Stronger Than Death Read online

  Good climbers don’t have bruises.

  I am not a good climber.

  But I am still alive.

  Eric grinned at me from the shadows on the floor. I shut my eyes and he grinned still. In the white cold of the autopsy room, Lee lifted his hair and peeled back the scalp line. I pressed my palms to my eyes and held them there. In the darkness and the flaring lights, there was no forgetting. The dregs of the night returned, together. I took a hard breath in. The arms that held me relaxed and let me go.

  I took my hands from my eyes. ‘Is Lee still here?’ I asked.

  Nina slid back on the bed. My back felt cold with her gone. ‘She’s outside with the colt,’ she said, and her voice was almost even. ‘She took the dog for a walk earlier on. They came back about an hour ago.’ She spun me back to face her. Need and concern gathered in her eyes, in her voice, in her hand, lying quiet in mine. Her other hand refastened the buttons on her shirt. I don’t think she knew that she did it. For a while she said nothing, just watched. Then, eventually: ‘It was bad, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t good. Has Lee not told you?’

  ‘No. She said to ask you.’

  And so you say nothing and hold me and wait until I’m ready. I do love you so very much.

  I folded her hand in mine. Looped my fingers round hers and curled them up. There is no good way to do this.

  ‘We made it most of the way up,’ I said. ‘There was a ledge two pitches down from the top. Eric was there.’

  ‘Eric? She smiled then, a smile to match the sunlight on the floor. She likes Eric. She owes him her life. It counts for a lot. ‘What was he there for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘We weren’t expecting him.’

  If I don’t say it aloud, I can go on pretending it’s not real. You don’t know and so, for you, Eric is still alive. This time yesterday, we didn’t know. He was dead, but we didn’t know and so for us he was alive. We could stay like this forever.

  It will never last.

  I took her hands again and held them, both of them, as in prayer. ‘He was dead, Nina. He is dead. Eric is dead.’ The man who kept you living when otherwise you would have died, is dead. And then moved on, because the magic of the morning has died and the walnut eyes have flashed to a black I had thought was gone for good. ‘He fell. He must have fallen. God knows why he was even on the rock but he broke his neck when he hit the ledge. Lee and Mike did the autopsy last night. Mike will have faxed it all through to the police by now. There’ll be an inquest. We’ll have to go.’

  Her body didn’t move but her hands lay where I held them. Long, surgeon’s fingers curled tight round mine, holding on as if I were the last hand-hold over a thousand-foot drop to nowhere. ‘Why?’ Her voice came from far away, thin and taut with the effort.

  ‘Because it was us who found him.’

  ‘No, Kellen. Why Eric? Why is he dead?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ We have questions. We have no answers. ‘He just is.’

  We have questions.

  I dressed and they didn’t change.

  Downstairs, the kitchen smelled of new-baked bread. A loaf lay warm by the Rayburn. Wee Jon’s mother was the village baker. She retired years ago but it hasn’t stopped her rising every morning with the dawn to heat the ovens. When she stops making bread it will be because she has joined Eric and the world will be the poorer for it. The world is poorer already.

  I cut bread and slid an apple from the fruit bowl into one pocket, then another, for the colt. Next door in the study, Nina switched on the computer. I heard her drag the chair to the desk and pull a file from the shelf. More than most of us, she takes refuge in her work. She didn’t weep. She hasn’t wept. I have the breath of her still warm on my palms, but no tears. Later, when the work is over, there will be time for that, for both of us.

  Through the window I could see the colt standing in the shade of the hawthorns at the gate to the pond field. Lee sat on the wall at the edge of the sunlight. Her jeans were rolled halfway to her calves, her spare T-shirt carried the folds of a day and a night in the rucksack; she hadn’t bothered with shoes. Sometime, not long ago, she finished sorting her climbing rack, a completion ritual for a climb that is not yet complete. A neat array of ropes and slings and krabs lay on the stones beside her. Bright, electric colours overlaid the muted grey-green of the wall, too bright for the day. She sat still, curled in on herself like a leaf in autumn, knees pulled up to her chest, chin balanced on knees, eyes locked on a horizon that may yet yield answers. Seen in profile, even from this distance, her skin was too pale from lack of sleep, her eyes too dark, her soul too still, too much like the blank silence of the autopsy room. For all of my adult life, Lee Adams has been my touchstone for vitality. She is the fire that drives the rest of living. Last night in the mortuary, she withdrew to a place I couldn’t reach. Blank rock took the place of laughter, of anger, of the sharing of pain. From here, it doesn’t look as if the night has changed anything. I would like that not to last. More even than Eric, I would mourn the loss of Lee. I cut more bread and went out to join her.

  The day was still, gathering heat. The air around the duck pond smelled wet and green. The pond was busy with insects. Water boatmen skimmed the surface from patch to patch of algae. A new-hatched dragonfly unfurled on the dead stump by the wall, launching a bright, electric body into a world already cluttered with bright metallic paint. A spider spun on a single thread high above the water, a climber with no fear of falling. One flick of a finger and the rope would be gone. But there would still have been a rope. Even a spider doesn’t climb without one. I walked round to the far side and pulled myself up on the wall. The colt stretched his neck out and snuffed shallow, exploratory huffs, rolling his eyes as if I might, just this once, be a phantom. I held out my fist, fingers up, and let him tease them apart to find the squashed mess of bread hidden inside. The sharp ends of his whiskers tickled my palm as he ate. The air filled with his breath. I shared the rest of the slice with Lee and we ate in silence. I didn’t come to talk. Normally, we don’t have to. Just now, it would be good to have some words in the stillness.

  She leant forward and fed the arc of her crust to the colt. ‘How’s Nina?’ she asked.

  ‘Alive. We’ll talk about it more when she’s had time to let it settle.’ I broke the apple and shared it out. ‘Good walk?’

  ‘Ish. Your dog wants to hunt.’

  ‘Nothing new. She’ll get rabbits enough when they’re not feeding young.’

  ‘I know. I told her. She didn’t believe me.’ She held out the core of the apple for the colt. He teased her fingers open as he had teased mine, gently and with care for the damage he could do. Sandy may have spoiled him as a foal, but he put manners on him while he did it.

  ‘Is the dog not around?’ I asked.

  ‘With MacDonald,’ said Lee. She nodded out past the colt. I followed the line of her gaze. At the far end of it a flash of pale hair showed a dog lying flat in the grass. In time it rose and divided and became two: mother and daughter, a tan-in-white collie and her half-breed lurcher offspring, the original and the almost-clone. Between them a figure in shirt sleeves leant on a long-handled crook. Like that, grey-haired and bent, he looked every bit his age, a man not far off retirement. Then he stood up straight and whistled and swung the stick out sideways and both dogs dropped flat to the ground, a blatant display for the audience and impressive at that. He held them steady for a minute or so and then turned towards us. The dogs fell into step behind him and the three of them walked back up along the line of the wall. Now, you wouldn’t put him much the far side of forty. He sheds years when he comes here simply because he lets go of his work as he drives in through the gate. This is his refuge, his escape from the world of law and order. Except on the two occasions when it has directly concerned me, I have never discussed police matters with Stewart MacDonald. It’s not my business what he does with his nine to five, or his eight to twelve or twelve to six or whatever shift it
is that he’s working. But that doesn’t mean that any one of us forgets what he is and what he does for a living.

  ‘Did you speak to him?’ I asked Lee.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Has he seen the report?’

  ‘I e-mailed him a copy home last night. He got it before he left this morning.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s on duty again this afternoon. He’ll come round with one of the lads and take statements when he’s in a position to do it in an official capacity.’

  That’s a start. ‘Did he say when?’

  ‘He’s due in at one. He’ll be round just after that.’

  ‘That doesn’t leave much time to pick up your car.’ We left the Saab at the top of the cliff when the helicopter came. Mike gave us a lift back to the farm. I think of several good reasons to go back to that cliff; her car is simply the most obvious.

  ‘Forget it. It’s a Sunday morning. Loch Lomondside will be nose-to-tail caravans. Anything that’s there will wait till tomorrow. There are things we need to look at here before we go back to the rock.’ Lee picked a green krab from the wall beside her and tossed it high over our heads. It tumbled in the still air, spinning colour to the sky and back. She reached out and caught it as it fell towards the colt. A second joined it and then a third. They juddered in the morning air, not smoothly caught. She bit her lip, concentrating.

  She is not as I thought she was. The new day has changed some things. There’s a containment in the stillness now. Questions burn behind the stone of the walls. It’s better than nothing. The krabs spun faster, more smoothly, a metal rainbow arcing over the water of the pond. I moved back along the wall to give her space.

  ‘How did he get there, Kellen?’ Her eyes were on the juggling. Her mind was on Eric. ‘Did you see his bike at the cliff?’

  ‘No.’ She knows that. I didn’t see it when we arrived, I didn’t see it in the half-hour we spent waiting for the Rescue. Equally, I wasn’t really looking. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. But I didn’t think of it till I woke up this morning.’

  ‘Just because we didn’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. He doesn’t leave it out in the open any more than you do. We can look for it when we pick up your car.’ Another good reason to go sooner rather than later.

  ‘Maybe.’ A fourth krab joined the others: the big pear-shaped loop that holds the belay. Two thousand kilos breaking strain. She chewed on her lip, narrowing her eyes against the morning sun. The rainbow faltered. She lost two of the smaller krabs. The pear-shape danced a brief, erratic dance with a pale gold partner and then the two of them thudded down on to the turf in a staccato duet. ‘I think I should go back home first,’ she said. ‘His bike might be there. And his gear. We need to see if he took his gear. If he didn’t, then we’ll know he wasn’t meaning to climb.’

  I looked at her carefully. She reached out and tugged a stray hair from the colt’s mane. She has never been any good at asking for help.

  I slid down from the wall, feeling in my pocket for the keys to my car. ‘You’ll need a lift,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Nina.’

  She caught my arm. ‘You don’t have to come. I could get a taxi.’

  Right. That’s not even worth the effort of an answer. ‘What about the statements to MacDonald?’ I asked. ‘Are we going to be back here by one?’

  ‘No need. They’ll meet us at the flat. Unless I tell him now that we’re not going.’

  MacDonald was less than half a field away. I waved and he raised the stick in greeting.

  ‘No. We’ll go.’

  The colt set off down the field to meet the dogs, head down, neck snaking, a parody of the stallion at war. I threw the half-core of my apple into the shade of the hawthorn, where he could find it later. The krabs lay in the grass at my feet: pink, green, gold, all dull in the shadow of the wall. I scooped them up and dropped them back on top of the ropes. ‘Come on, let’s go. It won’t get any easier with waiting.’

  Lee’s home is a ground-floor flat on Park Terrace with panoramic views of Kelvingrove Park and the Art Gallery, tastefully furnished throughout in modern Scandinavian style. I know all of this because I read the estate agent’s description before she ever moved in. Flats on Park Terrace don’t come cheap, even without the panoramic views and the sanded wood floors. The agency percentage on the sale was more than my annual salary and you could feel the saliva dribbling through the prose. They didn’t, naturally, mention that the flat was on the market because the owner’s wife had finally given up the battle to persuade him that women made better bed-mates than men, or specifically, that she made a better bed-mate than a twenty-eight-year-old bio-engineering post-grad working in the orthopaedics department at the Western. Anna Dalziel divorced her husband for adultery, which was risible given her own track record, but they had to have something for the paperwork and she didn’t cite Andy in the correspondence, which was, I gather, part of the deal. It was a remarkably peaceful separation under the circumstances, except for the flat. They’d have gouged each other’s eyes out over the flat. Anna wanted her pound of flesh or, at the very least, the six figures she’d put into buying her half and then turning it into Little Sweden in the middle of Glasgow. Eric wasn’t that bothered about living in a Scandinavian transplant but he liked the view and he was quite attached to the fact that he could run through the grove to work without breathing in too much carbon monoxide on the way. He’d been there long enough to feel at home and he wasn’t in a hurry to move out.

  I remember sitting at the table on a Saturday afternoon in the November after Bridget died. Lee sat on one of the limed ash counters teasing the flat-faced blue and cream cat, Anna’s last attempt to integrate into the British way of life. I was absorbed in the third page of the estate agent’s drivel.

  ‘Hey, people, is the master bedroom really seventeen by twenty-three feet?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Plus the walk-in wardrobe.’

  ‘God. And underfloor heating?’

  ‘Absolutely. She put it in last winter.’

  ‘Essential in Sweden.’

  ‘Allegedly.’

  ‘Probably true. It’s forty below in Sweden in the winter.’

  ‘What does it get to here?’

  ‘I think it clocked up minus five one day last February … Oh shit, here we go, children. Make way for the ravening hordes.’

  The doorbell rang. Lee slid off the counter. The cat hissed and made for the cat flap in the basement. I moved the mugs to the sink and stuffed the papers in my back pocket.

  ‘Bye, guys.’ We followed the cat, all three of us sprinting down the stairs into the basement and out into the garden at the back. The cat vanished into the depths of a small, spreading acer. Lee led the way down the path to the gate. The combination on the padlock opened for the date of Eric’s graduation and let us out into the higher parkland of the grove. We ran down the slope, across the bridge and back up towards the Art Gallery, slowing as we reached the path. The air was sharp and cold. The leaves on the path crunched like blown glass. We were both still drunk, I think, with the novelty of being alive. It felt good. Lee spun on her heels, out of breath, laughing. ‘The Man?’ she asked.

  ‘Where else?’

  Byres Road heaved with shoppers charging out their fifth shopping weekend before Christmas. Students fenced dope. Ex-students fenced copies of the Big Issue. The ones without degrees sat in the entrance to the Hillhead Underground and drank El Dorado from unconcealed bottles. A lad with fading scarlet hair and a complacent whippet spun a diablo for a crowd of kids, practising for the summer and the Edinburgh tourists. Lee chucked two bits of silver into his cap. They sparkled, angle-edged amongst the coppers.

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘Dog needs a feed.’

  Ever the sucker for a complacent whippet.

  The Man in the Moon sits round the back, out of the tourist gaze. We commandeered a table on the balcony and ordered water. I was still on water by
orders of every doctor I knew except me. Lee has never been on anything else. The estate agency papers dug into my back as I sat down. I threw them on the table between us.

  ‘Do you think she’ll buy it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ms Advocate?’ She shrugged. ‘I doubt it. She was driving a Porsche.’

  ‘Which means she won’t buy it?’ I asked.

  ‘Which means she’s got the money but not the taste, so, no, she probably won’t buy it.’

  The water arrived. I buy this for something to do, not because I enjoy the experience. I toyed with the ice cubes and turned back to the page I’d been reading. ‘It has three bedrooms,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where’s the third?’

  ‘Downstairs. In the basement. Second on the left after the shower room.’

  The second shower room. ‘So why’s it got an en suite shower?’

  ‘All bedrooms in Sweden have facilities en suite. Allegedly.’

  ‘Has anyone ever actually checked this?’

  ‘No. But it was Anna’s money. She’s entitled to her own fantasy.’

  Clearly. Up to and including marrying Eric. A triumph of hope over all the available evidence.

  We sat in peace for a while. Lee watched the crowd, out of habit. I read through the details of Eric’s home, matching the hyperbole to the reality of what I had seen. They had missed the bits that really mattered, the things that set it apart from the Little Sweden of the superstores and catalogues, all blond wood and chrome and everything still Hampstead underneath. It’s the small things that make the difference. Things like the taps that take you ten minutes to figure out how they work but are so much more effective than anything I’ve got at home; like a shower room with a shower head fitted beside the loo to function as a self-operated bidet and a floor that slopes in two planes so that water spilled anywhere in the room runs down to a spiralling drain in the corner. And the duvet covers. Remarkable things, Scandinavian duvet covers. I helped her make a bed up once and found the duvet covers had hand holes in the blind end so you could reach through and pull the quilt straight in. Sheer genius. Very un-British. Sadly, they went straight back to Uppsala when she moved back home.