Snowfall Read online

  ‘Ulrich says,’ he explained, ‘and I agree, that we can’t risk your staying in the car. This road is very little used, but if anyone does come along it they’re bound to stop and offer to help. So he wants you to stay out of sight in this hut. But remember, he’ll be watching you; and he has a gun. He won’t kill you or the boy, of course; you’re too valuable. But if anyone comes and you attempt to leave the hut, or to call out, the passer-by will be shot. And you wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you, Kate?’

  The hut was tucked under such a thick blanket of snow that little more than the dark wooden door was visible. Like the hut higher up the mountain, this was obviously a summer shelter for herdsmen; unlike the other hut, this one still had its original door, sagging at the hinges and unlockable. But one glance at the depth of the snow all round us was enough to convince me that escape would be impossible. The only walkable route would be back along the ruts the car had made, and Ulrich would obviously keep the road under observation.

  He kicked aside some of the snow, opened the door and pushed us into the filthy interior. Then the door was slammed shut, and Bruno and I were alone in the cold, reeking, spidery darkness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was Bruno who encouraged me to keep my head. His small hand tightened in mine apprehensively, but now that he felt physically better he was clearly determined to play a suitably masculine rôle. ‘I’m not afraid of the dark,’ he declared. ‘Are you, Kate?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ I said, with hollow cheerfulness. ‘Besides, it isn’t really dark now that our eyes are getting used to it. And it’s much nicer having this hut to ourselves rather than sitting in the car with that disagreeable Ulrich, isn’t it? We can do exercises, too, to keep ourselves warm … can you teach me some?’

  I drew a line at handstands, preferring to put nothing but the soles of my ski boots in contact with the unknown composition of the uneven floor, but we worked our way through an extensive combined repertoire of exercises, clapping games, singing games and jumping-on-the-spot games. And when we stopped to rest we turned to quizzes and riddles, until the numbing cold forced us into activity again.

  At first, I listened intently for any sound of a vehicle on the road. None came. Occasionally I peered through the gaps between the log walls of the hut, but we seemed to be marooned in a steep wasteland of white. Behind the hut were a few scattered pine trees, and above them the mountain reared up towards a cloud-ridden summit. Below the hut, just beyond the ledge along which the road ran, the mountainside dropped steeply away out of sight. For all the sign of population, we might as well have been in Antarctica.

  Despair began to cloud my mind. I had been so sure, once we met Stephen, that help would be on the way. But since he hadn’t followed me, he couldn’t possibly know where we were.

  For the hundredth time, I wondered what Jon was doing now. He would be searching frantically for his son, but probably in Italy. Even if Stephen had appreciated my predicament and had managed to get a message through, there would be no reason for Jon to come searching up here. And if he did –

  I peered out of the gap between the jamb and the door. There was the car, perched on the snowbound ledge of road. Inside the car was Ulrich, and as I watched he shifted in his seat so that he could take a good look round. Ulrich was alert and unscrupulous, and he had a gun. If Jon were to come here, alone, to look for us, he would be shot.

  No – better to pray for him not to come on his own. Bruno and I would be perfectly all right … perfectly content to wait … glad to wait, here or in the other hut, until a proper search party eventually arrived.

  Always providing that we survived so long.

  ‘Come on,’ I cried, with feverishly false jollity, ‘time for another jumping game, before our toes drop off. Let’s see who can jump furthest off the ground –’

  But Bruno had had enough. He leaned against the rear wall of the hut, tucked his hands under his armpits for warmth and stuck out his lower lip obstinately. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m tired. And I’m cold and I’m ever so hungry and I want to go home.’

  I moved towards him. ‘I know, Bruno dear,’ I said gently. ‘I know how you feel because I do too – but everything will be all right, truly. Sloan doesn’t mean us any harm. He’ll take us to a much nicer hut as soon as he gets back, and give us some food. And then your father will fetch us as quickly as he can. But it may be a long wait, and we must keep ourselves warm. We have to keep moving. So do some jumping exercises with me, please – I feel silly doing them on my own, and I expect I look silly too –’

  Bruno didn’t disagree. He had turned away from me and pressed his face rebelliously against the wall, but suddenly I was aware, in the half-light, that his small body had stiffened.

  ‘Someone’s coming!’ he exclaimed. ‘Kate, come and see – a man ski-ing downhill through the trees. Not Mr Sloan, though – this one’s wearing goggles.’

  I hurried to an eye-level chink. The skier certainly wasn’t Sloan. Quite apart from the goggles, he was approaching with some caution; taking advantage of the cover of the trees, and keeping out of sight of the car.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t a hoped-for rescuer, either. He wasn’t slim enough for Jon, or large enough for Stephen Marsh.

  He was, though, someone I had encountered before. As he shot at a crouch out of the trees, heading for the rear of the hut, I recognized him immediately. Not that I knew his name, but the dark clothes, the goggles, the stance of the man as he balanced expertly on his skis, were alarmingly familiar.

  He was the man who had come ski-ing down the Kirchwalder Alm as Stephen Marsh and I were tobogganing; the man who had, with cold deliberation and a lethal flourish of the same metal-tipped sticks he was now wielding, swooped so low over the toboggan that Stephen and I had crashed.

  He side-stopped in a hissing flurry of snow just above and behind the hut. I found myself holding my breath and gripping Bruno’s shoulder tightly, praying that the skier wouldn’t see us; we had troubles enough, without meeting another enemy.

  But Bruno saw him simply as a rescuer. Before I realized what he intended, the boy had called out softly but urgently: ‘Hallo – we’re here, in the hut!’

  I tried to put my hand over his mouth, but it was too late. The man had heard. He frowned, and it seemed to me that he gripped his ski sticks menacingly.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded in German. And Bruno, innocent of any need for caution, pushed aside my hand indignantly and answered, ‘Me and Kate!’

  There was a pause. Then the man pushed up his snow goggles and directed at the hut the same hard blue calculating stare he had given me up by the mountain inn, before he had locked me in his father’s hut.

  ‘Kate Paterson?’ asked Toni Hammerl slowly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruno impatiently. ‘And I’m Bruno Becker, and we want to go home. Only you’ll have to be careful, there’s a man out there on the road in a car. He’ll shoot you if he sees you talking to us.’

  ‘I saw the car,’ said Hammerl. ‘That is why I came carefully. Who is this man, Kate?’

  I was still trying to work out whose side Hammerl might be on, so I said nothing. Bruno did all the talking: ‘His name’s Ulrich. He’s a friend of Mr Sloan and I don’t like either of them. They put me to sleep and made me sick, and now they’re going to lock us up somewhere and keep us there until Papa tells them what they want to know.’

  Toni Hammerl moved forward so that he could look into the hut through one of the gaps. Instinctively I stepped back.

  ‘You’re Dr Becker’s son, are you?’ he asked the boy. ‘Tell me, Bruno – are there any boxes in your hut?’

  Bruno had made a thorough exploration between our games. ‘No – just us and some farm odds and ends and the spiders,’ he reported.

  ‘I see.’ Toni Hammerl was staring directly at me now, and his breath came through the crack like puffs of smoke. ‘What I’m looking for, Kate, are the boxes of explosives. I didn’t know that my fath
er had hidden them in that other hut, until I went to let you out and found that you had already been released. Now the old fox has shifted the explosives, and I want to know where.’

  ‘There aren’t any boxes here, honestly,’ said Bruno. ‘You can come in and look if you like, only I think that Ulrich might shoot you.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me – I’ll stay where I am, then.’ His voice when he spoke to the boy was kind, but it hardened with suspicion when he asked me what information Sloan wanted from Dr Becker.

  My own voice, when I found it, was higher than usual and cracked from strain and exhaustion. ‘Information that Jon doesn’t have! Can’t you understand that? Didn’t you take in what Bruno just told you? We’re being held against our will, and guarded by a gunman. Sloan admits to being a communist agent, and he imagines that Jon knew that Matt was in the CIA and that Jon worked with Matt. I’ve told Sloan again and again that Jon knows nothing, and that I knew nothing about Matt’s CIA job, but he won’t believe me. And if you’re going to persist in your crazy suspicion that I have some kind of connection with your father –’

  ‘No.’ Toni Hammerl’s voice was still curt, but I realized with a rising, warming flicker of relief that it was embarrassment that made him abrupt with me. ‘No, I no longer suspect you of that. I believe that I owe you an explanation and an apology. I have found out from my father that your friend Danby was not, after all, encouraging the old man to supply explosives to the extremists in the South Tyrol.’

  ‘Of course he wasn’t,’ I said proudly. The thought that Matt might have been encouraging a form of terrorism had weighed on me heavily, and I was glad that I could now deny it. ‘Sloan told me what Matt had been doing. Apparently he was helping to organize a scheme for blocking what Sloan called a “peaceful” communist invasion of Austria.’

  Toni Hammerl spat out some German words that adequately conveyed, without need of translation, his opinion of the true nature of any invasion from Eastern Europe. He also started to say, in English, what he thought of Sloan, but cut off his tirade when I reminded him that Bruno was listening.

  ‘My father, you see,’ he went on to explain, ‘is an Austrian patriot, just as I am. In the ’sixties, he did all he could to support the South Tyrol cause. I was a boy then, and I thought that supplying explosives for the purpose of bombing and killing was exciting; now, much as I love Austria, I disagree with the use of violence. My father knows that, and so he concealed from me the fact that this American, Danby, was more than a hotel guest who came for the ski-ing and the climbing. But after Danby died, my father admitted that he and some of our relatives had been helping Danby – for the sake of Austria, he said.

  ‘I did not ask what they had been doing, but I assumed that it was the South Tyrol problem again, and I was afraid that my father might be arrested for illegal activities. That was why I decided not to enquire about Danby’s death, though I thought the circumstances were mysterious. With Danby dead, I hoped that my father would no longer be involved.’

  ‘And then I turned up,’ I said wryly. ‘And when your father realized that I was a friend of Matt, I suppose he thought that I knew all about what Matt, had been doing …’ The differing attitudes of the Hammerl family towards me suddenly made complete sense. ‘And that was what you thought, Toni – and your mother? Does that explain some of the unpleasant things that have been happening to me, then? The icicle that fell just as I was walking down the path, and the interference with my room? Oh, and the toboggan! Were you the skier who made Stephen and me crash? Of all the dangerous –’

  Toni’s apologies were profuse. ‘It was not to harm you,’ he insisted, ‘only to frighten you away from Kirchwald. But you seemed so determined to stay that I felt sure that you must be trying to continue with Danby’s plans. And when I found that the hut I had locked you in did contain explosives, I made my father tell me the truth about what he had been doing. While I was questioning him, though, the others moved the boxes. I am searching for them now, so that I can tell the police – without of course mentioning any names.’

  Bruno was tugging impatiently at my arm. ‘Wait a minute,’ I told him absently. ‘You’re still going to tell the police about the explosives, Toni, even though they’re part of a defence plan?’

  ‘Defence plans,’ said Toni firmly, ‘are not for foolish old men to implement. You see, since Danby’s death, my father and his friends have been preparing their own scheme. Blocking the autobahn in the event of an invasion is insufficient for them; they dislike the autobahn – they prefer Austria as it used to be. Their own plan, if you please, on the slightest pretext, was to blow up the Europabrücke itself!’

  ‘Oh, blow the Europabrücke!’ shouted Bruno crossly. ‘It’s silly just to stand here talking – why doesn’t Toni try to get us out of here?’

  ‘Of course.’ Toni adjusted his goggles. ‘I shall take the short cut – straight down into the valley, and from there I shall call the police.’

  ‘But be careful,’ I urged him. ‘The man in the car has a gun, and –’

  Bruno had already run to the front of the hut, and was peering through a chink. ‘Sshh!’ he commanded us. ‘Mr Sloan’s coming – he’s ski-ing back along the road from Kirchwald.’

  I relayed the message to Toni. ‘And Sloan has a gun, too,’ I told him. I lowered my voice further: ‘I didn’t want to tell you in front of Bruno, but it was Sloan who killed Matt. For God’s sake be careful, Toni, he’ll have no compunction about killing you either.’

  ‘Shush,’ begged Bruno, ‘he’ll be coming past in a minute –’

  The three of us froze. Like me, Bruno must have held his breath, because in a few moments I saw and heard him exhale. He reported that Sloan had gone straight past the hut and was standing by the car, talking to Ulrich.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ Toni muttered. ‘The sooner I can get help, the better.’

  ‘Mr Sloan’s looking over here,’ called Bruno shrilly. ‘He’s coming this way!’

  ‘Quickly,’ I hissed to Toni. ‘I’ll try to distract him while you make a break. Open the door, Bruno!’

  The boy pulled it wide open and I ran to the entrance. ‘Phil,’ I called ingratiatingly, ‘Phil, how did you get on at Kirchwald? Will you soon be able to move us? We’re terribly cold and hungry, and –’

  From behind the hut I heard the thump of Toni’s skis on the snow as he pushed himself into motion. Within seconds he appeared, trying to pick up speed as he crossed the level stretch of deep snow that blocked the roadway. Sloan saw him immediately, but he had been working his way up the slope towards the hut and was encumbered by his sticks and skis. He shouted to Toni to stop, flung down his sticks and reached for his gun.

  If Sloan got his gun out in time, he couldn’t miss. Toni’s arms and legs were moving like pistons as he propelled himself towards the edge of the steep drop, but he wasn’t yet fast enough to be anything other than an easy target. ‘No –’ I cried, as Sloan raised his gun and took aim.

  And then something cold and hard whizzed past my ear. Sloan’s hands jerked high as a snowball, hurled with magnificent accuracy by Bruno, hit him splat on the side of the face. The gun fired harmlessly in the air, and the sound reverberated across the mountainside. With a whoop of triumph, Toni leaped over the edge of the drop in a flurry of snow and careered out of sight with heart-stopping expertise.

  Sloan raised his gun again and I made a grab for Bruno, pulling him inside the hut and slamming the door. Toni was safe enough, and I was afraid that either Sloan or Ulrich might turn on the boy.

  ‘That was a wonderful shot, Bruno,’ I told him with awed admiration.

  ‘Austrian boys are good with snowballs,’ he said complacently. ‘Plenty of practice.’

  And then I said, ‘What’s that noise? It sounds like thunder, but I didn’t think –’

  Bruno’s face went very pale. His complacency vanished. ‘I know what it is,’ he said slowly, with a gulp of fear in his voice. ‘I’ve heard it before, only
not so near. I think the noise of the gun must have started an avalanche.’

  The thunder grew louder, as if an express train were bearing down upon us. My ears were filled with roaring sound. The timbers of the hut began to shake.

  I clutched Bruno and we flung ourselves to the ground, cowering at the foot of the frail wall of logs that was our only protection against the onrush of tons of crashing snow.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was the pine trees that hit the hut first. Even above the thundering noise of the oncoming snow, I could hear a terrible crunching sound as the trees were torn up by their roots. And then the world caved in on us as they fell across the hut, and the snow broke over us like a roaring wave.

  The noise passed, diminished, grew faint, died away. Everywhere was dark. The air seemed filled with fine particles of snow; there was snow in my eyes and in my ears and in my mouth –

  I spat it out. ‘Bruno?’ I croaked.

  The snowy mound under my hand began to stir. I had been sheltering the boy’s head with my bent arm, and now I could feel his hair, and the small warmth of his breath as he raised his face from my coat. ‘Are we all right?’ he whispered doubtfully.

  ‘I am if you are.’ I was aware of something digging painfully into my back, holding me down. Pushing my hand through the snow I found a pine branch. I forced it aside, shifted my position and explored a little further, encountering more branches tangled among the jumble of fallen logs that had been the hut. The snow continued to sift down through the ruins.

  ‘I’ve got a torch in my pocket,’ said Bruno, ‘if it still works.’ He wriggled about, and after a few moments a pencil of light shone in the darkness. He sat up beside me and flashed the light all round us; it was faint, but it told me what I needed to know.