The Fell Walker (9 page)

One of the problems solved itself. He didn’t have enough money with him to buy her a flight to Scotland.

He shuffled his seat closer to her and took hold of her tiny hand. His heart was thumping, his face burning. ‘Why don’t we get married tomorrow,’ he rasped, hoarsely, his mouth dry with heat and tension, ‘and then you go to see your family, and I’ll fly home and send you the money for you to follow me later. Do you know anywhere where we could get married tomorrow?’

‘What strange people westerners are,’ Leni thought. ‘They don’t ask questions about virginity. They don’t seem to care about morals or religion. They seem to believe in nothing except money. They value things as much as people, and treat them the same.’

‘We could try Father Botaro. He does lots of quick weddings,’ she said.

The shed door handle rattled loudly, and Vilma came in carrying an old bean tin half full of milk. She stopped, open-mouthed, when she saw them holding hands.

‘I am getting married to Hector tomorrow,’ Leni announced.

Vilma dropped the tin, and the milk surged across the floorboards, percolated through the joints, and fed the loitering cockroaches.

*

The next day, Father Botaro managed to fit them in at 4.30. Leni wore Vilma’s newest dress. Yul gave her away. John Elland was best man. Vilma cried.

At the end of the ceremony, Hector kissed a woman for the first time in his life. Still trembling, he was ushered, along with John Elland, into the company car to be hurtled towards the airport where the 6.15 flight took him home to anxiously wait for his new bride.

Chapter 12

It was a perfect day for Tessa Coleman. Early morning rain had left small clouds hanging low above the lakes and in the valleys, floating about like islands of smoke. Above 2,000 ft, mist screened the fells, but she knew from experience, and a quick listen to the local weather forecast, that there was a chance of the sun breaking through by lunchtime.

This was her kind of weather. The kind that brings mood and drama, making a masterpiece of an already transcendent landscape. She liked to capture that magic moment when the sun breaks through the mist and lights up a mountain-top or sends a shaft of light down to a cloud-filled valley, or best of all, to a precipitous crag face.

Her watercolour paintings were full of swirling mists, dramatic clouds, and shafts of sunlight highlighting the main subject, usually a high crag face. Not for her the gentle, pastoral views of the Lake District that dominated the towns’ gift shops, pandering to the tourists who viewed it all from the windows of their cars.

She was a climber as well as an artist. Her paintings were born of her love of the high places where she set her small, athletic frame against the might of the mountain. There was nothing more fulfilling than climbing a difficult crag, then capturing it forever on paper. Both were experienced through your fingertips. A lack of concentration, determination or skill, and both ended in disaster, albeit with greatly differing consequences. She enjoyed the challenge; she loved taking risks; it made her alive.

Winter was her favourite time, when rust-coloured bracken and reflecting snow added yet more colour and drama. Being on the tops, in the snow, in the silence, with only her sketchbook for company, was her idea of heaven. Her winter sketches provided her with the backbone of a year’s work, which she completed in her studio, an ex-post office in the village of Patterdale, overlooking Ullswater.

Today, she was heading for Dale Head, from where she hoped to capture the sun casting dramatic light into a cloud-filled Newlands valley. To give herself as much sketching time as possible, she decided to drive up to the top of Honister Pass, and take the short route from there.

She parked her car at the top of Honister Pass, in the slate quarry car park, and armed with her sketchbook and climbing rope, started the easy ascent of Dale Head’s south-facing slope.

Within an hour she reached the summit, a simple mound with a magnificent cairn marking the highest point. She was planning to include the cairn in the foreground of her composition, sitting as it does only a few paces from the precipitous north face drop into Newlands valley.

The valley was just discernable through the mist, and the sun had yet to break through, but it still looked promising. Tessa sat with her back resting against the cairn, looking down the valley, absorbing the atmosphere, the mood. This was more important to her than graphic accuracy.

 
She was still absorbing her surroundings, in preparation for sketching, when she heard someone sniff behind her. Turning, she saw a small man standing a few paces away. He appeared to be carrying a small sketch pad. She assumed he was a fellow artist.

Chapter 13

‘Don’t tell me, Margaret,’ Ben said to the middle-aged woman standing behind the counter in Keswick Police Station. ‘You’ve had three missing cats, two thefts from cars, two sprained ankles on the fells, the Chief Constable’s ran off with his secretary, and you’ve won the lottery.’

‘Spot on,’ Margaret said, straight-faced, while pushing slips of paper towards him.

Ben was making his regular call at the station to pick up the week’s events, to include in his column in the Tribune. He glanced at the mountain rescue slip. ‘MR’s been busy,’ he noted.

‘Aye - usual charities nonsense,’ Margaret said.

Ben knew she was referring to the annual mass invasion of well-meaning charity organisations doing sponsored walks and climbs. They might be saving the whale, but they were eroding the fells and making life difficult for villagers as they clogged up the narrow valley lanes with their parked vehicles. A lot of them were inexperienced on the fells so there was always plenty of action for the mountain rescue team when they were visiting.

‘Nothing too serious,’ Ben observed, reading the slip. ‘Have they all gone yet?’

‘I think so,’ Margaret said. ‘But the team’s getting no rest. They’ve just been called out again. There’s a woman missing. I think she’s a local artist.’

‘Thanks,’ Ben said, hurriedly, as he took his leave.

He wanted to get to the mountain rescue headquarters as soon as possible to find out who it was. As a member of the Keswick Society of Art himself, he knew most of the local artists, and had interviewed many of them for a series of articles he was writing for a county magazine.

A brisk ten-minute walk took him through Keswick’s narrow streets to the headquarters by the lake, and a dash up the stairs brought him, breathlessly, to the controller’s office. As ever, Ian had his head down, filling-in some paperwork.

‘Good morning Ian,’ Ben breathed. ‘Do you mind telling me who you are you looking for?’

Ian didn’t raise his head. ‘Somebody called Coleman. She’s a climber.’

Ben knew immediately. Tessa was a leading light in the Art Society - exhibition organiser, and probably its best artist. He had interviewed her last year for the magazine and been captivated by her climbing exploits and zest for life, as well as her painting.

‘Should know better than be on her own,’ Ian mumbled. ‘We’ve just got rid of that charity lot. Save this, help that. Now we’ve got a local behaving like a prat.’

‘How long has she been missing?’ Ben asked.

‘Could be a few days. They found old mail in her flat when the alarm was raised. Looks like she didn’t tell anybody where she was going.’

‘So you don’t know where to look!’

‘Nope,’ Ian sighed, resignedly. ‘We’ve put out a general call to all the other teams to come and help.’

‘I’d like to help,’ Ben said. ‘I know her. Is there anything I can do without getting in the way?’

Ian shook his head, then hesitated. ‘Her car is missing. You could help to look for that. Hopefully, it will lead us to the area she went climbing in.’

He glanced at his notes. ‘It’s a red Astra, Reg. number J658 TEF.’ He wrote it down on a scrap of paper and handed it to Ben. ‘We’re searching the central climbing areas, so it would be best if you concentrated on the northern outer peripheries. Thanks.’

*

For the next two days, Ben spent every spare hour scouring the highways and byways of the northern limits of the national park, concentrating on the places where a climber like Tessa might park her car before setting off to the high crags.

Throughout his search he phoned in to MR control to let Ian know the car parking areas he had covered. At the end of two unsuccessful days for both him and the mountain rescue teams, he filed the following report at the offices of the Tribune:

MISSING CLIMBER

Fears are growing for a local climber and artist who

has not been seen for more than a week.

Tessa Coleman is still missing in spite of a two-day

search by members of several mountain rescue teams,

including teams from Teesside and Ribblesdale as well as from other parts of the Lake District,

co-ordinated by the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team.

In spite of two days intensive search by

150 volunteers, 17 search and rescue dogs and an RAF helicopter, Mrs Coleman was not found.

Sergeant Bill Unwin of Keswick police said thesearchers returned on Friday evening extremely tired

after their long hours on the fells.

It has been estimated that the search has

involved more than three and a half thousand man
hours, many spent looking for Mrs Coleman’s car.
It is hoped that the discovery of her red Astra,Registration No. J658 TEF, will pinpoint her location within the national park. Police are again

reminding people not to go on to the fells without

informing someone of their destination, and, preferably,

not to go alone.

Mrs Coleman, who lives in Patterdale, is 5 ft. 2 ins.

tall and has distinctive long brown hair. She is

a well known local artist specialising in paintings of thehigh crags she climbs, being a member of the PatterdaleClimbing Club.

It is assumed that she left her studio, early last

week, to set off on one of her many painting expeditionsto the high fells.

Keswick police would like anyone with a lead

as to her whereabouts to contact them on Keswick 79003.

———————————-

Two days later, the Manager of the recently re-opened Honister Pass Slate Quarry Company reported finding the red Astra in his car park, tucked away behind a large stack of newly palletised slates, which had obviously hidden the car from the view of the search teams.

From the car park, the re-assembled search teams spread out into the three main climbing zones in that area - around Great Gable, Haystacks, and Dale Head. Again, after three more days searching, they were unsuccessful.

Ben was about to submit his piece to the Tribune, confirming these facts, when a phone call from Bill Unwin told him that she had been found by two climbers.

Follow-up enquiries at the police station and mountain rescue headquarters enabled him to file the following report for the Tribune.

MISSING CLIMBER MYSTERY SOLVED

A disturbing Lake District mystery was brought to a conclusion this week with the identification of a body, found on Dale Head by climbers at the weekend, as that of 39-year-old Tessa Coleman from Patterdale.Two full-scale search operations during the past two weeks had failed to find Mrs Coleman, a well-known local artist, who had apparently set out on a climbing/sketching expedition and failed to return. Despite an extensive sweep of the area by mountain rescue teams from all over the north of England, 5 ft. 2 ins. tall Mrs Coleman was never found.

However, on Wednesday two climbers from the Liverpool area spotted a body on a narrow ledge about 340 feet from the summit of Dale Head.

They notified the authorities and PC Adrian Low, a member of Keswick Mountain Rescue Team, was winched by helicopter on to the ledge to confirm that what the climbers had seen was indeed the body of a woman, which had been there for some time.

The following day, members of the Keswick Rescue Team returned to Dale Head and recovered the body, leaving the police with the task of formally identifying it as that of Mrs Coleman.

It was evident that Mrs Coleman had fallen over steep ground on to the narrow ledge.

Police are currently trying to contact relatives of Mrs Coleman to obtain confirmation of identity.

———————————————

Ben finished the piece with moist eyes. She had been so full of life, so friendly, so vital; even inspiring when giving her risk-taking painting demonstrations to the Art Society. And, he had inadvertently seen the photographs taken at the scene of death, temporarily unguarded on Ian’s desk. Nature is indeed pitiless. To the ravens and carrion crows, she was just another carcass. Both of her beautiful brown eyes had gone. One socket had been left intact; the other had suffered severe attack leaving a void through to the brain filled with maggots. Dried blood and lesions around the mouth, tongue and ears told of pecking and tearing. Her long brown hair was matted with blood.

As she lay on her back, arms and legs spread wide, she looked like a discarded scarecrow, though her clothes were incongruously clean and tidy. Through all this horror, Ben could still see her sweet, youthful, face shining through, and he kept this image with him as he tore himself from the photographs.

As he did so, his brain flashed:
‘Something’s wrong.’
There was nothing more. He searched for it, but it wouldn’t come.

Back at the police station, Bill Unwin told him that Tessa had been found with her rope unused and her sketch materials still in her backpack. Obviously, she hadn’t been climbing or drawing when she fell.

‘She must have fallen from the top,’ Bill surmised. ‘She must have slipped or tripped while looking over the edge. Even the most experienced...’

‘Have you had many falls off Dale Head,’ Ben interrupted.

‘None that I can remember; MR have all the records.’ Bill turned his back and blew his nose into his handkerchief. He was a big softy at heart. ‘You never get used to this,’ he said.

*

Ben arrived home that night planning to check the MR records the next day. His antennae were twitching. Something wasn’t right.

Helen came in late as usual. She looked exhausted.

‘I’ve booked us a holiday,’ she announced in a tone that rejected debate.

Ben held out his arms and took her into a big cuddle. She still managed to smell nice even after 12 hours in a sticky, chlorine filled atmosphere. He felt at home against her soft cheek.

‘When and where?’ he whispered

‘Tomorrow. Sutherland.’

Ben watched her slump into the armchair beside the fireplace. ‘Good,’ he said.