Alan Hunter - Gently to the Summit

‘He wanted everything, her hand and her fortune. The small matter of his being married could be adjusted quite easily. For a year or two now he’d known that his wife had a lover, and his divorce was a formality which he put in hand directly. His position was unassailable and he revelled in his power. He made no bones about discussing the affair before her son. They were helpless. Their choice lay between Fleece and relative poverty. Any compromise they suggested he brushed insolently aside.

‘That was the situation on Monday, with one significant development: Kincaid was in Caernarvon. He had been seen and recognized by Mrs Askham’s housekeeper. His presence there then may have been fortuitous or it may have been contrived as a flick of the whip, but he was there, and that circumstance gave rise to a desperate plan. Henry Askham would seek him and confide to him the situation. He would offer him an unlimited bribe to declare himself an impostor. Askham sought for him in Caernarvon and was directed to Llanberis, and there discovered that Kincaid had bought sandwiches and had set off again up the Pass. Askham guessed, and guessed wrongly, that Kincaid had gone up Snowdon, and rather than miss him he went up also, taking what he judged to be the same track.

‘You’ve heard his statement. He arrived at the summit a little ahead of the Everest Club party, and seeing them coming he decided to wait in case Kincaid should be among them. Because he was giddy he sat down on the cairn, which had the effect of concealing him, so that neither Heslington nor Fleece were aware of his presence when they arrived. But he saw them, especially Fleece. His hatred flared at the sight of him. To his tormented brain this was part of a plot, Fleece had come there to rendezvous with Kincaid. When Fleece went down to the edge and stood watching he was presumably on the look-out for his man, and Askham would have been less than human if a certain idea hadn’t occurred to him.

‘But there were two things against it. One was Askham’s poor head for heights. I believe he would never have dared to go where Fleece was standing then. The other was the structure of the cairn, which, as you may know, is built of loose rock. It would have been physically impossible for Askham to have got down off it without making a noise and attracting Fleece’s attention. And the distance between them was about forty-five feet, and Fleece was a powerful and heavily built man; so murder was out. I was convinced of that as soon as I had a chance to examine the place.

‘What, then, happened? Askham was left with his original plan to pursue. Kincaid was coming, or so he thought, and with luck he might be intercepted. But by now Askham’s nerves were so tattered that he was unfit for even this course, and after rising to his feet he lit a cigarette in an attempt to smooth them down. Then he took a step forward, and made a clatter. Fleece turned to see Askham standing above him.

‘The sequel is instructive: it was his sense of guilt and nothing else that did for Fleece. Askham had no intention of attacking him, nor could he have done so if he’d wished. But Fleece’s guilt prevented him from seeing it. I imagine he had only one thought: here was a person who he’d driven to extremes, and who was about to act as he himself would have acted. The shock unnerved him. He gave a shout of dismay. He lost his balance, and with a scream toppled backwards.’

Gently broke off, his nice sense of timing warning him that here he should relight his pipe. His authority was felt, for neither the C.C. nor Evans unsettled the spell with a question. From outside came the patter of rain. It was beating insistently on the pavements below. Only just in time had they gone to the mountain, subpoenaing the sun to be a witness…

‘Askham was petrified, but he knew he’d be a fool if he stopped there to explain matters. Forgetting his cigarette-case, which he’d dropped, he made tracks for Llanberis. At Trecastles he told his mother and they agreed between them to keep it quiet, but later he remembered the cigarette-case and the loss of it preyed on his mind. The case, of course, had been Kincaid’s; it had a history of its own. It had been given him by his wife a short time before the expedition. But on the same day, which was his birthday, he’d learned something suspicious about his wife; there’d been a row, he’d returned the case, and she’d taken to using it as a gesture of defiance. Kincaid was disturbed when I showed it him. It concealed a memory which he wanted kept concealed.

‘However, the fact that it had been Kincaid’s suggested a piece of embroidery to Askham. He knew by his own experience that people tended to remember Kincaid. So the next day he drove into Llanberis and reported to the police about seeing Kincaid, giving them the name of ‘Basil Gwynne-Davies’ and an address he’d noticed in Bangor. The result exceeded his expectations; he had intended only to confuse the inquiry. But on the evidence there was nothing we could do except to arrest Kincaid and charge him. And then immediately a fresh danger arose, since we were bound to investigate the antecedents of Kincaid, and so the threat which should have died with Fleece was revived in a second and more alarming form. The Askhams fled from Wales to London, where they consulted their friend, Mr Stanley. They conspired to obstruct what inquiry they could and, in Askham’s case, to lay the ghost of Paula entirely.

‘Again it was he who went one too many. I could credit Mrs Askham, and Stanley’s obstructions only baffled me. But Henry’s gambit I knew for a fake, it was much too obvious and convenient, and once I grasped how it tied in the case began to fall together. But Henry wasn’t going to split, and showing motive wasn’t enough. I had to know and prove before witnesses exactly what happened up there on Monday. So I put him through the reconstruction, which was the only course open to me. And it worked, I’m pleased to say. The rest was merely a matter of production.’

‘So I noticed.’ The C.C. was gruff after his long bout of silence. He looked away, tweaking his moustache with alternate jerkings of his face muscles. ‘But, dash it all, there was a chance there… you needn’t have sunk the lady’s canoe. Once you were certain that it was an accident you might have given it the soft pedal.’

Gently nodded. ‘I did think about it. Though she rated a reprimand. But then I saw it in a different way as I was coming down Snowdon.’

Evans said roundly: ‘Kincaid, man,’ as though he had suddenly solved a problem.

Gently nodded again. ‘Yes, Kincaid, man. We owed him something. I thought his wife.’

He took the noon train for town after spending a Sunday morning with Evans, admiring Caernarvon, which was easy, and submitting to the Welshman’s long post-mortem. Evans had lost, but he bore no grudge for it; he appeared to have forgotten his dimmed hopes of promotion. His object now was to study that case and to dwell on each aspect of the way Gently had handled it. He wanted to learn and he acknowledged his master. He acknowledged the insufficiency of his restless logic. He had seized on the secret that logic was not enough, and he wanted to be logically certain that he was reading it aright. He developed his ideas with a native fervour, and Gently responded to him generously.

At the police station they met the Chief Constable again: another man who had been indulging in meditations on Kincaid. He succeeded in cornering Gently in the superintendent’s office, where after some introductory compliments he came down to the business near to him.

‘You know, I can’t help thinking that our man was a bit simple. Damn it, he might have waited a day before hanging a charge on Kincaid.’

Poor Evans. Gently was glad that the office door was closed between them. He paused before returning an answer and raised his brows in surprised dissent.