Jon Evans - Dark Places

I climbed onwards, past a gaggle of French package-tourists wielding ski poles who were necessarily moving at the speed of their slowest member, past six-inch iron bars engraved with apparently random numbers that protruded from the thin snow cover to mark the path. The sun had risen behind us and the snow-capped peaks all around us glittered like diamonds. The only colours of the landscape were dark gray earth and white snow. It was astonishingly beautiful, like walking through a Group Of Seven painting. I tromped slowly but steadily in the thick dark gravel, moving at a constant comfortable pace. An old seabed, I remembered. Aquatic fossils are found at the summit of Mount Everest. Long ago, before India plunged into the Asian continent and forced the folds of the Himalaya high into the sky, this very earth I walked on had been deep beneath the sea.

I passed a cairn on the left side of the trail; an American tourist, according to the headstone, who had died here not so long ago. It didn't say whether it was a blizzard or altitude sickness that got him. Or a killer.

And then I looked up and saw a blaze of colour up ahead. Strands of triangular Buddhist prayer flags by the hundred, red and yellow and green and blue and white, festooned the apex of our trek. Anticipated, feared, spoken of in hushed tones for two weeks now; the Thorung La.

There was a teahouse here — rebuilt every year, according to the guidebook, after being destroyed by the winter — and a crowd of triumphant trekkers milled about and took each other's picture. I wasn't really in the mood but I got a Dutch girl to take my picture against the sign that reported that I had reached the altitude of 5400 meters aka 17500 feet, the same height as Everest Base Camp. I ate another Snickers bar, and had another metal cupful of the most expensive lemon tea in Asia, and tried to work out why I felt so disappointed.

The rocks on the other side of the pass were brown and beige and if I squinted I could make out a green patch far below. Muktinath, I presumed. An oasis in the desert Tibetan Plateau, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook, politically Nepali, but in terms of culture and ethnicity and geography, it was part of fabled and mysterious Tibet. I took one last look around at the clean stark panorama and began the long trek down.

Downhill was hell. When I finally arrived in Muktinath I thought my knees were going to buckle and collapse. I staggered past the series of temples on the edge of town, walked up to the first lodge I saw, and asked for a bed. But they were full. I went to the next, and the next, and the next; it was the fourth which had a spare bed. I collapsed on it, surprised at the paucity of lodging, for I knew I had to be part of the leading wave. Most of those crossing today would have begun at Thorung Phedi, a good hour below Death Camp.

I made myself get up and washed myself with a bucket bath. There was no hot water, but I was beyond caring. I shaved with a broken fragment of a mirror. I wanted to wash my clothes, but the communal tap nearest my lodge was being used by a Nepali family to fill a series of large buckets, so instead I went to the police checkpoint to sign in. The bored policeman flipped through my passport, stamped my trekking permit, and gestured to the ledger. I wrote down my name, nationality, passport number, etc. Gavin had already checked in. I flipped through the last few pages of the ledger, thinking to myself that somewhere here was the killer's name.

And then I saw it. Eight pages and two days ago. Stanley Goebel, the entry read. Passport number and all.

I stared at it until a pair of trekkers came up behind me and the policeman motioned me to make way. I stared at the ledger as they went through the procedure. Had Stanley Goebel's killer taken his identity? Used his passport? Or was Stanley Goebel alive and well, was the dead man someone else? Had Abigail the Australian been wrong? Or had she lied?

I wanted a picture of that entry, and I had my camera on me, but I could easily imagine the policeman being sticky about letting me take one; so after the two trekkers had left, I took my camera out, set the flash to on, and asked the policeman if I could take his picture, idly flipping the ledger back to the appropriate page. He puffed his chest out proudly, and I snapped a shot of him — and, apparently accidentally, a shot of the ledger as I lowered the camera. I wasn't sure it would turn out but it would have to do.

I hobbled back to my lodge, my mind churning. I ordered fried noodles with cheese and vegetables and wrote in my journal until the food arrived. I didn't realize how hungry I was until the plate was before me. After it was empty I went back to my room to give my legs a rest, intending to later track down Gavin at whatever lodge he was at and tell him the news.

But I didn't do that. Instead I closed my eyes and opened them again well after dawn.

My legs were fine the next day. Unless I tried to go even the slightest bit downhill, in which case bolts of agony shot through my knees and quadriceps with every step. I knew within moments of getting out of bed that I wasn't trekking out of Muktinath that day. That, and the soon-discovered fact that this side of the Thorung La was the easy half of the Annapurna Circuit and thus overpopulated with groups of twenty or thirty pudgy German package tourists, explained why it was hard to find a room in Muktinath. I wondered what happened to those who came late over the pass. I didn't envy them, finally arriving at what they thought was their destination after one of the most physically gruelling days of their life, only to find out that there was no room at the inn, and they had another hour to go before reaching the next group of lodges.

I could walk around town, albeit slowly and stiffly, and I looked for Gavin but he was gone. And maybe that was for the best. Why rehash it? Yes, the appearance of the name Goebel in the Muktinath ledger was mysterious; and yes, in the back of my mind I'd had the idea that I could send my picture of it to the HRA doctor who had examined the body, whose name Gavin could tell me, to compare to the handwriting used when Stanley Goebel had signed in to the Manang ledger; but really, what was the point? Regardless of the name, a man had been murdered and his murderer had gotten off scot-free. There was no point in sifting through the ashes of those two cold facts.

And yet. It was all the whys that bothered me. Why was there a murder in the first place? Why the knives? Why was the body not hidden? Why had the masked man followed me on the trail? And now why this confusion over the name? And the most fundamental question; why was it all so much like the murder of Laura Mason in Limbe, Cameroon, more than two years ago?

It had been a typical night on the truck. No, scratch that; it had been a good night. There had been no rain. Chong and Kristin and Nicole had cooked and cleaned. There was plenty of firewood for once and we had a big bonfire, and Steven and Hallam and I had passed the guitar back and forth and sung songs. A few curious locals had squatted and stared at us, but not the huge crowds we had sometimes drawn in the desert and in Nigeria. Limbe was a pretty regular stop for overland trucks and its inhabitants fairly cosmopolitan.

After dinner Laura and Carmel and Emma and Michael went swimming on the black-sand beach. I wasn't in the mood to swim, so I stayed with the rest. We played guitar and passed joints around and everyone got a little high. We reminisced fondly about the epic meal we had had in Nigeria, the spacecakes in Dixcove, the FanIce in Ghana. Food was always a popular topic on the truck. We talked about whether we would find a way across to Kenya by land. At that point we were still hopeful. There was talk of going through Chad.

Eventually it got late. Carmel and Emma and Michael had returned. I assumed Laura had come back to our tent and gone to sleep. I decided to accompany Hallam and Nicole for a midnight swim before joining Laura in the tent. Hallam took his mid-sized Maglite to light our way, even though the moon was bright and it hardly seemed necessary. When I first saw her I thought it was a dead animal, a big dog or something, lying in a puddle. It wasn't until five or ten seconds of Hallam aiming the light at her that my mind finally clicked and identified her. I think it was the same for Hallam and Nicole. Whoever had killed Laura had stripped her naked and gutted her like an animal, and she had died with her hands on her belly, pathetically trying to keep her insides from spilling out. She had been gagged with a black rag. And there were knives in her eyes.