Jon Evans - Dark Places

The next day I could walk and I trekked through the Arizonian desert landscape, in the shadow of Dhaulagiri, the world's seventh highest mountain, to the medieval village of Kagbeni at the end of the remote Mustang Valley. The following day I walked along the nearly-dry bed of the Kali Gandaki River to the town of Jomsom, even bigger than Manang. I did not want to trek any more, and Jomsom had an airstrip. I bought a plane ticket with Buddha Air. The next morning I made my way through the Kafkaesque chaos of the Jomsom airport, where they had demolished the old building and not really gotten around yet to constructing another. I boarded a prop plane, overloaded with bags of the apples grown around Jomsom. The engines were so loud they gave us cotton wads to stick in our ears. The plane carried me from the Wild West desert of Jomsom, over conifer forests, and deciduous forests, and hills terraced into rice paddies, and subtropical jungle, and back to the city of Pokhara, five days' worth of trekking compressed to twenty-five minutes. My Annapurna Circuit was complete.

Trekking is wonderful but it was good to be back in civilization. Pokhara's Lakeside district was like Disneyland for backpackers; nothing but restaurants, bars, bookstores, souvenir shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, trekking outfitters, massage parlors, music stores, banks, camera shops, travel agencies, Internet cafes, and about a hundred lodges armed with running water and reliable electricity. I could have parachuted into Lakeside naked but for my passport and ATM card and been fully outfitted for travel within 24 hours.

I went to the Sacred Valley Inn, took a room, repossessed the gear I had deemed inessential-for-trekking from their locker, and had a long hot shower. I ate pepper steak and drank wine and read a two-day-old International Herald Tribune at the Moondance Cafe, which wouldn't have looked out of place in any First World country, except for its affordable prices. I traded my copy of War And Peace and a hundred rupees for a bootleg copy of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. I took my trekking pictures in to a camera shop to be developed.

And then I continued my investigation.

I began with the police, and as I expected, they were no help. They had not heard that a man had died on the trail. They would not contact their compatriots in Manang to see if there were any new developments. I had best wait for the official report to be filed in Kathmandu before doing anything. It wouldn't be more than a few months.

After that I called the Canadian Embassy in Kathmandu.

"Welcome to Canada, bienvenue au Canada," a disembodied voice said. "For service in English, press one. Pour service en francais, appuyez sur le deux. "

I pushed nothing, having learned long ago the best way to avoid voice-mail mazes. After a little while a telephone began to ring and a real live woman answered it.

"Hello?" she said.

"Hello," I said. "My name is Paul Wood. I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm calling from Pokhara. I'm calling because I want to know if you've been told that a Canadian man named Stanley Goebel was found dead while trekking in the Annapurna district."

"One moment please," she said, as if she got this kind of call all the time and was going to transfer me to an extension specifically reserved for death confirmations. I went into the limbo of hold.

"Hello?" a man said eventually. "Can I help you?"

I repeated my spiel and went into hold one more time.

"Hello?" a different man said. "Are you calling about Stanley Goebel?"

"Yes I am," I said.

"And who are you?"

"My name is Paul Wood, I'm a Canadian citizen."

"And what is your interest in the matter?"

"I found the body."

There was a pause as the man absorbed that. Then he said "Well, thank you for calling in, but the Nepali government has already informed us about Mr. Goebel. His family has been notified and his body is on its way home."

"What exactly did the Nepali government inform you of?" I asked.

I think he could hear the edge in my voice, and he began to erect a bureaucratic wall to hide behind. "Their final report has not yet been filed," he said cautiously, "but they have informed us on an informal basis that Mr. Goebel regrettably committed suicide."

"Is that so. Well, I'm calling to inform you that that is regrettably not the case. Mr. Goebel was murdered."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Murdered," I repeated. "Violently killed. Somebody smashed his head in and stuck knives in his eyes, and the Nepali police are lying through their teeth about it because they can't be bothered to deal with a murder. I have pictures that prove this."

"Mr… what was your name again?"

"Paul Wood."

"Mr. Wood," he said. "I've read the Nepali report myself and it quite definitively states that Mr. Goebel obviously killed himself, and it makes no mention of any knives… "

"I am the person who found the body," I said, speaking each word slowly and distinctly. "I'm telling you that the Nepali report is a pack of lies."

"I see. Mr. Wood, obviously I can't accept those claims unless they are confirmed by the Nepali police."

"The police don't want to do anything with it."

"Mr. Wood… Obviously we appreciate that you're calling in to help us with this tragic case, but if you don't have any evidence of any of what you're saying then there's very little we can do. The only official document here is the Nepali report, and it says quite clearly that the death was a suicide."

"The only official document? " I said incredulously. "That's what you care about? Whether or not I have official documents? I've got pictures, and they show beyond question that he was murdered."

"Now, of course if you'd like to get in touch with the Nepali police to aid them with their investigation, I can put you in touch with some of the relevant officials who I'm sure would be very interested in whatever photographs you have. As I said, their report isn't final yet, and can still be amended — "

"What's your name?" I demanded.

After a long pause he said, very grudgingly, "My name is Alan Tremblay."

"All right. Mr. Tremblay, I have just told you that a fellow Canadian citizen was murdered in cold blood up there, that the Nepali police are covering it up, and that I have photographs that prove this. Do you understand that that is what I was saying?"

"I understand, but our policy is to accept the Nepali government's official report and investigation instead of poorly substantiated phoned-in claims of murder from random travelers."

"You understand fine but you just don't give a shit, is that it?"

"Mr. Wood, I think that is completely uncalled for. I am perfectly willing to connect you with some Nepali police officials if you would like to assist them in their — "

I hung up.

I was still fuming when I returned to the 1-Hour Photo Development shop and picked up my pictures. I stopped at a cafe and bought a Coke, a little surprised that my addiction to lemon tea had abruptly vanished now that the trek was over, and sipped from it as I flipped through the pictures. Monkeys, rickety bridges, towering waterfalls, tiny villages, prayer wheels, mana walls, mule trains, mountains mountains and more mountains, fellow-trekkers, me upon the Thorung La. And those three shots of the dead body, a little overexposed. And my shot of the Muktinath ledger. It had come out perfectly and I could make out the Goebel entry very clearly.

A brainwave hit me and I paid for my Coke and went to the Pokhara office of the Annapurna Conservation Authority. We had had to sign in here to get our trekking permits. The office was quiet and the man behind the desk didn't mind if I looked through their ledger to see when my friends had begun their trek. I flipped back through two weeks of entries and began to pore over them. And found Stanley Goebel's entry, in neat handwriting, only a half-dozen places ahead of my own. He must have stood practically next to me in line that morning.