Over the Edge (12 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Tony was with you, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. We’d been to a fundraising function.’

‘Who was driving?’

‘I was.’

‘Your relationship ended soon after.’

‘Not so soon after. We rumbled along for a couple of years, until he came back from Everest in ‘97, but we didn’t see much of each other. It all ended just after Everest.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I don’t know. It – the accident – just put a strain on us. I missed going to the Olympics and…we’d been drifting apart. He’d achieved his goal, I’d failed
at mine. He didn’t seem to understand how I felt.’

‘Where were you on Saturday evening?’

‘Am I a suspect, Inspector?’

‘Ex-partners are always suspects, Miss Thornton.’

‘I was working. I was at High Adventure until after ten o’clock. I came straight home and it’s a
25-minute
drive. Will that do?’

‘Sounds watertight to me.’ I looked around the room, patted my hands on the chair arms as if about to rise, then said: ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted Tony dead?’

‘No.’

‘How about if I asked you for a list of the names of his friends?’

‘Wouldn’t his enemies be more appropriate?’

‘Did he have enemies?’

‘Not that I know of, but climbing’s a competitive world. It’s not just you against the mountain, you know. It’s you against everybody else. There’s a lot of jealousy.’

‘I need help, Sonia. Can you give me a list?’

‘I have photograph albums, but it’s nearly five years since I saw him.’

‘Can I look at them?’

‘I don’t see why not. They’re upstairs.’ She rose to her feet and moved towards the door. When I didn’t follow her she said: ‘They weigh a ton. You’d better come with me.’

They were in the attic, along with loads of other gear that had belonged to Krabbe. Sonia told me that he left the stuff with her because one day he wanted it putting in a museum. There were climbing jackets made of canvas and oilskin, boots like Captain Scott might have worn, and a mass of complicated devices for climbing up and down ropes, belaying and abseiling. Several ice axes were leaning on the wall. They started with
old-fashioned
ones, a generation on from the
wooden-handled
device that killed him, and evolved right through to wicked looking shapes like the beaks of prehistoric birds of prey, designed for hooking into vertical walls of ice.

Everything had a parcel label on it, tied with a piece of string. I read them off:
Eiger N Face 1984
one said;
Napes Needle 1965; K2 1991
and
Weisshorn 1987
. On a shelf I saw a bundle bristling with steel teeth and picked it up. It was a pair of crampons, tied together with blue neoprene straps. They were designed for fixing to the climber’s boots, to give him grip on glaciers and ice-encrusted rock faces. Each had a plastic sole, surrounded by twelve wicked teeth, like a crown of thorns. The front two teeth pointed straight forward, so he could tiptoe up vertical walls. Moulded into the sole, put there during the manufacturing process, it said
Krabbe Klaw
. The ticket read:
Everest 1997
.

I proffered them to Sonia, indicating the name,
and she took them from me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’d started his own manufacturing company, designing highly technical gear. These were one of his first attempts.’

‘Everest in 1997,’ I said. ‘Is that when he lost his partner?’

‘Jeremy Quigley. Yes, it was. That was a bad time for him.’

‘Did you know Jeremy?’

‘We’d met, but only a couple of times. Jeremy wasn’t a close friend, and not expected to be in the first summit team.’

I said: ‘I suppose reaching the summit was some sort of consolation,’ but she didn’t reply. ‘Was there any criticism of Tony after the incident?’ I asked.

‘Not that I heard. These things happen in climbing.’

‘What did Jeremy’s family and friends think about it?’

‘You’ll have to ask them that.’

‘Was he married?’

‘He had a partner. Gabi – Gabrielle Naylor. I only met her once, at the memorial service. We exchanged phone numbers but never rang each other.’

There were two photo albums, each about six inches thick. Far too many pictures for me to look at there and then and make any sense of. ‘How do
you feel about me borrowing these?’ I asked. ‘I’ll really look after them.’

‘Take what you want, Inspector,’ she replied. ‘I long ago learnt the pointlessness of possessions.’

‘Sophie’s pregnant.’ My visitor’s chair creaked as Dave dumped his weight on it, and I groaned inwardly at his announcement. This was the conversation I’d been dreading. ‘Apparently she was sick over the weekend, and eventually confessed to her mother. Shirley told me about it this morning.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, even though I’d resolved not to admit it.

‘You
know! You
know!’ he exploded.

‘Don’t get uppity about it,’ I told him. ‘And calm down. These things happen. Young people have different standards, these days. Her boyfriend’s a good bloke and they’re staying together, which is the way they do things. Two years from now you’ll be buying him football boots and teaching him how to bend free kicks.’

‘So how come you know before I do? I’m only her father, after all.’

‘Sophie rang me.’

‘When was this?’

‘As soon as she knew. She was crying, on the phone. She was upset and scared, didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what Digby’s reaction would be and she was frightened of telling you. I
tried to reassure her. You might be her dad, but I’m her God dad, remember. It’s my job to give spiritual guidance.’ That last sentence was an afterthought, but it sounded good.

‘So you knew before Digby did?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you say she was scared of telling me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘Because she knew you’d explode. She felt that she’d let you down.’

Dave buried his face in his hands and let out a great sigh. ‘Oh Charlie,’ he groaned, ‘what a mess.’ I sat looking at him for a long minute, wondering if I’d done the right thing. He lifted his face, saying: ‘You say she was frightened of telling me?

‘Yes.’

‘My little girl was frightened of me?’

‘It was bound to be a shock to you, Dave. She didn’t know how you’d take it.’

‘It’s him I’m mad with, not her. So what do I do next time I see him? Punch him on the nose?’

‘No, Dave, not if you don’t want to lose her. You shake his hand and give him a cigar.’ I retrieved the Post-it note Sonia Thornton had given me with Gabrielle Naylor’s name and number on it. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Track her down and make an appointment to see her in the morning. We’ll go together.’

Rosie was in when I rang her, after I’d dined and washed the dishes. ‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, so-so.’

‘Have you eaten?’ If she hadn’t I could always force something else down.

‘Yes. Have you?’

‘Meat and three veg, with an M&S bread-
and-butter
pudding to follow. Heaven. What did you have?’

‘Poached egg on toast.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘I had a school dinner at lunchtime.’

‘You are what you eat, you know.’

‘Then I must have eaten some rubbishy meals.’

‘School dinners. Aren’t you feeling too good, love?’

‘I’m…struggling, a bit.’

‘Listen, Rosie,’ I said. ‘No strings, no chatting you up, but I’ve managed to borrow Tony Krabbe’s photo albums. There’s some terrific stuff in there; I’m sure you’ll find them interesting. I want to go through them and make a list of all the names. How about if I brought them round and we went through them together?’

‘I don’t…’

‘C’mon, Rosie. It can’t do any harm, and I promise to behave. Scouts’ honour.’

‘You haven’t caught his murderer yet?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think there might be a picture of him in there?’

‘I doubt it, but its possible.’

‘All right then. I’ll watch out for you.’

She hadn’t baked a cake, like she used to do, and something else was missing. Her face had lost its glow and the force field that normally surrounded and defined her was switched off. I missed its sparkle and crackle. She brightened briefly as she let me in and I noticed that she was still wearing her school ma’am clothes: longish skirt and bulky sweater. Normally Rosie changed into jeans within seconds of coming through the door. She rinsed two mugs and made coffee.

We sat close together at her table and turned the pages of the albums. Apart from being a history of climbing they were also a catalogue of the changes in photography over the last 30 years. The first pictures were minute squares in fading black and white, the latest ones ten-by-eights in glorious Kodachrome.

‘I’ve been there,’ Rosie said, as we peered at three figures sitting on a summit cairn in the Lake District. ‘Good place to explore the Borrowdale Volcanic Series, and there’s supposed to be a Stone Age axe factory on the fellside, but I’ve never found anything.’

‘Me neither.’

‘And there,’ she declared. ‘Went with a chap I knew, briefly. And there.’

‘Me too.’

But within two or three pages our amateur efforts in the Lake and Peak Districts were left well behind. The photos grew bigger, the slopes steeper, the names more romantic. Soon we were clinging to rock faces in the Dolomites, the Alps and the Karakorams. Napes Needle and Pike of Stickle were replaced by Lhotse, Annapurna and the dreaded K2.

As I turned the pages I could feel Rosie’s arm warm against mine. I wanted to reach out across her shoulders and pull her close. Every instinct I had told me it was the most natural thing in the world to do, a thousand films and stories had imbued me with the belief that she would respond favourably, but I knew, deep down, that they were false. My only chance of staying friends with Rosie was to maintain the distance between us.
Softly, softly, catchee monkey
, but for how long I could play the game I had no idea.

We stared in wonder at vast landscapes of
ice-clad
peaks, me envious of the people who had the single-mindedness to sacrifice their careers and relationships, and sometimes their lives, to go off to these beautiful, inhospitable places. We didn’t speak for the last few pages, because our superlatives sounded banal. I turned over the final page
somewhat reluctantly, and there he was: Tony Krabbe with another man, each cocooned in full climbing gear, but with their hoods down to take advantage of the brief sunshine as they grinned at the camera. Their teeth shone like Aldis lamps in their scabby, sun-blackened faces, and the peaks behind the camera were reflected like a saw blade in their snow goggles.

The two of them were sitting on a snow step with their feet, bristling with the evil-toothed crampons, towards the camera. The caption read:
With Jeremy, Camp IV
.

I touched the photo with a forefinger. ‘That’s on Everest,’ I said, my voice a whisper. ‘Last camp before they pushed to the summit. Jeremy is Jeremy Quigley. They became separated. Krabbe made it to the top and back down. Jeremy perished.’

‘Which one’s Jeremy?’

‘That one, I think.’

‘Poor chap.’

‘Yeah, poor chap.’

The eastern leg of the M62 is probably the quietest stretch of road in the country. Its construction, and that of the Humber Bridge, was more to do with pandering to the electorate than with needs of the traffic lobby. Gabrielle Naylor ran an animal sanctuary, called High Chaparral, near Barton, on the south side of the bridge.

Dave touched 110 on the motorway, out of sheer exuberance, and conned his way through the tollbooth by flashing his warrant card.

‘I, er, had a word with Sophie last night,’ he’d said to me on one of the slower stretches.

‘You rang her?’

‘Mmm.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s OK. I, sort of, told her it was all right.’

‘So you’re friends again.’

‘I suppose so. She said you were good to her.’

‘We came to an agreement.’

‘An agreement?’

‘Yeah. If it’s a boy she’s calling him Charlie.’

‘Over my dead body.’

Once it was called Lincolnshire, then it became South Humberside, and now it’s something else but nobody knows what. Businesses are waiting before they order new stationery in case the name changes again. Armies fought over the land and now county councils do the same. God knows why. It’s flat, barren and bleak, fit only for growing potatoes, and the most prominent colour is mud. Everything about it feels as if it were designed by a committee. The people are good and nice, of course they are, and, when the sun comes out it’s probably as pretty and welcoming as anywhere in the country. But on the few occasions I’ve ventured over there it’s either
been grizzling with rain or swept by winds from the Urals. The folks of South Humberside buy their clothes with the collars already turned up.

We were lost, thumbing through his book of maps, when Dave said: ‘I think we’ve found it.’

I looked up and followed his gaze. A lugubrious head on the end of a long neck was peering over the hedge, studying us. ‘You could be right,’ I agreed.

‘Can we call you Gabrielle?’ Dave asked after she’d met us at the gate; our presence announced by three liquorice-allsorts dogs that leapt and cavorted in a friendly way when they saw us. We’d seen her in the distance, heaving straw bales on to a stack, and were wondering how to attract her attention when the dogs did it for us. Gabrielle had ordered them away and opened the gate.

‘Gabi,’ she replied. ‘Everybody calls me Gabi.’ She was small and dark, with a tip-tilted nose that no-doubt had a band of freckles across it when she was younger.

‘Was that a llama we saw?’ I asked as she led us towards her small bungalow.

‘Yes. We rescued him – he’s called Santiago – from a farmer who’d died and he didn’t fit in with the new owner’s plans. That’s how we get most of our animals.’ Several donkeys were tethered in a field with a flock of geese grazing amongst them. Hutches outside the bungalow held rabbits and
guinea pigs, and a purpose built run housed a selection of cats.