The Deadly Space Between Page 22

  There was no room inside the cable car to move in any direction. The windows immediately fogged up with our collective breath. Iso leaned against the outside rail as the thing jerked straight upwards, clearing the road in seconds. As we drew closer to the flesh of the mountain I could see the tracks of animals in the wall of snow. Chamois? Or foxes? What creature could negotiate the precipice with such ease? The surface of the upper cliffs, which, from the terrace below, had appeared to be a single massive sheer wall of rock and ice, now developed cracks, ribs, outcrops and overhangs, folds and crevices, all choked with ice. Someone opened the window and the mountain breathed in upon us. The air was dry and cold.

  We changed cable cars halfway up. The second stage of the ascent was terrifying.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ I said.

  Far below, Chamonix became an orderly arrangement of shaded boxes, like the internal grid in a computer, squares packed neatly around the black circuits. We suddenly crossed the descending line of shadow and found ourselves in the sun among the snow peaks. Spread out before us, the valleys stretching away into France succeeded one another in a white phalanx of snow folds, one after another, each peak drawn with a chisel against the blue. The black needles hardened into giant spires with sloping snowfields coating their foreheads. We looked out at the distant range, astonished by the dramatic alteration in our perspective. We were suspended in air, thousands of feet up. I turned away to examine the rock.

  Then I saw him across the hats and heads of the packed cabin. Roehm was gazing at me steadily. He was dressed as one of the mountaineers. It was broad daylight and full sun. His heavy smooth cheek, his strong face and pale gaze were barely twelve feet away. As the cabin jerked and paused, before bumping up the last stage of the ascent, we stood looking into one another’s eyes. He was wearing a dark red hat with earflaps tied over the top. His black coat was made of thick tweed. I saw hemp ropes coiled about his shoulder. No one else carried those. I tried to take him in at once. I couldn’t. There was too much of him there. He had already occupied too much of me. I gazed into this man’s hooded eyes. Everyone was present on the stage. The curtain had gone up on the action. The play could begin.

  But what was my role? My lines? Who was waiting in the wings, following the text, ready to prompt me now? I stood tongue-tied, gazing at the Minotaur, who returned my stare, unhurried, amused. His gaze was slow, obscene.

  I formulated a curious sentence in my mind, each word carved and precise as if written on a gravestone. This man is my father. And then there it was, engraved on the murky windows behind him. I savoured his dense black presence, at once so enthralling and so monstrous. This man is my father. I tried to make sense of the triangle we formed in the crowded cable car. There she stands, gazing out at the far peaks, looking away from us, into infinity. She does not know that he is here, with us. Roehm stands before the sentence I have written on the windows. The sentence remains, fixed, accusatory, but without concrete meaning and suddenly repeating itself without end. This man, this man. I felt the colour draining away from my face.

  The cabin banged against the buffer, then slid back. We all shouted in fright and protest, tumbling into one another, standing on each other’s boots and equipment. The cable had slipped. We had docked too quickly and the ratchet had been unable to hold us. My elbow gouged Isobel’s ribs and she yelped in pain. The thing swung for a moment over the cement void. Then rose gently back to the platform. I steadied myself and searched for Roehm. The far doors had opened and the frightened group of people were pouring out.

  He must have left in the first wave. I pushed rudely against the intervening mass.

  ‘Attendez!’ One of the skiers resisted my aggressive shove.

  I fell back, rebuked.

  Isobel stamped her boots on the concrete with relief.

  ‘Terrifying ride,’ she said.

  I staggered to the edge of the dissipating mass, searching for the massive shoulders and the dark red hat, but there was no sign of him in the crowds pouring across the bridge of wooden slats over the void.

  ‘Where are you going?’ demanded Isobel.

  I pushed on to the ice tunnel and the outside ledge above the Glacier Géant. The mountaineers had all strode off in that direction. A terrible ice wind rushed up from the huge gulf of white on the inner range. There was a razor ridge protected by a rope handrail leading down to the surface of the glacier. A queue of skiers and snowboarders were waiting to descend. I heard one of the guides saying, ‘If you must fall off, fall to the right. It’s only four hundred feet. If you fall off to the left it’s seven thousand feet down.’

  ‘Why have you come out here?’

  Isobel suddenly noticed the long range of glittering peaks and the gigantic pyramid of the Matterhorn in the distance. She stopped dead and gasped.

  ‘Oh! It’s amazing,’ she cried.

  I snatched her shoulders and forced her to look at me.

  ‘Iso. I’ve seen him. He’s here, with us.’

  * * *

  When we finally got back to the chalet she locked herself in the lavatory and sicked up the little that she had eaten that day. She didn’t say much. She shrivelled into herself. She was exhausted.

  We had searched the platforms and terraces of the Aiguille du Midi, gulping thin, brittle air as we raced up the steps. We hovered in the restaurants. We lurked outside the gents. We even interrogated the guides and staff who manned the cable car. No one had ever seen a man who looked like Roehm. I described his clothes and the equipment he had been carrying. There was only one guide who really listened to us. His opinion was categorical. No experienced mountaineer ever went out onto the ice in winter without a windproof Gore-Tex survival suit. He would never have been allowed past the moniteur on watch at the ridge.

  ‘If he wasn’t carrying an ice axe and crampons then he was under-equipped for the glacier,’ said the guide, clearly anticipating a forced call-out of the emergency services.

  It was no longer clear to me whether we were fleeing from Roehm or hunting him down. Iso’s unhesitating reaction had been the same as mine. He must not escape. We must speak to him. But he had evaded our grasp. Finally we had to accept that we would not find him. Iso sat down on the ice steps in the brilliant glare and wept bitterly. People stared at her and tiptoed past. I offered her hot drinks and handkerchiefs. Nothing could console her. She sat crouched on the ice, the snot running from her nose. We were being stalked, watched. Roehm was toying with us, circling his game, waiting for the moment when his hand was secure, and he could not miss.

  I put my arms around my mother, but she would not be held and she would not be comforted. Her lips were white with cold and fear. Her voice was unstable, gasping, as if she were being strangled.

  ‘He’s waiting. You have to make the first move. He can’t come near you unless you invite him to approach you. You have to be alone. Then he’ll be there. Waiting.’

  I gazed at her, uncomprehending. Her lip curled and the next words emerged in a register that was somewhere between a snarl and a shriek.

  ‘Don’t you see? He hasn’t come back for me. He’s come for you.’

  Morgen, Er oder Du.

  I lit a fire and made her a bowl of herb tea, apple and cinnamon, soaked in honey, to remove the taste of vomit. But she hardly touched it. She sat staring at the burning logs, sunk into blank, red-eyed resignation. I cooked myself some sausages and chips but ate them in the kitchen. For the last four days she had barely let me out of her sight. Now she no longer cared. I stuck the solitary plate in the dishwasher and sat down beside her.

  ‘You tried to kill him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ She shrugged.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poison. Women always kill their lovers in the kitchen. I gave him a cocktail of weedkiller and barbiturates. Masked by gazpacho. I got the idea out of a movie by Almodóvar.’

  ‘And he drank it?�
� I was incredulous.

  ‘He knew what I was doing. He drank it like a toast to me.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he die?’

  ‘God knows. Roehm has the constitution of an ogre in a fairy tale. It probably didn’t even give him constipation.’

  I sat staring at the fire in silence. Then I said, ‘Iso, was it Roehm who came for us? That day when we hid in the coat cupboard at Luce’s house?’

  ‘Roehm? Coming for us?’

  ‘Yes. I was about four or five. I can’t have been older. I saw his shoes through the holes on the bottom of the door.’

  ‘You remember that? No, of course it wasn’t Roehm. I never saw him again until the day of your eighteenth birthday. It began in October. I was buying your present. The new bike. When I came out of the shop he was there, waiting for me. He paid for the bike. He insisted.’

  ‘Then who was that man who came for us?’

  ‘My father. He was coming to take you away from me.’

  Her voice broke and she began to wail. I tried to comfort her. But I saw now that we were trapped. The pattern was almost complete.

  ‘What does he want?’

  She shuddered. I put my arms around her.

  ‘What do we have to do?’

  ‘We have to give up running. He’s beaten us. We can either sit here and wait or we can go out. If we can find somewhere in this ice wilderness where there are no people – then he’ll come.’

  This didn’t make sense to me. I had seen Roehm in the midst of crowds. But she was too weary and distraught to be contradicted.

  ‘Iso, we have to end this.’

  ‘With Roehm, there is no end.’

  I didn’t understand her.

  * * *

  The next day was white and still. We caught the first train up the valley to Montanvert. Iso allowed herself to be led. She was crushed, silent, acquiescent. Her skin was pasty, discoloured. She had dried and shrunk, like the carcass of a fruit consumed. There were children playing on the slatted bench beside her. She ignored them. Other people pressed against the windows, marvelling at the views, craning their necks, lifting their heads towards the sun. She sat mute and unmoving, eaten up with cold. I chafed her icy hands. She let me touch her, indifferent, dry-eyed. She was past hate, past fear. She was waiting for Roehm.

  When we reached the station a small band of Italians followed us down in the red cable car to the ice caves. We found ourselves in their company. They were waving brochures excitedly and longing to see the ice dog that had been carved out of the glacier that year. They looked at Iso sympathetically, as if she had suffered a bereavement. We dropped back. I inspected the soles of Iso’s boots. They were light, with deep treads. We decided to risk the ice.

  At first it was hard going. We sank into loose snow and struggled to move forward, wavering, clutching one another. I was terrified that we would vanish down an invisible crevasse, or that our combined weight would prove too much for the frail snow bridges that we could not even see. We sat perched for a while gasping for breath on a rock that overlooks the sea of ice. The surface was very uneven; we slithered into hollows, then found ourselves facing sheer curtains of vertical ice. All the routes we picked out were blocked; we sank back, baffled, struggling to find another way. At last we crossed the frozen tracks of the skiers descending to Chamonix. The going was then a little steadier. Our boots no longer sank with every step. We trudged across the vast river of ice, pausing, gasping, gazing up at the glittering white peaks, which shone in the sunlight above the clouds. Before us rose the bare face of perpendicular rock. We could go no further.

  Iso sank down upon a boulder and rubbed her face. She had never looked so weary or so old. The glare blinded me. I could not judge the distances. My jacket proved inadequate against a butchering wind which came sweeping down the mountain corridor of ice. We were caught in the passage of the ice winds, which blew the snow into waist-high flurries before us. We were now astride the dragon’s spine where there were no further markers in the snow. I could still see the tiny brown square of the hotel far away on the other side of the valley and the light glinting on the descending red cable cars, swaying down to the ice caves. Our only stable point was a muscle of rock thrown up from the white flesh of the living thing beneath us. I looked out across the white hood of the serpent.

  Suddenly I beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards us with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice among which we had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of a man. And at his side, intent, unswerving, moving across the blown snow with uncanny swiftness, loped the lean grey streak of the wolf. A mist came over my eyes.

  Then Iso’s gloved claw clamped into my arm.

  She was screaming, a high fine note in the emaciated air. The wind blew a flurry of powdered snow directly into my face. I was unable to see anything.

  ‘Look, look, look!’

  Her voice splintered and cracked.

  Beneath us, clearly visible, sightless eyes gazing upwards, was the body of a man, cast in ice. Through the smoky glaze I saw the great white face and the fixed pale stare. It was Roehm. Terrified, I clutched my mother, but I did not look down. I looked out across the sea of ice towards the huge gasping craters on the glacier. But as the wind dropped and the gust of blown snow settled on the blue shadows I had a clear view all the way across the waste spaces of the ice world. And where I had seen a man, a figure greater than a man, there was nothing. There was no one there.

  We stopped the leader of a team of skiers who were swooping down the improvised piste at the centre of the glacier. Their guide had a cell phone and all the emergency numbers in his head. He summoned up the rescue helicopter and the Gendarmerie de l’Haut Montagne. Then he skimmed across the snow to the smooth curve in the frozen river where we had seen the corpse. He stood for a long time peering into the ice. We were surrounded by breathless, curious skiers, anxious to view our discovery, as if we were archaeologists revealing an important find. Isobel was trembling. They helped us back across the white wastes, guiding our steps. I can remember every detail of the voyage out, but our return to Montanvert remains blurred. Dense blocks of white light baffled our sight. Isobel’s fingers bruised my arm, despite my layers of wool and down. I bought her a double cognac in the station buffet. Melted ice ran from our clothes and boots, soaking the chairs, puddling the floors. My mother was wild-eyed and incoherent. She was drinking her second glass of firewater when the police came to take us back down the mountain. She insisted in faltering French that she had to make a déposition. I heard one of the police officers quietly refer to her as ‘la folle’. And she did indeed sound mad once we were seated in the cream offices of the gendarmerie and she began to insist that not only did she know the man in the ice, but that she had killed him. She tried to calm herself and speak in short sentences.

  ‘His name is Roehm. He is the father of my son. And I murdered him.’

  The officer in charge of our case was Inspector Georges Daubert. He was not a local man. He had a thin aristocratic face. He stared at Isobel.

  ‘Vous êtes britannique? Do you have your passport?’

  ‘Excuse me, I need to make a full statement –’ she began.

  He cut her off. ‘First – your passport. Thank you. Date of birth? Full address? Your address here in Chamonix?’

  And so it went on.

  How old is your son?

  Where was he born?

  Vous parlez Français? Vous aussi? Bien.

  Your reason for visiting Chamonix?

  Isobel explained that we were on the run after our failed murder attempts.

  The inspector wrote down ‘tourism’.

  Then he ticked us off for venturing out onto the Mer de Glace in midwinter without a guide, proper clothes or equipment.

  ‘You could be killed. Easily,’ he said in English, ‘it is very irresponsible. Why do you think that you know this body in the ice?’ he asked, genui
nely puzzled.

  ‘We recognized him,’ Iso gasped, tormented by hysterical anxiety at the way we were being treated, as if we were exhibitionists or lunatics.

  ‘And did you recognize him too?’ The inspector swivelled towards me.

  ‘Yes. Well, I thought so. But in fact . . .’ I hesitated, then came out with it anyway, ‘just before my mother cried out I saw him coming towards us. Over the ice.’

  Georges Daubert stared at me. He was clearly wondering how altitude sickness could set in at less than two thousand metres.

  ‘I will arrange a taxi for you. I think that you had better go home. Please leave me a phone number where you can be contacted.’

  As we climbed into the cab we saw the red helicopter descending towards the hospital.

  * * *

  We were called back to the police station two days later, ‘just to clarify a few details’. We took the bus into town. Isobel was convinced that, at last, we would be taken into custody and locked up. She left a message for Françoise with the car keys. But when she declared that she was quite prepared to be arrested and would sign her confession at once Georges Daubert roared at her in irritation.

  ‘Arrest you? Whatever for? Vous êtes cinglé ou quoi?

  ‘Écoutez-moi bien. We now have a positive identification. The body in the ice is that of Gustave Roehm, the Swiss alpinist. He was lost on the mountain in 1786 during the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc. It is a very significant, scientific discovery. The body is very well preserved, most of the fatty tissue has been converted into grave wax. Only the hands have been completely mummified. They are like leather, yellow and hard as a dried cod. He appears to have had enormous hands. We know who he was from the instruments he was carrying. Usually the ice tears corpses into pieces over time. The sheering action of the ice as it flows downhill will dismember them. We find buttons, boots, a jawbone. It is very rare, indeed it is almost miraculous, to find a body intact.