We Are Death (14 page)

‘The case is yours. I wish you good luck, and safe travel.’

*

J
ericho was cold, the moist mountain air clinging to his head, working its way beneath the thin coat he was wearing over his suit, the coat he’d just had to buy in one of the many shops lining the main street through Grindelwald. It would have cost him a couple of hundred euros to buy anything that would actually have been of any use, and he’d decided he could suffer the cold for a while, rather than have an expensive jacket he’d never wear again.

They had driven up the mountain together and were now standing on the spot where Connolly had fallen. The area was no longer taped off. The police presence had been moved away. There was nothing left to show that anything of interest had occurred bar a couple of straight, sprayed white lines to mark the position of the body. With the body gone, the lines could have been indicating anything.

‘Did you fix a location for the shooter?’ he asked, looking down across the valley towards the Eiger. The mountain itself was largely obscured, the low cloud covering most of its famous north face.

Badstuber was standing next to him, her arms folded. She indicated a small area of trees in the far valley, over a kilometre away.

‘You see the three houses grouped together, the road leading away to the right?’

He nodded after a few moments.

‘Follow it along, there is a small copse of trees, and then more road, and then another. We think there.’

‘That’s a long way. Really?’

‘We looked at this on Tuesday and established certain positions. A ballistic team came up yesterday and confirmed. Obviously there are many people in this valley, there are many dwellings. That was the point, most obscured, farthest away from the victim and from civilians, next to a road for quick departure, so the shot could have been made. He used a McMillan Tac-50, although we think it might have been adapted to his personal specification.’

‘That’s an incredible shot from there.’

‘Yes, Chief Inspector, it would have been. The shot of a highly trained sniper. I think, however, that we know this to be the kind of man for whom we are looking.’

‘Can we go over there?’

‘Of course, I would like to see it more closely for myself.’

Jericho stood for another few moments, looking around, taking in the surroundings. The last thing Connolly would have seen.

Where was the dead Connolly now? It would be of much greater help if Connolly or Carter were to turn up at his kitchen table, rather than Durrant. They, at least, might have some idea why they were killed, even if, certainly in the case of Connolly, they might have been unaware of their killer.

They got back into the car and drove down through town and over to the other side of the valley in silence. It seemed to Jericho that the cloud was starting to lift and that more of the mountain was becoming visible.

It would be nice to see the mountains on a clear day, he thought. Maybe he could come back. A month from now, when he was out of work. He wouldn’t have to work, if he didn’t want to, his pension would be fine for his needs. On his own. No children. Perhaps he could do the Grand Tour. Down through the Alps to Italy, and onto Greece.

Jesus. Mind on the fucking job.

‘Do you find this useful, Chief Inspector?’ asked Badstuber.

Jericho was looking out the window, back across at the tourist trap of the town.

‘It’s always useful,’ he said. ‘It’s not about expecting to find, I don’t know... It’s not some 1940s detective movie where our man is going to have foolishly discarded a book of matches from the nightclub he frequents. It’s not about that. It’s about getting into his head. Seeing how he works. Seeing how well he covers his tracks, or how immaculately he leaves no tracks at all. We’re getting to know our man. Or, of course, our woman. We shouldn’t judge.’

‘Very good, Chief Inspector,’ she said, as though he’d answered the question correctly.

He wasn’t sure how to respond, so put it out of his mind and looked up at the Eiger, as they drove beneath that ridge of mountains.

––––––––

M
orlock had been born in East Germany in 1981. Life had not improved greatly for the family after reunification. His father had never amounted to much. Spent his entire life looking bitterly upon the west, and looking bitterly east to Moscow, resenting everyone.

He told the young Morlock the stories his father had told him of the War and afterwards. Morlock’s grandfather had been ten years old as the War entered its final year, and had narrowly avoided being expected to fight off the Red Army with an unloaded broomstick on the streets of Berlin.

They had lived in Silesia, in the east, in the land ceded to Poland after the War. Under the terms of Yalta, all European nations were given the right to ethnically cleanse their land of Germans, even families that had been living there for generations. As stories emerged of how the Germans had treated detainees of the concentration camps, much of the rest of Europe took its chance for revenge.

Hundreds of thousands of Germans were killed. Many were sent to camps, many were starved, raped, beaten, left to die, left hanging from trees, buried in unmarked graves. A grotesque trail of retaliatory brutality.

The women and children from his grandfather’s village had been taken out into the woods. There was a grave there, where recently hundreds of Poles had been buried. They were made to dig up the grave, revealing the bodies. In telling the story, the grandfather recalled how they presumed they were going to have to give the bodies a proper burial, or that worse, they expected to be shot in the back, their bodies dumped into the same grave.

Instead they were made to lie, face down, on the rotting carcasses of the dead. The Polish soldiers then stood on them, pressing their faces down into the putrid flesh with their boots or the butts of their guns.

Many of them died. Morlock’s grandfather was not one of them. They had to walk back to the camp at which they were held, and were not allowed to wash.

He told these stories. He passed them on to his children, and Morlock’s father, who could never escape his bitterness, passed them on to Morlock.

‘Never, ever,’ he would say, ‘suppose that there is an ounce of compassion in the heart of any man. We are animals. We were born to hunt, and we were born to kill.’

Morlock hadn’t thought about his father in many years. No more, in fact, than any killer remembers his first victim.

He was currently at St Pancras station, waiting to get the train to Paris, where he would spend a night before flying out to Marrakech. Walking through the station, having arrived early and thinking that he would either catch an earlier train or relax in the first class lounge, he noticed one of the upright pianos, awaiting the occasional passer-by.

Playing the piano was how Morlock relaxed, so he sat down, with other passers-by for an audience, and played
Full Moon And Empty Heart
,
September Song
and
At Last
, before lifting his bag and heading to the ticket barrier.

*

‘W
hen did you last have sex?’

Haynes had smiled, had looked along the platform to see if there was anyone close enough to hear.

‘You’re very forward,’ he said.

‘Yes. So, when was it?’

‘About a year, I suppose.’

‘That seems a long time.’

‘Had a bit of a break up, so was happy enough with no one for a while. Then I met you, and I was thinking about you, rather than anyone else, and here we are now.’

‘Eventually.’

‘Yes.’

‘Being a man, you must have watched a lot of porn in that time?’

Haynes smiled, shook his head.

‘Police officers don’t watch porn. Not allowed.’

‘Is that right?’

‘We take an oath.’

They’d stared across the line, both of them smiling inside.

‘When was the last time you had sex?’ Haynes asked.

‘Oh, been a couple of years.’

‘I think we did all right, then, considering we were both out of practice.’

‘Oh, yes.’

Another warm morning, sun beginning to climb into a clear blue sky, a hint of freshness nevertheless. He’d looked down and realised they were holding hands. Hadn’t been sure how that had happened, or who had made the first move. Not that it mattered.

‘I love watching porn,’ she said.

Haynes had stared blankly across the train tracks.

‘I lied about the oath...’ he said.

*

H
aynes had spent the morning reading up on Kangchenjunga. He’d barely known anything about it when this started. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d even heard of it at all, but at least he’d tried to persuade himself that he had.

The name translated as Five Treasures of Snow, after the five summits. Brown and Band, the first climbers to complete the ascent, had stopped a few yards short of the summit, as agreed with the Chogyal, the monarch of Sikkim. Haynes struggled at first to establish, however, whether all expeditions since then had done the same. He found it hard to imagine that someone, at some time, had not taken those extra few steps. If Geyerson had done so, he could surely not have been the first.

Haynes knew that Jericho hadn’t had the time to do this, and although he had picked up some information on the mountain in the previous two days, his knowledge wouldn’t be as broad as he’d want it to be before speaking to Geyerson, assuming he managed to find him, and assuming he wasn’t already dead.

Haynes started to jot down a few notes, intending to e-mail Jericho a broad outline of the history of climbing expeditions, including any notable failures or fatalities.

Forty-three minutes in he came across a mention of the curse of Kangchenjunga. A blog page, the authorship of which was unclear, it stated that anyone who defied the local tradition and actually reached the very summit of the highest of the five peaks would be cursed to a miserable – and short – life thereafter.

In support of this, the writer had included one story of a Canadian climber who scaled the peak in the late 1970s, proudly boasting of the fact that he’d stood on the very summit. He had been declared bankrupt soon after his return home, divorce had followed, and then he died in a car accident the following year. As a representative pool, it was extremely poor.

Haynes could find no other mention of a specific curse on the mountain, and realised after fifteen minutes that he was wasting his time. Back to the original blog page, and it revealed itself to be a one-off. No links, no other pages on the site.

He noted down the URL and kept looking. He couldn’t find a list of everyone who had successfully climbed the mountain, and he wondered if that was because there were too many, or if it was because the information was unknown, or if he wasn’t looking in the right place.

As he went along, he made a list of people to call. He was, after all, supposed to be finding out about the organisation sending out the tarot cards, but this needed doing too, and it wasn’t completely unlikely that the two were linked in some way.

When he’d decided that he had enough to put together a short piece for Jericho’s benefit, he wrote it quickly, then dithered for a few moments before deciding to include mention of the curse, and then sent it off to him, with a note that he had some calls to make later which would hopefully augment the information.

He put a call through to his local technical support and asked them if they could try to trace the URL of the blog that had mentioned the curse, and then he finally decided it was time to turn his hand to the organisation behind the cards, something on which he had much, much less to go.

*

J
ericho stood in middle of the trees, on what he considered to be the perfect spot. There were no footprints, no discarded bullet casings, no weapon left propped up against the tree. No sandwich wrapper, no biscuit crumbs. He just got the sense of it. Surrounded by the woods, but with a clear shot, the killer would have needed an excellent sight on the gun, as he would have needed the steadiest of hands and to be trained to the highest level. That had not been clear from the assassination at three feet near Wells. Sometime before six a.m. on the Somerset Levels was not like early afternoon Grindelwald. Murder at close range was a much easier calculation to make in that circumstance.

‘What do you think?’ asked Badstuber. She was standing a few yards away at the edge of the small copse.

‘I think,’ said Jericho, ‘that we’re dealing with a master, and that there’s absolutely zero chance we’ll find him.’

He turned and they looked at each other through the trees.

‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘let’s go to Marrakech. Someone should try to save Geyerson, I suppose.’

‘Of course,’ said Badstuber.

Going to Marrakech had never been in doubt.

––––––––

‘T
he curse?’ said Dylan, raising her eyebrow.

Haynes had noticed immediately that she was more relaxed today. Jericho was gone, and the outsider from Switzerland was gone. Perhaps, she was also happy that the professor was gone, although Haynes didn’t think too much about that.

‘That’s what I read.’

‘And this was in... what?
The Ripping Yarns Book for Boys
?
Climbing For Men
, January issue.
It’s a Curse Special
, everyone who’s died and why an ancient god killed them?’

‘Read it in a blog.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who wrote the blog?’

‘It’s unclear.’

‘This is all you’ve got?’

‘No, but I thought it was of interest. If there was considered to be a curse.’

‘I’m not entirely sure how, but humour me, please.’

Haynes had been called into the superintendent’s office too early. Much too early. Really didn’t have anything worthwhile to share with her, but here he was, having to do it, nevertheless.

‘Let’s say–’

‘Oh, I love it when an explanation begins with “let’s say...” So do the courts. Not a judge nor jury in the country that won’t be swayed by a
let’s say
.’