We Are Death

by Douglas Lindsay

  Carter, whose hand had been resting on the handle of the teapot, about to pour, slumped back, his hands falling away. Seemed to go pale before him. He’d had a couple of hours to get used to the idea that his son was dead. Maybe, given his profession, it was something he’d come to anticipate. This new information, however, was brutal and bewildering.

  ‘Why?’

  His voice sounded small.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Jericho.

  Carter started to form the word ‘who’ but the sound never quite made it to his lips.

  ‘We have no idea,’ added Jericho.

  Carter swallowed, stared across the great table, lowered his eyes. Unusually for Jericho, he suddenly got the sense that he should do something for him, no matter how slight. He got up, poured out two cups of tea with milk, then placed one of the cups in Carter’s hand.

  ‘Take a drink, Mr Carter,’ he said, sitting back down.

  Carter stared down at the cup as though surprised to see it there. Then he took a small sip, the cup unsteady in his hand.

  ‘Did you hear from him much after the last expedition? While he was travelling through Asia...?’

  Carter seemed to take a few moments. Still processing the information. Finally, as though he was hearing the question on time delay, he looked up, nodding.

  ‘He always kept in contact during expeditions, as much as he could at any rate. He knew I worried, even though we’d never seen eye to eye over his career choice. Once he was on holiday, of course, he was like any child. There was no need to contact his father.’

  ‘Did you know he was back in England?’

  ‘Not exactly. I knew it would be sometime this week but didn’t know when, until... until the police came this morning.’

  ‘Was there anything significant about the expedition?’

  Carter’s eyes widened for a moment, then he lifted the tea again. His hand seemed a little steadier.

  ‘He didn’t get on with this chap Geyerson. Was much too brash for Evan. I may not have liked what he chose to do, but he was a decent sort, Evan, a nice boy. Just like his mother. We used to say he had all her good qualities and his sister had all my bad ones.’

  A long, sad stare across the room and out into the garden. Jericho gave him his moment. He presumed the mother was dead and wondered about the sister. Maybe she was dead too and Carter was going to be all that was left of what had been a happy family of four.

  ‘No, he didn’t like Geyerson. American. Loud. It was obvious... I don’t think he was ever going to work with him again.’

  ‘Did they actually fall out? I mean...’

  ‘So much that Geyerson would have had him killed?’ Carter looked up, a half-smile on his lips. ‘I don’t think so, though Evan did write to me about a big disagreement they had about going to the actual summit of Kangchenjunga.’

  His voice drifted away again, and Jericho had to gently encourage him to continue with a questioning movement of his eyebrows.

  ‘You know about this mountain?’ asked the father.

  ‘Not really,’ said Jericho. He knew more than he was saying, but it didn’t mean that he couldn’t learn anything. And it was always better to find out what other people knew.

  ‘The first men to reach the summit – English, of course – some time in the 1950s, agreed not to ascend to the very summit. The mountain is holy to the local people. So, this first successful expedition stopped a few feet short of the actual summit. Later expeditions, and I believe there haven’t been that many, did the same. Not, of course, everybody. And there’s some folklore, or whatever, about anyone getting to the summit being cursed. Anyway, Geyerson insisted they were going right to the top. Evan thought they should respect local custom.’

  ‘And did they go right to the top?’

  ‘You know, I never found out. I’m not sure what happened. I heard less from Evan after they’d summited...

  ‘Looking back, actually he seemed quite different. More detached. I don’t think I even asked him if there was anything wrong. You know, we were just exchanging e-mails, and he didn’t want to hear about me. He was just writing to let me know he was all right. But before he reached the summit he seemed quite talkative, then afterwards... afterwards, not so much.’

  He took another sip of tea. The day crept into the room on a warm breeze, carrying the smell of summer, the bright, sunny afternoon completely at odds with the weight of melancholy hanging over the kitchen table.

  *

  Jericho opened his car door, and sat in the driver’s seat. He’d left the windows closed and parked in the shade of an old oak tree, so the car had somehow managed to retain some of the coolness in which he had driven down from Wells, air conditioning running full blast.

  He closed the door and hesitated. There was something not quite right, although it was hard to place. Almost as though someone had been in the car and had somehow left something of themselves behind.

  He turned sharply, looking in the back seat, and then bent down to look at the floor to see if anyone was hiding down there. Perhaps, he darkly thought, the dwarf who had killed Carter that morning.

  He straightened up, staring straight ahead into the thick mass of bushes and trees that surrounded the lawn. He wondered what it was he was feeling. The hairs on his neck had been standing on end, then slowly the shiver passed and the hairs settled down.

  He looked around again, looked into the trees, looked around the car. Nothing seemed to have been touched, the feeling was gone, nothing taken or disturbed. There was no evidence that anyone had been in the car, except that strange, uneasy feeling.

  He started the engine, reversed a few yards, then turned and was on his way.

  10

  ‘I take it you haven’t managed to get anywhere with the tarot card?’ asked Jericho.

  Back in his office, the room stiflingly hot, there was much to discuss in the investigation, but Jericho was aware that the card was in and out of his mind, and there was always the chance it would be completely forgotten. Perhaps talking about it was easier than talking about Kangchenjunga.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment tomorrow,’ said Haynes. ‘Made it on Tuesday night, before all this started, so you know, I can break it if you like.’

  Jericho shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry about the investigation. I’ll stay on top of it. Who’s the appointment with?’

  ‘Professor Leighton.’

  ‘From the British Library,’ said Jericho, nodding. ‘You trusted her, eh?’

  ‘She’s good. She managed to work out the connection between Light and Durrant a long time before we did.’

  ‘I remember you said. OK, good, bring her on board.’

  ‘And I thought I’d try to take a closer look at the card. Get it blown up, you know. There’s tremendous detail on there, the drawing’s so intricate. Seems quite different in that sense to the previous card. And that emblem...’

  ‘Yes, I know. How were you going to do that?’

  ‘At the moment, nothing too epic. I’ll just scan it in, download it to an iPad, see what kind of detail I can make out when enlarging various sections.’

  ‘You can do that on an iPad?’

  ‘Maybe when you leave the police you can join the twenty-first century, sir.’

  ‘You can do that on an iPad?’ repeated Jericho, drily.

  ‘Yes. Not sure if it’ll give us the resolution we need, but I’ll see what happens. If not, I can speak to someone in Taunton, take it down there.’

  ‘Be careful with that.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘OK, good. Enough about the damn card. What about this climbing expedition? Beginning to feel like this is what we should be aiming at, rather than minutely investigating his round-the-world holiday of the past few months.’

  ‘Yep, coming to the same conclusion, sir.’

  As always, Haynes glanced down at his notes, and as usual he didn’t really need to. Better to refresh, however, better to keep the habit.


  ‘So the centre of all this is Geyerson. He arranged, planned, and funded the expedition. Made his money on Wall Street. He kind of lives in the shadows, I mean, he’s never on TV as a financial expert or whatever, so people don’t really know him, but there’s tons of stuff online about him if you look. There are a couple of profiles on him in Forbes, Time, things like that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sounds like a bit of a dick.’

  Jericho smiled ruefully.

  ‘Carter’s dad said he and his kid had argued.’

  ‘He’s got Wolf of Wall Street written all over him.’

  Jericho shook his head.

  ‘No, not your kind of thing, sir. The only trouble with this guy is, he never had his comeuppance.’

  ‘I don’t suppose, by any chance, he’s currently climbing in the Mendips?’

  Haynes laughed. Jericho was actually joking. He must be de-mob happy, he thought.

  ‘Or the Quantocks?’

  ‘High Atlas, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Morocco?’

  ‘Yep. Not climbing as such, apparently, just walking in the mountains, doing whatever. He has this assistant who’s been with him for twenty years or something. Emerick. Goes with him everywhere. He was on Kangchenjunga, and he’s with him in Morocco.’

  ‘And what do we know about Emerick?’

  Haynes shrugged.

  ‘Maybe he’s a long-suffering assistant only too happy to talk to us,’ said Jericho, ‘or perhaps as well as being his assistant, he’s his gimp.’

  Haynes smiled.

  ‘Geyerson has been married four times but never appears to take his wives with him when he travels.’

  ‘Is he currently married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, we’re including Emerick as one of the five on Kangchenjunga?’

  ‘Yes, we are. The other two are Harrow and Connolly. They all appeared to have gone their separate ways after the climb, which is reasonable. Why wouldn’t they? Harrow, I haven’t been able to locate. Connolly moved around, then came home to the UK for a couple of weeks. He left two days ago, saying he had a climb to pick up on the Eiger. Went to Grindelwald. His family haven’t heard from him since he left. They didn’t know where he was staying.’

  ‘All right, I guess we need to find those two guys. I’ll take Harrow, you stick with Connolly. Grindelwald... how many hotels are there? Can’t be too many, stuck on the side of a mountain.’

  ‘Grindelwald is all hotels, sir. There are like a million.’

  Jericho smiled, although there was an edge behind the look that hadn’t been there earlier. He indicated for Haynes to leave, then looked at his computer, which he had yet to turn on that day.

  ‘E-mail me everything you’ve got on Harrow.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And we’ll need to work out what we’re going to do about Geyerson. I doubt Dylan will want us going to Morocco.’

  ‘Do you want us going to Morocco?’ asked Haynes, opening the door.

  ‘No, not really. We’ll need to get someone to speak to him. I’ll look into it. Leave it open, please.’

  Haynes left, pushing the door wide open. The breath of warm air from the window started flowing through Jericho’s office.

  *

  Jericho spent the next hour immersed in the expedition and the climbing life of Harrow. Harrow, it quickly transpired, was a nickname, given to him at the University of Sussex, as he was the only one in his year to have attended Harrow. That he had ended up at the University of Sussex, rather than at his father’s Oxford College, was likely to be a sore point in the family.

  Real name, Thomas Ninkovich. Another one who, like Carter, had given his life over to being a full-time climber. Another life where chasing the next mountain alternated with chasing the next cheque from Gatorade.

  The expedition had ended on the seventh of May. That was the day they walked back into the hotel in Sikkim, from where they had started out two-and-a-half months previously. Jericho suddenly wondered if he would have to go to Sikkim as well. Certainly, this had all the hallmarks of an international investigation and as such was likely to go beyond the jurisdiction, and the capacity, of a small police station in Somerset.

  Maybe we won’t have this for very long, he thought to himself. The idea that he might be handing over his work at some point made him want to do the job all the more thoroughly, rather than think that, in the end, it probably wouldn’t matter what he did.

  Harrow proved hard to track. He had stayed in India for a while, and then nothing. No one knew where he had gone. His parents were dead, one brother in Vancouver, another in Stoke-on-Trent. Jericho couldn’t get hold of the second brother. The one in Canada, whom Jericho had caught on his way out the door, hadn’t heard from Harrow in eighteen months.

  Jericho knew he would have to get into tracking Harrow’s passport and had no idea how easy or useful it would prove to be to contact India. He’d need to do it through the Foreign Office, he presumed, but a look at the clock said that it was likely already too late in the day.

  Whichever way you looked at it, he was beginning to think, this was going to end up beyond the control of Wells Police Station. Given the Kangchenjunga connection, that may well have been for the best.

  *

  Haynes knocked on the door and walked in. Jericho was standing at the window, looking out across the new houses and the fields. The sun was lower in the sky, the day coming to an end, but nothing of the heat had left it. Nevertheless, he’d put his jacket on, ready for the walk home. His house, at least, was likely to be a little cooler than the station.

  ‘So, this thing just got ramped up. Might be getting out of our league.’

  Jericho turned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Connolly got murdered in Switzerland yesterday.’

  Jericho held his gaze for a moment, then turned away.

  ‘Shot from a distance of three feet?’

  ‘Hundreds of feet, from across the valley. This time, a perfect sniper shot to the head.’

  Jericho put his hands in his pockets and looked down on the cars backing up on the road outside, the endless building works still impacting on the flow of traffic.

  ‘Any contact or news from the other three?’

  ‘Can’t get hold of them.’

  ‘So it’s possible they’re already dead.’

  ‘Entirely,’ said Haynes.

  ‘Or two of them are dead, and the one with the grudge has taken care of business. Crap.’

  He continued to look sadly down on the road outside. When he spoke again, his voice was a little heavier than before.

  ‘Come on, we should go and see the boss.’

  11

  ‘Well, there’s some confirmation of the impressions we’ve been getting, which is that this thing is about the expedition to Kangchenjunga. Always possible, of course, that Connolly and Carter knew each other anyway and had some other business. That should be easy enough to check out. That aside, we really ought to be finding these other three.’

  ‘So, how do we tackle it?’ asked Dylan. ‘Who is it we should be speaking to?’

  ‘The Swiss, Interpol, probably the Met. The Foreign Office, I guess, and UK Borders to see if it’s possible to pick up someone who came from Switzerland and left again this afternoon. The chances of them doing that on the same passport you’d think would be nil, but let’s look.’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to the Swiss yet, Sergeant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did you find the news?’

  ‘The local police in Cheltenham had been alerted to go and tell his family. His brother, I think, said that we’d been asking. I’d left my details. So Cheltenham called us. They’re obviously not involved, they just had messenger status.’

  ‘It is possible that they’ve already arrested someone and we’re looking at two different shooters? You’ll need to put–’

  ‘I looked online,’ said Haynes. ‘The reports indicated that
the police are pretty clueless on the matter.’

  ‘All right.’ She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘So, it’s almost eight thirty in Switzerland. You never know. Give them a call, Robert. We should make contact. Our case impacts on them just as much as their case does on us.’

  Jericho nodded.

  ‘I’m going to speak to the Chief Constable. We may find by tomorrow morning that this has got away from us, but we need to keep running with it, so let’s see how it plays out.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jericho. ‘Anything else?’

  She looked down at the open file in front of her and made a small movement with her fingers.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’

  Jericho and Haynes got to their feet, walked from the office and closed the door behind them. They both paused for a minute, facing the awfulness of stepping out of the air-conditioned fantasy world of the superintendent’s office and into the clammy discomfort of the open plan.

  ‘What’s with you two?’ asked Haynes, as they walked through the office.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re usually like a pair of velociraptors fighting over the last nugget in McDonald’s.’

  Jericho walked on. He’d known full well what Haynes had meant. Not that he was entirely comfortable with this strange new state of affairs with his boss, it seemed so alien.

  ‘Maybe we’re more mature,’ he said.

  *

  Jericho opened the door and walked into his house at seventeen minutes past ten. Darkness had come and with it, at last, a slight chill in the air. Very slight.

  An unsatisfactory end to the day, struggling to get anywhere with the Swiss police, too many people not speaking English, or claiming not to understand. He’d finally given up and decided to try again in the morning.

  His house was warm and muggy, so the first thing he did was go into the sitting room and bedroom to open the windows. Wide, to let in as much of the night as possible.

  He stood at his bedroom window and looked out into the dark. The clouds were gone, clear skies, a slender, crescent moon. There had been stars aplenty as he’d walked home.

  He’d gone beyond hunger, having not eaten anything in such a long time, but he did feel like a drink. Gin and tonic, he thought. Lots of ice.