White. Rosie Thomas

Hotel. In their plaid shirts, combat pants and cheery slogan T-shirts they might have been any group of tourists, although a closer inspection would have revealed that they seemed noticeably fitter than the average. They had just eaten an excellent dinner and they had the rosy, expansive look of people intent on enjoying themselves for much of the rest of the night.

      ‘Yeah, come on. We’re going to Rumdoodle.’

      ‘What the hell’s that?’ Finch grinned.

      ‘She’s a newcomer, isn’t she?’ a big, grizzled man teased in a broad Yorkshire accent. His name was Hugh Rix; the front of his T-shirt proclaimed ‘Rix Trucking. Here Today, There Tomorrow’.

      ‘Bar,’ Ken Kennedy said briefly. He was in his early forties, short but broad-built. His colourless hair was shaved close to his scalp and his rolled shirtsleeve showed a scorpion tattoo on his left bicep.

      ‘Uh, I don’t think so,’ Finch demurred. ‘I’m going to sleep. In a bed. While I still have the chance.’

      ‘Coward.’

      ‘Leave her be, Rix. She’ll be seeing more than enough of you before the trip ends,’ Ken said.

      ‘Night,’ they all said to her and in a solid phalanx moved towards the door. Of the ten-strong Western contingent that made up the Mountain People expedition, George Heywood had eaten a quick dinner and gone off to a meeting with the climbing Sherpas and Alyn Hood had not yet arrived. The word was that he had taken a two-day stopover in Karachi.

      Finch went upstairs to her small single room and switched on her PowerBook to send an e-mail to Suzy.

      Hey, married woman.

      Good honeymoon?

      Here I am. Flights not too bad, hotel plain but reasonably clean (as my mother would say). Dinner tonight with the rest of the group except lead guide who isn’t here yet. They’re okay!!! George Heywood I already met, Adam Vries is communications manager, pretty face (but your type, not mine), poses a bit. Ken Kennedy’s the second guide, acts tough, sports a tattoo, probably has a heart of gold. Clients are Hugh Rix and Mark Mason, both Brits, know each other from back home. Rix (as he calls himself) is the self-made-man type, probably won’t stand any nonsense unless he’s generating it. Mark is quieter and more sensitive, although not by a long way. There’s a longhair Aussie rock jock named Sandy Jackson and two determined Americans, Vern Ecker and Ted Koplicki, who were here last year and turned back from Camp Four. Now they’ve all gone out for a beer.

      For me, bed. If I can sleep, with excitement.

      I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world, or be doing anything different. You know that. Give Big J a kiss from me xxx

      Before she climbed into bed, Finch stood at her window. She opened the shutter and looked out over the trees of the garden and a carved statue of the Buddha to a corner of the busy street just visible beyond the gate. The traffic rolled and hooted through the haze of pollution. Kathmandu lay in a hollow ringed by high hills, and the smoke and exhaust fumes hung in the air like a grey veil. As she stood absently watching, a man walked in the darkness across the grass and through the gate into the roadway. He lifted his hand to a bicycle rickshaw man hopefully lingering near the hotel entrance and hopped into the hooded seat. The old man stood up on the pedals, his lean legs tensing with the effort, and the rickshaw trundled away. Finch stood for a moment longer, resting her shoulder against the window frame and breathing in the scent of woodsmoke and joss and curry that drifted up to her. Then she pulled the shutter to and finished her preparations for bed.

      It was surprisingly snug in the rickshaw seat, with the hood framing the view of haphazard streets and ancient wooden houses leaning out over the cobbles. Piles of rotting debris carelessly swept into the angles of walls gave out a pungent vegetable smell. Sam leaned forward to the driver. ‘Very far?’

      A triangle of brown face briefly presented itself over the hunched shoulder. ‘No, sir. Near enough.’

      Sam had landed at Kathmandu six hours earlier. He had found himself an acceptable hotel close to the Buddha’s Garden, changed his clothes, eaten a meal that he didn’t taste and couldn’t remember, and shaved and showered with close attention. The unfamiliar feeling in his gut was nothing to do with the soupy dal bhaat he had eaten – it was anticipation. It was a very long time since anything in his life had given him the same sensation. Even running didn’t do it for him any more. He had tried to summon it up before he competed at Pittsburgh and had failed. There was a part of himself that warned the rest that it had been a long way to travel from Seattle to catch up with a woman he had spent barely five hours with. But Sam told himself that in any case it wasn’t just to do with Finch. He was in Kathmandu, he was doing something other than withering away at home.

      When he finally reached Finch’s hotel the obliging receptionist told him that yes, Miss Buchanan was resident there. But he believed that all the climbers had gone out – just gone, sir, five minutes only – to a bar in the Thamel district.

      Armed with the name and directions, Sam set out again. The quickest way through the steaming traffic looked as though it might be this bicycle-propelled pram. He sat even further forward on the sagging seat, as if he could urge the driver to pedal faster. His eyes were gritty with travel and he blinked at the waves of people and cars with a yawn trapped in the back of his throat. Maybe he should have gone to bed and waited until tomorrow to find her. But the thought of being so close, and the fear that she would somehow disappear into the mountains before he could reach her, was too much for him.

      At last the old man sank back on his saddle and the rickshaw wavered to a halt. They had come to a doorway wedged in a row of open-fronted shops, where multicoloured T-shirts and cotton trousers hung like flags overhead, and a press of wandering shoppers threaded through narrow alleyways. There was a thick smell of spicy food, and patchouli and marijuana. Two dogs lay asleep on a littered doorstep.

      The bar was up a flight of wooden stairs. Sam found a big room, noisy with muzzily amplified music and loud talk. Most of the customers were very young Westerners with the suntans, bleached hair and ripped shorts of backpackers, although there were a few Thais and Japanese among them. He edged his way through the babble of American, British and indeterminate accents to the bar, and positioned himself in front of it. He searched the crowd with his eyes, looking for her.

      Finch wasn’t there. Within a minute he knew it for certain but he still examined each of the groups more carefully and drank some weak beer while he waited in case she had gone outside for five minutes. It took him much less than five minutes to identify the group of Everest mountaineers. They were older than most of the other drinkers and were gathered in a tight group around two rickety little tables. One of them had a goatee and wore his long hair tied back in a lank ponytail, another had an effete blond fringe, the rest had brutally short crops. They all had worked-out, hard-looking rather than muscular physiques. The look was familiar enough to Sam: for years he had seen men with similar bodies high on the pillars in Yosemite, or drinking beers with his father and exchanging the arcane details of routes and lines and remote peaks.

      There was an empty chair at the far side of their group, next to the blond man. Sam strolled casually across the room and hesitated beside it. ‘Mind if I take this?’

      ‘Sure. Help yourself.’

      He sat down, carefully placing his drink on the table. He relaxed for a minute, gazing into the room with unfocused eyes and letting their conversation drift around him.

      ‘The man’s an asshole. Forget the hills. I wouldn’t go as far as the Bronx with him leading …’

      ‘… into a heap of shit. So I say to the guy, this place is a latrine …’

      ‘A brand new camera, a Nikon AX.’

      ‘I’m ready for it. But if I don’t make it this year I’ll be back. And I’ll keep on coming back until I do make it.’

      ‘You’ll do it, man. George Heywood’s put thirty-five clients up there already. Why not you? And Al Hood’s a fine leader.’

      ‘He’s