find him, I would still have to find a man. And he would be arrested quickly and sent to rot in jail. But both of us know what happened here. One trekker kills another, what do I care? Do they live here? Do they care about my people? If I say, yes, this a murder, maybe there is a scandal. It gets in the newspapers. It gets in the Lonely Planet. People wonder, should I come to Nepal, should I go trekking? And I do not like trekkers. I think you can see that. I do not like you. But my people need your money. So to risk that, to find one trekker who kills another? What reason do I have? Soon he will be gone back to his own country. Let his own police find him when he kills again. If two Nepalese go to your country, and one kills the other, do your police rush to capture the other and put him in one of your jails? I do not think so.'
'They certainly do,' I said hotly, though I was not near as convinced of this as I tried to sound. 'Our police treat everyone the same, and they definitely never ignore a murder in their back yard.'
'I do not think that is so,' Laxman said. 'You are from Canada, yes? I have been to Canada. I was a Gurkha, you know. Do not think of me as some ignorant man who has never been away from Nepal. I served twelve years in the Indian Army, and I trained once in Canada. I do not believe what you say. I wonder if you believe it.'
'That's why you locked Gavin up,' I said disbelievingly. 'So the guy who killed him had time to get away.'
'Quite,' Laxman said. 'Now go away. Continue with your trek. Cross the Thorung La. Trek all the way back to Pokhara. And then, please, go back to your own country without making any more trouble in mine. We have quite enough trouble here without importing it. Thank you. You may go.'
After a little while I stood up. He wasn't incompetent. He certainly wasn't stupid. He just didn't want the hassle, and there was no way I could force it on him.
'Naturally,' he warned me, 'if you repeat anything I said here I will deny it and find a reason to arrest you.'
'Naturally,' I said sarcastically. And I went. What else could I do?
I spent a little time looking for Gavin, but after a while I gave up. It was still early, and I could have gone back to Gunsang, but I decided to spend the night in Braka, a little village twenty minutes' walk towards the airfield. There was a lodge there called the Braka Bakery and Super Restaurant, and it lived up to its name. And I was in no mood to travel any more today. All I wanted to do was shower and eat and read and sleep and start anew tomorrow. And leave poor Stanley Goebel behind.
I was another forty pages into War And Peace when Gavin joined me.
'I got a double room again,' I said.
'Good,' he said.
'What happened to Mr. Goebel?'
'I had his body inspected.'
I blinked. 'Inspected? By who?'
'By one of the good doctors of the Himalayan Rescue Association,' he said, and paused to order mint tea from the lodge waitress.
I had forgotten that there were three Western volunteer doctors in town, treating trekkers and locals alike. Just two days ago we had gone to their altitude-sickness lecture, held in a cabbage patch just outside the building they occupied.
'What did they say?' I asked.
'She told me that it couldn't have been suicide,' he said dryly. 'I'm ever so glad that we got that settled. And she confirmed that a Stanley Goebel had signed the attendance register at their altitude-sickness clinic two days ago.'
'That's it?'
'Not entirely. She determined that he was killed by a stone. Fragments in his skull or something. And that the knives… that was done after he was already dead. And she agrees that he died within the last couple of days. She tried to look for fingerprints on the knives and jacket… ' He shrugged. 'Not exactly her area of expertise. But she thinks the knives were wiped clean.'
'Is she going to talk to Laxman?'
'They don't have to,' he said. 'He came and talked to us. And made it very clear to all concerned that our opinion was as valuable as a fart in a hurricane, and that if he so desired he could have us expelled from Nepal or possibly jailed for interfering in a police investigation.'
'Pretty much what he said to me,' I said.
'To her credit Dr. Janssen didn't seem particularly intimidated. But I don't think it really matters whether she says anything or not. Whether we say anything or not.'
I nodded, slowly, thinking it over as he poured himself a glass of seabuckthorn juice, an intensely tangy drink made from a local berry. He was right. Even if Laxman suddenly morphed into a highly-motivated Sherlock Holmes, Stanley Goebel's killer was going to walk. No evidence of any kind. Even if it had been he on the trail behind me, an event which I was beginning to think of as an attack of paranoia rather than that of a murderer, that simply narrowed him down to one of the throng in Letdar or Thorung Phedi tonight. They could have locked down the villages and interrogated every traveler and it still wouldn't have helped.
'So I reckon there's only one thing we can do,' Gavin said.
'What's that?' I asked.
'Sweet fuck-all.' He raised his glass in a mock toast. 'To Stanley Goebel, unlamented and unavenged. There but for the grace of God go all of us.'
I clinked my lemon tea against his seabuckthorn juice and we drank to the dead man.
Chapter 5 Up, And Down Again
In the dream I was climbing Mount Everest. There was a blizzard, but I knew I was on Everest, almost at the summit, pulling myself up the vertical Hillary Step on a fixed line. It seemed remarkably easy and I felt a giddy sense of triumph. Eat your heart out, Jon Krakauer, I thought. I was almost near the top, where two figures waited for me. I recognized them, two old friends, but couldn't call their names to mind. I pulled myself up further, near to the top, where the line was anchored around a rusty iron pole, and the blizzard thinned out and I saw them clearly. Laura and Stanley Goebel. They stared down at me with knives in their eyes. I felt myself slipping and when I looked down I saw that frostbite had turned my fingers the blue of glacial ice. I tried to pull myself up to the top and slowly, one at a time, my fingers fell off my hands and tumbled down into the swirling snow. It didn't hurt at all. I tried to hold on with my thumbs, but they too snapped like icicles and fell away, and I plummeted back into the blizzard. For a moment everything went dark, then I was lying on my back in a snowbank and the sun shone brilliantly into my eyes. I made it, I thought. And then a man wearing a ski mask crouched down over me. And I couldn't move. Ice had formed around me, trapping me in the ground. Something glittered in the man's hand.
'Paul,' Gavin whispered urgently, shaking me awake. 'Time to go.'
I made guttural noises, opened my eyes, lifted my head. I was cocooned in my sleeping bag, fully dressed, with only a razor-narrow slit open to let in the thin subzero air. Thorung High Camp, I remembered. That was where we were. Except Jim-Bair-the-American had rechristened it Thorung Death Camp.
'What time is it?' I asked.
'Night time,' he said. 'Dawn in about half an hour. Get your kit together. I'll order you some tea.'
He left. Normally I would have rolled back into the sleeping bag and gotten another hour's sleep. But today was the big day, today we crossed the much-discussed Thorung La. I pulled myself together, put my boots on and assembled my pack by Maglite. The two other occupants of the room still slept. The gravel floor crunched under my feet as I stumbled towards the door and made my way outside. I left the pack against the wall of the long low bungalow and made my way to the outhouse. My breath formed thick clouds in the air. Up above the sky was stuffed full of stars, impossibly clear and bright. Around me was the stark lunar landscape of sixteen thousand feet, lightly dusted by snow. Snow for Gavin at last, hurrah.
I swallowed down three cups of tea, bought three Snickers bars as the day's trail food, filled my water bottle from the High Camp's jerry cans, and we were on our way as dawn began to stain the eastern sky. Gavin made the first snowball of his life and threw it at me. Both his technique and his aim were terrible, and I demonstrated to him
