— It’s just random. It’s chaos.
— It is not, Prichard counters. All these signs point to you. The more I’ve learned, the more certain I’ve become. Perhaps it’s too much to say that Ashley Walsingham died for the money, or that it kept him and Ms. Soames-Andersson apart, or that it hurt your grandmother or your mother. But it seems to me they all suffered something, and only you stand to gain from it. Sentimental old fool that I am, I can’t bear to see you throw it away simply to satisfy some mad theory at the extremity of Europe. It isn’t fair to you. And it certainly isn’t fair to them.
I shake my head, winding the telephone cord around my fingers.
— I can’t turn back. I’m getting close—
— You may be close to something, Prichard says. But I doubt it’s what you think it is.
No one speaks. Finally Prichard says that Khan will expect to hear from me by tomorrow morning at the latest. I give the phone back to the clerk.
— How far is it to the Eastfjords from here?
— The Eastfjords? Why do you want to go there?
— To go swimming.
The clerk doesn’t smile.
— Two hundred and sixty kilometers to Egilsstaðir.
Night falls as I cook dinner in the hostel kitchen, boiling spaghetti with my scarf doubled around my neck to keep warm. I eat alone at the dining table, twirling the pasta onto a fork and looking out the window into the darkness.
Does Prichard know everything, even the things I haven’t found out yet? Could he have designed it all? Because I don’t know anyone else with the means to have faked all this, even if I can’t imagine a reason why Prichard would do it. Who else would have been a part of the deception — Mireille, Desmarais, Karin, everyone I’ve met in Europe? Did Ashley and Imogen ever exist? Surely it is beyond all notions of luck to have found those letters. Or is the past always there, only waiting for the person who truly wants to find it?
I have to decide tonight. Akureyri has a small airport and if the law firm paid for my travel I could get a flight to Reykjavík and then on to London. Otherwise I could continue east tomorrow and reach the Eastfjords within a few hours. But even if I found more evidence, by then it would be too late to reach London before the estate passes on.
I grab my coat and camera and walk into the town center, following sidewalks among shuttered businesses. I think of the small towns in Picardie, how the shops and cafés were closed but Mireille would describe what they looked like inside. I’d say how cold and lonely these towns were and Mireille would throw her cigarette in the gutter.
This is what you came here for. Not the lights of the boulevard Saint-Germain. This is what you wanted.
Is it?
Everyone gets Paris. But this is just for you and me.
I reach the center of Akureyri, standing in the middle of an empty road. Over the drizzling rain I catch an echo of distant music and I follow the noise to a small bar whose single window is fogged with condensation. I snap a few pictures from the sidewalk, but I don’t go in. On the way back to the hostel the lights are in the eastern sky again, swaying like a band of satin in a breeze, the blue-green now frigid with red, the forms changing faster.
My hostel room is cold and empty. The radiator’s dial is set to zero. If I cranked the plastic knob, the room would be warm in ten minutes. But I don’t turn the knob. I zip into my sleeping bag and switch on my headlamp, lying back with one of Imogen’s letters. Past the corner of the pages I can see a little starlight.
6 June 1924
6 June 1924
Camp VI, 26,800 feet
Mount Everest, Tibet
There was neither beginning nor end to the night. The light seemed to have vanished days before. The two climbers are not outside to see the last rays of sunset; they huddle in a tiny Meade tent at Camp VI, a heap of stones laboriously stacked to make a six-foot platform on the steep mountainside. At great cost the expedition established this camp within striking distance of the summit. Two days ago the colonel and Somervell tried to climb the mountain with bottled oxygen. They came within a thousand feet of the summit. Tomorrow morning Ashley and Price make their attempt without the gas.
Price forces down a supper of orange marmalade and condensed milk, stirring the mixture in their cooking pot. Unopened tins of meat lie in the corner of the tent, but the climbers cannot stomach anything but sweets. Price spoons the orange-white mixture past his cracked lips. He passes the pot to Ashley.
— You must eat, Price wheezes.
Ashley looks at the pot, the rim crusted with treacle and condensed milk. He shakes his head.
They light the Meta stove to brew tea, but the boiling point is too low and after thirty minutes the liquid is lukewarm and faintly golden. They drink it down anyway, but before they have drained their mugs the dregs at the bottom are frozen.
The climbers speak very little. They cocoon under double eiderdowns bags and massage their hands and feet, hoping to rub some semblance of blood and feeling into their flesh. It is time to sleep.
The tent floor is sloped and jagged. Price is wedged in the lower pocket of the tent wall, pushed flush against the snowy canvas. Ashley is above him. Whenever Ashley’s body relaxes he rolls onto the lower climber, collapsing upon Price with indifferent exhaustion. Price jabs his elbow into Ashley’s back. Ashley moans and slowly retreats upward. The cycle continues in grim repetition.
The canvas shrieks and flails in the wind, calming slightly before rising to fever pitch. The sound is deafening, a whole screaming sky. There is a stiff thumping against the tent wall and in his half-delirium Ashley imagines that some creature pounds upon the canvas. Price leans into Ashley and yells.
— It’s ice, Price bellows. Ice blown off some cornice.
The gusts increase. Each volley is worse than the last, the snow permeating the thin flapping canvas. With every blow further powder is loosed from the roof. Ashley lowers himself deep into his sleeping bag, but its collar is frozen stiff with condensation. At times there is a lull in the wind and Ashley fantasizes that it will calm, but the squall always rises again, only gathering toward a tormenting finale.
There is a wrenching and the canvas collapses upon them. A guyline has torn loose, crumpling the tent in the wind. Price presses his body into the icy canvas, using his weight to feebly anchor the shelter. Ashley gropes for his wind suit in the darkness. He must go outside and refasten the line. The frosted tent roof is draped over his face as he feels for the opening of the gabardine jacket, stiff and dusted with snow. It takes him several minutes to pull on the jacket and trousers, Price ballasting the tent all the while. Ashley thinks the tent might be carried off the slope, but in his dim and distant mind the thought is scarcely troubling.
Grasping in the darkness, Ashley claws the ice from his boots and wedges his feet inside. He sucks his breath in horror. The boots are frozen stiff. He tugs the laces into gangly knots, then struggles to unfasten the icy canvas tapes cinching the tent’s flap. He works the ties with cramped white fingers. Finally the flap opens, a jet of snow whirling into the tent. Ashley crawls out into the maelstrom.
The mountainside is howling. The wind shrieks and punches Ashley and he does not rise from all fours, crawling across a slope of icy scree under a purple-black sky. He follows the outline of the thrashing guyline to its source. The line had been rigged to a pair of huge stones weighing hundreds of pounds. The stones have shifted. Ashley clumsily refastens the cord and doubles it back around more stones, stamping his feet as he works with numb fingers. Twice he drops the line and has to fish it from the snow by feeling alone. His toes feel pressed against blocks of ice. The simple task drags on in slow agony.