‘But you were seeing Krabbe at the time?’
She looked uncomfortable, picked up a spoon and slowly stirred her coffee.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘It was awkward.’
‘Did you know that Chris blames Krabbe for Jeremy’s death,’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your take on it?’
She shook her head. ‘Tony was ambitious,’ she replied after a pause. ‘He wanted Everest more than anything. Jerry was more happy-go-lucky. He climbed for the fun of it. He wasn’t expected to be in the first summit team, but he proved to be stronger than the others. They’d climbed together before but weren’t friends. If they didn’t make the top it was no big deal to Jerry, but it was everything to Tony.’ She looked down at the table and said, very quietly: ‘Knowing what I know now, I believe he’d have done anything to get to the summit.’
She stood up and walked over to the window. Pedro was outside, hoping for scraps to eat. Gabi pushed the window open and threw him a crust.
I said: ‘Chris told me that Jeremy left a diary. Do you know anything about that?’
‘Well,’ she began. ‘It’s true that he always kept a diary or journal on all his climbs, so there must have been one.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘I only know what Chris told me. He claims two Austrian climbers took it from Jerry’s body and gave it to him, but he lost it. He reckons that Tony stole it.’
‘Did he tell you what it said?’
‘About the crampons? Yes.’
‘Do you believe it?’
‘Yes, but it could have been accidental. I don’t know what to believe. All I know is that Jerry’s still up there, frozen in the ice, with other climbers passing him by and barely sparing him a glance.’ She’d been standing with her back to the window, facing me, but she turned away and I heard her sobbing. I stood up and offered her a tissue, my other hand in the small of her back. She turned to me, put her arms on my waist and I felt the shudders of grief passing through her body.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and wrapped one arm around her shoulders.
After a moment I made her sit down and I put the kettle on again. Gabi dried her eyes and apologised.
‘It’s me who should be apologising,’ I said. ‘This must be unpleasant for you. I’ve some more questions but I could always come back.’
‘No, Charlie. I’m all right. Honest I am.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘I am.’
‘Chris said that the Austrian climbers took some photographs, for insurance purposes.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you have copies?’
She said she had and went to fetch them. I stepped over to the window where Pedro was still looking in. There was a bunch of celery on the drainer so I broke a stick off, had a bite and passed the remainder out to the donkey.
Gabi came back with a manila envelope. ‘They’re here.’
I looked into the envelope and saw about four ten-by-eight colour prints. I said: ‘Why don’t you go feed the animals for a couple of minutes while I look at these?’ She thought it was a good idea and left.
I spread the prints on the table and stood so that they were in the shadow of my body. When I saw the first one I was glad that Gabi wasn’t looking over my shoulder. It was of the dead man’s face, in close up and full colour. His eyes were closed and his lips were slightly parted. He’d died cold and alone and feeling betrayed, and it showed in his expression. Clods of snow were stuck to his skin and a film of ice covered his features as pitilessly as if he were a rock.
The next one was a general one of his body. It was snowing and out of focus. I thought about the Austrian climber who took the pictures. He’d have to remove his mitts, find the camera and fumble with the controls. And all the time his chances of making the summit, or returning safely, were diminishing. Photo three was the one I wanted. It was a close-up of Jeremy’s legs, taken to give a reason for his predicament. One was twisted, looked broken. He’d died trying to crawl back to camp, up there in the death zone. The left boot was thrust towards the camera, and the front two points of the crampon were missing. No doubt about it. I remembered how prominent, how vicious, they’d looked in the photo that Sonia Thornton loaned me, but I couldn’t see the colour of the fixing straps now because his ankles were caked in snow.
The final shot was entirely different. It was of the Himalayas, the roof of the world, stretching out for what looked like infinity. Hundreds of peaks, many unclimbed and unnamed, all the way to the Karakorams. The left corner of the picture was lost in cloud as a storm moved across, and the mountains in the foreground were shivering in the shadows while the distant ones were bathed in alpenglow. It was a view in a million, and you had to brave the death zone to see it. Again, I wondered about the photographer. Had he taken this shot to show where the body lay, or was he trying to tell us much more than that? Was he saying that this was the last view the dead man saw? That this was what it was all about? Don’t ask me, I’m only a cop.
I put the photos back in the envelope and went outside. Gabi was sitting on a garden seat, rubbing Pedro’s nose.
‘Did you find what you wanted?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Thank you for letting me see them. The crampons look broken, but it wouldn’t stand in a court of law. There’s no overlap of the photos, so the one of the legs couldn’t be proved to be of the same body. It could’ve been faked. It obviously wasn’t, but I doubt if CPS would let it through in a murder case. That’s not what they had in mind when they took the pictures.’
‘Is Chris a suspect?’ she asked.
‘Yes, as much as we have any suspects. Do you think he could have done it?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt it, but somebody did it.’
‘He was at base camp, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes. I think he went to pieces. He tried to go up there, into the death zone, to find the body. An American team brought him down.’
‘Can we go inside,’ I said. It might have been a bright day but the wind was from the east and I didn’t have my porridge for breakfast. She followed me in and I closed the door behind her. ‘Sit down, please,’ I said.
I moved the envelope containing the photographs to one side and looked at her. I’d raked up events that she’d tried to forget, and it showed on her face. The counsellors believe we should face up to our problems and talk about them, but I’m not so sure. Some things are best left undisturbed.
‘What do you know about Krabbe’s business interests?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not much. He spent a lot of effort over there meeting people, looking for products, chasing contracts. I didn’t know anything about it, except for…’ She let the sentence tail off.
‘Except for what, Gabi?’ I prompted.
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Like with the crampons, there’s no proof.’
I picked up my coffee mug, now cold and empty, looked at it and replaced it on the table. ‘I’ll make some more,’ Gabi said, half rising to her feet.
‘No, it’s OK,’ I insisted. ‘I was just fidgeting.’ When she was seated again I asked: ‘Did you ever hear Tony mention a man called Peter Wallenberg?’
She looked thoughtful before saying she’d never heard of him. ‘Who is he?’ she asked.
‘Peter Wallenberg? He’s a businessman in Heckley. He sponsored Krabbe for the Everest expedition, and they have business connections. I went to a charity function that he organised, about a month ago, and Wallenberg’s wife was there, as you might expect. She was wearing a sexy dress that left little to the imagination, with a rather nice shawl to protect her modesty and keep her shoulders warm. The person I was with asked her about it. The shawl, that is. Apparently it was called a shahtoosh, and they’re very expensive. What can you tell me about shahtoosh, Gabi?’
She sat back, her hands still on the table, and I noticed the missing pinky for the first time. Her face coloured up and her sh
oulders rose and fell as she breathed. ‘Is it true,’ she asked, ‘about the shahtoosh?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘You tell me what you know.’
It took her a full minute to gather her thoughts. ‘I was working with this film company,’ she began in a very soft voice. ‘It was a dream job. Tony helped me get it, pulled some strings. It was just what I wanted to make me forget Jerry. Not forget him. I’ll never forget him. To help me build my life again without him. We were making a film for TV about the Silk Road through west China and the Changtang region of the Tibetan plateau, into Nepal and then Kashmir. I fell in love with the land; I could understand for the first time what it was that kept drawing Jerry back there. It’s probably due to the altitude and the thinness of the air, but you feel slightly high.’ She smiled at the pun. ‘Light-headed, I think that’s a better explanation. You feel slightly drunk, all the time. Well, I did.’
And then the smile fled from her face. ‘We saw the birds first,’ she said. ‘Dozens of them wheeling in the sky. One of the technicians said: “I wonder what they’ve found?” so we had a drive over.’
‘They were eagles and vultures. Lammergeiers and black vultures. Griffons, too. You could see them thousands of feet up, like little black flies, homing in on the place. They have territories that they patrol, way up high, watching the ground, endlessly circling. Out of the corners of their eyes they can see their neighbour tens of miles away, patrolling his domain. If he suddenly vanishes they turn that way to see what he’s found. In minutes, birds from hundreds of miles around converge on the spot.’
‘And what had they found?’ I asked, although I knew the answer.
‘The ground was black with birds in a feeding frenzy. I should have been thrilled to bits, seeing those great birds for the first time, and so close, but it was frightening. Carcasses were spread all around with these big black monsters tearing and pulling at them. We could see by the horns that they were some sort of mountain goat, but they’d been skinned. Everyone of them had been skinned. We watched these great birds gorging themselves until they were too heavy to fly, reducing the carcasses to skeletons before our eyes. It was sickening. It was obscene.’
‘How many dead goats did you estimate there were?’
‘Between 40 and 50. I found out later that they are called chiru, or Tibetan antelope. They live at about 15,000 feet and have the finest wool in the world. It’s used to make shawls which are considered high-fashion items in America and parts of Europe, even though it’s against the law to possess one. The antelope can’t be farmed. The only way to gather the wool is to kill them. It’s illegal in China, but there’s a ready market in the West for the shawls, which can sell for over £10,000. The poachers use high-powered rifles, and kill the animals as they migrate. The females are pregnant, but that makes no difference. They skin them where they fall and smuggle the skins through Tibet or Nepal into Kashmir, where the wool is plucked from them and woven into shawls. What we saw would make four, possibly five, shawls.’
‘So what did you do?’ I asked.
‘I wanted to expose the whole racket. We met up with Tony in Kathmandu, as we’d arranged, and told I him all about it. He tried to persuade me to forget the whole thing. He said that if we caused trouble we wouldn’t get filming or climbing permits; the government was corrupt – they turned a blind eye to the trade; I could jeopardise the contracts he’d negotiated; and so on. Then he said that if we did report it to the authorities, all we would succeed in doing was force the price even higher, and make the trade more lucrative for the poachers. I’m ashamed to say I fell for that one. I did nothing, held my silence.’
‘Do you think Krabbe was involved in the trade?’
‘I didn’t, but later I learnt that he was buying and selling pashminas. These are shawls made from the wool of another goat that lives high in the Himalayas, but one that can be farmed. They’re still expensive – I couldn’t afford one – but the trade is legal. When I learnt that Tony was importing pashminas I was convinced that he was involved in the shahtoosh trade, too.’
‘But you never saw anything to prove it?’
‘No.’
‘Is that why you fell out with him?’
‘It was the final straw. He wasn’t the person I thought he was. I saw a side of him that wasn’t very nice, and started to believe what Chris had said about the crampons.’
I stood up and carried my coffee mug to the sink. Pedro was standing several yards away, watching the geese. I rinsed the mug and left it standing on the drainer.
‘Thanks for seeing me, Gabi,’ I said. ‘And for being so frank. I’m sorry about the circumstances.’
She walked with me to the gate. As she opened it she asked if I had any suspects for Tony’s murder.
I said: ‘Suspects, but nobody really stands out.’
‘Have you ever seen the film Spartacus?’ she asked.
‘Only on TV,’ I replied.
‘You know the scene at the end where the Romans are looking for him amongst all the prisoners and one of his soldiers stands up and says:
‘I am Spartacus’?’
‘I remember it.’
‘Well, if you gathered everyone together who knew Tony Krabbe, and asked which of them had killed him, I hope that I’d be first on my feet to say I did, and one by one all the others would join me.’
‘You feel that strongly about him?’
‘I learnt to hate him, Charlie. I hated him.’
Gabi hadn’t told me anything about shahtoosh that I hadn’t learnt from the internet. The wool, which is six times finer than human hair, is plucked by hand from the pelts in Kashmir, where it’s not against the law, and woven into the shawls by traditional methods. They are the world’s experts at that sort of thing. Shahtoosh became a high-fashion item in the late 80s, after fur coats fell out of favour. For some reason wealthy women feel more pampered when their clothes have a savage origin. There’s a paper there for some psychiatrist, I thought. It probably went right back to when we lived in caves and the boss hunter was the man to be seen with. In the late 90s the Tibetan antelope became endangered, rapidly approaching extinction, and adverse publicity caused the shawls to go out of fashion, but the market still exists.
There’s a parking place in the nick car park, right next to the door. It’s marked Chief Constable and stands empty for approximately 99 per cent of the time. Today, though, when I returned from my visit with Gabi Nayior, the Assistant Chief Constable’s (Operations) Jaguar was standing in it. I did a quick circuit, parked in the road outside and dialled my own number.
‘DI Priest’s office,’ I heard Jeff Caton say.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’ve a job for you.’
‘Where are you? The boss is looking for you.’
‘I’m miles away. Is Dave in?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK. I want you both to meet me across the road from the nick, and bring the keys for Tony Krabbe’s shop in the mall. Quick as you can.’
‘How long will you be?’
‘I’m already there.’
A figure appeared at the second floor window. ‘Hey, I can see you.’
The figure waved and I flashed my headlights. ‘Quick as you can,’ I urged. A minute later Dave and Jeff came running across the road. ‘Did you bring the keys?’ I asked, and Dave waved them in my face.
On the short drive I gave them a brief history of the shahtoosh. We parked in the pedestrian precinct and marched purposefully towards the mall, Dave leading. I’d hung back, hoping to see a parking warden and explain what I was doing there, but you can never find one when you want one. I strode out to catch up with the other two.
The Salvation Army brass band was playing a Susa march, soon to be replaced by their Christmas repertoire, and the Big Issue seller was in his usual spot. I shook my head slightly as he started to proffer the latest issue, and he nodded an acknowledgement. The beggar and his dog weren’t there. Probably having the BMW serviced, I though
t.
The mall was buzzing with shoppers. Unfortunately for the traders it was mainly of the window kind. Wandering around displays of goods we can’t afford or don’t want is the new national obsession. Touchers and feelers, the shopkeepers call them. People with money to spend are like the chiru antelope – an endangered species.
A woman was peering through the window of Art of Asia. As Dave unlocked the door she stood behind us, expecting to be let in. ‘We’re not opening, love,’ I said to her.
‘How much is that Buddha?’ she asked.
I stooped to read the label. ‘Three hundred pounds,’ I told her, and she nodded her thanks and wandered off. ‘Lock us in,’ I said, ‘before we have a rush.’
‘What are we looking for?’
I led them through into the back room and retrieved the flat cardboard box from the shelf where I’d placed it when we first turned the shop over. ‘These,’ I said.
I cleared the table that stood in the middle of the room and placed the box at one end. As I removed the lid and several sheets of tissue paper Dave said: ‘So are these shah-whatsits?’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘These are pashminas, and perfectly legal. Well, I think they are. Feel the softness.’ They both took hold of a corner and rubbed the material between fingers and thumb.
‘Colours are nice,’ Jeff said.
‘They are, aren’t they.’ They were earth colours, but these were from the more exotic corners of the planet: browns merging into purples; oranges that lay comfortably alongside reds; and greens that tied them all together. No palette I’d ever seen could match them for perfection. I lifted the top shawl out and tried to spread it over the table. Jeff saw what I was doing and started to help. Dave watched.
We’d lifted six out and the cold fingers of doubt were starting to clutch at my nether regions when we found the first shahtoosh. It was simply laid on a pashmina and folded up with it. The extra weight and thickness were negligible and we’d never have found it without fully spreading them out. It was just that bit finer, the colours slightly more muted, that much more expensive feeling.
Over the Edge Page 21
