The man was hanging from a rope that had been wound round his chest and was attached to a roof beam. In the corner behind him there was a pair of skis and poles. And there were several sacks of logs. Stupidly, Cally found herself thinking that she had been right about the firewood.
Richard immediately took charge. “You two should go back inside and stay warm. Let me deal with this.”
There was something in his voice that made them do as he said.
They had only just made their way into the cabin when Richard came in, carrying one of the sacks of logs. He spoke briskly. “Cally, will you please build up the fire? It’s really important that we all keep warm.”
Then he turned to Neep. “What size are your boots?”
“What?”
“Your ski boots. What size are they?”
“Nine. Why are you asking?”
There was no reply. Richard was already on his way out.
Cally tended the fire, hoping that the wood smoke would clear the smell of decay from her nostrils, hoping that the sight of the flames would take away the image of the dead face. She could see that Neep had slumped on his bench again, his head in his hands. She left him to it.
Several minutes passed before Richard returned, this time carrying the man’s boots and skis. He propped the skis against a wall. “Neep, I want you to try these boots for size.”
“I don’t want to wear a dead man’s boots.”
“If you can fit into the dead man’s boots then you can use his skis. And that means you’ll be able to ski out of here tomorrow morning rather than walk. Your own skis are ruined, remember?”
Neep looked none the wiser, so Richard spelled it out. “The bindings on his skis are an old style and they won’t fit your boots. So in order to use his skis you need to wear his boots.” He hesitated, as if considering what to say next. “That man has been murdered - obviously. He was severely beaten before being hit on the head with something hard. And there are marks on his wrists that suggest he was tied up for a while before he was killed - as if he’d been interrogated. The killers might come back, so we need to be out of here as soon as the storm dies down, and we need to travel quickly.”
Neep could have been speaking for Cally as well as himself when he asked, “How come you know so much about dead bodies all of a sudden?”
Richard laid his head-torch on the table so that its beam shone on the wall. “I know about lots of things. For instance, I know you’re suffering from the first stage of hypothermia. You’ve been shivering and falling about for the last three hours, and now you’ve become grumpy and aggressive. And it’s really vital that you function better than this tomorrow. So I want you to start cooperating. Start looking after yourself. Help us get this place warm. Get your kit in order for an early start. And try on these damned boots now!”
Neep looked up moodily, but the fight had gone out of him. He bent to loosen his boots.
Cally was embarrassed. As much as she liked Neep – more than liked him – she still saw him as a kind of “elder”. So it had been bad enough to watch him gradually unravelling during the afternoon. And now she’d seen him get a bawling out, one that he deserved. To break the silence, and make a distraction that would give him some space, she noisily put another log in the stove and then moved across to where the dead man’s skis were leaning against the wall.
She took one in her hands. It was ancient. The top surface was badly scratched and the base was very sticky. She put it back against the wall and wiped her hands on her trousers. Then she said to Richard, “He is probably the missing person, isn’t he? The hunter on the poster at Vesterheim. Elin called him Hawkeye.”
“Yes, I saw that poster, and I think it is him. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the face - he’s had such a hammering. But the clothing looks right for a hunter, rather than somebody who skis for fun. And, just like you did, I noticed the sticky wax on the skis it would probably have been the correct wax for the warm temperatures last week, when the hunter went missing.”
Across the room Neep started to rummage in his rucksack. He seemed to be making progress. “The boots fit me,” he said. “I need to wear an extra pair of socks, but they’re okay.”
“Brilliant”, Richard said, coming back to his old self. As if to show that there was no bad feeling, he went on, “Let’s do a stock-take and see what food we’ve got left. I’ll make us a drink and then refill the pot with snow. Then I suggest we take turns at cleaning Neep’s new skis – they’ll need several goes. In fact we might as well clean all the skis and start again with fresh wax. And then we can talk about all this.”
So they set about their allotted tasks. To begin with Cally thought it was a weird way to proceed, when they had just discovered a dead body, but then she realised that it was good to be doing things, to be keeping active rather than talking, to be clearing her mind of the horror yet at the same time trying to make sense of it. Richard closed the curtains and lit a candle, making the place seem warmer – cosy, almost. Soon the wax-removing solvent they were using on the skis gave the room a lemony smell that made Cally think about washing-up liquid, a thought that seemed stupid yet at the same time strangely comforting.
When they finished with the skis they had a look at Neep’s injured knee. It didn’t seem to be serious, but he took a couple of ibuprofen to reduce the inflammation. Then they ate some food, keeping a little back for the morning. While he was eating, Richard looked at the map and the GPS, checking the next day’s route down to the valley.
Then, finally, they ran out of practical things to do. By now the stove was giving out a lot of heat, and an orange-red light came through its open doors, flickering their shadows on to the wall. A soft crackling sound came from the burning logs.
It was time to sit down and talk, to try to work out exactly what kind of madness they had stumbled into.
Richard took it upon himself to start the ball rolling. “Sometimes at the university we have brainstorming sessions where we all just chip in, one at a time, with whatever is in our mind. It doesn’t matter whether it sounds sensible. I’d like us to do that now and see if it works.” He leaned forward. “I’ll go first. I think the man came to this cabin on skis and that he was murdered here, after getting a really bad beating. There are marks on his wrists that suggest he was interrogated.” He stopped and said, “Okay, Cally – your turn.”
Feeling like this was some kind of macabre game, Cally offered her tuppence-worth. “Well, the chances are that the dead man is Hawkeye, the hunter who went missing last week - the one on the poster at the hotel.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Neep cut in eagerly, as if he had a lot to get off his chest. “I heard you and Richard talking about that earlier and I’ve been thinking it over. If the dead man is Hawkeye, then we can rule out the possibility that this cabin belongs to him. Because if it did belong to him, then the police would have searched it as soon as he was reported missing. So it’s someone else’s cabin. And unlike us Hawkeye didn’t need to break in. So he was meeting someone he already knew. He was probably interrogated right here, in this room, tied to one of these chairs.”
“I’ve been looking at this stain on the floorboards,” Cally said. “And I think it is blood. So you’re probably right. But there’s something I don’t get. If Hawkeye came up to meet people that he already knew, and then they killed him, why didn’t they take him back down right away? And why didn’t they kill him somewhere else and save themselves the trouble of getting the body off the hill?”
“Why are you so sure they need to take him down?” Neep asked. “Why not just leave him here?”
Cally said, “Because in a few more days the smell will be unbearable, especially if the sunny weather comes back. Anybody skiing within a hundred yards would realise something was wrong.”
And this nice warm fire isn’t helping matters, she thought. But kept the thought to herself.
They all fell silent for a moment. Then Richard said, “I agree w
ith what you’ve both been saying. And I think it only makes sense if they hadn’t been planning to kill him. Otherwise, as Cally says, they’d have done it somewhere else. Or at least brought some transport up with them – and it would have had to be a dog-sled or a pulk. Even if they had access to a snow-mobile they wouldn’t have been able to use it up here legally - Elin told me there are strict regulations about that. And if they used one illegally it would only have attracted attention.”
Neep seemed unconvinced. “But why not come up for him before now? He’s been dead for a few days, so they’ve had plenty of time. And until today the weather hasn’t been a problem.”
Richard said, “Maybe the good weather has been the problem. Maybe it has been too good. In the last few days, over the weekend, these hills have been full of skiers – you could see that from the route book at Vesterheim. And when I was looking at the map earlier I could see that we are now pretty close to one of the other standard routes up to the DNT cabin at Storkvelbu – the one that comes up from the southern end of the Espedalen valley. So a lot of people could have been passing nearby.”
“I’ve been thinking about the route book at Vesterheim,” Cally said. “Richard, when you wrote down the route that we were planning to do today, you said we would go as far as the cabin at Storhøliseter and that we would sleep there tonight. You didn’t mention that we might come over to this area, to try to get to Storkvelvbu - because we hadn’t planned to do that.”
Richard looked up quickly, and Cally had the impression that, for the first time since they started talking, he had heard something he hadn’t already thought of. He said, “That’s right.”
Neep said, “Cally, you’re not suggesting that the killers have been reading the hotel’s route book – to check on where we were going?”
“There was nothing to stop them. When I went down for your wallet, when you were in the shower, there was a policeman reading the route book. And he was asking Elin questions. She made a joke about it, said he was with Operation Hawkeye. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but now it seems like a strange thing for the police to do. So maybe the police were involved in the murder.”
Neep was shaking his head. “Even for a hack writer like me, a plot that depends on corrupt cops is just too much to accept -”
Cally cut him off. “Neep, I’ve spent most of my life in care homes. And there would always be some kids who ran away - absconded. If they were under sixteen the police would usually take it seriously and start looking for them immediately. But if they were older than sixteen, the police would do nothing – and the older kids were well aware of that. So it just seems a bit strange for the Norwegian police to be going to so much trouble to find a grown man.”
Neep said, “But a lot of other people could have read the route book - including Elin. And since she was the one who suggested we leave our mobile phones behind - and prevented us calling for help - we might as well add her to the list of suspicious people.”
But Cally wasn’t going to be diverted on to other suspects. “If we think that someone - anyone at all - was checking on what we wrote in the route book, then what matters is that they wanted to know what we were planning to do today. And that means they were planning to come for Hawkeye today. And that means the change in the weather turned them back.”
She expected that the men knew where she was going with this but she went ahead and said it anyway. “And that means that they’ll come up as soon as the storm is over. Just like Richard said earlier.”
There was a long silence. No-one seemed to want to break it. Finally Richard asked, “Neep, do you disagree with what Cally said?”
Neep shook his head.
Richard stood up and put another log in the stove. He said, “I guess that’s as far as we can take it.” He looked at his watch. “It’s only nine o’clock, but it will do no harm if we try to sleep. I suggest we keep a watch, each of us taking three hours. I’m happy to take first watch, then Neep, then Cally. At the first sign of the storm abating, the person on watch should waken the others.”
Since nobody had a better suggestion they packed their rucksacks as far as they could and made sure the stove doors were secure and that the metal pot was refilled with snow.
Richard gave Cally and Neep a chance to get into their sleeping bags then extinguished the candle. In the darkness the sound of the storm seemed to intensify. But now it was a comforting sound, for as long as the storm raged they were safe.
Cally didn’t need the discomfort of the hard wooden boards to remind her that she was lying on a floor stained with the blood of a man who had died here, apparently after being interrogated. She had meant to ask Richard about the interrogation. Why would anybody do that? In films people got interrogated because the bad guys wanted information. But what kind of information would an old hunter have that was worth torturing him for? Maybe he had threatened his bad guys. Not physically - in that case there would have been no need for the interrogation. But threatened them in a way that made them want to find out what else he knew. Some kind of blackmail?
She had also wanted to ask Richard why the bad guys hadn’t simply come up at night to collect the body. If the weather had been clear and settled during the last few days, it must have been clear and settled at night as well.
But even more than all that, she had wanted to ask Richard . . . who Richard really was.
Until just a few hours ago she would have known the answer: a serious-minded, bookish man who worked as a researcher in the university’s divinity department. But what would her answer be now?
Immediately after the discovery of Hawkeye’s body, when she was being sick and Neep wasn’t worth a damn, Richard had morphed into James Bond. Leave it to me while I calmly go and examine the horribly decomposing body. And I’ll get some firewood while I’m out. Oh, and I’ll organise a pair of skis for Neep into the bargain. And then there was the calm way he handled the situation after that – he gave them time to think things over before starting to talk, and then he managed the talk so that they could all chip in and so that Neep could even feel he was using his super powers as a thriller writer.
She felt that she and Richard would have a lot to talk about when they got out of this.
Soon she heard snoring from Neep’s direction. Richard was silent. Outside the storm continued, its elemental power kept at bay by an old dining chair propped against a broken door.
She turned over and tried to sleep.
CHAPTER 16
Standing at the bar in the basement of Vesterheim hotel, Finn Andersen waited for Kari Gaustad to arrive for their nine o’clock meeting. She wanted to talk about the arrangements for the sports weekend. Finn had finished work at eight-thirty and had then gone up to the bedroom that Elin Olsen had given him so that he could come and go as he pleased during the preparations for the weekend. He had shaved and showered, and put on freshly laundered jeans and a white tee-shirt that he knew would accentuate his sun-tan.
He wanted to look his best. Kari Gaustad was the kind of woman you scrubbed up for.
Finn’s day had been a busy one. After the Initiative Group meeting he’d gone home to make himself some lunch; and since then he had been in Vesterheim’s ski-workshop, preparing the rental kit for the foreign kids. Because of the large number of participants, he needed to use a lot of the hotel’s equipment as well as his own, and this afternoon he had spent hours cleaning Vesterheim’s skis. Many of them still had the sticky wax from last week. It was obvious that most guests hadn’t tried very hard to clean it off; and some hadn’t tried at all.
As the afternoon wore on, Finn realised that the hotel’s kit was in a shocking condition. He fixed what he could, tightening loose bindings and glueing ski-tails that had delaminated. But many of the ski bases needed a major repair, and they all needed to be glide-waxed. And he just didn’t have time to do that. It was clear that the hotel would soon have to spend a lot of money on new equipment. Alternatively, if money was as short as he
thought it was, someone should be given the job of properly maintaining the existing stock.
But who, among Elin Olsen’s staff, would be capable of doing that job?
Elin had certainly not helped herself with her choice of boyfriend. The problem wasn’t so much that he was Asian, though that had undoubtedly set a lot of tongues wagging in the valley. It was more that he was wrong for a hotel. She had fallen for a helicopter pilot, for Christ’s sake, when what she needed was someone practical. Someone who could look after skis – and who could replace broken sinks, and fix blocked drains, and clear snow from the car park. Someone who could look after this bar tonight, and save Elin having to pay the cook overtime rates for serving the small handful of guests that still had the energy, after a day’s skiing, to make their way down to the basement.
The one redeeming thing about the new boyfriend was that he had apparently used his contacts in the Asian community to help Elin get the booking for the sports weekend. So maybe there was a bright side after all. Or even two bright sides, if you considered how quickly the night-time companionship of the young man had put the smile back on Elin’s face.
At precisely nine o’clock Kari Gaustad came in. An attractive woman, Finn thought, not for the first time. She was a good skier, too. He had seen her on the tracks and had noticed her distinctive style. It was a bit wrong, technically, but he would be happy to help her sort it out. More than happy.
They took a table behind one of the big structural pillars that were placed all around the dimly-lit room. The secluded spot was Kari’s choice, not Finn’s. He thought it would just make the barman suspect they were having an affair. Not that he would mind that – if he ever felt the urge to get involved with a complicated woman who would surely turn his life upside down.
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