The Old Farmhouse, Betws-Y-Coed, Snowdonia, North Wales
March 15, 2010
11:00 a.m.
The ring of the doorbell followed by a heavy welsh accent shouting, “Delivery. Three packages for a Mr. Quinn,” announced the arrival of the bags from Munich that Martin Emmerich had promised. They had been a long time coming owing to the protracted legal process involving Graf’s estate which was, inevitably, thought Quinn, as obscure and complicated as the man himself.
As Quinn ripped open the three boxes to reveal his big kit bag and the two plastic pannier suitcases off his motorcycle, his first thoughts were of the climbing kit they contained. It was just one month before he was due to leave Snowdonia for Tibet and the absence of his bags had begun to make him think that he was going to have to purchase much of it anew, something he could ill afford to do.
The delivery, the same week that the Welsh valley turned yellow with daffodils, signaled that his winter of recovery from the events of Munich was now finished. He had spent all of it at that whitewashed farmhouse, run as a small yet comfortable hotel by some distant cousin of Henrietta, rebuilding himself for a return to Everest. He refused to call it hiding.
During the cold, damp days, he progressively pushed himself out of the medical rooms of the local physiotherapist and back into the granite and heath peaks that surrounded the small town. In the evenings he recovered from the aches and pains sitting by a log fire in the local pub, immersed in the notes and maps of Everest that Henrietta had loaned him.
Quinn thought he knew a lot about the mountain, but Henrietta’s information was so much more detailed than the well-known histories of Everest that he had read in the past. It opened up a new world to him, one of unpublished mystery and endeavor that made him appreciate for the first time how the mountain had been a magnet for many unknown adventurers over the years. The more he read, the more he thought about Josef Becker and Ang Noru, the more inspired he became to follow in their tracks. The more he wanted to resolve the story and keep it, as Graf and Henrietta desired, from those that would use it for harm.
Opening the bags, still sealed with German police tags, he unpacked the contents and began to assemble the things he needed. One of the alpine climbing boots he took out was filled by a green T-shirt.
The sight shocked him.
He had forgotten all about it.
Quinn gently pulled the cotton bundle from the leather boot, feeling the hard lump within.
It’s still there!
He slowly opened up the crumpled T-shirt to reveal inside the antique Leica camera that the collector had given him.
For a moment, Quinn just held it in his hands lost in thought about Graf. He had only met the man briefly, but his murder at the hands of Sarron had, in a way, wounded Quinn far more than the nightclub shooting. Even if he suspected that such an end might have appealed to the collector, it made him increasingly fearful for Henrietta. She had the same intense curiosity in the story of the axe, a curiosity that was tending to kill the cat.
He would have been lying if he’d said it didn’t worry him that there had been no recent news about Sarron. Quinn knew that he was still out there, watching and waiting. To have hoped that the psychotic Frenchman would be simply apprehended by the police now struck him as ridiculous. With every hike up into the Welsh hills, he understood that he was not only preparing himself to go back to the mountain but also to finish this thing with Sarron once and for all. He owed it to many people.
Quinn looked again at the Leica III, imagining it lying with a dead body high on the mountain.
He turned it over in his hands, studying it in detail.
It was compact and strong. Such a dense metal body could easily survive seventy years frozen in ice.
Lifting the camera to his right eye, he pictured within the small viewfinder a climber on a summit raising an ice axe and a flag.
He pushed the small shutter release button to capture the imaginary moment. It wouldn’t move.
When he looked at the film indicator, Quinn remembered something else.