“Where there’s so little oxygen that you’re likely to die quite quickly.”
Jamie shuddered. “It must be like drowning,” he said. “Drowning in air, like fish taken out of the water.”
“I suppose so. Anyway, there you are, making your way up the mountain, and you see another climber collapsed in the snow. What would you do?”
Jamie shrugged. “I’d stop and ask him how he was.”
“And then?”
“Give him a hand.”
She had not expected anything else. “Help him down the mountain?”
Jamie answered naturally. “If that was what was necessary. I suppose it wouldn’t be practical for me to go and get help, would it?”
Isabel did not think it would.
“In that case,” said Jamie, “I’d help him down to … base camp, isn’t it? There’d be a doctor there, no doubt.”
Along with the thieves and extortionists, thought Isabel. “Yes, there’d probably be a doctor. But you’d probably be alone if you tried to help him, you know.”
Jamie looked at her for explanation. “But I thought that Everest was quite busy. Aren’t there always several hundred people on the mountain—if you include the base camp—all the hangers-on?”
Isabel put down the book. “Yes, so I gather. But very few of them sign up to the old ethic of mountaineering.”
“Which was?”
“One of fellow feeling for other mountaineers. If you came across somebody in need of help, you helped them.”
Jamie was thoughtful. “Like the custom of the sea.”
“I suppose so.”
He remembered a yachtsman friend who had told him that one could not count on that any more. He had mentioned that there had been cases where ships ran down yachts and were suspected of not stopping. “It’s survival of the fittest,” he had said. “These large ships have places to get to and can’t be bothered to lose the time.”
Jamie had been appalled, and Isabel too, as he told her. “So it’s like that on Everest?”
Isabel gestured to the book. “So we are told. It’s a different sport today. Look.” She opened the book to show Jamie a photograph of a mountaineering expedition in the thirties. A group of three men stood on an ice field, roped together. They were wearing tweed jackets, with waistcoats and ties. “Ties!” exclaimed Jamie.
Isabel smiled. “Yes. And plus fours. Look.”
She turned to another picture, this time showing a mountaineer equipped for an assault on Everest. It was difficult to make out his features under the goggles and the breathing apparatus. In his hand he carried a satellite phone.
Jamie looked at the face. The photograph had been taken at the beginning of the expedition; the man was smiling, looked optimistic. It was the face of a healthy sportsman, but it had the poignancy of being the last photograph, or almost the last photograph. The camera catches somebody in the fullness of life, but the subject’s fate is already decided.
“He could have been saved?”
“It seems so. Or at least given a chance. But that would have meant that the rescuers would have lost their chance of getting to the top.” She reached out to touch the photograph; to put a finger on the mountaineer’s cheek.
She stopped. She did not know where that expression had come from. Had she made it up, or had she heard it somewhere? It was difficult to tell; was it just a reworking of
She touched the photograph again. Jamie was watching.
“Why are you doing that?”
She answered softly. “Because he’s dead.”
Jamie moved to the window. “Those flowers,” he said. “The ones by the wall. What did you call them again?”
She told him, giving the Scots vernacular name as well as the botanical one. But her mind was elsewhere. Guilt. “He walked past somebody,” she whispered.
Jamie turned round. “Who did?”
She closed the book. “I think I know what’s troubling John Fraser,” she said. “He walked past another climber, who was dying. He didn’t help him.”
Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “Isabel! How do you know that? You haven’t got a shred—not a shred—of evidence.”
She just felt it, and told him so. She did not need evidence for hunches—that was what hunches were all about.
