The Crag

by Claire Sutherland

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Will the mountain give up its secrets? While walking on an isolated track in the windswept Wimmera, rock-climber Skye discovers the body of a young woman. The body has injuries that suggest a rock-climbing accident, but it's been found more than 5km from the nearest cliffs at Mount Arapiles.

Police ask Skye to help them navigate the perilous world of rock climbing as they try to unravel what happened. Skye is secretly thrilled to be part of the investigation, but as it becomes clear that a killer is on the loose, all thrill turns to fear. In the isolated crags of the mountain, stark beauty can conceal horrific truths.

Release date: July 30, 2024

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

ONE

They were boys.

They were always boys.

Stuck halfway up Skink, the void sucking at their backs, no moves left and the ground eighty metres below them. They were now resigned to the humiliation of rescue. Skye knew they’d still crack a few jokes in weak, wavering voices, an attempt at bravado, but they and everyone else would know they were shit-scared, near tears and thinking of their mums.

The boys would go back to the climbing gym and the story would become one of their set pieces, but they’d never climb outside again.

‘Breathe long and slow and try to relax,’ Skye shouted down at them. ‘You’re going to be okay; you’re in a safe spot.’

They weren’t in a safe spot.

‘Check me,’ Skye said to Lucas.

He looked at her harness, making sure her figure-of-eight knot was threaded through its front loop. ‘Yep, you’re right. Me?’

‘You’re good too,’ Skye told him after a quick glance.

They fed their ropes through an anchor and leaned over the edge.

‘Rope below,’ they shouted together before tossing the heavy coils off, careful to avoid the frightened pair.

‘My arms are getting pumped,’ one of the boys cried out. She could tell his mouth was dry as bone, every drop of saliva somehow drained away. Hers was the same when she was in a dicey spot. He was on a ledge no wider than a paperback, and the cliff face above him was ever so slightly overhanging so he had to cling to small pockets in the rock above his head to stop himself peeling off.

‘You’re okay; you’ve got more strength than you think. I’ll be there in one sec,’ Skye called back, attaching the rope to the belay device hanging from her harness. ‘On my way.’

She leaned backwards over the cliff and smoothly lowered herself, taking care not to knock down any loose rocks or vegetation as she went.

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he screamed below her.

She looked down between her legs.

He was clawing desperately at the rock, then he dropped like a stone. The full force of his weight hit the last climbing nut he’d placed in a crack, and it held for a few tense seconds, then popped out like a cork from a champagne bottle.

He dropped again, another four metres, before the rope caught on his next piece of protection, ten centimetres of wire attached to a knuckle-sized wedge of metal jammed into a split in the rock. Skye winced, waiting for it to jerk free of its crevice like the first one and drop him again, but it held. He slammed against the cliff hard, then swung back out to dangle in mid-air, spinning slowly above the jumble of rocks sixty metres below him. Five seconds, ten. The piece still held. It looked like he’d done a better job of placing this one. It might keep him safe until she could reach him.

Gym climbers. It was like thinking you could surf because you’d once had a bath. Place a nut, cam or hex in the right spot, and it could hold the weight of a small car. Jammed in with no thought as to how it might behave under the sudden movement of a fall and this is what could happen.

His mate on the other end of the rope had been yanked up a metre by the force of his friend’s fall, but at least he was above a wide ledge and in no danger of plummeting to the bottom. They were both hanging from that single half-inch alloy nut embedded in the thin crack though, and Skye wasn’t brimming with confidence it would hold indefinitely. If it popped out, the first kid would plummet to the ground and pull his mate down after him.

She zipped down quickly, not braking until she reached the slowly spinning climber. He was dazed and bleeding from what she hoped was a superficial head scrape. His helmet had absorbed some of the blow, but it was designed to protect the head from rocks and equipment falling from above, not side knocks. He would have a concussion at the very least.

As Lucas rappelled down in three big jumps to reach the belayer, Skye clipped a carabiner attached to a sling into the boy’s harness and secured him to her.

‘All good, mate – you’re safe – you’ve hit your head but everything’s fine,’ she said. ‘You can’t fall any further: you’re attached to me now.’

He was teary, which was a good sign. If they were in a less dicey spot she’d start assessing him properly, but the priority here was getting him down. No time for niceties.

She shouted to the ambos who had gathered below. They’d hiked up through the scrub from the road with a couple of stretchers, just in case things went south. At least one of them would be used today.

‘Head wound here, Davo. Don’t think it’s too serious.’

She connected the boy to her harness with another sling and set of carabiners for extra safety before unfastening him from his own rope.

The boy yelped as Skye adjusted his gear and he suddenly dropped thirty centimetres, swinging to dangle directly below her harness.

‘It’s okay: you’re attached to me. We’re going to rap down to the ambos now, mate,’ she told him. ‘You don’t have to do anything – I’ll lower us down, okay?’

‘Yep,’ he managed shakily. ‘Thank you.’

She knew any more sudden drops would fray his nerves too much so she was careful to allow for his extra weight, keeping the descent smooth and controlled. She heard his shaky breathing all the way down.

On the ground he took some deep gasping breaths and promptly threw up. The sour smell of beer and bile.

‘We’re going to carry you out, mate,’ Davo told him. ‘What’s your name, and how much did you drink last night?’

‘Jaden. A lot,’ he said. ‘Sorry, we fucked up.’

‘No big harm done, buddy. We’re taking you to Horsham Hospital for a check-up and you probably shouldn’t drive back to Melbourne tonight.’

Skye knew why Davo hadn’t needed to ask where they were from. Local climbers got into plenty of jams, but not on routes this easy.

‘What about our stuff?’ his mate piped up. He’d arrived at the bottom attached to Lucas. ‘We borrowed it all.’

Davo rolled his eyes at her, but she felt sorry for them. Uni students most likely, with no money, and god knows she’d done some dumb stuff in her time.

‘Feel like a climb, Lucas?’ she said.

‘Yeah, righto. There’s worse ways to spend a day off – but we better get moving. Rain’s not far off.’

‘We’ll go up and get your gear,’ Skye told the boys. ‘My car’s up there anyway. We’ll take it to the hospital later. But don’t come out again until you’ve done some trad climbing lessons. Gyms don’t count.’

The boys nodded miserably.

‘See you tomorrow, Davo,’ she added. ‘I’m on the early shift.’

She liked climbing with Lucas. He ran the cafe in Natimuk and she had her day job too, but like most climbers up here, they were both on the informal volunteer Mount Arapiles rescue team. The members knew every nook and cranny of it, lived minutes from its base and usually had enough equipment for a rescue piled in the back of their dusty cars. They could get there much quicker than most emergency services, and the cops and SES deferred to them and their expertise and local knowledge whenever someone got into strife on the crag.

‘Wanna lead?’ Lucas asked.

That was just one of the reasons she liked him. No assumption that because he was the bloke he was more qualified for the higher risk of going first and placing the gear. You only had to look at the names of some of the routes up here to know climbing had been a sport for blokes – one of her favourite climbs was called Slut’s Revenge, for Christ’s sake – but in a pursuit where flexibility and lightness trump brute strength, women had shown they could excel just as readily as men.

She set off up Skink’s first pitch, an easy grade 12. She loved this rock. Warm red, studded with subtle greys, unbreakable, reliable, rough enough for grip but not so rough it tore up your hands. She’d spent countless happy hours sitting on suntrap ledges in the silence, belaying high above the canola fields and grazing roos, waiting for an ‘I’m safe’ call from above and her turn to climb.

This enormous old sea cliff rose from the relentless flatness of the Wimmera district like Uluru. With more than three thousand climbing routes snaking up its faces, it was world-renowned in climbing circles, but barely known to anyone else. Even the locals hardly visited. Most of them thought the climbers were mad. Why scale it when there was a tourist road to the lookout at the top?

Pick Mount Arapiles up and plonk it in America and an entire tourist town would have sprung up next to it. But its remoteness and position at the bottom of the world meant a handful of climbers mostly had the place to themselves. On a still day, all you would hear was the odd breath of wind through the trees far below, the occasional grain truck on the road that sliced through the canola fields to Horsham and periodic calls of climbers echoing off the cliffs.

Skye reached the first stance and set up an anchor. ‘I’m safe,’ she called to Lucas.

‘Off belay,’ he replied a few minutes later.

She pulled the rope up until she felt it tighten and attached it to her harness. ‘You’re on belay,’ she called down.

‘Climbing,’ Lucas replied.

She pulled him taut, gently feeding the rope through her device as he lightly scaled the rock, collecting the boys’ borrowed gear and the pieces she’d placed on her way up, clipping them all to his harness as he went. A watchful lizard settled on the coils of her rope in a weak patch of sun.

Two pitches later – including the ever-so-slightly tricky bit where the boys had lost their nerve, too unskilled to go up or downclimb – they topped out and separated the boys’ gear from their own before hiking the two hundred metres to the summit road and her car.

‘You find someone to run the cafe today?’ she asked Lucas.

‘Yeah, Jojo was on. He makes shit coffee but it was pretty dead anyway. Worth it for a sneaky climb.’

‘And to save a couple of deadshits,’ she said.

He snorted. ‘We were all deadshits once. Will you drop off their gear?’

‘Yeah, I’m heading home anyway. Callum’ll be wondering where I am.’

She thought about the boys as she drove back towards town. They had mistaken rock climbing as a sport for adrenaline seekers when really it was for thinkers and dreamers, lovers of scenery and silence, puzzle solvers – tortoises, not hares.

TWO

Skye and Callum had been in the Wimmera coming on four years now. When she left Horsham for uni in Melbourne she’d vowed never to return. Boring, insular, hellishly hot in summer, strafed by icy rain and wind in winter, all it had going for it was the climbing. But after a few years paying $600 a week for a dark, dank, single-fronted Richmond terrace an hour’s drive from a decent horizon, her perspective on her hometown had softened.

The COVID lockdowns helped paint a rosier picture of the country too. That long endless fever dream – day after day of streets with the eerie emptiness of a Christmas morning but without the joyous shrieks of kids on new bikes. While Callum and Skye were calculating which parks were within a five-kilometre radius of their mates so they could shiver a metre and a half apart and sip overpriced hipster cocktails in a vain attempt to Keep Calm and Carry On, her old school friends and her parents were living their country-town lives as if nothing had happened, watching what was happening in Melbourne with horrified fascination. It was like being a goldfish in a bowl. By the time the next pandemic came along, Skye was determined she’d be on their side of the glass.

The idea of a bit of distance between Callum and a party scene that was threatening to drag him under only sealed the deal.

They needed paramedics at home – everywhere, really – but the call outs here were for farmers with severed fingers and rock climbers who’d come a cropper, in stark contrast to her urban clientele of raging ice addicts and stabbed teenagers.

Ice was starting to make inroads out here, and there were grisly car crashes to deal with wherever you were, but they’d been able to buy a house with a tiny mortgage and they could climb almost year-round. She’d transferred to the local ambo service easily, and Callum signed on with the biggest plumbing outfit in town, and now they were settled. She occasionally wondered if this was it for the rest of her life, if she’d settled for something too small, but then she’d pull into their driveway and the feeling would pass. Two dogs, nice weatherboard with air con and a big yard, pub meal once a week, spontaneous visits to her mum and dad’s hobby farm outside town whenever she felt like it and a trip to Melbourne every few months when the cultural claustrophobia gripped too hard – there was nothing wrong with small.

Skye swung into the hospital carpark and shouldered the bag of gear, sidling between cars on her way to the waiting room, where one of the still shaken boys was sitting glumly on a plastic moulded chair in the sharp fluorescent light. Jaden was off having his head scanned for fractures, he told her.

The boy was sombre, but Skye still clocked him checking her out. Her forearms and hands were the mess of cuts, calluses and ropy veins common to any regular climber, but she was used to her athletic figure, close-cropped hair, olive skin and green eyes drawing attention from guys.

‘So, wanna tell me what happened for my accident report?’ she asked. ‘It’s not official: we just like to share warning stories with the other volunteers, and climbers on our website.’

‘God, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘We got pissed at the campground last night, woke up late and probably still drunk, thought we’d be right on a 12 because we climb 15-plus at the gym, and started feeling shaky about halfway up the third pitch. Then Jaden lost his nerve, couldn’t find anywhere to place good gear, so he just kept going, and then he froze. Plus, I think we were dehydrated. I reckon he was hallucinating at one stage. Honestly, I’ve never been that scared in my life.’

Skye nodded. ‘I’m not surprised. You made a series of shit decisions, but the final one was a good one. Calling for help probably saved you a lot more pain, and maybe worse.’ She stood up. ‘Look after yourselves.’

‘Thanks again, from both of us. Lesson learned,’ he said.

Maybe not complete deadshits after all.

Callum’s car was there when she pulled into the driveway.

He kissed her hello then went back to slicing onions while the dogs fussed at her for a pat. She hugged him from behind as he worked, running her hands up his ribs playfully. There wasn’t much bulk to him. Slight and lean but muscular, his build was perfect for a climber. He could have been top notch if he’d taken it up earlier, but he was content to be decent.

They’d met at a climbing gym in North Melbourne six years earlier – a desperate measure for Skye when she missed real rock, for Callum a bit of fun with mates.

She’d noticed him watching her on a tricky overhanging route and might have started showing off a bit, hooking her heel into a tight corner and swinging upside down to pendulum her way to the next hold. Her theatrics worked. When his mates were packing up he held back and came over to compliment her on her skill.

She’d since taught him to climb outside a gym and now they were well matched, climbing up to a testing grade 25. The best climbers in the country climbed in the high 20s, and even 30s, but Skye wasn’t looking to make a career of it and she knew Callum wasn’t either.

‘Spag bog,’ Callum said, looking up from his onions, his blue eyes welling from the fumes. ‘How’s your day off?’

‘Ended up doing a rescue,’ Skye told him. ‘Couple of Melbourne gym rats got into strife on Skink. Got a bit sketchy and one of them hit his head when his gear popped, but they’re okay. And I climbed up with Lucas and collected their gear.’

‘Nice one,’ Callum said. ‘Any journos turn up?’

‘Nah, your status is safe.’

He laughed. ‘Excellent.’

The year before Callum had helped with a tricky rescue at Arapiles. A bloke had passed out with heatstroke and it had taken a few hours to reach him – enough time for the local news station to show up and make Callum what passed for a Horsham celebrity for fifteen minutes. They’d interviewed him when the guy had been safely bundled into an ambulance: Skye’s, as it happened.

She thought then, as she sometimes did, about how content she was. Spag bog, an episode of Survivor and the company of her decent, competent guy was all she needed. She’d wasted plenty of time on charismatic arseholes before she met Callum. He was charismatic in a dry and understated kind of way, but minus the games and dick pics.

Skye had worried Callum would hate Horsham when they moved here. When they’d met, his weekends had been filled with hangovers and benders. He’d grown up a lot in the years after they moved in together, dumping a pretty decent swathe of hard-partying mates, and if not dumping then distancing himself from his even harder-partying brother. But there’s calming down, and there’s calming down in the Wimmera. Skye had spent their first year in Horsham waiting for Callum to decide living here was too close to semi-retirement for a pair of twenty-nine-year-olds. All she could see was Horsham’s pounding summer heat, relentless flatness, sluggish brown river and bad coffee. Throw in a three-hour drive to the nearest surf beach and she worried they’d be back in a chilly Melbourne shithole before they knew it.

She shouldn’t have. He’d settled in better than she had, and now seeing the town through his eyes reminded her of the good stuff she’d forgotten – the cool little cinema, the local footy club where farmers’ sons played with real estate agents, and the annual show where their first year here they’d watched a dog talent competition whose winner’s only skill was sitting more or less on command. You didn’t get entertainment like that in Melbourne.

‘What shift you on tomorrow?’ Callum asked her.

‘Six am,’ she said. ‘I’m off at two. Want to go for a climb?’

‘Nah, got a big job on: I’m not likely to finish till five for a few days. Maybe later this week,’ Callum replied.

‘Okay, I’ll take the dogs somewhere then. Maybe down the river,’ she said.

With any luck her shift would be quiet. Monday mornings usually were. Saturdays were the shifts you wanted to avoid. That’s when the drunk drivers and pub brawlers really hit their stride, and that’s when you were most likely to cop something yourself.

Skye had done a bunch of self-defence classes and she was agile and fast, but she was also slight. That’s one of the reasons she kept her dark hair cropped close to her skull in a pixie cut. It meant nobody could grab a ponytail and slam her to the ground – something that had happened to a mate of hers when they were both trainees in Melbourne.

But work was something to think about when the alarm went off at five-thirty am, not now, when Survivor was about to begin.

THREE

An old bloke with suspected broken ribs and arm after a ladder fall and a kid who came off a quad bike and her shift was over. She hated quad bikes, but this one had a roll bar and the kid was wearing a helmet so all he had was a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder. She’d been to one where the results had been much grimmer and she always steeled herself when those calls came through.

Skye loved her job. She’d seen plenty of ambos get burned out and jaded, sick of the sadness and occasional abuse, but she wasn’t there yet and might never be. She’d thought about nursing but being a paramedic meant she got to do the fixing up and helping people without the bedpans and catheters. She was a good person, but not that good.

She was home by two-thirty pm and chucked her uniform in a bucket of cold water to soak. The kid’s broken nose had been a gusher.

She opened the back door to Mack and Murphy, and the shaggy pound mongrels danced around her. Their default mood was ‘delighted’ – delighted to see her, delighted to go out, delighted to stay in.

Today they were going out. Skye had thought again about the river. The wide brown expanse of it ran through the town and beyond, imposing river red gums looming over the water. Its invisible bottom was booby-trapped with twisted roots and sodden branches, and it was full of farm run-off after a long, dry summer with nothing much in the way of rain to flush it out. The dogs would need a hose off if she took them there. They’d plunge in the second she opened the back of her station wagon, and by the time they were coaxed out they’d be rank with diluted sheep shit and farm chemicals.

Nope. Plan B.

She loaded them into the car and headed out of town for her favourite one-hour walking loop. It was too snakey in summer, but in winter the tree-lined dirt track that wended its way between farms, salt lakes and the billabong was a perfect option.

About thirty minutes from Horsham, Mack and Murphy started stirring. They might not be getting a swim, but they knew this road and the promise of rabbits was a good alternative. They were yet to catch one, but they were very much of the view that winning didn’t matter; it was the way they played the game.

Skye pulled over at the side of the narrow road where a dirt track that barely warranted the name disappeared into the scrub. She opened the back hatch of her station wagon for the keening hounds and they set off. She followed them down the meandering path cut between paddocks of chickpeas and s. . .