Gently to the Summit (13 page)

He stumbled again, almost falling this time. He recovered his balance in a panic, shrinking closer to the wall of rock that hemmed the track at that point. There could be no doubt that he was really frightened; it wasn’t a clever simulation. About his movements there was a tense automatism that betrayed the presence of physical fear.

‘It’s crazy … it’s utterly pointless!’

Gently himself had a feeling of uneasiness.
Somewhere
, at a boundary that had passed unnoticed, the mountains had withdrawn their picturesque
benevolence
. They had begun to be wild, with an undertone of savagery; they seemed poised in a sinister potential of violence. Wherever one looked there were crushing rock-falls, unscalable cliffs, and hypnotic precipices. One experienced a sensation of being there on trial, of being small and alien and distinctly vulnerable …

‘If anything happens, then you’ll be responsible!’

Gently dashed at the sweat that lay heavy on his lids. Above them, standing easily with hands on hips, Overton rested and watched them as they laboured in the toils. One more bout and they would be there, another slam at that vicious incline! But already Gently’s thigh muscles were crying for mercy, after only a foretaste of the scramble impending.

‘If I get stuck you’ll have to bring me down …’

Gently saved his breath and kept on slogging.

‘I’ll sue you, my God … I’ll sue you!’

One last, killing stretch, and he stood shakily by Overton.

And then it was nearly worth getting up to that high vantage, worth it to peer into the inner recess which the mountain held concealed there. Level, shallow, grey, peaceful, the Glaslyn extended across its plateau, its ripples fretting the gentlest of music against its harsh rocky shore. Straight above it soared the Wyddfa, now more threatening than ever, its hollow cliffs of reddish grey exposed from their foot to their summit; and supporting them were high, frowning ridges that circled round the calm lake, leaving this rent through which spilled the torrent to join Llydaw, pale below.

‘I’d sit a minute if I were you.’

Gently plumped down on a boulder. All right; he was turned fifty and not accustomed to these larks. Askham had already dropped prone and lay gulping his breath in fierce little gasps. Overton, casual and apparently sweatless, was lighting a fresh cigarette.

‘Now you can see just where it happened. There’s the Pyg Track. Can you make it out?’

Across the flank of the rightward wall one saw a scratched white line. Along there Heslington, and then Fleece, had taken their way to the ridge ahead, moving like tiny upright ants to the man who watched from the Glaslyn shore. Then up the ridge to the staring summit, that humpty cone with its sudden conclusion, the Tarpeian Rock: and the mortal cry as the human starfish floated down …

‘You can see that apron-like projection? That’s where he struck and started rolling. There was blood
on it, quite plain. He couldn’t have known anything after that. But he kept on tumbling down until he got there, where I’m pointing; and as you can judge, it was quite a feat to get across to him without equipment.’

‘For God’s sake stop it!’ Askham sat up, his eyes burning at Overton. ‘Don’t you understand? Isn’t it enough for me to be dragged up to this place …?’

Overton turned to him in surprise. ‘No offence intended, old man.’

‘There is offence. I can’t stand it. This bloody mountain is driving me crazy!’

He jumped to his feet and jerked away from them, to throw himself down again at a distance. Overton stared bewilderingly at Gently. He was wholly taken aback by the explosion.

‘What’s needling the youngster?’ he wanted to know.

Gently gave a lift of his shoulder. ‘It’s just the mountains,’ he replied. ‘They have an effect on some people.’

Had he ever been as tired and perhaps so fundamentally frightened? He didn’t know and daren’t think about it, caught in the dizzying web of the Zigzags. After the first few hundreds of feet he had begun to feel a slow panic, and all the way after that he’d had to fight it with his will. It was absurd. There was no danger, it was only the scale of the thing that sapped at him. The side of the ridge was no steeper than a house roof and was gnarled with helpful outcrops of rock. If he’d slipped and fallen he wouldn’t have rolled far, would perhaps have come off with the shock and some bruises; while
at the worst – say, a broken leg – he had experienced companions to come to his aid. Yet still he couldn’t get rid of that panic, he could only oppose it and keep it under: by not looking back, down seven hundred feet; by not looking up, another five hundred. From minute to minute, just the rock-rim ahead …

Overton, mercifully, was staying down close to him. He was gruesomely enjoying this swing up the ridge. He climbed with a relaxed and familiar rhythm and apparently took nothing out of himself at all. He could even find time to make a little conversation. The Wyddfa, it seemed, resembled Everest in miniature. The chasm below them would represent the Western Cwm, the Crib-y-ddysgl Lhotse, and the ridge the South Col.

‘And under snow the resemblance must be even more striking. In January now … I’ve a good mind to try it in January.’

But Overton, roving on in front, then dropping back to keep touch, wasn’t sticking so near to Gently as was Henry Askham. The latter had made his attachment permanent and went beside Gently like his shadow; grey of face, drenched with sweat and his hair plastered damply over his brow. He hadn’t ventured a word since that outburst down below. He’d kept his distance while the others arrived and while Gently had given a few instructions. But directly the party moved he had scrambled up to join the detective, his eyes averted and mouth gone small, his head and shoulders drooped a little. And so he had stuck, a spaniel at heel, enduring the terrors of the Zigzags …

Of the others, Gently noticed that Heslington had dropped his earlier aloofness. He was now
accompanying
Evans and Williams and was seemingly on terms not uncordial. Gently saw them below him, now strung out, now proceeding together in a knot, and twice he heard Evans’s laugh and the sudden lilting rise of his voice. They were used to it of course, the three who followed on behind. Two of them were born in the shadow of Snowdon; this was like a stroll up their own backyard.

‘Here would be about the spot, Super.’

Overton halted by a marker cairn. He took his bearings across the void with a callous sang-froid that made Gently shiver.

‘You see? There’s Crib Goch just on a level, and the Moel Siabod in line beyond it; roughly we’re on the twenty-eight hundred mark. I was near a marker when I heard the cry.’

Gently dropped on his hands and knees and seated himself before looking; to rest his legs, it might have been, they were surely in need of it! Then he braced himself for the survey, taking a firm grip on his nerves. Below his boots he caught sight of the Glaslyn, now turned hard and very steely-looking …

‘Do you hear those choughs. The way they echo?’

He could hear them all right, and he wished he couldn’t. Two wavering black dots passing slowly across the summit, their choking cries seemed to rake at his viscera.

‘So now you can imagine—’

‘There’s no need to be explicit.’

And Askham too was clearly of Gently’s opinion. He was lying face inwards, his hands grasping the rock, and he gave a whimpering kind of groan as he heard Overton’s commencement.

‘How are we doing for time?’

‘We’ll be up there soon after one. You wouldn’t like me to speed it up a bit, would you?’

Gently echoed Askham’s groan. ‘I was born in a flat country!’

‘You’ll like it when we get on the ridge. You’ll find it a different world up there.’

A minute of rest, no more: not even time for their sweat to dry, though the sun was falling hotly on the south-facing slope; then they were up and on again, pursuing the goat-like stride of Overton, with the loose rock scuttling from underfoot and the live rock making them check and stagger. Was there no end to those punishing Zigzags, no ultimate rock-rim above which was no other; were they doomed now until life was extinct to continue agonizedly climbing into a perpetual extension? Askham’s distress was even greater than his own. He had got to a state where he no longer dared to rest. He simply kept going in a panic-triggered scramble, with the knowledge of the void behind him staring from his eyes. The problem had gone to the mountains again, and the mountains were ready with their answer …

And finally they could see it, the true ridge-top fretted above them; about a hundred feet higher and the last fifty of them sheer and smooth. But Overton was bearing to the right now; he was making a long,
shallow traverse, bringing them safely to a low gap by which the ridge-top was easily attained. He stood watching them clinically as they came over; he had a caustic look for Askham. The youngster dropped as though he were shot as soon as he staggered out of the gap. Gently’s knees were shaking too; the relief of getting up there was tremendous! But he managed to clump a few steps from the gap before he permitted those knees to collapse. Then he sat motionless, his arms hanging limp, drinking in the sweet, cold breeze of the top.

‘There you are. How’s that for a prospect?’

Overton was ruthless, he was a bundle of springs. He pointed to Llanberis, Caernarvon, Anglesey,
Tremadoc
Bay, and the ghost of Liverpool.

‘Isn’t it something, though you only get this far?’

Gently accepted the disparagement without a
murmur
. Askham to all intents was dead to the world. He lay with closed eyes and his cheeks had a leaden colour.

And so they were mustered for the last lap, on what seemed the backbone of the world: the titanic ridge that climbed from Llanberis up to the highest level of all. To right and left the great spaces fell away in soaring chasms of light and colour, leaving their knife-edge rising inexorably, straight and firm towards the
summit
. Heslington went first, as he had done on the Monday, his manner and step determinedly jaunty; Gently came next with Askham at his elbow, and the other three silently followed behind. Silently, because there was an atmosphere somehow, a peculiar
tenseness that quelled their chatter; so that even Evans, now confessedly in opposition, was catching the faint echo of a drama unexpressed. After all, was there more in Gently’s whims than met the eye …?

Askham was almost touching Gently, so near was he trudging along beside him: that was the point that kept striking Evans on the slog up the ridge. At the bottom Askham had been rebellious, he’d been furiously angry with Gently, but now he slunk at the Yard man’s side, a chastened, almost a filial figure. What had happened between them coming up? Evans wished he’d kept a more attentive eye on them. All he’d noticed was that Askham was panicky and had obviously a shocking head for heights. But that didn’t explain this turnabout from angry antagonism to servile deference, nor the little glances that Askham kept throwing at Gently’s unregistering, rock-like face …

Evans muttered at last to Overton: ‘What did they talk about man, him and Askham?’

Overton raised and let fall his hands. ‘Nothing. Though the young man was blowing off steam.’

‘It was only that? It was nothing more?’

‘Nothing that I heard in any case. There wasn’t a lot of conversation after we’d started on the Zigzags.’

So the mystery continued a mystery and Evans frowned as he strode along.

Now the café appeared ahead, hopefully crowning the last long slope, an ugly, utilitarian building on the lines of a mess-hut from a temporary camp. They saw Heslington work his way towards it, pass across the front and disappear; providing a positive demonstration
of the tenability of his story. Thus the scene was set as on Monday, with the time at precisely five minutes past one. The sun, as then, stood over the summit and was full in their eyes as they approached. Gently halted when they drew near the café.

‘One of you – Williams – remain here, will you? I want you to keep your eye fixed on the top there, above the café. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Williams stiffened himself involuntarily. ‘But what do you want me to watch for, sir?’

‘For whatever you can see. And remember, it’s important. So don’t let your attention wander for a second.’

Leaving Williams looking puzzled, they proceeded to the café, which lay niched into the rock on the right, its roof on a level with the track. Above it to the left stood the round cairn, a drum-shaped platform of rocks, a matter of thirty feet in diameter and ten or twelve in height. The track passed round it, still screwing upwards, to end in a sloped plane of rock which was the summit. From the base of the cairn to the brink of this platform would be a distance of perhaps fifteen yards.

Gently brought them to a stand again on the far side of the cairn, not sufficiently advanced round it to have re-entered Williams’ field of vision. For several
moments
he stood studying the disposition of the spot, the cairn, the narrowing slope and the violent emptiness it descended into. Then he felt in his pocket and – for the first time – turned to Askham.

‘Take this.’

It was the cigarette-case bearing the monogram
‘RTK’. Askham drew his breath sharply. He visibly shrank away from Gently.

‘I … no! Why should I – why are you giving that to me?’

‘Take it!’

The case was shoved into his reluctant hand.

‘Now …!’ Gently’s voice sounded softer, his lids sank a little. ‘I shall need some help from you in your capacity of Kincaid. He was evidently up here ahead of Fleece, and perhaps ahead of Heslington too. But he wasn’t concealed behind the café, because Heslington went there to eat his lunch. Yet Fleece didn’t see Kincaid when he was coming up the track, so he must have been somewhere not immediately visible. I’d like you to suggest where that somewhere could have been, where Kincaid could see Fleece, but Fleece missed seeing Kincaid.’

It was too simple. There was only one place. Askham pointed to it tremblingly.