The Chalet: the most exciting new debut crime thriller of 2020 to race through this Christmas

by Catherine Cooper

  ‘What a good idea!’ I trill. ‘That would be lovely.’

  I turn back to my iPad, quite certain that a lift will close, I’ll get lost or something else will make me miss my lunch date. ‘Cass could come with us too if she’d like,’ I add, making a mental note to make sure that, one way or another, she won’t want to. Judging by the ski lesson I joined her for briefly, she doesn’t enjoy skiing much, so I don’t think it will be difficult. I might book her a nice spa day as a ‘treat’ to make sure.

  Millie cuts the cake, places a slice on each plate and hands them round. ‘Hugo, Simon, I understand from head office that you were both keen to meet Cameron, the owner of this chalet and some of the others in the resort. He’s planning to come for dinner this evening – assuming it suits you, that is. Would that work for you all?’

  Simon nods, stuffing his face full of cake. ‘Fine,’ he mumbles, crumbs unpleasantly falling out of his mouth as he does so. He swallows the huge mouthful with a large gulp and belches. ‘’S’cuse me. Looking forward to meeting him.’

  ‘Great!’ Millie says. ‘I’ll let him know. Now, if you have everything you need, I’ll go and get on with preparing dinner.’

  ‘Better be a good one if the boss is coming, eh?’ Simon quips.

  ‘Absolutely. Although I hope all the meals I prepare are equally as good?’

  ‘You’ve got no worries there. We’re only going to say nice things about you,’ Simon adds, staring at Millie’s ample boobs. He may as well have smacked her on the bum. I don’t know how she puts up with it.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything else, otherwise I’ll see you for canapés at about eight?’

  ‘That sounds lovely, Millie, thank you,’ I say, to avoid giving Simon the chance to say anything suggestive.

  Hugo turns to look out of the enormous window. ‘It’s really coming down now,’ he says.

  Simon claps him on the back. ‘Great!’ he roars. ‘Imagine the powder tomorrow!’

  16

  December 1998, La Madière, France

  ‘The most important thing is that we get our stories straight,’ I tell Andy as soon as I put the phone down.

  ‘What do you mean? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not getting involved.’

  ‘You’re already involved. You were with me when we lost them. You helped me search.’

  ‘And that’s bad because …’

  ‘It’s not!’ I hiss. ‘But not only have we lost two men, in retrospect, we probably should have alerted the authorities earlier. Given the conditions.’ I wipe my hand over my face. ‘This is serious stuff, Andy.’

  ‘But you’re the boss, as you never tire of telling me.’

  I pull Andy closer to me so that our faces are almost touching. ‘You were with me – I didn’t hear you saying we should call rescue out,’ I growl. ‘Both of us skied too fast at times, we didn’t always put the clients’ needs first. Either of us. We are in this together. OK? I go down, so do you. Neither of us have covered ourselves in glory here. The way we dealt with things wasn’t exactly textbook, was it? Richard saw both of us with the clients. You and I are both on all the business documents, even though I put in pretty much all the money. So you are as liable as me. Understood?’

  Andy violently wrenches out of my grasp. ‘Let go of me, OK? Fine. Let’s get our stories straight then.’

  17

  Daily Mail

  30 December, 1998

  One of two men missing in La Madière in the French Alps has been found alive following an extensive search. The British man in his twenties was airlifted to Grenoble Hospital yesterday, where he remains in a critical condition.

  Another man, believed to be his brother, is still missing. François Delpont, leading the rescue said: ‘We have a large team of experts searching the mountain where the brothers were skiing, but local weather conditions are making the search difficult. We are delighted to have found one man alive and will continue to search for the other as long as is appropriate and the weather conditions allow.

  ‘The two men were skiing with local guides who are helping our officers to ascertain what happened. No arrests have been made and currently there is nothing to indicate that this was anything other than a tragic accident.’

  18

  December 1998, La Madière, France

  The police interview room is stifling. It’s early in the morning and I’ve been here through the night, stewing, while they find an officer who can speak English to interview me. I’m too stressed to attempt it in French and I need to be 100 per cent clear on what I’m saying.

  Officially, it seems I don’t have to stay to be interviewed, but if I say I can’t be bothered to wait around to talk about how two men came to go missing it isn’t going to look good, is it? Eventually, the door opens and a bleary-eyed uniformed man comes in.

  I stand up and he offers his hand. I shake it and we both sit down.

  ‘Thank you for coming in,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry we kept you waiting.’

  ‘That’s fine. It’s been a long day though and I’m very tired. If you could ask your questions, perhaps we can all get to bed.’

  That sounded tetchier than I’d intended. Stay calm. Stick to what we planned, I remind myself.

  ‘You will have heard the news that one of the men has been found,’ the officer says.

  A whoosh of relief shoots through me, very quickly followed by one of panic. Is he alive? Conscious? Is he going to know that we were too slow to alert rescue? Where was he? Did he see us? What did he tell them? Did he say we skied too fast? Is this some kind of trick?

  ‘No, I didn’t know that!’ I almost shout. ‘Why didn’t someone tell me?’

  ‘I must apologize,’ the officer says, covering his eyes momentarily and then looking at me again. ‘As you say, it’s been a long night and we have been very busy. The fact that you hadn’t yet been told that he’d been found must have been an oversight.’

  Yeah, right. Mind games, more like. ‘So is he …’ A surge of adrenaline pulses through me and for a second I think I’m going to be sick. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s going to tell me he’s dead. I’m sure of it.

  ‘He is on his way to hospital. The last I heard he had not yet woken up. The medics will be doing all they can, but for now his future is uncertain.’

  I nod. Panic continues to course through me. What if he dies? Or if the other one turns up dead? Would that be manslaughter in France? Would I go to prison? Why do I not already know this? Why didn’t I check when I – we – set up the business? It’s not my fault, I remind myself. Not my fault.

  ‘And the other man?’

  He pulls a face. ‘They continue to search, as much as the weather allows, but I fear his chances are now slim, would you not say?’

  I shake my head and then nod. I don’t know what to say. My palms are sweating; I wipe them on my trousers.

  ‘Can you please tell us in your own words what happened from the time you met the two men to the time you called the emergency services?’ the officer asks.

  I swallow hard. ‘Right. Um, I met the two men at three. The weather wasn’t great even at that point, but they were – are – only here for a week, so like most punters they wanted to ski even so.’

  He nods. ‘OK. And had you met the men before? Had they filled in any paperwork?’

  The paperwork! There’s a disclaimer! They’ll have ticked the disclaimer! Suddenly I feel a lot lighter. Thank Christ for the French love of paperwork.

  ‘Of course,’ I say, though this hadn’t occurred to me until that very second. ‘They’d come by the office earlier to fill in our standard form – you know: name, address, level of skiing, the standard disclaimer about skiing at their own risk, contact details …’ I drop in the disclaimer as if it’s unimportant, but I see the officer make a note. While remaining poker-faced on the outside, inwardly I smile.

  ‘I see. And was there anything unusual about that?’

  ‘No, noth
ing unusual, except that they’d both marked themselves as expert skiers when it turned out that wasn’t really the case.’

  ‘I see. So at what point did it become clear they weren’t expert skiers?’

  ‘Almost as soon as we set off.’

  ‘Right. So what did you do then?’

  ‘Well, they said they wanted to go into the back country, but I could see they wouldn’t be capable – well, more that it wasn’t the best idea, given their level of experience and the conditions.’ I add this to make out I was erring on the side of caution when the truth is I couldn’t be bothered to try to coax them down something they were going to be incredibly slow on in blizzard conditions.

  ‘So instead I took them down Couloir Noir – you know the one?’ He nods. ‘Officially it’s off-piste, but it starts and ends at the lift and isn’t too hairy, so I figured it was a compromise between keeping the clients safe and giving them what they want.’

  Argh, I shouldn’t have said that. Because I didn’t keep them safe, did I? Not my fault. Not my fault.

  ‘I understand. So at what point did you realize the men had gone missing?’

  ‘They started going down the track quite slowly with me leading at first – off-piste, I generally think that’s safer, especially in bad weather. There was a bit of an issue because one of them turned out to be a speed merchant and kept overtaking me, with his brother racing behind him too so as not to be outdone.’

  Good one. Put some blame on the clients. Not my fault.

  ‘To begin with it was OK though. The weather was getting worse, but they seemed to be getting more confident, turning better, stopping less, definitely going faster though, however much I urged them to slow down and follow me. Then we came to that bend – you know the one? They’d gone ahead again, and by the time I got round it, a few seconds behind them, I couldn’t see them.’

  I wipe my palms again. I wish I knew where the man had been found. I’m not sure exactly what happened and when, who was in front and behind and at what point – I can’t remember any of that now. But I can’t say that.

  ‘So I knew they’d been in front of me, and I figured the best thing would be to ski down and catch up with them. Most people wait for you after a while. But the clients were – are – brothers and they seemed a bit competitive as I said, so they might have been trying to race to the bottom, something like that, I don’t know. My colleague Andy was also there, assisting me, even though they’d only booked one guide.’ I don’t mention about Andy tearing off ahead, obviously, or about me trying to overtake so as not to lose face. I’ll have to hope that the guy in the hospital bed doesn’t remember too many details about who was where and when – I certainly don’t. Assuming the poor sap wakes up, that is. I take a sip of water from the plastic cup in front of me and notice my hands are shaking. Calm down. Calm down.

  The officer nods. ‘I see. Did you do anything else?’

  Anything else? Like what? What else was I meant to do? I swallow the panic down. What is he looking for me to say?

  ‘Well, obviously we called out, stuff like that.’

  ‘And when did you decide to call the emergency services?’

  ‘Once I got to the bottom, given the bad weather, I asked my colleague to go to the office to call their chalet, see if anyone knew where they were. They hadn’t noted which chalet they were staying in on the forms, so we had to call the tour company rep first, which meant we lost some time doing that.’ The clients’ fault that time was lost. Not ours. ‘Meanwhile, I went back up to check the track again, see if I could spot them, in spite of the worsening weather.’

  Making myself out to be a bit of a hero there.

  The officer nods again. ‘I see. And how long did all this take?’

  ‘Um – for my colleague to get back to the office? Twenty minutes?’ Way longer than that by the time we’d dithered about what to do. ‘It’s hard to say,’ I continue, ‘I was more focused on finding the men than on what time it was. Besides, with the weather so bad it would have been difficult to look at my watch anyway …’ Stupid thing to say. Think. Calm down.

  ‘Richard from Powder Puff said he couldn’t be exact, but he thinks he received a call from you at around five.’

  I swallow hard. ‘Yes, that sounds about right. The men were a few minutes late for our meeting, we had to get up the mountain, then they spent ages at the top fiddling with their goggles and boot buckles – you know how punters do – and then they were very slow at the top of the slope so … yes, that would make sense.’

  Big risk. If the guy in hospital wakes up, he’ll know that they weren’t late – if anything, we left a little early – they weren’t that slow and Andy and I spent a good forty-five minutes faffing around before I alerted rescue. Quite possibly longer. Forty-five minutes to an hour when the pisteurs and snowcats could have been out searching for these two missing men. Before the weather worsened. Vital minutes which could have made all the difference. Life-or-death minutes, literally. I swallow hard.

  The officer puts his pen down and leans back in his chair. ‘OK. Obviously, we will need to see the paperwork and we will be checking the phone records when they arrive.’

  ‘That’s fine. Of course. I’m happy to help in any way I can.’

  Thank Christ for the disclaimer.

  19

  January 2020, La Madière, France

  Ria

  I am feeling so refreshed and relaxed after another hot tub session that I let Hugo have sex with me before dinner without even trying to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

  ‘I hope this is the one,’ he sighs as he rolls off me.

  ‘The one what?’

  ‘The one where it works. You know, the one where you get pregnant.’

  He props himself up on his elbow and gestures towards the window. ‘Look at that – snow falling outside, here in this beautiful room, what an amazing place it would be to conceive a child! What a lovely story to be able to tell her. We could call her Snowy.’

  ‘Ewww. No child wants to hear about their conception. And Snowy?’ I laugh. ‘That’s a kitten’s name.’

  He traces his finger down my stomach. ‘OK. Not Snowy. A name that means snow. Or winter or something. What about calling her Winter? You get kids called Summer. Is Winter a good name for a girl?’ He reaches over me for my iPad and starts browsing. I feel a lurch of alarm.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t touch my iPad?’ I ask.

  ‘I didn’t the other day,’ he says distractedly, ‘I’m just looking for wintery names now, and mine is downstairs. Here – Neve – that’s nice. Noelle – hmm, not sure. Alaska. Christmas. Crystal. Maybe not.’

  I snatch my iPad back, pretending I am looking at the names but really I don’t want him holding it. ‘Maybe we could call her Elsa, like in Frozen,’ I suggest, trying to shut this conversation down. ‘Anyway, how do you know it would be a girl?’

  He snuggles his face into my shoulder. ‘I don’t. I just hope it would be so that she would be like you.’

  I stroke his hair and at that moment, I almost feel sorry for him.

  20

  January 2020, La Madière, France

  Hugo

  Whatever Millie said about hoping that all her meals were equally as good as each other, you can see she’s gone all out for dinner this evening with her boss here. We have oysters for canapés, three-cheese soufflé starters, some kind of bird within a bird within a bird like you might imagine Henry VIII eating at a banquet when he wants to impress foreign kings, and then a very light homemade ice cream thing topped with elaborate spun sugar creations.

  I sometimes wish I could bring Olivia on these trips. I’m hopeless at schmoozing. I wonder if that’s partly why the business isn’t doing so well at the moment – being able to do small talk seems so much more important now than it used to be. I could really do with some of the Snow Snow chalets in my stable, and also I need Simon to feel like I’m the kind of person he wants to do business with. S
o there’s a lot at stake, but I know I’m rubbish when it comes to this aspect of the business and it makes me uncomfortable. And much as I love Ria, I can’t always trust her to behave herself like Olivia would. Ria seems to be behaving especially obstreperously this week. She always likes a drink and to be sociable, but she doesn’t usually get so wasted. She’s not her usual self at the moment and I don’t understand why.

  On top of that, this evening is not being made any easier by the fact that chalet-owner Cameron is a total arse. He isn’t what I was expecting at all. In all honesty, I thought he’d be a bit like me – public-school-educated, maybe someone who’d inherited the family business and built it up over the years, or made some money in the City or something like that and then decided to invest in ski chalets.

  But no, it turns out he built up the company from scratch. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – clearly, it’s something to be admired – but does he need to wang on about it so much? On and on with his self-congratulatory spiel about how hard he’s worked and how well he’s done, along with how much he knows about the industry, about the mountains, and about pretty much everything else as far as I can tell.

  I realize I haven’t heard a word Cameron’s said for the last few minutes, partly because Millie is being especially attentive about topping up everyone’s glasses this evening, but mainly because he is such a bore.

  ‘… So I knew from the start that what I wanted to offer was properly luxurious chalets, not those mass market ones aimed at people who like to pretend they’re richer than they really are,’ he is postulating. ‘I started off with one chalet – broke my balls to get the finance to rent it for the season and did pretty much everything myself, from airport transfers to cleaning and cooking. The punters lap up that kind personal service, nothing being too much trouble, so that’s what I’ve tried to build on. It’s difficult to find the right staff – no one is as dedicated to it as me, obviously, but there you go, that’s how it is as a business owner. Fortunately there are good people out there if you have a rigorous interview process and pay a decent wage as I do, and I certainly got lucky with Millie here.’