The Magdalena Curse (18 page)

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Authors: F.G. Cottam

BOOK: The Magdalena Curse
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It was dusk when he got to where the road petered out. He had taken trains from Geneva to Innsbruck. At Innsbruck he had hired a car. He was about eight kilometres from the Stubai Valley. The country was very remote. There were no dwellings here, no twinkling house lights at the foot of the rising slope. He had a climb ahead of him, but Miss Hall had said it was a climb that could be accomplished without the use of ropes or crampons. He had to climb a path that wound through the tree line and then the going became steeper and more demanding. He looked up. The darkening sky was spangled by crystals of falling snow increasing all the time in weight and density. He had bought boots and cold weather apparel and a head torch at a store near to where he had hired the car and he wore this clothing and equipment now. And he needed it. All he could hear as night descended under the white, thickening sky was the tick of his hire car’s cooling engine in the bitter cold. This did not seem a location suited to the sorceress femme fatale he remembered from Magdalena, to the black magician party animal Miss Hall had insisted he pursue. But he was in the right place. It was exactly as Miss Hall had described it to him and he could see the thin path twisting through the dark rise of conifers ahead. He took a drink from the metal water bottle he had bought with the rest of his kit at Innsbruck and had the wit to fill from the water cooler in the car hire office before setting out. The bottle had travelled there on the back seat of the car but its contents were already icy against his teeth and on his tongue. Hunter wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, screwed the cap back on to the bottle and set off.
He had bought an ice axe in the shop at Innsbruck. And after some hesitation, he had bought a combat knife. The knife had a knuckle duster guard and a saw edge on what would be the blunt of the blade on a conventional knife.
It was Solingen forged steel and its blade was eight inches long and lethally honed, and Hunter had it now in its sheath on his belt. In the display case in the shop it had looked like the hunting knife from hell. He did not really know why he had bought it. In a way it felt like sixty euros’ worth of macho folly after the rag doll an enfeebled Miss Hall had been able to make of him with a few vindictive thoughts. What good was a blade, however keen, against such malevolent power? But instinct had impelled him to buy the knife and he had learned over the years not to ignore his deep, nagging hunches. They had frequently urged precautions that had definitely saved his life.
He climbed. The snow was deepening all the time. There was no moonlight through the cloud cover. Nevertheless, he could see quite well along the rising path by using the head torch, without giving himself away. Miss Hall had been adamant that his destination lay empty. But he had been too thoroughly trained to take unnecessary risks. He ascended. His breathing deepened. He climbed the gradient carefully and with deliberation but at pace. He wanted to get where he was going. He was still stiff from the bruises inflicted during the first, unpromising part of his encounter with Miss Hall. He did not want to dwell on what might confront him now at the top of the mountain. That was pointless. He just wanted to get there. In a sense, he knew he had never felt more resolute in his life. He loved his son more than anything, certainly far more than he loved his own circumscribed life. But he felt pessimistic too. The training that enabled his stealthy ascent, with his heart never climbing above sixty beats a minute, bore sometimes impressive results. But it had failed him in Magdalena. And he feared it might fail him again ranged against the same dark and powerful protagonist now.
The summit of the climb was a sharp ridge, high and
ragged and exposed. He was ascending on the southern slope that rose to it. On the other side, to its north, it descended in a vaunting rampart of ice for thousands of featureless metres, Miss Hall had told him. That too was a slope, technically. But it fell in a gradient so steep that local guides referred to it as a wall. His destination was on this side of the mountain, a building constructed on a small plateau, set against the hewn rock that provided its shelter, about four hundred feet beneath the knife-edge of the summit ridge.
There was a narrowing of the trail as shoulders of ice-covered granite loomed to either side of him. Beyond this gully, he knew, was a field of crevasses. It was these that made the place to which he ascended so inaccessible. It was these that kept Mrs Mallory’s keep from the curiosity of climbers and mountain guides.
‘You need not fear the crevasses,’ Miss Hall had told him.
‘Are they deep?’
‘Deep? They are as near to bottomless as the Alps can boast.’
‘It goes against nature. Not to fear them, I mean.’
She had laughed at that. It was a sandpapery, unpleasant sound. She was defiant, dying. ‘I have had nature bow to my will many times, Colonel. Perhaps tomorrow I will do it for the last time. But you will not die in the depths of a crevasse.’
Skiing had been a joy to him, with his family, in his life. But he had known tragedy climbing in the mountains. Once in Norway early in his military career, in training, they had lost a brave American to a crevasse. They had been travelling in haste because the weather had been closing in. They had not secured sufficient lines and were testing the snow with their axes in a thickening blizzard. He had survived the drop and become wedged a long way down. They had not had the length of rope to recover him. He had been stoical,
resigned in the end. But he had been the father of two young children and only twenty-eight years old. And the necessity of leaving him, the last of his words rising faintly in a brave farewell from the abyss, had stayed with his English comrade in arms.
Hunter thought that he could see the building, now. He had been travelling for well over an hour above the tree line. The light distorted with the shifting weight of cloud, and the thickening snow on the rising ground seemed to shift with it. The wind had risen from the occasional howl through the conifers below to a withering, banshee shriek up here. He had felt he was being trailed, or stalked, for the past twenty minutes at least. Wading through the high drifts he felt the lumbering self-consciousness of someone being watched. And the hairs on his arms and the backs of his hands under his gloves had a razored tenderness, a raw itch of exposure caused by more than just the deepening chill of increasing altitude.
He tensed. He thought he heard the sough through wet drifts of something large approaching him. And then he made sense of the scale and thunderous weight of the sound and knew what it was. Wet snow in a serac at the top of the ridge towards which he climbed had been wrenched off by its own unstable weight and pulled away. He was hearing the mournful rumble of an avalanche away on the mountain’s north face. It must be of monstrous size, he thought, a colossal fall of ice and snow for me to hear it from here. But the wind was blowing from the north. And the sound was a signal of how close he was to approaching the ridge and the summit.
He could see his destination clearly now. And there was nothing charming or Tyrolean about it. It was a tall, rectangular building constructed of stained grey concrete. Its windows were as narrow as the gun-slits of a bunker. There was a
massive steel door painted with bitumen or some other stuff to seal the metal from rust. Securing the door were two huge padlocks hanging from great, riveted hasps. The place was totally dark and still. It looked impregnable. It also looked to Mark Hunter like the most forlorn dwelling he had ever seen. Peering up at the gaunt edifice before him, he thought that no creature harbouring a soul could live free of despair in such a bleak and forbidding place.
He reached into his jacket pocket for the keys to the padlocks handed him by the Comte in the moments before his departure from the house above Lake Geneva ready for the drive back to his hotel. They had seemed suitably impressive on their iron ring, large items fashioned from brass pitted by time. But he had hefted them thinking them merely props. Miss Hall’s fading magic would open the door for him. Mrs Mallory had not willingly surrendered keys to her mountain domain. He would insert a key into a padlock and the frozen mechanism would spring compliantly under Miss Hall’s fading spell. Even dying, she was tenacious, determined. Looking at the keep now brooding blackly over him, Hunter thought he knew the source of her determination. She really was more good than bad. And she was his ally in this enterprise. But her magic was a feeble attribute in the face of that possessed by their adversary. He turned the keys. He put them back into his jacket pocket. He unfastened and dropped the sprung padlocks on to the snow. He felt the bone hilt of the impressive weapon on his hip, in which he had, at that moment, not an ounce of faith. He pushed at the door, which opened of course on darkness.
 
It was fully dark when Elizabeth completed the drive from her evening surgery to her cottage. She had already called Mrs Anderson, the childcare professional engaged by Mark Hunter, to ask whether she would do an hour’s overtime to
enable the detour. Mrs Anderson seemed amenable enough. She was an accommodating woman, she was being well paid and she had described Adam as a delightful boy. Another hour would not be any great stretch. Her headlamps illuminated the front of the cottage in a bright sweep as Elizabeth turned off the road to park. And so she knew something else had been done to violate her home before she left the safe confines of her car.
Her mobile phone was equipped with a tiny torch light and she used this to examine the recent handiwork. The skull of a goat had been hung on a flathead nail driven into the wood above the knocker. It depended from one eye socket. It sat at the centre of a crudely fashioned pentagram. Pig’s blood had not been used on this occasion. The five-sided star was described in silver paint from an aerosol spray. Whoever had done it had done it in relative haste, shy about being seen. Elizabeth walked the perimeter of her home. It had not been breached. No windows were smashed. No one had broken in. But that would be next. That desecration would certainly come.
She did not enter her cottage. She decided that the clothes she wore would do another day. She could wash her underwear in the sink in the bathroom adjoining the spare room at the Hunter house. It would dry overnight on the radiator under her window. She scrolled through the numbers stored in her mobile until she came to that of Sergeant Kilbride. He served with a local unit of the Perthshire police force. She had a good relationship with Superintendent Galloway, at regional headquarters. But this was not a job for the brass. It was a job for a tough and resourceful local copper and Kilbride was all of that.
He answered straight away.
‘Tony? Elizabeth Bancroft. I need a favour.’
‘Dr Lizzie! How lovely it is to hear from you.’
Dr Lizzie. He always called her that. ‘You won’t think it lovely to hear from me when I tell you the problem I’ve got,’ she said. ‘You’ll think me an imposition and a pain.’
Perhaps she betrayed some of her shock or distress in her tone. It was a few seconds before Kilbride answered her. ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘So fire away.’
She got to the Hunter house just before seven. Kilbride had promised to go and examine the mischief done to her cottage as soon as their phone conversation was concluded. But by then he knew that she had a commitment of care to Adam. And he did not anyway see the need for her to endure the ordeal of awaiting his arrival in the darkness on her own. She had been unnerved enough. She also got the impression that he was not wholly convinced that the mischief maker had gone. He did not say so, but she knew from her own experience of crime that the perpetrators of this sort of offence sometimes stuck around to watch their victim’s reaction. That was part of the fun for them. She was happy to leave the scene. And of course, she left the scene intact.
The landline rang at eight o’clock and Elizabeth answered it. Adam was doing his homework at his father’s desk in the sitting room. He did not even raise his head at the sound of the phone, evidently thinking it an adult’s job to pick it up. Elizabeth was swiftly reminded by that of how isolated the boy was here. He had no neighbouring kids to mix with – no network of friends, evidently, to call or email and gossip among. It was a shame for him. It was not ideal either for his recovery.
‘Hello?’
‘Dr Bancroft?’
‘Speaking.’
‘This is Emma Davies, from the school. I teach Adam Hunter English.’
The school had been told about Mark Hunter’s absence
from home. They had been given a sketchy account of the reason for Adam’s recent absence from class. Elizabeth herself had provided that.
‘I’m sorry to call so late.’
‘That’s absolutely fine. What can I do for you?’
‘It might be more a case of what I can do for you, doctor. Adam’s class had to recite verse today learned as last night’s homework assignment.’
‘I see.’ Except that Elizabeth knew bloody well Adam had not completed any homework assignment. Jeremy Clarkson had seen to that.
‘Adam recited a poem comprising a hundred and forty-one lines. I counted them myself this afternoon. This was a prodigious feat of memory for a boy of his age and, of itself, would have been unusual.’
Elizabeth’s breath felt shallow. ‘Go on.’
‘Even more unusual was the diction.’
‘Well. He is from the Home Counties of England and well spoken. His father, until he retired, was a colonel in the British Army.’

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