Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  I turned the last page over and back to the beginning and sat staring at the interior picture of the living room, Anna’s show-piece in white wood and hessian with an incredible, intricate bronze-in-cream Danish rug laid exactly one-third of the distance from the fireplace to the far wall. It’s the kind of room where all the cushions are set at symmetrical angles and the magazines are bought for their front covers alone. That room apart, it’s not a bad place to live. If I had to live in the city again, I’d give quite a lot to live there.

  ‘You can see why he doesn’t want to move,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm.’ She was staring over the balcony, flexing her fingers, one at a time. She did that a lot, that winter.

  ‘Why doesn’t Andy buy her out?’

  ‘C’mon, Kells, the lad’s a post-grad. He’s on eight grand a year. That wouldn’t pay the estate agents, never mind the bank.’

  True enough. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Not unless I won the lottery.’

  ‘Or if you sold Otago Street.’ She bought half the building we had lived in as students just after I moved out. I never asked where she got the money although I would put a bet on Mad Mhaire Culloch as the likely source. It didn’t cost that much. The house price balloon hadn’t taken off in those days. By the time Eric was selling up, prices were heading for escape velocity and Otago Street was somewhere up there in stationary orbit.

  ‘Have you had it valued recently?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t, no.’ She looked at me, her head on one side, considering. ‘Maybe I should.’

  ‘Would you cope sharing with Eric?’

  ‘If anybody.’

  ‘Eric and Andy?’

  ‘It’s a big place.’ She smiled, flexed all her fingers in one go. ‘I expect we’d manage.’

  It took four days to find a buyer for the tenement in Otago Street and another three to sort the contracts with Anna. Two weeks after that, Lee moved in and Andy was invited to follow. He dithered and delayed, moved half of his stuff into the basement bedroom and then didn’t quite follow through. Lee and Eric stacked his books on the bed out of the way and fixed some bolt-on climbing holds on to the wall, next to the en suite shower. Andy finished his Ph.D. and moved, books and all, to a new job at MIT in time for Easter. Lee and Eric took out the shower and set up an angled bend-crete wall in the corner with a simulated jamming crack and a thirty-degree overhang near the top. Not long after that, they took out Anna’s oatmeal carpet and put in wall-to-wall crash mats instead. At Hogmanay the next year, they made a joint resolution that no lover on either side should stay for more than three consecutive nights. They both keep their resolutions.

  We let ourselves in the front door. The air in the hallway hung warm and still, mid-day, mid-summer heavy. Lee hit a switch on the wall and the air conditioning kicked in: a soft flutter of electric fans in the background. A pile of medical junk mail littered the floor. His and hers, two matching sets. Lee pulled an airmail envelope from the heap and ripped it open with her index finger. I sorted the rest, checking the dates on the postmarks as I went. ‘When did you leave on Friday morning?’

  ‘Hmm?’ She didn’t look up. ‘Normal time. Six. Thereabouts.’

  ‘Before the post arrived?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘So if anything came in for you while Eric was here, where would he put it?’

  ‘On the table in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’ll take a look.’

  ‘If you like …’ She was miles away. Nepal, I would say, at a guess. She folded the letter across and across and shoved it into a back pocket. ‘Kells … do you want to check downstairs? I ought to feed the cat. I’ll follow you down in a minute or two.’

  ‘You sure?’ Ten minutes ago, nothing mattered but finding his bike.

  ‘I’m sure.’ The line was back between her eyes, short and deep, as it was last night in the morgue. A singular index of stress.

  The stairs to the basement go down from one corner of the kitchen. It’s dark down there, an optical contrast to the wide windows and well-placed lights of the rest. I made my way down into the gloom, felt my way into the corridor, shoved open the sliding door on my right and hit a switch. The workshop flared into life. This place, of all the rooms in the house, was never Anna’s. Eric set it up the year they first moved in and Lee joined him later, by invitation. You can count the Christmases they’ve been here by the tool sets ranged around the bench. A set of chisels glimmered on the far wall; a lathe stood underneath them, bolted on to the four-inch oak of the bench; a butane cylinder sat in the corner with a rack of nozzles off to one side. An arc-welder huddled squat in the shadows, complete with gloves and mask. Eric’s plumbing kit cluttered the doorway, thrown in after an emergency change of washers. Just beyond it, a motorbike sat shrouded under a dust sheet. I stepped over the tool kit and lifted the edge to look. It was a Ducati, glossy and black and six inches shorter than any bike Eric ever rode. Lee Adams is five foot one. Her bike is suitably small. She came up behind me. I lifted the sheet higher.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Mine.’

  A second dust sheet hung draped over a vice on the bench. There was no second bike. ‘Would he leave it anywhere else? Out in the back garden, maybe?’

  ‘It would invalidate the insurance if he did.’

  ‘We ought to look, all the same.’

  ‘If you like.’ She was already in the corridor. I took a quick look into the shower and followed her into the climbing room, the place that was once Anna’s third bedroom and is now a verrucose cave. Artificial climbing holds in grey-green plastic stud every flat surface like malformed stalactites. Long, thin, flat ones mimic cliff edges. Smaller, rounder ones with cutaway centres act as limestone finger-holds. The smallest and most rounded function as pebbles, although they’re never as hard to pull up as the real thing. All of them come off and go on again with a twist or two of an Allen key. The pattern of the routes changes with the months and the seasons but at any point in time and from any point on the perimeter, Lee and Eric can climb up the wall, across the ceiling and down the other side without ever touching the floor. At my best, when I’m feeling fit, I can go all the way round the walls. On the day I can climb to the top of the bend-crete overhang without falling off, I will take off my boots and retire.

  Lee stopped just inside the door and started sorting through the ropes and the racks, the crampons and the ice-axes and the spare kit bags that hung from pegs along the wall. I sat down on a mat in one corner and watched her. A long, smooth hold pushed into the small of my back. A fan flickered on the opposite wall, chopping daylight into bite-sized portions. A haze of climbing chalk filtered upwards, pulled on visible currents of air, swirling in a soup of ancient sweat and perishing rubber. With my eyes closed, I can imagine this place on a Thursday evening in the winter: a place to escape to after work, away from the dreich December rain. Eric bolting a new route on the wall beside the door. Lee falling from the overhang because her fingers still can’t quite take the weight of a one-handed pull-up. Dee, the learner, sliding off a simple rounded hold and lying splayed out on the crash mats, cursing and laughing in a string of breathless Irish oaths. Sarah pushing all the limits to get across the roof in one go. Sarah, who is now in Nepal and who writes letters to Lee that bring back the line between her eyes. I will hear about that. Later, when the line is gone.

  ‘He’s taken his kit.’ Her voice came round twice with the echo of the room, hard and hollow.

  ‘Has he? What’s gone?’

  ‘Two of the 9-mm ropes. His belt. His rack. All of the spare friends.’

  I picked at a scab on the back of my hand. That’s pretty much what we had. ‘Could he fit that lot on the bike?’

  ‘Easily.’

  ‘So we better find where it is then, hadn’t we?’

  And then we can find out if he was carrying it with him. And after that we can try to work out why the hell he wasn’t using any of it when he fell.

  MacDonald arrived wit
h his sergeant just after one. We were still in the climbing room, kneeling on the mats, making an ordered list of what was missing, trying to remember exactly how much of it was in Lee’s car and how much could have gone with Eric. They waited in the kitchen while we finished the inventory, and then they split us into separate rooms for the statements: Lee and the sergeant—a brittle, nicotine-stained red-head in his late thirties—stayed in the kitchen. I followed MacDonald through to Anna’s pristine hell of a living room.

  ‘This is a full list of what’s missing, aye?’ He folded the sheet of paper into the back page of his notes.

  ‘Pretty much.’ I sat on the floor with my back to the armchair. He perched uncomfortably on the edge of the cream leather sofa. I found an old copy of the BMJ on the floor beside the chair and slid it across the floor for a coffee mat. Even now, you wouldn’t want to risk a coffee ring on the polished wood of the table.

  I leant back against the chair, hugging my mug to my chest. It’s a long time since I’ve had a formal conversation with this man, longer still since he took notes of what we said. I looked down at the floor and drew patterns on the carpet with my finger. ‘If I was you,’ I said, ‘I’d concentrate on finding his bike first. It’s a silver-green BMW. Lee will have the model and the registration number. If it’s anywhere, it’ll be in the woods at the top of Ardpatrick Point. At least then we’ll know if he was alive when he got there.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I heard the pen scrawl across the book. ‘You think he might have been dead before he ever reached the cliff?’

  ‘I don’t know. It has to be a possibility. Just because you find a body at the bottom of a wall, doesn’t necessarily mean it was pushed from the top. It’s more likely than him climbing up and falling off on his own.’

  ‘Uhuh?’ He wrote that down, too, or an approximation of it. ‘Dr Adams has estimated you’d need a height of fall of around seventy-five feet to sustain the injuries she found at autopsy. Any more and the impact injuries would have been greater, any less and he might not have died.’ He flipped back a page in his notebook. ‘According to the Rescue, the height of the cliff above the point where the body was found is one hundred and twenty-five feet.’ He looked up, caught my eye and held it. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I think we can say that he definitely wasn’t pushed from the top.’

  I’m not sure if that makes me feel better at all. I looked across at the notebook balanced on his knee. There was a lot more written where that came from. I nodded, once. ‘Go on.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He shrugged, short and heavy. ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to like this. There is no evidence whatsoever of him having been moved after he died. That kind of thing shows up at post-mortem. It’s very difficult to disguise.’

  ‘So then he died where he fell.’

  ‘He did. And he fell roughly half the height of the cliff at that point.’ He moved the coffee out of the way and leant forward, his hands clasped together in front of his knees. The hands were red, raw and over-scrubbed from a morning’s work in the fields. His voice was soft, unsettlingly so. ‘Kellen, did Eric know you and Lee were going to climb that cliff yesterday?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone knew.’

  ‘And how did he feel about it? I mean—he straightened up—‘was he sore that it was you going with Lee and not him? They normally climbed together, did they not?’

  ‘Mostly, yes. She didn’t think it was enough of a challenge for him.’ I feel nervous now, just because of the way he’s speaking. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just wondering if maybe he had something to prove.’ The notebook flipped shut and he dropped it in a pocket. ‘We have a time of death of twenty-four hours before you found him, give or take three either way, so we’ll say he fell sometime on Friday afternoon or early evening. That’s twelve hours before you two got there to start your climb up from the sea.’ He chewed the corner of his thumb and wasn’t keen to meet my eye. ‘It seems an awful coincidence, that’s all. You have a lump of rock no one’s ever been on before and suddenly there’s him climbing the top part twenty-four hours before you two make a stab at the bottom. I’m wondering if perhaps he was making a point?’

  ‘ “Anything you can do I can do better?” ’

  ‘More or less, yes.’

  ‘You never met Eric, did you?’

  ‘Not socially. Should I have done?’

  ‘Probably. If you had, you wouldn’t be saying that.’

  ‘He wasn’t the kind to fall off a rock?’

  ‘He wasn’t the kind to climb up a rock of any kind without someone else standing at the bottom with a good grip on the ropes. If you said it of Lee, I might believe you. She might give it a go if she felt she had something to prove—to herself if not the rest of the world. But not Eric. He didn’t take risks.’

  ‘He’s still dead, Kellen.’

  ‘Clearly.’ I stood up and led the way out of the room. ‘And we need to find out how it happened and why. But mindless stupidity isn’t the answer.’

  ‘They think he was climbing alone and fell off.’ I was back in the kitchen, sitting on a counter nursing a fresh cup of coffee and the beginnings of a headache.

  ‘I know.’ Lee shrugged and opened the windows. Fresh air filtered in, clearing the stale tobacco. The cat came out of hiding and sat on the table, purring his flat-faced purr. ‘They have no reason to think otherwise.’ She filled a jug and began watering the plants along the window ledge. She’s never been into plants, particularly. I suppose this is as good a time as any to change that. ‘With the best will in the world, they can only run on the evidence. MacDonald’s no fool. He’ll keep looking till he finds something. Then he’ll listen.’

  ‘You think there’s something to find?’

  ‘I’m an optimist.’ She flexed the fingers of her spare hand. ‘There has to be something.’

  ‘Right.’ I would like to think I could believe that. He deserves answers, Eric. He would do no less for either of us.

  I finished the coffee. It did nothing to fill in the hollow space growing under my ribs. I was exhausted, sucked dry by the outflowing tides of adrenaline. I don’t think I was alone.

  We were quiet for a while. I searched through the cupboard at my back and found some Ponstan. Lee filled her jug again and knelt by the great clay pot holding Eric’s avocado plant. Her avocado plant. Hers, along with the flat and everything in it. That will take some getting used to.

  She slid her hand in her back pocket and brought it out again, empty.

  ‘I had a letter from Sarah,’ she said.

  ‘Uhuh?’ She had her back to me, but if I had to bet, I’d say the line was back between her eyes. ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘No. She’s got dysentery. She ran out of iodine tablets and now she’s on a drip in the central hospital in Kathmandu.’

  ‘Oh. Shit.’

  ‘Don’t, Kells. I’m not in the mood for it.’

  ‘I wasn’t … I’m sorry.’ I am a medic. She is a medic. Sarah is a medic. All three of us know the benefits of intravenous fluids. We also know the risks of infected needles. I might trust the Western not to contaminate my bloodstream. I would have to be very, very desperate to trust a hospital in Kathmandu. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘No.’ The avocado had more water than it needed for a month. She emptied the rest down the sink and turned the jug upside down on the rack, then dried her hands on a tea-towel and threw it on to the back of a chair. The cat looked up at her face and left. Lee sat down on the floor with her back to the wall and pulled her knees up to her chest. It’s how she sits when she’s hassled. She looked up at me. The line was there.

  ‘When did she write it?’ I asked. There’s a logic, always, to the way she thinks.

  ‘It’s dated the twenty-eighth of May. Postmarked on the thirtieth.’

  Three weeks. ‘So by now she’s better or she’s …’

  ‘… past ever getting better. I know.’

  ‘Sh
e’ll call when she can.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re sure she hasn’t tried already?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘So give it time, huh?’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  She didn’t call. Not that afternoon nor that evening. There was no real reason why she should have called when she hadn’t the day before or the one before that, but we waited and we watched the phone because now we knew and before we didn’t. In theory, we could have put in the six-hour round-trip to Knapdale and gone looking for Eric’s bike, but the momentum had gone out of that one. We didn’t talk about it; just neither of us brought it up. Lee fired up her computer and spent the afternoon sending e-mails to the people she thought needed to know about Eric. I sat in the kitchen reading Dee’s folder of papers and data and trying hard to remember the names and the pain scores and the treatments that, a week ago, were somewhere up there on the list of priorities. Standing on a platform addressing two hundred sceptical colleagues is a fair way to bring on the adrenaline rush; it’s just hard to get wound up about it when there’s been a death in the family.

  At eight, I gave up and put in an hour on the climbing wall. Every muscle I’ve ever climbed with screamed for the first thirty minutes and then relaxed and eased into work. At nine, I wandered into Lee’s room with a fresh mug of tea and found her asleep across the keyboard. At ten, with her safely in bed, I called Nina and told her I was on the way home and found that Dee had been round with a pile of last-minute data and a promise to come back to pick me up at seven o’clock the next morning so we could go over the presentation one last time before the real thing. On the way home, I stopped at the top of the lane and watched the fine silver of the new moon setting in the wake of the sun. I think the pre-talk adrenaline might have kicked in somewhere around then, but I was too tired to take any notice.