“We’re still deliberating!” yelled Kate Conway, who was standing with the undecided Alice MacKenzie and the horrified Frances Coles.
“You can be the next group!” Rowan called back from far above them. “There isn’t much room up here, so we’d better limit ourselves to four people at a time. I can take one more now. Susan? Not afraid, are you?”
Susan hesitated for a moment and looked down at her slick-soled Italian pumps. “You’d better not, Susan,” said Elizabeth, also looking at Susan’s footwear. “That ladder is awfully small. And it may be slippery.”
Susan cast her companion a look of scorn. “I have excellent balance,” she retorted. “In grade school I took several months of ballet.” She waved her hand at the group on the summit. “Here I come, you guys!”
Elizabeth sighed. “I’d better come with you, then.”
For anyone afraid of heights, the top of Roche Rock could fuel twenty years of nightmares. The roofless ruined chapel was missing walls on two sides so that only one’s sense of balance separated the climber from a sixty-foot plunge to the jagged rocks below. The space within the chapel was about the size of a walk-in closet, so that the climbers had to be very careful not to bump into each other as they changed positions to look at the scenery.
“You’re right about the view,” said Nancy Warren. “You can see for miles. Rowan, look almost straight down on the back side. Is that a schoolyard? What are those boys playing?”
“Football. Well, soccer to you,” Rowan replied. “What a perfect place to watch the game from. I wonder none of the school’s football fans has thought of it.”
Maud Marsh, who was looking across the fields to the northeast, motioned for Rowan to come and stand beside her. “That’s an odd-looking mountain over there,” she said, pointing to a bare hill with an escarpment of white clay.
“I’m afraid that what you’re looking at is a bit of industrial blight,” said Rowan sadly. “This part of Cornwall is the source of the clay used by the makers of fine china. You know, Wedgwood… Spode… all those wonderfully delicate works of ceramic art. That mound that you’re looking at is a refuse heap made by the china clay industry. They take the earth they want, and leave the rest behind in ugly mounds to sully the landscape. Ugly, isn’t it?”
Maud Marsh looked stern. “They’d never get away with that in Berkeley!”
“No,” said Rowan. “I expect your environmental terrorists would begin picketing before they’d deposited more than four shovels full of waste dirt.” Still, he felt a pang of sympathy for the clay quarriers. They made it possible to fashion creations of great and lasting beauty, but all anyone ever seemed to notice was their refuse dump. In his darkest drinking moods, he saw his life like that: superior intelligence and achievement that went unrewarded, while the world carped about his credit rating and his marital problems. He wondered if his much-contemplated actions were about to change his luck or whether the deed would only prove to make his spiritual refuse heap so much the greater. He reminded himself that this was not the time for philosophy.
“You’d think there’d be a better way up here than that stupid iron ladder!” Susan Cohen’s voice floated up to them several moments before her scowling face appeared at the top rung. She heaved herself onto the flat rock floor of the mined chapel and looked around while she caught her breath. “No barriers!” she exclaimed, edging forward to peer over the precipice. “That’s negligence if I ever saw it. If somebody fell off this thing, whoever owns this could get sued for a bundle.”
“We are up here at our own risk,” said Rowan. He hoped that Mr. Kosminski would not be crass enough to recoup his assassin’s fee by suing the landowner of the rock. It was definitely a consideration, but unfortunately for Rowan’s scruples, his time was running out and he could not afford to be overly fastidious in his choice of methods. “Walk around a bit,” he said to Susan. “The views are quite spectacular.”
Elizabeth MacPherson crept up the ladder, resolutely refusing to look down. She eased her way out onto the barren rock in a posture that was somewhere between a crawl and a catatonic seizure. “This is intense,” she managed to whisper. “And there’s nothing below us but rocks, whichever way you fall.” She edged her way to the one wall of the chapel that was still standing and sat with her back to it, gripping a small outcrop of rock and taking slow deep breaths while she mustered her composure.
Susan seemed undisturbed by the imminence of death. She ambled around the tiny square of rock as if it were the interior of a gift shop. “This is a funny place for a chapel,” she announced. “Like they wanted to look down on everybody. You know that Father Brown story called ‘The Hammer of God’? According to him…”
Rowan Rover, who had been standing next to the ladder, suddenly moved in behind Susan. Furtively he took in the positions of everyone else. The group down below were talking among themselves and weren’t looking up at the rock anymore. Charles Warren, still at the base of the iron ladder, was out of the line of sight. Maud Marsh and Nancy Warren were on the eastern edge of the precipice, watching the schoolyard soccer game. Fortunately the position of the afternoon sun meant that the people in the schoolyard could not clearly see the top of the rock. Elizabeth MacPherson seemed to be taking in the scenery or recovering from the shock of the heights; at any rate, she was oblivious to her companions. Now! he thought.
He edged in closer to Susan, so that he was standing beside her, but a few inches back, out of her range of vision. They were six inches from the rock floor’s ending in open space. He felt his stomach turn over as the wind touched him, reminding him of the emptiness beyond. Moving his arms slowly, so as not to attract attention, he maneuvered himself behind Susan, preparing to give her a fatal shove in her back and send her plummeting over the edge. He put his left foot forward and shifted his weight onto that foot as he leaned out, palms upright, ready to deliver the coup de grace.
Rowan pushed.
Susan moved.
The soccer game had caught her attention and, in the last split second, she moved sideways along the rock to get a better view of the playing field. Rowan Rover, hands outstretched and braced for a collision, found himself pushing molecules of air that were only too willing to step aside.
Rowan Rover pitched forward into the welcoming abyss, with an obscenity caught in his throat. His mind, which was racing in overdrive, was considering all the Famous Last Words entries in reference books. If the anthologists were to be believed, people never seemed to say “Oh shit!” as their ultimate utterance, but he was willing to bet that in accidents, that phrase topped the list of final remarks. In his terror-driven brain, properties like gravity and inertia had switched to slow motion and there seemed to be endless time left to contemplate his life-and various other philosophical points of interest. And, he reflected, if he did go to hell, he might be able to find out who Jack the Ripper actually was. A tempting prospect. He wondered if he could come back as a ghost and taunt Donald Rumblelow with the information.
As he reached a horizontal position, with a clear view of the underbrush, the rocks, and eternity, something stopped his forward catapult, so that instead of diving into space, he slammed against the edge of Roche Rock and dangled in a dizzying jackknife position halfway over the side. The obscenity lodged in his throat managed to find its way out, meandered for a short jaunt up into his nasal passages, and finally emerged triumphantly through his open jaws, leading a parade of expelled air for maximum volume. Fortunately, perhaps, for the schoolboys’ innocent ears, the word was lost amid the general screams on the precipice.
The pain of incipient bruises coursed through his body on the way to his whirling brain, and he had to sift through injury, fright, and bewilderment to ascertain why he wasn’t plummeting to his death. A further check of his senses told him that someone was holding onto his leg. Shortly thereafter he noted that he was being shouted at.