One morning, high in the Dolomite mountains, two hikers are some distance apart. The path in places is narrow and perilous. One man falls to his death. The other sounds the alarm. But these men are not strangers. Members of the same revolutionary group forty years earlier, the first had betrayed the second, who must now hold his own against a young magistrate intent upon having him tried for murder.
Was their meeting an improbable encounter, or an impossible coincidence?
Impossible is a brilliant hymn to the lure of the mountains, an engrossing illumination of political brotherhood, and also the subtlest of detective stories.
Release date:
June 23, 2022
Publisher:
Headline
Print pages:
160
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Q: Let’s start again from the beginning of that day, shall we? You don’t recognise the person in the photograph I’ve shown you?
A: No, I don’t recognise him. I’m not good at faces and with good reason after so many years. I can only repeat what I’ve already said.
Q: Perhaps, but possibly you could add something you haven’t said before?
A: Perhaps, but this isn’t a friendly chat between passengers on a train. I’m being questioned by an examining magistrate in a pre-trial investigation. It’s your decision what to ask, mine to decide if I want to talk about a memory or not.
Q: I can understand that. All the same, I must ask you to run over that day again.
A: I woke up early, around five o’clock. I waited till seven to go down to the dining hall for breakfast. Then I went to my room, brushed my teeth, went out to my car and drove off to the mountains. I’d decided to go for a hike up there. I chose a difficult route off the beaten track, so as not to meet other people. That day I chose the Cengia del Bandiàrac in the Val Badia. It’s one of the most difficult and dangerous regions in the Dolomites.
So I left the car and set off along the official path from the Capanna Alpina up to the Col de Locia. At seven-thirty there was still no-one around so I was surprised to see someone higher up who’d started before me.
Q: And it was a man?
A: Yes, a man. In the mountains, people behave strangely. If you know there’s someone behind you who’s climbing up faster, you tend to increase your speed so as not to be overtaken. It’s childish, but often happens. It’s obvious that if the person below is faster, he’ll catch up with the first. The one in front increases their pace, and soon they have to slow down or stop to catch their breath. Then there are those who pretend they have to tie a bootlace or stop to admire the view or take a photograph. If it’s a couple, you hear the man telling the woman to hurry up and he’ll say it in a loud voice to let you know he’d be much faster on his own.
If there’s someone faster behind me, I slow down to let them pass. I don’t like having anyone treading on my heels.
Q: You see, this aspect wasn’t in your previous summary. You don’t like having anyone behind you. You prefer to stay back and follow. That’s interesting. Please go on.
A: I carried on as if to overtake him, but I didn’t catch up with him. Evidently, I’d forced the pace. All the better. I prefer to be alone. When I go up at a steady pace, my body goes into a kind of state, while my mind wanders around between frivolous thoughts, serious ones, fantasies, snatches of song and conversations long past. Striding along is intense and I don’t like to interrupt it to overtake someone and to have to say hello. When I’m out on a hike I never take a break. I’ll slow down if I need to lower the pace, but I never stop.
The fact is I came to the end of the path at Col de Locia, where the high Fanes plateau starts, without having to overtake anyone. From there you leave the beaten track to proceed towards the Cengia del Bandiàrac, a slender ledge below the vertical wall of the Conturines peak, the highest in the Fanes group. It’s a place known only to poachers in the past. And it annoyed me to see that figure striding along ahead of me towards it.
Q: He was hurrying?
A: From Col de Locia you first have to go down into a depression, then start climbing again. That man in front of me was actually running as he was going down. I went more slowly in the same direction. If he wanted to put some distance between us that was fine by me. I lost sight of him for a while, then spotted him again as he started on the Cengia path. He was a few hundred metres away as the crow flies.
Q: How long was it before you saw him again?
A: No more than a couple of hours. He was walking as if he were afraid.
Q: What do you mean “afraid”?
A: He was holding on to the rock wall. It’s gravelly there, so you have to put the full weight of your body down as you step forward so as not to slip. But holding on to the rock wall makes it worse for the balance. It’s the way people do who don’t feel sure of their footholds.
Q: I understand. Please go on.
A: I thought no more about him. The route along that ledge requires concentration, looking down only at the ground step by step. It’s as if you’re trying to make no noise, because that would mean the scree was slipping from under your feet. On the Cengia del Bandiàrac you have to watch your step with that drop next to you.
I went on like this for about another hour, then came to a point where it looked as if there’d been a landslide. It happens. The rain and accumulated snow the previous winter can sweep away the path leaving a gap in the middle of it. I couldn’t carry on. Had to turn back. I wasn’t upset though; my aim had been to get out into the wilderness and I’d accomplished that.
The landslide wasn’t recent, but you could see something at the bottom of it. I got out my binoculars and could see bits of clothing down among the rocks. It was impossible to get down there to check so I called the emergency services on 112 and reported it. I waited there to show the helicopter the spot. It arrived after about twenty minutes.
Then I turned back. And now several days later I’m repeating the day’s events for the third time.
Q: So the two of you weren’t together?
A: No, I go to the mountains to be alone. That man evidently did the same.
Q: You didn’t hear him cry out? People usually do when they fall.
A: I didn’t hear anyone cry out, otherwise I’d have hurried to try and help.
Q: What do you carry in your rucksack? Your binoculars and what else?
A: A length of rope and some carabiners in case I have to help someone in difficulty. A waterproof groundsheet and a thermal blanket in case I have to bivouac outside overnight. I don’t carry any food or water.
Q: No compass?
A: I’m not out at sea.
Q: And you discovered later whose body that was?
A: From the news.
Q: A distinct surprise, I’d say. No? You were both on the same remote path forty years after the trial.
A: It was him or could have been anyone else. Accidents happen in the mountains. I’ve been lucky and avoided several.
Q: Accidents, yes. It’s up to my office as investigating magistrate to establish whether or not this incident comes under the heading of an accident. The coincidence here arouses suspicion.
A: Coincidences happen all the time, many of them, and we don’t even notice. But in this case, the word “coincidence” isn’t enough for you?
Q: Between yourself and this man – who was once an informer, a collaborating witness, and helped the arrest of many of you, yourself included, with the result that you served a long prison sentence – I have to decide whether we’re dealing with an accident or not and, in order to arrive at that, I need to exclude that the meeting was intentional.
A: So you’re willing to call it an accident when a worker’s been killed at work because h. . .
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