murdered.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Murdered,' I repeated. 'Violently killed. Somebody smashed his head in and stuck knives in his eyes, and the Nepali police are lying through their teeth about it because they can't be bothered to deal with a murder. I have pictures that prove this.'
'Mr… what was your name again?'
'Paul Wood.'
'Mr. Wood,' he said. 'I've read the Nepali report myself and it quite definitively states that Mr. Goebel obviously killed himself, and it makes no mention of any knives… '
'I am the person who found the body,' I said, speaking each word slowly and distinctly. 'I'm telling you that the Nepali report is a pack of lies.'
'I see. Mr. Wood, obviously I can't accept those claims unless they are confirmed by the Nepali police.'
'The police don't want to do anything with it.'
'Mr. Wood… Obviously we appreciate that you're calling in to help us with this tragic case, but if you don't have any evidence of any of what you're saying then there's very little we can do. The only official document here is the Nepali report, and it says quite clearly that the death was a suicide.'
'The only official document? ' I said incredulously. 'That's what you care about? Whether or not I have official documents? I've got pictures, and they show beyond question that he was murdered.'
'Now, of course if you'd like to get in touch with the Nepali police to aid them with their investigation, I can put you in touch with some of the relevant officials who I'm sure would be very interested in whatever photographs you have. As I said, their report isn't final yet, and can still be amended — '
'What's your name?' I demanded.
After a long pause he said, very grudgingly, 'My name is Alan Tremblay.'
'All right. Mr. Tremblay, I have just told you that a fellow Canadian citizen was murdered in cold blood up there, that the Nepali police are covering it up, and that I have photographs that prove this. Do you understand that that is what I was saying?'
'I understand, but our policy is to accept the Nepali government's official report and investigation instead of poorly substantiated phoned-in claims of murder from random travelers.'
'You understand fine but you just don't give a shit, is that it?'
'Mr. Wood, I think that is completely uncalled for. I am perfectly willing to connect you with some Nepali police officials if you would like to assist them in their — '
I hung up.
I was still fuming when I returned to the 1-Hour Photo Development shop and picked up my pictures. I stopped at a cafe and bought a Coke, a little surprised that my addiction to lemon tea had abruptly vanished now that the trek was over, and sipped from it as I flipped through the pictures. Monkeys, rickety bridges, towering waterfalls, tiny villages, prayer wheels, mana walls, mule trains, mountains mountains and more mountains, fellow-trekkers, me upon the Thorung La. And those three shots of the dead body, a little overexposed. And my shot of the Muktinath ledger. It had come out perfectly and I could make out the Goebel entry very clearly.
A brainwave hit me and I paid for my Coke and went to the Pokhara office of the Annapurna Conservation Authority. We had had to sign in here to get our trekking permits. The office was quiet and the man behind the desk didn't mind if I looked through their ledger to see when my friends had begun their trek. I flipped back through two weeks of entries and began to pore over them. And found Stanley Goebel's entry, in neat handwriting, only a half- dozen places ahead of my own. He must have stood practically next to me in line that morning.
His handwriting in this ledger was very different from that in the photo. Clearly the work of someone else.
So: after killing Stanley Goebel, the murderer used his name, and presumably his passport and trekking permit, to check in to Muktinath. For no conceivable reason. Hell, the checkpoints were in practice optional, you could walk right by them if you wanted to and nobody would demand that you check in.
No conceivable logical reason, that is. But then there was no conceivable logical reason to kill him in the first place. Maybe he wasn't traveling alone, maybe he started his travels out with a friend, and they had a falling out, and the friend decided to follow him and kill him? Maybe he was killed by somebody who got his kicks by killing people and pretending to be them for a while? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I thought. Clearly this was a case for the Shadow, not for me.
I was about out of options. Nepal didn't care. Canada didn't care. I felt like at the very least I had a responsibility to write all this down, document what had happened, tell somebody about it in case it ever happened again. I thought of Interpol. I wasn't sure what they did but I knew they were some kind of international police force. But what exactly were they going to do when the Nepalis were stonewalling?
In desperation I decided on the last refuge of the conspiracy theorist: the Internet.
The Internet cafes that littered Pokhara had come to a communal arrangement which kept Internet access prices at seven rupees per minute, about six U.S. dollars an hour, approximately ten times the price in Kathmandu. It was unabashed OPEC-style cartel capitalism and I had to admire it, though I wondered how they kept members in line. If somebody tried to boost their business by competing on price, did the cartel take him out back and beat him with a stick?
I sat down at one that competed on quality instead, with a relatively high-speed ISDN line instead of the slow staticky phone connections used by most. The computers were newish, probably made in India, and came with headsets used to make scratchy inaudible telephone calls over the Internet. I launched Internet Explorer and then I typed into the address bar: thorntree. lonelyplanet. com.
The enormous power wielded by the Lonely Planet publishing empire over backpacking tourism has to be seen to be believed. With the stroke of a pen their writers can turn hotspots into ghost towns, or draw thousands of travelers to what had been a backwater. They can determine with a single well-chosen word whether lodge owners and their families will be wealthy or bankrupt within the year. The have de facto control over all budget travel in developing nations: who goes there, when, where they go, and what they do. Experienced travelers talk of 'the Lonely Planet effect' when a hitherto unmentioned place or activity they recommend leads to a deluge of travelers, the sprouting of a hundred lodges and souvenir shops, and a wave of overcommercialization and traffic that almost inevitably destroys whatever quality prompted the recommendation in the first place.
Of course this is not their fault. The fault lies with the hordes of travelers who follow their Lonely Planet bible faithfully without once venturing away from its safety blanket; and with the world, for having so many budget travelers and so few magical places which can be accessed cheaply and conveniently. All Lonely Planet does is publish guidebooks better than the competition's. As a result fully ninety per cent of travelers in developing countries rely on them for guidance.
Since guidebooks are only updated every year or two, and destinations change more rapidly than that, Lonely Planet maintains a web site where they provide recent updates on the hundreds of countries they cover. They also provide a forum called the Thorn Tree where Lonely Planet travelers can talk to one another. The Thorn Tree seemed like the best place for me to tell the world what I had found. After all, despite my many reservations, I was a Lonely Planet traveler myself. It seemed right that I should tell my people what I had discovered. It was the best I could think of to do.
I logged on as 'PaulWood' and created a new topic in the Indian Subcontinent area, entitled 'Murder On The Annapurna Circuit.' Thinking, that should get their attention. Then I wrote down what had happened as simply and shortly as I could. I didn't mention the knives — it seemed gratuitous to do so. I didn't mention being pursued on the trail. I didn't mention Cameroon. I told of finding the body, discovering his name, the stonewalling of the Nepali police, the Muktinath ledger, the unhelpful Canadian embassy. I ended with a warning to those in the region that there was a real live murderer on the loose and a plea for anyone who knew anything else to get in touch with me and/or post what they knew here.
I wasn't concerned about Laxman's warning not to cause more trouble. For one thing I doubted too many official Nepali government sources read the Thorn Tree. For another it barely qualified as trouble. A few thousand people would read it and shake their heads in surprise and dismay, assuming the LP web editors did not censor it in the first place, and in a few weeks the topic would disappear, the Thorn Tree was a busy place. At best it might be
