The Fell Walker (15 page)

Even if this unlikely sequence happened, there were still the big questions to be answered - why would a killer look for victims on mountain tops, and what was his motive?

Ben’s mind began to blur. He was going round in circles. It was time to get on with some Tribune work; he would return to Tessa later. Before starting, he went through the pile of post-mortems on his desk, collated them into individual reports, stapled them together, then hid them among a large pile of old Tribune papers that lay in a corner; a constant source of annoyance to Helen who liked to see things kept tidy.

Finally, he tore a fresh sheet from his desk pad and wrote the heading - ‘CLUES.’ Under this he listed - ‘1. Fatality Statistics. 2. Tessa’s left eye damage. 3. ‘Summer sniffs’.’

‘Not a lot,’ he sighed, as he stuffed it into his personal correspondence file in the desk Then, realising that he was allowing himself to get disheartened, he recalled his old motivational motto - ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

Chapter 22

The good people of Thurso were shocked. You could see it in their faces; they couldn’t hide it. Those that didn’t know him stared because they rarely, if ever, saw a non-white face in town. Those that did know him stared in disbelief that ‘Snoddy the body’ was walking down the street holding hands with a stunningly beautiful foreign woman.

Few would know where she came from, and many would resent her presence. The good folk of the north of Scotland have their own ways, and like to keep them unsullied by outsiders.

Their isolationism had been sorely tested by the ‘invasion’ of engineers from England to work in the Dounreay nuclear plant. That was bad enough! But, a local man bringing a foreigner to live there was beyond the pale. It was unheard of. Hector could hear the whispering swirling around the streets like car exhaust fumes - polluting.

The first time he took Leni into town was one of his favourite memories. It always came to mind when he heard the triumphant trumpet introduction to Sibelius’s first symphony pounding in his headphones. It epitomized exactly how he felt when he marched down the street, hand-in-hand. Now he was showing them. Now he was somebody. The explosive, exultant, music said it all.

They had been together for a few weeks, clumsily getting to know each other, stumbling through the days like newborn foals. But the nights brought magic - when darkness hid shyness, when touch replaced words. Then, each seeking comfort in an alien world, they joined in a desperate joy.

He had bought her some new clothes and shoes from a mail order catalogue. He had watched her smile with delight when she turned the pages, then giggle infectiously when he had indicated she could order more than one item.

When she had finished making her choice, Hector added a scarlet dress he had spotted, with matching scarlet shoes. It was these he insisted she wore on their first parade along Thurso’s main street.

In that grey town, under a grey sky, she had looked like a dazzling, exotic, butterfly. Madame Butterfly! And wonder of wonders - she belonged to him.

Chapter 23

It was two days before Ben got back to ‘Tessa business’. At the behest of Sue Burrows, he had been charging about covering a number of events, from the annual jazz festival to the opening of a new equestrian centre. When driving between assignments he had occasionally put his mind to the ‘summer sniffs’ enigma, but for the most part it had been head down for the Tribune.

On the second day, during his lunch break at home, he checked his e-mail and found another pile of data waiting to come through from Sophie Lund. They turned out to be all the fatal incident reports from every mountain rescue team he had nominated, including Scotland’s teams. Her ‘boys’ were indeed remarkable.

Now, having stapled each mountain rescue report to its relevant post mortem report, and having sorted them into datal order, he sat with a very large stack of paper in front of him.

He intended to visit the summit of Dale Head as soon as possible, to go through the motions of looking for blood-stains, but it wasn’t going to be today. Heavy rain tapped at the bedroom window, and through it he could see dense mist and cloud obscuring the fells on the other side of the lake. As he looked, it occurred to him that the Lake District’s heavy rainfall might make it difficult, even for experts, to find any blood-stains that had been deposited. Even more reason to stay inside, fill a coffee cup, grab a scone, and plough through paper.

He decided to start with the most recent and work back. His pad and pen were ready to note any similarities, coincidences, mutuality. Taking a deep breath, as though he was about to start a marathon, he picked up the first set of papers - the reports on Professor and Mrs Metternich.

Having already seen their mountain rescue reports at Patterdale team headquarters, he skipped through them briefly, noting again that Mrs Metternich had suffered extensive injuries to her face, and Professor Metternich had said ‘summer sniffs’ before dying. He moved on to their post-mortem reports.

The first thing he noticed was that the pathologist was not the one who had carried out Tessa’s post mortem. Tessa’s body had been taken to Whitehaven hospital, while the Metternichs had gone to Penrith morgue. Clearly, with the Lake District being ringed by six hospitals, bodies found in different areas were being taken to their nearest hospital or morgue. So, if there was any overall suspect injury pattern to be found, it would not be obvious to several individual pathologists. Only someone with an overview, like he now had, would be able to spot it. He jotted on his pad - ‘No Post-Mortem Overview’.

Translating from medical to layman’s language, he found that Professor Metternich’s post-mortem report more-or-less confirmed the information contained in the mountain rescue report, adding, of course, the extensive internal injuries to major organs, which were stated as the cause of death. Both eyes were intact, and there were no queries raised. Once more, he was looking at a totally non-suspicious document.

Mrs Metternich’s report was different. He was immediately attracted to a number of photographs. They showed where the tree branch had penetrated her neck, but having been taken from varying positions, they also showed the damage to the rest of her face, particularly to her left eye, cheek, and ear. The type and location of these injuries were very similar to those sustained by Tessa, though they didn’t look quite the same, presumably because Mrs Metternich had been found within 24-hours, while Tessa had been missing for many days and the birds had been at her.

Ben found his sheet of paper headed - ‘CLUES’, and wrote ‘4. Mrs Metternich’s left eye damage.’

He picked up the report again and started to read the detail. The bones around the left eye had been fractured and the soft eye tissue had been dispersed into liquid particles. These, together with stone fragments were still present within the socket, suggesting, once again, that the head had struck a crag on the way down, and also indicating that the birds had not paid a subsequent visit. The left ear was, again, severely torn, and almost severed from the head. Ben added ‘5. Ear damage - Tessa, Mrs Metternich’ to his ‘CLUES’ list.

The Summary and Diagnosis were by now familiar - ‘injuries consistent with a fall from a mountain’, and, ‘death due to multiple injuries to vital organs.’ As with the others, the pathologist had found nothing to indicate that this might be a suspicious death.

Ben, however, was beginning to think he was getting somewhere. He now had two people with very similar injuries; too similar to be a coincidence, and too rare to be commonplace, he hoped. While he had no hard evidence that these were anything but accidental, he still had faith in his judgement that Tessa’s left eye injuries had not been caused by the fall or by the birds.

At least, he now had something specific to look for in the daunting pile of reports that lay in front of him. If he found anyone with similar injuries, then, surely, he was on the right track.

He placed Mrs Metternich’s reports face down on top of her husband’s reports, which already lay on the desk. He found himself doing this with great care and gentleness, finger tipping the pages together until they looked like one, as if lying their bodies together in a final, perfect embrace.

His eyes misted, and he swallowed hard. This was bloody awful. A retired couple, out for a day’s walk, lay in front of him in pieces. It could have been Helen and him. It didn’t feel right, reading about the intimate condition of their bodies at death. He felt like an invader into their privacy. Worse still, he had been
hoping
to find terrible, matching injuries.

He got up from his chair and opened the bedroom window, somehow hoping that the fresh air might clear the bad taste in his mouth and the sad fog in his mind. Instead, the cloud and mist and rain that greeted him served only to deepen his gloom. He glanced back at the pile of papers on his desk. He didn’t want to read them. He didn’t want to wade through dozens of intimate reports that only families should see.

Yet, that was the thing wasn’t it - there were dozens of them. If there was a killer out there...he needed to be stopped before the pile grew higher.

He didn’t have to spend much time on the next two sets of reports. They covered the deaths of two young male novice climbers found at the foot of Castle Crag, a well-known training crag in Borrowdale. Ben had covered the incident for the Tribune. They had been roped together and fell together; the evidence was all there.

Sadly for all concerned, it was a routine case of a dangerous sport claiming two young lives. Its ‘routineness’ did, however, serve to remind Ben that the deaths of Tessa and the Frasers, and possibly the Metternichs, were not routine. Reinforced by this: he needed all the encourage-ment he could get: he picked up the next set of reports. They came from Scotland.

A lone walker had perished on Liathach, a severe mountain in the Torridon range, and another on Ben Hope, the most northerly Munro in Scotland; a Munro being a mountain over 3,000 ft in height, named as a tribute to Sir Hugh Munro who, in 1891, published a meticulous record of all Scottish mountains over 3,000 ft.

Both sets of reports pointed to routine tragedy rather than anything suspicious. It was what Ben had expected. If his theory was right he didn’t expect to find anything questionable in the Scottish reports until he had gone back at least two years - to when the fatality figures had suddenly leaped in the Torridon and Inchnadamph MR team reports.

Again, he placed the papers carefully on to the finished pile, face down on top of the young novices reports. It was like building a wall of death.

The name John Fraser took him by surprise when he picked up the next reports. For a moment he wondered if it was another Fraser, not Jack Fraser, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Then he remembered that he had filed Jack’s reports in datal order along with the rest. A quick glance at the wording of the post-mortem confirmed that he had already read it - it was Jack Fraser’s. He added it carefully to the finished pile, then picked up the next report - Mrs Elaine Fraser - Jack’s wife.

There appeared to be no photographs or drawings attached, so, stifling a yawn, he went straight to reading the post-mortem report. Within a minute he was wide awake, sitting up in his seat. There it was again. Amongst all the other injuries the poor woman had suffered were fractures to all the bones surrounding the left eye orbit. The orbit contained remnants of soft eye tissue and particles of stone, and the left ear was lacerated and had a 95 per cent disconnect with the skull.

With his mind now racing, Ben reached for his ‘CLUES’ list and wrote ‘6. Mrs Fraser - left eye damage.’

Chapter 24

‘Smile, Leni, smile,’ Hector shouted above the roar of the wind. Leni sat on a rock, posing. Hector was on one knee, having found the right angle for the photograph. He ignored the moisture soaking up from the sand into his trousers.

They were on Strathy Point beach on a bright but wild summer afternoon. Unlike the beaches of Sutherland’s west coast, which are a match for any in more exotic corners of the earth, the northern beaches are plain and conventional. Nevertheless they had become a favourite playground for Leni and Hector. In spite of the cold, Leni had grown to love the feeling of space and freedom they offered, compared to the beehive activity of Manila. She had never had the time or money to visit the beaches of her own country, life there being about survival rather than pleasure.

Now, she had all the time in the world, as Hector would not allow her to go out to work. It wasn’t that he wanted her at home, cooking and cleaning like a dutiful wife. He was prepared to do all that as well as work at Dounreay nuclear plant He just didn’t want to share her with anyone. He wanted her beauty all to himself. He wanted to capture it, hold it, bottle it, cage it; keep it always within arms reach. That is why he had taken up photography.

Almost daily, he took a photograph of her. Anything would do as a subject, from eating her breakfast to reading a book, from bringing in the peat to running along the beach. He took them zealously, as though, at any moment, she was going to run away and leave him.

Such was his obsession that he set up his own developing unit in what had been a large pantry. Every room in the house now had photographs of Leni on every wall. Everywhere he went, his camera went with him, even though his only subject, so far, was Leni.

Leni shuffled slightly on the rock and gave him yet another dazzling smile, her perfect teeth white against her tanned skin, her black hair flying across a white cloud.

The rock was situated just outside the cave where Hector had fantasised about living with his animal friends when he was young; the cave where he dissected the fox to make it his first permanent friend. It was one of the first places he took Leni to see. To have her with him in the place where he had dreamt of living with Kathleen Rinaldi was like a dream come true.

The photograph had turned out brilliantly, and with so many attached memories, it was no wonder it became one of Hector’s favourites.

Now it came back to him as he listened to Elgar’s ‘In the South’, a joyous and beautiful tribute to the colour and vitality of Italy. It was as close as western music could bring him to the essence of Leni.

It brought a half smile to his thin lips, though such was his emaciation it looked like a skeletal grimace. After all those years, and though numbed by alcohol, the memory of Leni sitting on the rock was as clear as ever. When would it fade? He needed it to fade. He glanced at the whisky bottle. It was empty.

He rose from his chair and swerved across the room to a sideboard. On his way, he stopped suddenly. He thought he felt a slight vibration in his stockinged feet. He removed his headphones, momentarily abandoning Elgar. He stood still...listening. There was nothing...there couldn’t be.

The pause made him search his swirling mind. Yes, he decided eventually, he had fed her tonight. He continued to the sideboard, took out another bottle of whisky and returned to his chair. He half filled the seven-sided glass, noticing for the first time that the knuckles on his left hand were as prominent as the edges of the glass. He must eat more, he told himself, as he gulped some more pain killer. ‘Tomorrow...that’s when I’ll eat ...tomorrow.’

It was getting late. He needed his sleep music. Music that soothed his mind, music that said the world was a beautiful place full of beautiful people who loved each other, music that engulfed him with its soaring passion and tender sweetness, then wrapped him up, tucked him in, and stroked his brow until he went to sleep.

He didn’t have to look far. It was always to hand. With reverence, he ejected Elgar and replaced him with Rachmaninov. He put the headphones back on. The adagio from the second symphony came down from heaven and took hold of his soul. His head fell back and his eyes closed.