Over the Edge (8 page)

Jeff was telling Dave about the death zone when I interrupted him.

‘What, Chas,’ he replied.

‘Coincidences,’ I stated. ‘Remember what you were saying earlier, about a name cropping up twice, close together, for different reasons?’

‘You mean Joe Crozier?’

‘Yes. It’s just happened again. There’s a list of Tony Krabbe’s sponsors here, on the very last page of the book. They’re in alphabetical order, just to show that he values the smallest of them as much as the largest. The final one on the list is someone else we’ve heard of, associated with Crozier: Peter Wallenberg Esquire, spinster of this county.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Dave said, reaching for the book, and I passed it to him. He studied the list for a while, head down, brow furrowed, before saying: ‘This is starting to look fishy to me.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Mmm. I wonder what he wanted in return. If this becomes part of an enquiry, will I be able to claim the book on expenses?’

We didn’t stay long in the pub. Dave was driving and it was my weekend to be senior detective on call. It comes round every six weeks, starting at 10 p.m. Friday, and I was expected to remain alert and lucid. We dropped Jeff off at his local, where he would probably imbibe freely until loss of the use of his limbs indicated to him that he’d had enough, or his audience deserted him, whichever came first. Dave took me home and came in for a coffee.

It was nearly ten thirty and we were well into a discussion on investments and pensions when the phone rang. I gave him the here-we-go smile and picked it up. A uniformed constable had been called to a body lying in the garden of a house just outside Heckley and he’d radioed in to say it was a murder. Now they needed a senior detective to confirm things and set the wheels rolling.

‘What makes him so sure it’s a murder?’ I asked.

‘Well, the deceased has a pickaxe embedded in his head,’ I was told, rather tardy. ‘Not a usual MO for a suicide.’

‘I’m convinced,’ I said, flicking the top off a pen and turning to a blank page on the memo pad. ‘Give me the details.’

It was a nineteenth century mansion on the south side of town, surrounded by trees and converted into four luxury apartments. Once upon a time it had housed a local surgeon and his family and their small army of retainers. Rooms that had once been home to the pastry cook, the nanny and the maid now echoed to the clink of glasses of Chardonnay, the Opera Babes on the CD player and shouted conversations about the merits of personal trainers. The PC who’d raised the call had the good sense to turn his blue light off and was sitting in darkness just outside the electrically operated gates. I parked behind him and Dave – try to keep him away – pulled in behind me.

There’s a popular misconception that for every murder we straight away call in the pathologist, the scenes of crime people and all the other experts. We don’t. We haven’t enough of them and they cost money. Fortunately, most murders are committed by someone close who we just happen to find sitting there with his head in his hands, saying: ‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ If we are reasonably certain who did the deed we just get on with it and don’t waste time with fingertip searches and DNA swabs of half the town.

But this didn’t look like one of those.

‘Any ideas who he is?’ I asked the PC when he climbed out of the panda to meet me. He looked about seventeen.

‘No, Sir.’

‘Boss or Mr Priest will do,’ I said. ‘So tell me about it.’

‘Well, Sir, I took the call at 21.40 and came straight here. One of the residents had come home and parked his car in the car barn and as he walked to the rear door of the house he came across a body, lying across the path. It was obviously dead so he rang the police, um, us.’

‘And is it obviously dead?’

‘Yes, Sir. There’s a pickaxe embedded in his head. It’s in solid; must be about six inches into his brain.’

‘OK, you’re right: it looks as if we have a murder on our hands. I’ll ring the pathologist and the duty superintendent and we’ll call in the experts.’ I looked at the imposing facade of the building, discreetly illuminated by concealed lighting. One window on the top floor was lit, all the others were in darkness. ‘Is that where the resident you met lives?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Sir. I told him to stay indoors, and it looks as if everybody else is out.’

‘But he didn’t recognise the body?’

‘No, Sir. He said he didn’t know any of the other residents. Everybody liked to…’

‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘They like to
keep themselves to themselves
. It’s a national disease.’

‘Um, aren’t you going to look for yourself, Sir?’ the PC ventured.

‘At the body? Nah,’ I replied airily. ‘Seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. And stop calling me sir. Let’s make these phone calls.’

The PC looked disappointed that I hadn’t rushed in to the crime scene, so I explained to him. We’d sent for the pathologist, who could tell us time and cause of death, and the SOCOs who would look for microscopic evidence. Neither of them wanted me blundering over the landscape. Anything I could deduce from a cursory examination of the body and its immediate surroundings, which I grandly referred to as the overview, would usually wait until they had finished. Not always, but usually. The secret is to know when to act swiftly and when to be patient.

Slowly the scene changed as people arrived to contribute their own special fields of knowledge in a process that would build up a picture of the victim and his death, and ultimately lead to his killer. I told the PC to record everybody who visited, and Dave wandered off to do his own investigation, knocking on the doors of the nearest neighbours. It was a black night, and everybody was working by torchlight. There was a danger that we’d overlook something obvious, lying in the herbaceous border, and were destroying evidence by trampling over the scene, so I decided to move the body, seal off the area and do a thorough examination in daylight. A
photographer did his best to record the site in stills and video and a SOCO made a preliminary walk-through search, holding his flashlight close to the ground so that anything down there would cast a long shadow.

It was nearly two o’clock when the undertaker’s van arrived and the pathologist told them where he wanted the body taking.

‘I want to see it before you put it on the gurney,’ I insisted.

‘C’mon, then, Charlie,’ the pathologist said. ‘I have to say, you’ve been very patient. What we have is a male, about 45 or 50, killed by a single, determined blow sometime between 21:00 and 22:30 last evening. His body temp is down by about two degrees and hypostasis has hardly started.’ Dave had rejoined me and we followed the pathologist through the gates and round the side of the house, along a path delineated by blue tape and then on raised metal stepping plates laid by the SOCOs.

The light of our torches flickered over the gravel, and shadows of plants loomed and swayed around us. I could smell wet compost, cut grass and, I imagined, the heavy scent of late roses like the ones Rosie grew. I wondered what she was doing. A pale cat strolled across our pool of light, emerging from the gloom like a spectre before mewing at our trespass onto his territory and moving off into the
enveloping blackness again. Into his forests of the night. Oh, to know what you know, I thought. Not far away a leftover firework exploded, startling us all.

‘There he is,’ the professor said, pinning the body with the beam of his torch. It was lying face downwards, legs towards us, one arm flung above the head and the other out sideways, as if he’d been about to make a right turn on a bicycle. A wooden shaft stood almost vertically away from it, the lower end firmly rooted in the skull.

It’s always a shock when you see a dead body. None of us shows it, but I’m sure we all give a shudder and think about our own mortality. Those who don’t probably never admired a sunset or were moved by an Elgar concerto. I stepped off the plates and Dave followed me, neither of us speaking. The head lay in a pool of blood which was black when our torches weren’t directly on it, but startlingly red when they were. The victim’s long hair was matted with it, pasted to the ground. I sank down to sit on my heels and reached a tentative hand towards the head, feeling under it for the chin. Dave kept his torch beam steady on where I was working. I grasped the chin and turned the head slightly until I could confirm what I already thought.

Dave said: ‘Well, bugger me.’

I turned to the pathologist as I rose up again,
saying: ‘That’s his ID sorted, Prof. He’s called Tony Krabbe.’

‘Tony Krabbe? You mean…the mountaineer?’

‘Ex-mountaineer,’ Dave corrected. ‘His
mountaineering
days are over.’

I visited the scene briefly on Sunday morning then spent the rest of the day in the office. It’s all about teams and lists, and it was my job to manage them. We cleared the incident room of the stuff left over from the previous case: wiped the computers clean; took the maps and diagrams off the walls; and started to fill them with new stuff. I opened a diary and murder log and my admin officer, drafted in from HQ, supervised the creation of a property book, message book, job sheets, daily duty lists and correspondence file. An action allocator, statement reader and exhibits officer were appointed.

One team looked into the victim’s background for any likely suspects; another into his family connections. We looked at the MO – which was fruitless as this was a first – listened to various theories from members of the public and did a house-to-house. All this was routine, laid down in the manual. The only bit of creative thinking was to have somebody look into the Wallenberg connection, if there was one.

Monday morning we had a briefing and update meeting. The detective super who lorded under the
title of senior investigating officer gave a pep talk to the troops, saying that this was a high-profile case involving a media celebrity, so we had to be on our best behaviour, thanked them for working the weekend and handed over to the investigating detective: moi.

The post-mortem findings revealed nothing relevant. It looked as if Krabbe had come straight home from the lecture and met his death after parking his car in the car barn, as the estate agents like to call the sheltered parking place that passes for a garage.

‘…and he drove a TVR Tasmin,’ I was told.

‘Wow!’ somebody exclaimed. ‘Nought to 60 in 6.2 seconds.’

Sometimes I wonder if I’m employing a bunch of petrol heads. I said: ‘Let’s keep it relevant, please. What’s next?’

Suspects. Most of all, we need suspects. The team looking into Krabbe’s background had unearthed the fact that he’d lost a companion on Everest. What was the full story, someone asked? Had Krabbe done enough to try save him?

‘Good point,’ I said. ‘Climbing’s a close-knit community and the dead man no doubt had friends and family. Krabbe talked about him…I’ve forgotten his name…’

‘Jeremy Quigley.’

‘Thanks. Jeremy Quigley. Krabbe talked about
him in the warmest of terms at the lecture on Saturday. He sounded genuinely moved about it.’

‘Guilty conscience?’

‘Could be. Stay with it. Who was looking into his family?’ One of my DCs stood up and opened his notebook. ‘What have you found, Robert?’ I asked.

‘Something fairly interesting. First of all, he’s only lived back in Heckley for about six months, since he bought the apartment in the block where he was found. His parents are still alive, in their eighties and living up in the Isle of Arran.’

‘Presumably they were informed.’

‘Yes. All dealt with. Krabbe has never married but he’s had a series of relationships, mainly with women climbers. Two were Austrian girls and one New Zealander. But the longest, and most interesting, was with Sonia Thornton.’

‘The runner?’ Sonia Thornton had been Yorkshires golden girl a few years ago. She’d come second in the London marathon and had a string of high-profile successes at various distances. Apart from that, she was attractive and articulate, and the media loved her. Sonia was hot favourite to win the Olympic 5,000 Metres in Atlanta until, two days before the team flew out, she injured a leg in a car crash and her athletics career came to an end.

‘The one and only. Apparently they were a couple from about 1989 right up to the accident, in 1996, although they spent a great deal of the time apart
because of their various commitments. He was off climbing and she trained in Arizona for much of the year. They kept the relationship fairly secret because it was thought that living with someone might not fit in with Sonia’s clean-cut image and damage her marketability.’

‘And that’s what it’s all about, these days. Was he with her when she had the accident?’

‘Yes, it was his car, but unfortunately she was driving. Their story was that a car came round a bend on the wrong side of the road. A couple of yobs were in the front seats but they didn’t get any sort of a description. Sonia braked hard and lost control. Went off the road and hit a tree.’

‘That’s right, I remember all the fuss. I don’t suppose the misguided, misunderstood young people in the other car stopped to render assistance, did they?’

‘‘Fraid not, boss. Would you believe it, they kept right on going.’

‘How unfortunate. Have you spoken to her?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘I’d like to be there when you do.’

Little of interest was found at Krabbe’s apartment. It was decorated with artefacts from Asia, as one might expect, but he’d bought it fully furnished so his mark had not yet been stamped on the place. There was a magnificent panorama of the Karakorams on the living room wall, and above the
desk in his study was a picture of him dangling
one-handed
from an overhang on El Capitan, in Yosemite, with a Dylan quote added:
He not busy being born is busy dying
. I’d never thought of the line in that context, but I liked it. The flat was remarkably free of climbing paraphernalia, but he had another place in Austria and, like most peripatetic climbers, tended to store his stuff anywhere he could: usually with friends who were slightly more settled than he was. When an expedition was due he’d just wander round and collect what he needed. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, and until relatively recently he’d not been very well off, earning just enough money to pay for the next trip. Now, it appeared, money from his writing was starting to build up, he’d started manufacturing specialist climbing equipment under his own name and he had the shop in the mall. Things had been looking good for him.