Over the Edge

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘So why are you telling me now?’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the truth. Perhaps I want to help the murderer, understand him. Because I want the world to know what sort of a person Krabbe was.’

  ‘Who has the photos?’ I asked.

  ‘The Austrians gave the film to Krabbe, because he was the expedition leader. Krabbe gave it to Jeremy’s girlfriend, Gabi N-Naylor, so she could do all the legal stuff.’

  ‘Before it was developed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he didn’t realise it might incriminate him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. Anything else?’

  He stood there, swaying slightly, looking at me. The wind had pushed his hair to one side so it clung to his cheek and covered an eye. He’d been standing slightly sideways-on to me, ready to bolt like a rabbit should I try to grab him, but now he turned to face me and came a step nearer. ‘Do you know about the d-death zone?’ he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘A little.’

  ‘You’re OK up to about 17,000 feet,’ he told me. ‘No problem. But after that some people get mountain sickness. So you acclimatise. You go up, then come back down again. You do that for three of four days and then move your camp higher. Base camp is at 17,700 feet. But above 26,000 feet acclimatisation doesn’t work. The air is too thin. Above that height your brain cells start to die and your lungs fill with fluid from pulmonary oedema. Down here, at sea level, life expectancy is about 75 years. Above 26,000 feet, in the death zone, life expectancy is two days. Two days maximum. Everybody is dying. Nobody can help you. Helicopters can’t go that high. At midnight you start out for the summit, and if you don’t make it by two in the afternoon you turn around and come back. If you don’t you’ll be stranded. You rest every two paces. Two paces. There’s no way you’ll make it through another night, up there. The blood vessels in your lungs and your brain are leaking and you’re hallucinating, and you don’t know which way is up and which is down. That’s when you need somebody like you’ve never needed anybody in your life. They leave the bodies. You can’t do anything about them. There are about 200 frozen in the ice, including Jeremy’s.’

  Rain was running down his face and there were tears mixed in with it.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ he continued. ‘It’s the highest point on Earth, and it’s right at the limit we can exist at. Who dares say that we weren’t designed to live on this planet?’

  Yeah, I thought. Hilarious.

  Wallenberg’s briefs didn’t complain to the chief constable. No doubt he ordered them to forget the whole thing. His wife was mixed up with some shady characters when she was young and struggling to make her mark on the modelling scene, he’ll have told them, and the conviction was all a big mistake. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mr Wood wanted a full review of progress so I spent most of Monday morning in his office.

  Dave had left a note on my desk about the crash that cost Sonia Thornton a place at the Olympics. I read it, rang High Adventure to confirm that she was working, and drove over to see her. Robert had been hard at work at a VDU. Before I left I asked him if he wanted to come, but he said he was busy and he wasn’t keen on ice maidens.

  She was standing at the foot of the climbing wall, holding a rope. Belaying, I believe, is the proper term. A little girl, aged about ten, was just starting to climb. She moved like a monkey, stretching and reaching for grips, shifting her weight, moving higher all the time. Sonia pulled spare rope through the belay and it coiled at her feet. Unfortunately the little girl was wearing low-cut pants, which were highly fashionable but impractical for climbing, so we were treated to a view of her bottom as she moved up the wall. After every move she reached back and tried to hitch the pants higher.

  I was grinning as I said hello to Sonia. She turned and returned the smile, almost as if she were pleased to see me.

  ‘She’s a natural,’ I said, nodding towards the little girl.

  ‘A natural what, though,’ she laughed, then, seeing the photo album under my arm, added: ‘Oh, you’ve brought my pictures back.’

  I said: ‘I’m not saying anything until that young lady is firmly on the ground again. If it were me up there I’d expect you to give it 100 per cent attention.’

  ‘Well done,’ Sonia called up to her as she reached the top. ‘Lean back and let go.’ She paid out the rope and the girl came down in a series of jerks, her feet dancing against the wall.

  ‘Want to try the blue route?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘No thanks, my dad’s waiting,’ the girl replied.

  ‘That was brilliant,’ I told her, but she just adjusted her jeans and dashed off to hand in her harness.

  I tapped the book and looked at Sonia. ‘I’d like to hang on to this and the other a little longer, if you don’t mind, but there’s a couple of questions I need to ask you.’

  ‘OK,’ she replied. ‘Let’s go in the office.’

  The office was just a partitioned off area behind the wall, but there were four desks each with a VDU. I placed the album on a desk and opened it a couple of pages from the end. ‘Who is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Hum, that’s Chris,’ she replied. ‘Chris Quigley.’

  ‘Jeremy’s brother?’

  ‘That’s the man.’

  ‘Tell me about him, please.’

  ‘Oh, let me see. I’d never met him until after the Everest expedition. Like with Gabi, I met him at the memorial service. It was at Selby Abbey. I think they’d both been choirboys there. Afterwards he came to visit a couple of times. He took his brother’s death badly. His big brother’s death. Apparently he hero-worshipped him, couldn’t believe he was dead. He just wanted to talk.’

  ‘Was he on the expedition?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think he was in a summit team. He paid his way, just for the experience. According to Tony he cracked up, became a liability.’

  I said: ‘Those crampons we saw in your attic. Were they the ones Tony wore to the summit?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why he wanted them saved. They’d been on top of Everest.’

  ‘Can you remember what colour the straps are?’

  ‘The straps? Hm, they’re blue, aren’t they? Why?’

  I opened the album at the last page and placed my hand over the bottom of the picture. ‘Which one is Tony?’ I asked.

  Sonia placed a finger on one of the grinning faces, saying: ‘He is. That’s Tony.’

  ‘And the other one is Jeremy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Of course I’m certain. What’s this all about?’

  I moved my hand away. ‘I’m not sure,’ I lied. ‘Look at the shadows. They’re long, so the sun must have been low. I’d guess that this was taken at Camp IV the evening before they pushed to the summit. They’d grab a few hours rest and set off, I’m told, around midnight.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘That’s how I understand it.’

  ‘If you look carefully,’ I said, ‘you’ll see that in this photo Jeremy is wearing the crampons with blue straps. Tony’s straps are black.’ The climbers’ feet were thrust towards the camera, the wide-angle lens making them look disproportionately large.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘So they are. No wonder you’re a detective. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I declared, untruthfully, and shut the book. ‘Nothing at all. It just seemed curious. In this job you look for little things like that. That’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So do you want a go up the wall while you’re here. On the house?’

  ‘M-me?’ I spluttered, suddenly developing a pain in my stomach and a twitchy eye.

  ‘Mmm, why not,’ she replied. ‘What size shoes do you take?’

  ‘Umm, there’s something else I want to ask you,’ I remembered. Panic is a wonderful memory-jogger.

  ‘What’s that?’

  I suddenly felt bet
ter. I was on safe ground again. ‘I’ve had a word with our traffic people about your accident,’ I said. ‘Apparently when they arrived on the scene the car was halfway up a tree just round a bend and you and Tony were attempting to walk down the road. He was assisting you. They asked which of you was driving and you said you were, so they breathalysed you. It’s standard procedure after an RTA. Needless to say, you didn’t register.’

  ‘I hardly drink,’ she replied, ‘and it was only three days before I was due to fly to Atlanta, so I’d been on the mineral water.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Tony, they reckoned, was well under the influence but he wasn’t breathalysed. After they sent you off in the ambulance they went to have a look at the car. You had a badly cut leg, but the only blood was at the passenger side, and there was a dent in the glove box just about where your knee would have been.’

  Her face had turned pink and she studied her hand. Her forefinger was polishing a little patch of desktop but she didn’t say anything. It moved side to side, then back and forth, over the same little square of desk.

  ‘They were called away,’ I continued, ‘to an accident on the bypass. It made no difference to them who was driving so they didn’t pursue it. You said you’d been forced off the road but the other car didn’t stop and there were no witnesses. You were both well known and you’d sorted it out between yourselves. Case closed. And it doesn’t make any difference to me, Sonia. I’m conducting a murder enquiry, so all I’m interested in is the truth. Who was driving the car?’

  ‘You’re right, he was,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why did you lie for him?’

  ‘He persuaded me to. It was obvious my Olympics were over, and I was sober, so I’d nothing to lose. I thought he’d been drinking low-alcohol beer all night. He said he was and they’d just offered him some sponsorship, so I believed him. When he saw the police car he panicked, told me he’d be well over the limit. He’d spent years building up the expedition to Everest. It was his dream, he said. If he were prosecuted for drunk driving it would have ruined him. He’d never find another sponsor and his career would collapse. He begged and pleaded for me to say I was driving. The policeman looked at us and asked the question. We stood there for a few seconds and I could feel Tony’s eyes boring into the side of my face. “Me,” I said, and that was that.’

  ‘I suppose you were being loyal,’ I said. ‘Thanks for telling me the truth.’

  ‘Is it relevant, Inspector? Does it make me even more of a suspect?’

  ‘Did you kill Tony Krabbe?’ I asked.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘There you are, then. That’s the question most murderers dread us asking. Others are just waiting for us to ask it. They want to confess, get it off their chests.’

  Sonia looked down at herself, then back at me. ‘I’ve nothing on my chest,’ she said, and suddenly it was my turn to blush.

  I opened my mouth to speak, shut it again and flapped a hand at her, ‘Um, no comment,’ I said.

  ‘You never told me what size shoe you took.’

  So there I was, five minutes later, tied into a harness that Madam Cyn would have had raptures over, with climbing shoes on feet, hardhat on head, looking up at sixty-odd vertical feet of papier-mache cliff and feeling like one of the Village People.

  I took my watch off and handed it to Sonia. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said to her. ‘If anything happens to me, my name is Charlie.’

  ‘Right, Charlie,’ she replied. ‘Off you go.’

  There was this saint, never knew his name, who walked across Europe with his head under his arm. Paris to Moscow, something like that. When he was asked how he did it he said that the first step was the hardest.

  I was six inches off the ground looking for the next foothold. Sonia told me to go for the green one on the left but I could hardly make it. The little girl I’d watched was about half my height but she’d had no trouble reaching the holds. I stretched some more and wedged my toes against the pitifully small block of brown plastic. Well, at least I wasn’t showing my bum. I reached up with my left hand, then my right, and brought my feet up one at a time. Repeat at will. A quick glance down and I was shocked to see how far I was above Sonia, which was strange because the top didn’t look any closer.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ she called, encouragingly.

  Most of the holds were big and comforting, cut away at the back to make them easy to grip. They were in different colours but these didn’t seem relative to the shape of the hold. I reached out for a green one, tested it for security and heaved myself higher. There was a blue one nicely placed just above my left foot, except that my left foot was bearing all my weight. I wondered if a quick hop from one foot to the other was a manoeuvre in the climbers’ repertoire but Sonia read my mind.

  ‘Go for the green to the right,’ she advised.

  It was miles away. I reached towards it, couldn’t make it and retreated.

  ‘Stretch!’ she called up to me.

  I stretched, reached the hold and moved over to the right. After that I deserved a rest, I decided. Sonia was a different person to the ice maiden I’d first met. I supposed she had every right to be wary when I came knocking on her door: I was investigating a murder; she was the deceased’s ex-partner. Admitting to being the driver had been stupid, but understandable, and she’d been in a state of shock at the time. She’d paid for it, though. If she’d won the gold at the Olympics she would have earned herself contracts worth hundreds of thousands. Millions if she’d kept on winning. She couldn’t blame Krabbe for that, though. The accident hadn’t been his fault. A couple of yobs take a corner on the wrong side and cause an accident. They drive on, laughing, unaware of the heartache they’ve caused. It’s a regular story; we hear it all the time. Krabbe was unlucky, that’s all.

  I looked down and nearly wet myself. Sonia looked about as big as an ant. The rope I was on stretched upwards to a karabiner through a ring bolt in the wall and then down to the belay plate on the front of her harness. I was surprised how secure it felt, how much confidence it gave you. I reached for a yellow and pulled myself higher.

  There was a slight overhang near the top. My right leg was carrying all my weight and it started to twitch. I transferred onto my left and wagged the right in the air, flexing my knee to keep the circulation going. After a second or two it stopped twitching and I placed it back on the block.

  A lot of people would kill for a million, I thought. Or would kill for revenge if a million had been lost. I was nearly there. Foot, foot, then hand, hand, and I was within touching distance of the top. No, it wasn’t Krabbe who lost her the money. It was the little scrotes in the other car. They were the ones who she should have held responsible. Except…

  Except I was wrong: it was Krabbe who lost her the money, and that was good enough reason for wanting him dead. I knew it, and she probably realised I knew it. I was 60 feet above the ground.

  And she was holding the rope.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Well done,’ she called up to me. ‘Plant the flag and come down.’

  I twisted round and grinned down at her. ‘I forgot the flag.’

  ‘Lean back and kick off.’

  I did as I was told and enjoyed a relaxing ride as she lowered me to safety. I was at the bottom quicker than expected and suddenly found myself stumbling to stay upright. Sonia grabbed my arm and steadied me.

  ‘Phew! That was fun,’ I declared, buzzing with enough adrenalin to power a small village.

  ‘Slightly unorthodox style,’ she told me, ‘but effective. I’d keep the day job if I were you.’

  I undipped myself from the rope and stepped out of the harness. ‘I might bring the troops over for a climb, sometime,’ I said. ‘Male bonding, all that stuff. Do you have concessionary rates for parties?’

  ‘Oh, I think we could work something out, Inspector.’

  The High Adventure complex houses restaurants, cinemas and retail outlets as well as the
climbing wall and ski slope. It was Monday morning, but there was an intermittent procession of people of all ages carrying skis and snowboards, heading for the real-snow slope. It was amazing how many citizens of Oldfield were apparently competent skiers.

  Straight across the foyer from the wall was a Starbucks coffee lounge. I said: ‘Let’s have a coffee, I need to talk to you.’ When we were seated behind two regular lattes I said: ‘The kids in the other car ruined your career. You must be angry with them.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ she replied. She picked up her coffee, decided it was too hot and put it down again. A couple with two children walked by carrying snowboards in nylon bags. The boards looked much bigger than I thought they’d be. Sonia watched them go by, avoiding looking at me. In her day she was one of the finest athletes in the world, but she was a lousy liar.

  ‘Charlie,’ I said.

  ‘Char-lee. O-Kay.’

  ‘But it wasn’t just the Olympics, was it? The honour and the glory and all that. It must have hit you financially.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Can you put a sum on it?’

  ‘Not exactly, but the numbers were big. I’d done the fastest time of the year, so I was in with a chance. If I reached the final I had contracts that would have brought me a quarter of a million. Guaranteed. If I won, I was looking at a million over the next couple of years.’

  ‘Except,’ I began, ‘it wasn’t really those kids who lost you the money, was it? Apparently you didn’t get a good look at them.’

  She heaved a sigh and placed both hands on the table. She twisted in her seat, looking across the large open area towards the climbing wall. There was a Frankie and Benny’s off to our left and a Burger King the other side. Her cheeks were tinged with pink when she looked at me again.

  ‘Was there another car?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No. Tony just came out with it when we were talking to the police. He’d been driving like a maniac. He always drove like a maniac. They all do. I just nodded and went along with it.’

  ‘All do?’

  ‘Climbers. They’re adrenalin junkies. If there’s no risk it’s not worth doing.’