Jon Evans - Dark Places

What if it had been one of us?

I could think of three candidates. Three people I had traveled with, gotten drunk and gotten high with, cooked with, sweated blood with, who I had seen sick and angry and embarrassed and ecstatic and giddy, who I had spent nearly every day with for four solid months; three people I could still envision as killers. Lawrence Carlin. Michael Smith. Morgan Jackson.

If true this would explain a lot. Especially if the same person who killed Laura had killed Stanley Goebel as well, if Goebel had been a victim of the copycat — call him The Bull II — rather than the original killer. That would explain why he came after me on the trail. Because he knew me and I knew him. He feared I had seen him in Letdar or seen his name on one of the checkpoint ledgers. I wished I'd looked at those more closely. So it also explained why he switched to using Stanley Goebel's name and passport.

Of course there were still a few holes in the theory. First of all, how would he have known the vital detail of the Swiss Army knives when apparently nobody knew this but the South African police, who weren't telling? And if Laura's death had been a crime of passion, which I thought possible — Lawrence, in particular, had had a brief fling with her early on in the trip, before she and I came together, and I thought had never really gotten over it — why would the same person have gone on to kill a total stranger in Nepal two years later? And what were the odds against me stumbling onto a crime committed by the same man?

Actually those odds weren't as awful as they first looked. It is an enormous planet out there, people who say "it's a small world" obviously haven't seen much of it, but the backpacker trail makes up a pretty small and navigable part. It wouldn't be the first time I stumbled into someone I knew. When in Thailand last year I bumped into a girl I knew from England on Thanon Khao Sanh, and the very next day met a guy I'd traveled with briefly in Zimbabwe. The Lonely Planet is a shrunken planet. And it shrinks even further depending on the type of traveler you are. Anyone who spends four months on a truck in West Africa is an adventure traveler, who likes struggle and challenge, prefers doing over seeing, and is too poor to buy their own Land Rover. There are a finite number of places in the world that suit the budget adventure traveler, and the Annapurna Circuit is one of them.

All of which might lead me to The Bull II, if he existed. There weren't many places around here for an adventure traveler. The drunken beach-bum culture here in Kuta Beach? Definitely not. Culture and dances and art in Ubud, a little further north? No. In fact the only Bali possibility mentioned in my SFO-purchased Indonesia: a travel survival kit was a live volcano named Gunung Batur, in the middle of the island. You could climb to the top of it and fry eggs on the hot rocks there. I thought that might be exactly the kind of thing The Bull II was into. Because I thought he and I might be into exactly the same kind of thing.

Not counting killing random strangers, of course.

It was three days after the cookies-and-minefield incident that Laura and I finally came together. The night Robbie got lost in the desert. Damn fool went for a walk and got caught out by sunset. Then, instead of staying where he was, he kept walking, trying to find us. It was an hour before Emma, who was at that point Robbie's girl, realized he hadn't gone for a nap. We all rushed out to look for him before Hallam could stop us and impose some kind of organization on the search.

Our camp that night was in the shelter of a U-shaped sand dune. Most of the others ran out towards the mouth of the U calling Robbie's name, but Laura and I, who had been spending a lot of quietly nervous time near each other in the previous three days, slogged up the dune, sliding two steps back for every three steps forward, until we reached the top. Our idea had been that maybe he had his flashlight with him and we could see him from the top.

The moon was nearly full that night, which in the Sahara means you can easily read a newspaper by its light. We could see a long way. But there was nothing but the desert wind, so fierce that contrails of sand were visible six inches above the dune, so loud that it swallowed up our cries of Robbie's name as soon as they left our lungs. Laura raised her hand to protect her face from the wind, and without even thinking about I stepped between her and the wind and put my arms around her protectively. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, and held me tight.

"I hope he's okay," she said. I could barely hear her over the wind's howl.

"He'll be fine," I said. "He'll stop when he realizes he's lost. Hallam will find him."

A few seconds passed, and then I lowered my head those final two inches and kissed her for the first time.

It was the headlights that interrupted us, I don't know how much time later, the headlights of the Tuareg Land Rover that had miraculously stumbled across Robbie wandering through the desert five miles from our camp and, even more miraculously, tracked us back to this particular sand dune. After returning our lost sheep they camped beside us, and Laura and I spent most of the rest of that night beneath their big canvas tent. It was one of my favourite memories, sitting with my arms wrapped around her as we and the Tuareg nomads in their sky-blue robes sat around their fire, sang songs from our respective homelands, and ate grilled chunks of a dead lamb that stared at us accusingly from the back of their Land Rover. It was a good night. It might have been the best night of my life.

Three suspects.

Lawrence Carlin because he had carried an ill-concealed torch for Laura long after she dumped him, and he was a menacing figure we had nicknamed the Terminator only half in jest, so tightly coiled that it was easy to imagine him snapping.

I thought maybe we had seen him snap, just the once. In Nouadhibou, during a long hot hungry wait outside the passport office, a cloud of a flies so thick they actually obscured the sun descended on the truck. They didn't bite, but they crawled all over us, feasting on our sweat, buzzing and twitching. It was enough to drive you mad.

It drove Lawrence into a killing frenzy. A quiet, emotionless, expressionless killing frenzy that must have lasted ten minutes. He stalked barefoot up and down the truck, smashing flies into unidentifiable blotches with his sandals, paying no attention to the catcalls which slowly diminished into a silence which was both awed and a little bit frightened. Under those circumstances, believe me, ten minutes is a very long time. It was funny, yes; we often mocked him about it afterwards, yes; but it was also genuinely scary.

For a long time he didn't like me. That was understandable. From his point of view, I had stolen his girl. Their breakup had been amicable enough, and they were only together two weeks, and he was always polite to both of us, but I often sensed cold hostility beneath the courtesy, and on several occasions I noticed angry glances directed at me. Little things. Perfectly understandable. But still.

In Cameroon, after her death, he and I became close friends. Grim friends, joined by mutual grief and shock, but close friends all the same. The others helped me, supported me, those nights I got desperately drunk and maudlin; but Lawrence actually joined me. Some nights he seemed as torn up and despairing as I did.

Maybe because he had a guilty conscience.

Michael Smith, despite all his charm, because of an incident that occurred in Ouagadougou, popularly known as Wagga, the capital city of Burkina Faso, quite a pleasant place despite being the fifth poorest country in the world. He and I were walking down the road, a pathetic-looking small boy scurrying alongside us, trying to sell us a model car made of meshed wire. You saw them all over, small boys with model cars. As by this time both of us were old Africa hands we ignored the small boy completely. Until we turned a corner. The small boy, on the outside of our turn, had to sprint to keep up up with us, looking up at us and pleading for our custom in soft broken French as he ran. He never saw the oncoming car.