Poe studied the photographs. Jessica was in most of them. Ropes flung across her chest, a string of carabiners on her belt, huge smile on her tanned face. He leaned into one photograph and squinted. He recognised what she was climbing: a rock called Napes Needle in the Lake District. It was thin and tapered and looked like a missile.
‘That was taken a few years ago,’ she said. ‘It was afterwards, in a pub in Keswick, that we began planning for the big one.’
‘Scafell Pike?’ Poe said. Scafell Pike was the tallest mountain in England but it hardly needed expedition-type planning; on a nice day you could walk up it in shorts and trainers.
She pointed at a photograph of the most famous mountain in the world.
‘Everest?’
Jessica nodded. ‘Everest.’
Poe whistled. ‘Impressive. Dangerous.’
She shrugge
d. ‘Everything’s dangerous.’
‘When are you going?’
‘They go next May, when the jet stream isn’t hitting the summit at one hundred miles an hour.’
‘They?’
‘I won’t be going with them, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh … what happened? You don’t seem the type to abandon difficult goals.’
‘I was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, unfortunately,’ she said.
‘I’m not familiar with it.’
‘You’re lucky then. It’s a long-term endocrine disorder. Means my adrenal glands don’t produce enough steroids.’
‘It’s treatable, though?’
‘It is. I’ll have to take tablets for the rest of my life but it won’t affect how long I live.’
Realisation dawned on him.
‘But for someone attempting an Everest summit expedition it’s problematic?’
‘Altitude sickness. My condition means it would have a greater impact on me, and as Everest’s summit is 8848 metres – the cruising altitude of a 747 – my diagnosis would have invalidated the group’s insurance.’
He gestured to the ice axe and read out the inscription on the brass plate: ‘Tenzing Norgay’s mountaineering axe. Mount Everest Expedition, May 1953.’
The axe had a wooden handle and was a more basic design than the ones Poe saw in the Lake District’s plague of mountaineering shops. The shorter end was wide and flat, like a pickaxe; the longer end was pointed and curved. The handle ended with a tapered metal spike.
‘The axe Sherpa Tenzing used to reach the summit is a pretty decent consolation, though,’ he said.
‘The one he used to reach the summit is actually in a Nepalese museum. This is a replica of the axe he used to save the life of Sir Edmund Hillary earlier in the expedition when he fell down a crevice. It was why Hillary chose Norgay as his climbing partner when he made his summit attempt.’
‘You never thought about trying to get the real thing?’
Jessica snorted. ‘Way out of my league, Sergeant Poe. Artefacts like that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.’
He looked at his surroundings. ‘You seem to be doing OK, though. This place can’t be cheap.’
She burst out laughing.