The Deadly Space Between (30 page)

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.