Morten concentrated on his brandy, giving her a moment. Then he stood up. “Go!” he said. “I’ll see you first thing in the morning. It’s going to snow in the night and I’ll need to come over again and cut the tracks.”
“But the forecast - ”
“ - is wrong. As I was getting into my car I could see that some of the reindeer have come down into the trees. So it will snow. Now please go and enjoy your meal.”
When she was outside in the cold night air Elin took a few minutes to compose herself. She looked up at the sky and saw that it was clear – not a trace of snow clouds. The moon had not yet risen and the stars shone brightly. She dabbed her eyes with her sleeve and walked slowly over to her house.
Chapter 6
Back in her room Cally Douglas switched on the TV and muted it. On the screen a woman wearing yellow oilskin waterproofs was in a small boat, her fingers hooked proudly in the gills of a fish that she was holding up for the camera. She seemed to be making a video diary. This is me and my dead fish. The boat pitched about in a choppy sea, apparently miles from land, but the woman seemed overjoyed to be alone in it. Lucky lady.
Cally had left the men chatting in the lounge. Or at any rate that’s where they were now. Richard had pretended to need something from his own room so that he could accompany her up the stairs, but as soon as she closed her door she heard him go back down.
Neep had been delighted with the news of her promotion and had shaken her hand and clapped her on the back and generally made a proper spectacle of himself. But although Richard had congratulated her, it had been in a polite and reserved sort of way. He had looked sad rather than happy, and even a little bit worried, as if . . . well, she didn’t know. Maybe it was just Richard being Richard. Even at the best of times she was never quite sure what he was really thinking.
She filled her glass with water then sat in the armchair and took a little plain package out of her rucksack. She unpicked the familiar yellow wrapping and revealed a familiar white card box. It was packed full of benzodiazepine tablets, weapons-grade, obtained through the magic of internet shopping.
An old Crombie resident had told Cally about the online pharmacy, a girl who had been trying to trick her boyfriend into getting her pregnant, by using fake contraceptive pills and real Clomid, a fertility drug. It had done the trick; the girl was now the happy mother of twins. But it had been a risky strategy, for it depended entirely on choosing the right boyfriend. Which was not something that Cally had yet proved very good at.
She opened the box and popped a pill out of one of the foil strips, then swallowed it with a sip of water and closed her eyes, savouring her reward for getting through the evening.
Then she remembered she still had something to do. She got her phone from her jacket and composed a text message.
Hi Anne. All okay so far and no “problems”. Group nice. Weather super. Big thanks once again for making it possible! Will text you at the end of our tour. Cally.
She pressed “Send” and waited for the confirmation.
As expected, Dr Anne Gilmour had been surprised when Cally first mentioned the ski trip, back in the autumn, during one of their fortnightly appointments at the adolescent psychiatry department. But, again as Cally had expected, the doctor had agreed to ask the charity for more funding.
“But it might be the last time”, Anne had said. “For I think we’ll soon find it difficult to make the case that you qualify for their support. You’re making such good progress. Steady job for several months, albeit in a sheltered environment. Outside interests developing nicely. No episodes for several months. Benzodiazepine now used only as a last resort. Good cooperation, excellent insight.”
She paused and gave Cally one of her long looks. When she spoke again there was a hint of concern in her voice. “I can see that you are determined to prove to the world that you are fully recovered, and I can understand that. But you shouldn’t push too hard. Forgive me for being cautious. But just a few years ago you could hardly venture out of Crombie House without medication. And now you feel capable of skiing in a wilderness in Norway. It seems almost too good to be true.”
If Cally had been totally honest she would have said, Well, Anne, the clock is ticking and I need to move things along quickly, even if that means taking risks.
But she believed that total honesty would have resulted in the doctor sectioning her, deploying the full force of the Mental Health Act to punish misdemeanours past and present. So what she actually did say was, “It’s a very easy tour in a very gentle area, not really a wilderness at all. And I won’t be short of company. Almost twenty people have put their names down. And my two volunteer supporters, Richard and Neep, will be coming along.”
Then she had shamelessly employed one of the coping strategies learned from Anne’s psychologists: the one in which you take people with you by convincing them that you are already on the same road. “Ever since you agreed to let me go on the ski-slope lessons,” she said, “people have seen me differently. Especially when they then found out that I could manage to go out in the hills with the club, and that I was actually quite good at skiing. That took them by surprise, the idea of me being good at something. And I’m convinced that the skiing helped me get my cleaning job. It was all we talked about at the interview. So I’m hoping that if I go on this tour, it won’t just help me recover, but it will help people accept that I am recovering.”
So the doctor had agreed to approach the charity, as expected.
Cally got on well enough with Anne now. She didn’t trust her, of course. Yet in a grudging sort of way she had come to like her, even though their early encounters had been a real challenge. Cally had just turned fifteen when this freshly-qualified psychiatrist took over her case, and their first session was still vivid in her memory.
The new doctor’s casual clothing and her Call-me-Anne nonsense would never have tricked Cally into lowering her guard. It was the woman’s disarming show of honesty that caught her by surprise.
“I’ve been through your file and studied all the previous psychiatric assessments, and I have spoken to a lot of my colleagues about you,” Anne had said. “But to tell you the truth I’m not entirely sure what to do. If I knew precisely what your condition was, then I’d know how to target it. But your illness does seem to be rather changeable in its nature. It seems to flare up for no obvious reason – or maybe I should say, no reason that is immediately obvious.”
The doctor had tapped the big file on her desk. “When I look at some of your earliest episodes I can honestly say, this seems to be a case of a frightened and lonely little girl reacting with genuine panic to the sudden loss of her mother. It must have been truly dreadful for her to witness such a sad and dramatic event. And I feel a great deal of sympathy for that little girl.”
At these words Cally’s heart had sunk. Not another shrink who is going to harp on about the early years. She’d been hoping to be spared the no-I-don’t-remember-anything-about-it rigmarole, and the why-should-I feel-guilty-about-something-that-happened-when-I-was-three routine. Anyway, being an orphan was no big deal if you couldn’t even remember your parents - especially if you’d only ever had one. The kids’ home she had started out in had been full of parentless children, and in Crombie having no family was almost a condition of membership, a badge of honour.
So she had put on a bored face. But Anne had ignored it. “However, when I look at some of the later episodes - some of them, not all of them - I see a different picture. I think, this might be a case of a frightened girl reacting badly to a change that she can see coming up. It might be a foster placement in the early days, or a move back to a mainstream residential home more recently. I find myself thinking, perhaps she is afraid of the change, and perhaps she decides to stage an episode, to pretend to have one, a really dramatic one in a busy public place, usually a large shop, in an attempt to sabotage the new placement. It would be an unhelpful thing to do, but I could understand why she would do it.”
Cally had put on an offended look. “If that was true, the episodes would have stopped as soon as the new placement was cancelled. But they didn’t. They always kept going afterwards.”
“Yes, they did. I’ve noticed that. There would always be a few recurrences in quick succession, always at least five, and often they too would be in very public places. And then things would settle down again and the episodes would revert to a more random pattern.”
Anne had then allowed a long pause to develop. “And that makes me consider the possibility that the girl might have staged not just the first episode in each series, but also the recurrences. It might just have been her way of trying to cover things up.”
“You make this girl sound like a really devious cow!” Cally had uttered the words angrily. But she knew she had lessened their effect by breaking eye-contact.
The doctor’s voice had been kind. “I don’t mean to make her sound devious. I’m just a little bit worried that she might be getting herself labelled as being even more unwell than she actually is. And that’s not a good thing for a teenage girl. Not when she should be working toward leaving care and starting to live in a more independent setting. For even if the label isn’t an accurate one, the danger is that it will lead her into the adult psychiatric system. And it might take her a long time to get back out of it.”
Cally had fallen silent and the doctor seemed to realise they could take it no further. “Anyway, let’s go one step at a time,” she said. “I suggest we continue with these one-to-one sessions, because there is obviously a lot for us to talk about. I will also refer you to the psychologists and ask them to work with you on coping strategies. And I’ll try to set up some practical activities for you, to boost your confidence and give you something to put in your CV. I know some charities that fund enjoyable things like self-defence classes and driving lessons in go-karts. As I say, we need to start looking forward to the day when you will walk out of the unit and start living independently. ”
Cally could have lived with most of that - even though the doctor, sharp as she was, hadn’t quite got the story right.
It was the next bit that had been the bombshell. “And a big part of getting you ready for independent living is to scale back the amount of medication that you are taking. We need to make sure you don’t become dependent on it.”
It had already been too late for that. Far too late.
Chapter 7
At six o’clock in the morning Elin Olsen clicked her house door shut and walked quietly along the snow-covered path. At this early hour she didn’t want to disturb her boyfriend, though maybe it was a needless worry, for Ash seemed to be able to sleep through anything whereas she would normally waken at the slightest sound. She had dressed quietly and made do with tying her hair back; she would use the poolside shower once the morning rush was over.
In the darkness she picked her way through the car park. She was glad she had taken Morten Espelund’s advice. The evening off had done her good. And so had all the time in bed with Ash: the urgent, almost frenzied sex before dinner as well as the slow and gentle lovemaking later in the evening. His meal - the alleged focus of the evening - had as usual been excellent, an African-Asian dish of lightly-spiced chicken accompanied by thick cornmeal porridge and washed down with an exceptionally strong spirit called Waragi. She had slept very well.
Now the air was refreshingly cold against her face and she guessed at a temperature of minus ten. Back in her school ski-racing days she had learned that if it got any colder than that, her nostrils would start to tingle.
Looking at the ground she could see that Morten’s reindeer had called it right again. Contrary to the weather forecast a few centimetres of snow had fallen in the night. But the sky was now clear and starry, with just a slight breeze to rattle the cables of the flag poles opposite her house. It looked like it would be another lovely day. Which would keep the guests happy. As long as the sun was shining, the guests would smile and laugh and spend all day on the ski tracks, and then bring back into the hotel an infectious happy buzz that would continue through the evening. If the sunshine lasted all week some of them would even book next winter’s holiday before they checked out. But if the weather was poor the guests would manage just a couple of hours’ skiing, and would then come back and mope around the hotel. And some of them might then have a tendency to squabble with their families, or to find fault with the décor or the food, or to complain that the water in the swimming pool was too cold. Or too warm.
Elin noticed tyre tracks going down the ramp by the side-entrance of the hotel and could see a car at the bottom. Good, the new snow hadn’t delayed Lech and Katarzyna, the kitchen staff. She would nip down for a coffee with them after she unlocked the main door and tidied the ski stall.
The breeze seemed to blow more strongly as she approached the archway, and she felt a sudden shiver, and a tingling in her nostrils. It was strange how even at night it always seemed a few degrees colder here than in the car park, as if the high building that blocked the sun’s rays during the day was somehow also capable of deflecting energy from the moon and stars.
As she drew close to the main door Elin was surprised when the courtesy light didn’t come on. It must need a new bulb, she thought, although it didn’t seem long since she had replaced the last one, so maybe it was the sensor that had failed. Or maybe Morten had just forgotten to activate it when he left last night.
But then she realised that something was wrong.
On the door and the windows there were markings, as if the blowing snow had adhered to the surfaces and formed a pattern. But even in the deep gloom under the archway Elin could see that the markings were too dark to be snow, and that the pattern was too regular. Hurrying to get inside and put the lights on, she took off her glove and reached up to put her key in the lock. But then recoiled with a gasp when her hand brushed against something in the alcove.
Something that felt like an animal.
She stepped back quickly. Raised her fists. Felt vulnerable, defenceless. Thought about running back to her house and shouting for Ash.
But shouting what? Help me! I’m a silly woman who is scared of the dark?
She forced herself to stand still, to think. If it was an animal, why hadn’t it run off? And why had she seen no tracks in the new snow? She could hear no animal sounds. There was hardly any sound at all, just the hiss of spindrift moving in the breeze. She took a breath and made up her mind. Strode quickly to the ski stall, aware that she was turning her back on the thing, and fumbled her key into the lock, silently cursing her clumsiness. Finally the key turned and she went inside. She closed the door and clicked the latch, locking herself in, then switched on the interior light and took a ski pole from one of the racks. Holding it in both hands, the spike pointing forward, she went quickly round the room, making sure all the windows were closed, making sure she was safe.
Only then did she switch on the outside lights. Then she waited a moment before, holding the ski pole awkwardly in one hand, she opened the door and stepped out into the cold.
And stopped in her tracks.
Facing her, hanging from the ski-rack in the alcove, was the head of an elk. A massive head, hacked roughly from the body of a full-grown beast. It had no antlers. Its eyes had been gouged away, leaving large fleshy sockets that gazed emptily into her own horrified eyes. Blood had dripped on to the snow and formed a dark frozen stain. Attached to the head, fastened by a long-bladed knife plunged into the neck, was a cloth flag of Norway.
Elin forced herself to look away, to look instead at the patterns she had seen on the wall and on the windows. She could now see that someone had painted the word “Ut!” several times, and also the number “77”. Further along the wall, in the darkness, there was a longer word that she could not make out. She went back into the ski stall and switched on another light, this one at the end of the building. Then she came back to the doorway and looked again.
She shivered as she read the
word.
Chapter 8
When Cally came down to breakfast with Richard, who just happened to be leaving his room at the precise moment that she came out of hers, the dining-room door was still locked, even though it was seven o’clock and a little crowd of guests had already assembled. The Scots joined the queue, and Cally found herself standing up against another closed door, a large one with a sign saying Bar. She made a mental note to buy the men a celebration drink when they all got back from their tour at the end of the week.
A few more minutes passed before Elin Olsen unlocked the dining-room. Cally thought the woman looked stressed. Elin spoke first in Norwegian, bringing some oohs and aahs from the guests. Then she said, “I’ll say that again in English. I am sorry for the delay in opening up, but the hotel has been damaged by vandals during the night and I needed to talk to the staff about it. It is nothing serious, just a little paint thrown at the windows and a few slogans written on the wall. It seems that some people in the locality don’t like the fact that we will have children from immigrant families here at the weekend. We have asked the police to come and investigate, so please don’t worry if you see them looking around the building. Just enjoy your breakfast, and then go out and enjoy your skiing. The forecast is for a sunny day and the conditions should be wonderful.”
Elin stepped aside and allowed the guests to move forward. Cally followed Richard past a table where they had to leave their thermoses to be filled. You could choose tea or hot water or something called saft, which Richard said was sweet red cordial. The saft was his choice – he had tried it yesterday and said the glucose had been really welcome after a few hours on the hill. Cally could see the sense in that and followed his example. She wasn’t especially fond of sweet things but she would take a bottle of water in her rucksack and dilute it.
The Red Mitten Page 4