, rather tardy. ‘Not a usual MO for a suicide.’
‘I’m convinced,’ I said, flicking the top off a pen and turning to a blank page on the memo pad. ‘Give me the details.’
* * *
It was a nineteenth century mansion on the south side of town, surrounded by trees and converted into four luxury apartments. Once upon a time it had housed a local surgeon and his family and their small army of retainers. Rooms that had once been home to the pastry cook, the nanny and the maid now echoed to the clink of glasses of Chardonnay, the Opera Babes on the CD player and shouted conversations about the merits of personal trainers. The PC who’d raised the call had the good sense to turn his blue light off and was sitting in darkness just outside the electrically operated gates. I parked behind him and Dave – try to keep him away – pulled in behind me.
There’s a popular misconception that for every murder we straight away call in the pathologist, the scenes of crime people and all the other experts. We don’t. We haven’t enough of them and they cost money. Fortunately, most murders are committed by someone close who we just happen to find sitting there with his head in his hands, saying: ‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ If we are reasonably certain who did the deed we just get on with it and don’t waste time with fingertip searches and DNA swabs of half the town.
But this didn’t look like one of those.
‘Any ideas who he is?’ I asked the PC when he climbed out of the panda to meet me. He looked about seventeen.
‘No, Sir.’
‘Boss or Mr Priest will do,’ I said. ‘So tell me about it.’
‘Well, Sir, I took the call at 21.40 and came straight here. One of the residents had come home and parked his car in the car barn and as he walked to the rear door of the house he came across a body, lying across the path. It was obviously dead so he rang the police, um, us.’
‘And is it obviously dead?’
‘Yes, Sir. There’s a pickaxe embedded in his head. It’s in solid; must be about six inches into his brain.’
‘OK, you’re right: it looks as if we have a murder on our hands. I’ll ring the pathologist and the duty superintendent and we’ll call in the experts.’ I looked at the imposing facade of the building, discreetly illuminated by concealed lighting. One window on the top floor was lit, all the others were in darkness. ‘Is that where the resident you met lives?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Sir. I told him to stay indoors, and it looks as if everybody else is out.’
‘But he didn’t recognise the body?’
‘No, Sir. He said he didn’t know any of the other residents. Everybody liked to…’
‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘They like to keep themselves to themselves. It’s a national disease.’
‘Um, aren’t you going to look for yourself, Sir?’ the PC ventured.
‘At the body? Nah,’ I replied airily. ‘Seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. And stop calling me sir. Let’s make these phone calls.’
The PC looked disappointed that I hadn’t rushed in to the crime scene, so I explained to him. We’d sent for the pathologist, who could tell us time and cause of death, and the SOCOs who would look for microscopic evidence. Neither of them wanted me blundering over the landscape. Anything I could deduce from a cursory examination of the body and its immediate surroundings, which I grandly referred to as the overview, would usually wait until they had finished. Not always, but usually. The secret is to know when to act swiftly and when to be patient.
Slowly the scene changed as people arrived to contribute their own special fields of knowledge in a process that would build up a picture of the victim and his death, and ultimately lead to his killer. I told the PC to record everybody who visited, and Dave wandered off to do his own investigation, knocking on the doors of the nearest neighbours. It was a black night, and everybody was working by torchlight. There was a danger that we’d overlook something obvious, lying in the herbaceous border, and were destroying evidence by trampling over the scene, so I decided to move the body, seal off the area and do a thorough examination in daylight. A photographer did his best to record the site in stills and video and a SOCO made a preliminary walk-through search, holding his flashlight close to the ground so that anything down there would cast a long shadow.
It was nearly two o’clock when the undertaker’s van arrived and the pathologist told them where he wanted the body taking.
‘I want to see it before you put it on the gurney,’ I insisted.
‘C’mon, then, Charlie,’ the pathologist said. ‘I have to say, you’ve been very patient. What we have is a male, about 45 or 50, killed by a single, determined blow sometime between 21:00 and 22:30 last evening. His body temp is down by about two degrees and hypostasis has hardly started.’ Dave had rejoined me and we followed the pathologist through the gates and round the side of the house, along a path delineated by blue tape and then on raised metal stepping plates laid by the SOCOs.
The light of our torches flickered over the gravel, and shadows of plants loomed and swayed around us. I could smell wet compost, cut grass and, I imagined, the heavy scent of late roses like the ones Rosie grew. I wondered what she was doing. A pale cat strolled across our pool of light, emerging from the gloom like a spectre before mewing at our trespass onto his territory and moving off into the enveloping blackness again. Into his forests of the night. Oh, to know what you know, I thought. Not far away a leftover firework exploded, startling us all.
‘There he is,’ the professor said, pinning the body with the beam of his torch. It was lying face downwards, legs towards us, one arm flung above the head and the other out sideways, as if he’d been about to make a right turn on a bicycle. A wooden shaft stood almost vertically away from it, the lower end firmly rooted i
n the skull.
It’s always a shock when you see a dead body. None of us shows it, but I’m sure we all give a shudder and think about our own mortality. Those who don’t probably never admired a sunset or were moved by an Elgar concerto. I stepped off the plates and Dave followed me, neither of us speaking. The head lay in a pool of blood which was black when our torches weren’t directly on it, but startlingly red when they were. The victim’s long hair was matted with it, pasted to the ground. I sank down to sit on my heels and reached a tentative hand towards the head, feeling under it for the chin. Dave kept his torch beam steady on where I was working. I grasped the chin and turned the head slightly until I could confirm what I already thought.
Dave said: ‘Well, bugger me.’
I turned to the pathologist as I rose up again, saying: ‘That’s his ID sorted, Prof. He’s called Tony Krabbe.’
‘Tony Krabbe? You mean…the mountaineer?’
‘Ex-mountaineer,’ Dave corrected. ‘His mountaineering days are over.’
I visited the scene briefly on Sunday morning then spent the rest of the day in the office. It’s all about teams and lists, and it was my job to manage them. We cleared the incident room of the stuff left over from the previous case: wiped the computers clean; took the maps and diagrams off the walls; and started to fill them with new stuff. I opened a diary and murder log and my admin officer, drafted in from HQ, supervised the creation of a property book, message book, job sheets, daily duty lists and correspondence file. An action allocator, statement reader and exhibits officer were appointed.
One team looked into the victim’s background for any likely suspects; another into his family connections. We looked at the MO – which was fruitless as this was a first – listened to various theories from members of the public and did a house-to-house. All this was routine, laid down in the manual. The only bit of creative thinking was to have somebody look into the Wallenberg connection, if there was one.
Monday morning we had a briefing and update meeting. The detective super who lorded under the title of senior investigating officer gave a pep talk to the troops, saying that this was a high-profile case involving a media celebrity, so we had to be on our best behaviour, thanked them for working the weekend and handed over to the investigating detective: moi.
Over the Edge Page 6
