Trick of the Dark

by Val McDermid

  'I'm interviewing a couple of the mountain rescue team.' She'd managed to keep that out of the conversation the night before, she was pretty sure. Nadia looked as if she was about to pass out with boredom.

  'Really? They have some sort of unique insight into abnormal psychology?'

  'You'd be amazed,' Charlie said. 'They do have to deal with people in extreme situations. It can be very revelatory.'

  'I suppose you have to manufacture things to keep yourself interested while you're waiting to find out your fate,' Lisa said with a sad smile. 'I know we didn't mention it last night, Charlie, but I am familiar with your situation.'

  Nadia perked up. 'What are you on about? What's Charlie's situation?'

  'I'm temporarily suspended from practising. I have a disciplinary hearing coming up,' Charlie said, wondering momentarily if this was Lisa's way of showing support. If it was, it backfired immediately.

  Nadia's mouth opened and she covered it with her hand. 'Oh my God,' she said. 'I recognise you now. I thought you looked familiar. You're the one who got that bloke off who went on to murder all those other women. God. How do you live with something like that?'

  'Charlie has nothing to reproach herself with,' Maria said, abruptly standing up. 'There's nothing clever or good about helping the prosecution convict an innocent man.'

  'He wasn't very innocent, though, was he? He killed four women. And that's just what we know about,' Nadia said.

  'He did not commit the first murder he was charged with,' Maria said. 'That's what everybody seems to forget.'

  Nadia shrugged. 'But nobody else has been arrested, have they?'

  'For heaven's sake, Nadia. We should stop talking about this,' Lisa said, visibly dismayed at the turn of the conversation. 'Thanks for your kind offer, Maria, but we're planning on making a full day of it. We're going up to Dunvegan Castle.'

  'I'm sure you'll have a lovely time,' Maria said, her voice cool now. 'Charlie, you need to keep an eye on the time, your guys will be here soon.'

  Charlie seized the chance to escape the room. 'I need to get my stuff. Thanks for reminding me. See you girls later.' And she was off, walking briskly out the door and trotting upstairs. She closed the bedroom door behind her with a sense of relief, squeezing her eyelids tight together to keep tears at bay. She felt like her emotions had been hurled into a washing machine on the spin cycle. It had been hard enough when she'd thought her feelings for Lisa were not reciprocated. But now that it seemed something significant was coming back at her, it was harder and harder to deal with the situation. The point where she was going to have to make a decision was growing closer. And whichever way she jumped, Charlie knew her present sense of being in hell would be a day at the seaside by comparison.

  The two men sitting in the bar could hardly have looked less alike. One was short and wiry, folded into the chair like a jack-in-the-box waiting for the lid to lift. His wavy hair was black, his beard slightly ginger in the sunlight flooding into the bar. He had the raw-boned look of the Gaelic Celt, blue eyes dark and darting under a ridge of black brows. The other was much bigger, a Viking of a man with broad shoulders and chest. His red-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, his thick beard a shade darker. His long legs sprawled carelessly at angles to each other. With their weathered skin and hundred-yard stares, they could have been any age from thirty to fifty. Charlie had no doubt that these were the men she was due to meet.

  The small dark one jumped to his feet as she approached. The other, more languid, just leaned forward. 'Dr Flint?' the small one said, sticking his hand out to shake.

  Charlie took it. 'That's right. You're Calum Macleod?'

  He shook his head. 'No, I'm Eric Peterson. Everybody thinks I'm the local, but he is.' Now he'd spoken more than two words, it was evident that he came from much further south. Cumbria, at a guess. He jerked his head towards the other man. 'He's Calum.'

  Calum nodded. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said, the soft sibilance of the islands evident.

  Charlie ordered the Cokes they wanted and more coffee for herself then sat down. They went through the usual ritual of small talk, then after the drinks arrived with a plate of homemade shortbread, she took out her recorder. 'I hope you don't mind,' she said as they attacked the sugar-dusted biscuits. 'My memory isn't what it used to be.'

  'You and me both,' Eric said. 'My wife says it's the drink, but I say it's because I've hit my head too often climbing. She says I've always been soft in the head. No respect, these local girls. You don't bring them up obedient enough, Calum.' He grinned, clearly used to being the cheerful life and soul of the party. Calum said nothing, settling for a delicate sip of his Coke to wash down the biscuit.

  'So, I want to talk to you about what happened on Friday, 18 February 2000. Am I right in thinking you both remember that day?'

  'I remember every rescue,' Eric said eagerly. 'I love to climb, but there's an extra rush that you get from going out there in extreme conditions, knowing somebody's life could depend on how well you do your job. I don't want to sound big-headed about it, but we do save lives out there, and that's a buzz like nothing else.'

  Calum cleared his throat. 'You always remember when the mountain takes a life,' he said, his voice a soft, deep rumble.

  'Well, yeah. Of course. It doesn't always have a happy ending. But we still got somebody off that day. And the lass that died' - the shrug of one shoulder - 'well, she was dead before we were called out. Nothing we could have done about that. These mountains, they're not to be taken lightly, you know.'

  'When did you get the call-out? Do you remember?'

  Eric looked at Calum, who nodded. 'I'm a teacher,' he said. Charlie struggled to get her head round that one. 'It was after the bell went. So, four o'clock. It's never good that late in the winter. You know it's going to be dark before you get on the hill.'

  'Do you remember where the call came from? Was it the hotel here? Or the emergency services?'

  'I never took the call. I just got a page.'

  Eric bounced in his seat. 'I never took the call either. That was Gordon Macdonald. He was the on-call person for the team back then.'

  'Is he still around? Could I talk to him, maybe?'

  'He's dead,' Calum said. 'Car accident on the A82. Head on into a supermarket delivery lorry. Hellish.'

  'Oh. I'm sorry to hear that,' Charlie said.

  'But I remember Gordon talking about the call-out, later that night when we were all in the bar. He said it was peculiar. When we get a call, it's nearly always one of three sources.' Eric counted them out on his fingers. 'One: the emergency services get a call from the climber's mobile. Two: one of the other people in their party worries when they don't make a rendezvous. Three: the hotel or guest house or pub where they've left a climb plan and an ETA. But he said the call-out was wrong. It was a woman. She said she was calling from the hotel, here.' He waved his arm to encompass the bar. 'But we know all the staff here, and it wasn't anybody Gordon knew. She said she'd had a call that two of their guests were in difficulty on the In Pinn - that's the Inaccessible Pinnacle on the summit of Sgurr Dearg,' he added helpfully.

  'She knows that,' Calum said. 'Gordon was uneasy about the call. So he phoned back. Only nobody put their hand up to phoning us. But right enough, they had a couple of guests who'd set off for the In Pinn that morning. So Gordon thought we should take a look.'

  Eric picked up the story. 'It was a shit night. Really cold, snowing on and off. There was a wind coming off the north east like a knife. Not a night when we could call out the chopper. But we know the ground, so we made good time. It's not easy, looking for a couple of climbers on a mountainside in the dark and the snow. But the route up the mountain's reasonably obvious so we reckoned we were in with a shout if they were still on the hill. You'd be amazed how often we get called out for people that are sitting in some pub somewhere nursing a malt because they couldn't be bothered to get back to where they said they'd be.'

  'We came up on the lassie a couple of
hundred feet down from the main summit of Sgurr Dearg. She was in a bad way.'

  'That's right. Shock, hypothermia setting in, and dragging one leg behind her like a useless lump of meat,' Eric said. 'We got the thermal wrap round her smartish, because obviously we needed to find out where her climbing partner was. We'd gone out for two women, but we'd only found the one. She was in a helluva state, but she told us right off. She'd had to cut the rope.' Even Eric shut up as he contemplated that.

  'We all understood,' Calum said. 'It's something you think about. If you don't climb, you can't understand.'

  'The way she explained it, it made sense,' Eric added. 'She didn't have any choice. Cut the rope or you both die. Cut the rope and one of you has a chance. To tell you the truth, we all felt for her. We knew she'd get stick, but there was nothing else she could have done. Not and lived.'

  'Were you surprised that they were up there in those weather conditions?' Charlie asked.

  Eric's face twisted into an expression of concentration. 'Not really. The forecast hadn't been that bad. The weather definitely closed in much worse than we expected that afternoon. And what you have to remember is that if you love to climb in snow and ice, there is nothing in the UK to match the Cuillin ridge in winter. Nothing. It's the biggest challenge in British winter climbing. The nearest you can get to the Alps.'

  'So you didn't think it was selfish? Out of order, going up in weather like that, knowing that if anything went wrong it was putting you guys at risk?' she persisted.

  'If you think like that, all climbing's selfish,' Calum said. 'I wouldn't quarrel with their choice that day.'

  'They got unlucky,' Eric said. Out came the fingers again. 'One, the weather turned against them. Two, the lass Kathy, she slipped on the narrowest bit of a narrow ridge. Three, she hit her head so she couldn't help herself. Four, the other lass couldn't find an anchor for the rope. And five, the other lass dropped her backpack with all her gear on board so she had no equipment to get them out of the mess they'd gotten into. They were - forgive my French - fucked every which way. I tell you, we all pray we never have a day like that on the hill.'

  'So you knew even then there was no point in looking for Kathy Lipson that night?'

  Calum gave her an incredulous look. 'We knew she'd gone the best part of three thousand feet down a mountain. What do you think?'

  'Our priority was getting the other lass off the hill and to hospital. You look to the living before you think about the dead,' Eric said. 'But we knew we'd be out there at first light. You don't want civilians stumbling across a body. Believe me, you don't want to think about what somebody looks like after a fall like that.'

  He was right. Charlie absolutely didn't want to think about it. 'You said that Jay Stewart had dropped her backpack. Do you know how that happened?'

  'She was spread-eagled across a ridge in the middle of a blizzard supporting another woman's entire body weight. The pack slipped through her fingers as she was trying to get access to her gear. Like Eric said, bad luck. Sometimes when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong.' Calum stared gloomily into his Coke, then knocked it back. 'Like dominoes.'

  They all sat locked in glum silence for a long moment, then Eric looked around expectantly. 'You think they'd bring us some more biscuits if we asked?'

  Charlie went off in search of more biscuits. She wasn't finished yet and if shortbread was what it took, she'd make sure they got it. When she returned, Calum was on his feet, examining an old map of the island that was framed on the wall. 'They're bringing some more,' she said. 'Did you ever find Jay's pack?'

  'We found it before we found the body,' Eric said. 'It burst when it hit the ground. There were cams and hexes and nuts scattered all round, a split water canteen, all the usual stuff.'

  'What about her phone?'

  Calum turned back. 'It was near the backpack. Busted to smithereens. It looked like it had come flying out on the way down.'

  'That's right,' Eric said, excited at having his memory jogged. 'She said it had been in a side pocket on its own.' He caught Charlie's look. 'What? You thought we wouldn't ask about a phone? We're not new to this, you know. Out here, it's a bit like the Wild West. The cops can't be everywhere so we've got to weigh in and do what we can to help. So we ask questions if there's anything needs explaining. And Gordon was still trying to make sense of the funny phone call. He wondered if she'd maybe called a pal or something. But she said no, she'd lost the phone before she could use it. So we were none the wiser.'

  She could have been lying, Charlie thought. Maybe she did make a phone call. But if you're hanging off a mountain with your business partner on the end of a rope, who are you going to call? 999 was the obvious answer. Charlie couldn't imagine calling anything else. Even if you couldn't do that with a sat-phone, which she didn't know anything about, surely there was an operator you could contact? And a sat-phone operator wouldn't need to pretend to be calling from a hotel on Skye. Nothing made sense, and all Charlie's instincts told her that when nothing made sense, something was going on that shouldn't be.

  'I know this is maybe going to sound like a strange question. But apart from the phone call, was there anything about what happened that day that seemed unusual to you?'

  Eric frowned and munched another biscuit while he thought about it. Calum chewed on a fingernail. 'No,' Eric said at last. 'They were just really, really unlucky.'

  'Except one thing was lucky,' Calum said.

  'What do you mean?' Eric said. 'It was a perfect storm. All the crap came at them together. I don't see how you can say they got lucky.'

  'I didn't say that. I said one thing was lucky.'

  Charlie decided it was time to step in. 'What was that, Calum?'

  'It was lucky the knife wasn't in the backpack, wasn't it?'

  5

  Sunday

  Sunday morning was infinitely better than the one before. Thanks to some deft footwork, Charlie had avoided Lisa until last thing in the evening. Maria had returned to the hotel at lunchtime, bubbling with delight at the beauty of the landscape. Meanwhile, Charlie had managed to book a table for dinner at another hotel whose restaurant was said to be in the top twenty in Scotland. After lunch, they went for a walk up Glen Brittle, following in the footsteps of Jay and Kathy ten years before. Even though they barely climbed a few hundred feet, they had a sense of the challenge and the grandeur of the Cuillin ridge. 'I can see how people want to come back again and again,' Maria said. 'Places like this, they get under your skin.'

  'We'll come back another time,' Charlie promised. 'When all this is behind us and I'm practising again. We'll rent a cottage and walk in the mountains and eat fabulous meals and sleep like babies.'

  Maria laughed. 'And they say romance is dead. I was thinking we could make mad passionate love in front of a roaring fire.'

  Charlie put an arm round her and hugged her. 'That too.' She wished she could have spoken without ambivalence, but until she could resolve her feelings for the two women in her life, Charlie would have to resign herself to that.

  When they got back to their hotel room, Charlie sprawled on the chaise longue and revealed her plans for the evening. 'It's quite near so we don't have to set off for an hour or so.'

  'We could go down to the bar for a drink.'

  Again, that ambivalence. Charlie longed to see Lisa, but the stress of being in the same room with her and Maria was impossible to negotiate with equanimity. The bar for a drink was the last thing she wanted, with the prospect of Lisa and Nadia returning at any minute. 'No, I'll be driving and I want to save myself for some really good wine with the meal. Besides . . .' Charlie stretched to reach her backpack. 'For some reason, I've been avoiding this. But I think I've got to the point where I have to deal with it.' She pulled a book from her bag and waggled it at Maria. 'Unrepentant, by Jay Macallan Stewart.'

  Maria pulled off her sweater and began to undo her trousers. 'I know why you've been avoiding it,' she said.

  'Why? And by the way,
I meant it. I need to read, Maria. And you're distracting me.'

  Maria poked her tongue out at Charlie. 'This is not for your benefit. If you're going to read, I'm going to soak my weary muscles in the bath. The reason you've not buckled down to Jay's book is very simple.'

  'I thought I was the psychiatrist round here? What's the reason?'

  Maria slipped out of her trousers. 'You're scared you'll like her.'

  'You think?'

  'I do. Because if she charms you with her misery memoir, you're going to struggle to carry out Corinna's mission to split up her and Magda. You know it's true.'

  Charlie, who hadn't really considered why she was finding lots of excuses not to read Jay's book, couldn't fault Maria's reasoning. It was reassuring to be known so well. 'You could be right,' she said.

  By the time Maria emerged from the bathroom, Charlie was midway through Jay's early years, notable for the quantity of drugs that seemed to have flowed through the bodies of her mother and a succession of hopeless boyfriends. It was a disturbing narrative of a downward spiral seen through the uncomprehending eyes of a child. Jay's mother Jenna had started off as a nice middle-class girl who had been carried away by the spirit of the sixties. The Isle of Wight festival in 1968 had changed the path of her life, swinging her out of the gravitational field of Home Counties suburbia into the orbit of musicians, artists and writers.

  It had probably been quite cool to begin with, Charlie thought. But the drugs became more important to Jenna than anything else, and gradually, the quality of her company diminished. The rock stars and published poets and exhibited artists had moved onwards and upwards and she'd fluttered downwards. By the time Jay had been born in 1974, Jenna had been living in a squat and working on a stall in the fledgling Camden Market.

  They'd moved from place to place, from city to country and back again. From the few photos, it was clear that Jenna had been a beauty, even ravaged by the drugs. Jay's childhood milestones had been the succession of different men and different places to live. She'd never been enrolled in school but nobody ever came looking for her because Jenna had never registered her birth. Jay recounted one conversation she'd overheard in which the latest boyfriend had been berating Jenna because she didn't get child benefit like the other mothers in the caravan of travellers they were with at that point. 'That's a small price to pay for freedom,' Jenna had said. 'My child can float free in the world. She has no shackles to the state.'