Over the Edge (18 page)

‘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 better. 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.

‘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.’

‘And Tony was one of the worst.’

‘Yes.’

‘So it was just Krabbe and yourself. When he
begged you to say you were driving he talked you out of a fortune. And you went along with him.’

She nodded her head, studying the plastic coffee container she was holding. I went on: ‘If you’d told the truth, that Krabbe was driving, you’d have been eligible for a third party insurance claim. You could have sued him, in effect. It’s routine, happens all the time. Put your contracts on the table and you might have received your money without having to break into a sweat for it.’

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘You sussed it right, Charlie. Five seconds’ stupidity, protecting the man I thought I loved, and that was the cost. He went to his precious Everest with his reputation intact, came home the conquering hero, and I ended up working here for peanuts. He wanted me to make a claim against the non-existent youths in the non-existent other car. Apparently the insurance companies have some sort of contingency fund for uninsured cases, but I couldn’t do anything like that. We had some colossal rows about it.’

I took a sip of the hot milky liquid and placed the beaker back on the counter. She looked at me, made a ‘huh’ noise and gave me a wry smile. Her hair was short and fair and she had tiny diamond studs in her ears. I said: ‘You made a balls of it, Sonia.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed with a nod. ‘I think that’s an accurate assessment. I made a balls of it.’

I’d had a good day. The search for Krabbe’s killer had progressed not one jot, but Sonia Thornton had turned out to be something other than the cold, aloof figure I’d first encountered. She’d been warm and charming, and we’d even shared a joke. Sitting in a queue of traffic on the M62 I remembered the first time I saw her on television. It was the AAA championships and several guest runners from overseas were competing in the 5,000 metres. In the preliminaries the young Yorkshire lass, Sonia Thornton, was hardly mentioned, but by the end of the race we had a new golden girl. She took the lead with a lap and a half to go and elegantly eased away from her rivals. She had a high, prancing style of running, her head held high, and the tabloids quickly dubbed her The Gazelle.

After supper I decided to ring Rosie and tell her about my adventures on the climbing wall.

‘It’s me,’ I said, when she answered the phone. ‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, um, I’m alright, thank you.’

‘Are you sure? You sound doubtful.’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘Good. What sort of a day have you had?’

‘Charlie…’

‘Mmm.’

‘I’m not in the mood for small-talk. Can we just…call the whole thing off, please?’

‘Oh. What do you mean by the whole thing?’

‘Me and you. Us. Except there is no us.’

‘OK, if that’s what you want. I’m sorry if I’ve been a nuisance. It’s just that I’m fond of you and care about you. I worry about you.’

‘I know you mean well but I don’t want you to be fond of me or worry about me. I just want some time to myself. Don’t you see?’

‘You’re going through a bad patch, Rosie,’ I said. ‘It’ll pass, but you mustn’t give in to it. How did the class go today?’

‘What if it’s not a bad patch, Charlie. What if this is the real bit?’

‘Happiness is a natural state,’ I argued. ‘Think about good things; all that travelling you have to do.’