Snowfall Read online

  ‘What?’ Jon Becker looked completely surprised for a moment, and then agreed.

  ‘Yes, of course, I’ll be going back very soon. He’ll be all right, my housekeeper’s keeping an eye on him at the moment. The point is that I’ve had an au pair girl to look after Bruno – an English girl – and she walked out on me a few days ago. My housekeeper’s kind, but she’s too elderly to cope for long. I’m hoping to get another au pair girl, but in the meantime I wondered whether you would be prepared to come and give a hand with the boy for the rest of your stay in Austria?’

  I gaped at him. It was the most preposterous suggestion I had ever heard. ‘Me?’ I said incredulously. ‘Good heavens … what an extraordinary thing to ask! I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Jon Becker straightened, and looked down his nose again. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’ll pay you what I paid Jane, of course. We live in a very pleasant apartment in Innsbruck, ideally situated for shopping and sightseeing. Bruno is at school from eight until one o’clock, so you’ll have plenty of free time, and in the afternoons you can both go ski-ing at Igls. It’s a bigger village than Kirchwald, with more practice slopes and instructors, and an ice rink and a heated swimming pool as well. You’ll have a really good holiday, far better than if you stayed here on your own.’

  I gave him a very long cool stare. ‘No thank you, Dr Becker,’ I said distinctly.

  His curiously light green eyes met mine and read my thoughts as easily as if they had appeared on a computer print-out. ‘You would, of course, have Jane’s old room in my housekeeper’s apartment,’ he added drily. ‘I can assure you that the invitation is solely for Bruno’s sake.’

  I lifted my chin and tried to pretend that I didn’t know that I was blushing. ‘As I said, no. For one thing, I don’t get on with children. They don’t like me, and I don’t care for them.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe that!’ he protested with false heartiness.

  I shrugged. ‘Believe it or not, just as you like. The fact remains.’

  He was obviously taken aback. ‘But even if that’s true,’ he argued, ‘surely you’d be prepared to help out just for a few days, in an emergency? Surely you can’t refuse to look after a motherless child?’

  His persistence was infuriating. I rounded on him. ‘An emergency? What kind of emergency are you talking about, if you’re prepared to leave your sick child at home while you come up here to ski? What kind of father are you, if you’re prepared to entrust your motherless child to a girl you know absolutely nothing about? And if it’s such a good deal that you’re offering, why is it that your au pair girl walked out on you? No, don’t tell me, I can imagine: she couldn’t stick your self-centred superciliousness any longer! Whatever your current problems are, you’ve brought them on yourself. If you won’t help me to find out what happened to Matt, I certainly don’t intend to help you. No, and that’s final!’

  I stalked away, without waiting for his reaction. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that if I wanted to find out about Matt’s accident, Becker was the last man to antagonize. Don’t probe, he had threatened me, it will do you no good. And he had given Stephen a warning: If I were you, I wouldn’t push my luck.

  Becker knew something, and I should have had the sense to deal with him diplomatically: to decline his suggestion with a show of regret, instead of telling him exactly what I thought of him; to offer some kind of compromise – an afternoon or two minding his child, perhaps – so that I could try to learn what he knew. But by the time I realized my folly, it was too late to withdraw my words.

  Stephen’s original suggestion had been that the two of us should make the most of the sun up on the Kirchwalder Alm, and that he would then ski down to the village while I returned on the chair lift. But he saw at once that my conversation with Becker had spoiled the day for me, and tried to cheer me up with an alternative offer. He had met some of his students, and one of them had brought a toboggan up the Alm. Stephen persuaded him to swap it, temporarily, for his skis.

  I was not particularly enthusiastic. I hadn’t been on a toboggan for years, and it seemed a rather childish occupation. But Phil Sloan and Toni Hammerl were still sitting on the terrace, and Becker had rejoined them. I was tired of being watched like a potential criminal; any form of transport would do, I thought, to get me away from all three of them.

  The toboggan run began a short distance from the mountain restaurant, well away from the crowds at the top of the ski slope. The start of the run was a narrow passage dug through several feet of snow, with a scarcely perceptible gradient. Gradually, however, the slope steepened. The toboggan began to pick up speed.

  Stephen sat behind me, his arms round me so that he could grasp the ropes. ‘Hold tight,’ he shouted in my ear, and the rush of air almost carried his voice away, ‘and keep your feet on the runners. Here we go!’

  This was no child’s play, no short open downhill run such as I’d thought exciting in my childhood on the hills near home, but a bumping, breathtaking, totally exhilarating roller-coaster ride down the mountain. The ski slopes went almost straight from top to bottom, but the long toboggan run wound through pinewoods and cut diagonally across open snowfields. It seemed to have all the features of an Olympic bobsleigh run, with hairpin bends and steep banks that we took at speed while the powdery snow rose up from our runners and sprayed us like sea foam.

  For sheer variety, the ride was unbeatable. One minute we were plunging and twisting through the dark silent depths of a wood; the next, we burst out into dazzling light and raced across a piste, while brightly dressed skiers came swooping recklessly across our path and down towards Innsbruck which lay spread in sunshine four thousand feet below.

  We also tipped over: hit a bump while crossing a piste, took to the air for two seconds while the toboggan shot from under us, and fell sprawling and laughing in the snow. Stephen hauled me to my feet, and righted the toboggan. We plonked down on it, side by side, gasping and brushing caked snow from our clothes. ‘Feeling better?’ he panted.

  ‘Much! This was a great idea, Stephen, thank you – just what I needed.’

  He picked up his fallen ski cap and combed snow out of his red-gold hair with his fingers. ‘What did Becker want, by the way?’ he asked.

  I told him, and he whistled. ‘He’s got a nerve!’

  ‘That’s what I thought – and I told him so. Heavens, that was close!’ I flinched as a skier skimmed past in a flash of brilliant yellow just a few feet from us. ‘Ought we to sit here, in the middle of the ski slope?’

  ‘Best place,’ said Stephen. ‘Skis are wonderfully manoeuvrable – as long as they can see us, the skiers can avoid us easily enough. It does get a bit hairy a little further down, just on the edge of that wood, because the toboggan run is at the bottom of a steep bank which the skiers sometimes jump over. I’ve jumped it myself, just as a toboggan was crossing underneath, and it’s an unnerving experience for both parties if they’re not expecting it.’

  We sat for a little longer, enjoying the sun and the view. Stephen pointed out that we could now see, far below, a stretch of the Brenner autobahn, and the great bridge – the Europabrücke that carried the road across the narrow valley and on towards Italy.

  ‘Well, shall we get going?’ he asked. We resumed our places on the toboggan, and I felt his arms slide round me. ‘Your hair smells delightful,’ he said suddenly. ‘Just like an Alpine meadow.’

  I leaned forward, away from him. ‘As long as it doesn’t smell like an Alpine village …’ I said lightly. ‘Are we off, then?’

  ‘Yes – as long as you really will come out with me tonight? And would you like to try ski-ing tomorrow, down on the lower slopes?’

  ‘Thank you – I’d like to. But what about Flora?’

  Stephen laughed. ‘Flora who … ?’ he said.

  As soon as the slope was clear of skiers we pushed ourselves into motion, picking up speed quickly on the icy surface of the piste. A steeply banked curv
e, two sharp zigzags, and then we were engulfed by pine trees and careering down a straight path below a steep high bank.

  ‘Skiers!’ I heard Stephen bawl, and I caught a momentary glimpse of two or three colourful figures rushing down towards us through the trees. They met the edge of the bank just ahead of us, thrusting off with their sticks and skimming, shouting, through the air before they landed, with less than Olympic elegance, on the far side of the toboggan run.

  I had tensed myself as they came over, dreading what might happen if one of them faltered and fell on us; their flashing skis and steel-tipped sticks were lethal weapons. But Stephen’s arms gripped me reassuringly, and he put his mouth against my hair again: ‘Relax – we’re past the ski run now.’

  We were almost through the wood. The gradient had risen, slowing us; the bank was now less than head-high.

  The dark, snow-goggled figure on skis came down towards us alone and silently – so sudden and so silent and so dark in the shadow of the trees that I hardly noticed him before he was upon us with a terrifying whoop and a rush of air. I shrieked in alarm. Stephen shouted something and threw his weight sideways. I felt myself hurled off the toboggan, saw a whirl of sky, of tree, of steel, a blinding whiteness, felt a stab of pain.

  Then nothing.

  Chapter Six

  There was a very small quantity of colourless liquid in the glass. It smelled foul and tasted worse.

  ‘You’re not supposed to sniff it and sip it genteelly. Never mind whether you like it or not, it’ll do you a power of good. Just knock it back!’ Stephen commanded.

  I did, and the shock to my system brought me up gasping and shuddering, but at last clear-headed. I put down the empty glass, gave my damp hair a final rub with a hotel towel, and groped for my bag.

  ‘I must look a sight.’ I tried to laugh it off, but I knew that I sounded as shaky as I still felt.

  Stephen didn’t try to contradict me. ‘You look,’ he said, and my mirror confirmed it, ‘exactly like a girl who’s been frightened out of her wits, flung off a toboggan and pitched head-first into a snowdrift. But thank heaven the drift was there – six inches either way and you’d have smashed your head against a tree trunk. How’s the hand now?’

  ‘Sore,’ I said. That was an understatement; it hurt like blazes, and no wonder. I’d instinctively thrust out my hands as I fell, and had gashed the left one on a broken branch jutting from the trunk of a pine tree.

  My memory of the incident was confused by the white-out, when I’d lain buried – deafened and blinded, numbed and near to suffocation in deep snow. Stephen had hauled me out of the drift by my feet, and I could vaguely remember the pull on my ankles, the choking sensation as he had hooked compacted snow from my mouth with his finger, the sight of blood from my hand dripping on to the snow and soaking in until the crystals became as pink as a raspberry sorbet. And then there had been the toboggan journey down to the nearest hotel, with Stephen cradling me back to warmth in his arms; I remembered all too vividly the jolting ride, the way my hand had caught fire as the numbness wore off and how Stephen’s handkerchief, which he had bound round it, gradually acquired a spreading stain.

  At the hotel, one of the modern ones at the foot of the ski lift, we were lucky. The manager’s wife was a former nurse, and she bandaged my hand with practised efficiency. A gashed hand was nothing, she told me drily, in comparison with the usual ski slope injuries; and since the other occupants of the sun lounge were two rueful holidaymakers, a man with a leg in plaster and a girl with one arm in a sling, I began to feel that a fall from a toboggan really was nothing to make a fuss about.

  Except for one nagging suspicion, as persistent as the pain in my hand.

  The skier had seen us, I was sure of that. Although he himself was wearing dark ski clothes, Stephen and I were not. True, we must have been partly hidden by the bank, but our woollen ski caps – Stephen’s red, mine bright blue – would have been clearly visible against both the snow and the trees. And if he had seen us, an experienced skier could have avoided us – stopped, even – instead of making that terrifyingly low jump directly over our path. If he’d wanted to upset and alarm and hurt me, he couldn’t have chosen a more effective way.

  Stephen had ordered some soup, and I waited until we had warmed ourselves on it before I worked my way round to the subject. ‘You didn’t see who the skier was, I suppose?’ I asked casually.

  ‘If I’d recognized him,’ said Stephen grimly, ‘I’d be telling him now exactly what I thought of him, instead of sitting here fuming! All I saw was his back. Of all the careless idiots, to try to make his way down through the trees like that instead of following one of the ski runs – he’s a danger to himself, as well as a menace to others. But why do you imagine I might know him? You don’t think that it was Hammerl, or Sloan, or Becker, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. But there’s some kind of mystery about Matt’s death, isn’t there? You were the one who suggested that because he wasn’t wearing his disc, he might not have been climbing when he was killed. I didn’t really believe you, I admit, but when Toni Hammerl and Jon Becker were so very insistent that I mustn’t make enquiries about Matt’s accident, I began to think that you might be right. And now I’m wondering whether that skier wasn’t making a deliberate attempt to frighten me. To frighten me off.’

  Stephen’s mind boggled visibly. ‘A deliberate attempt? Oh, that’s a bit far-fetched! I agree that Hammerl and Becker seem to be trying to hush something up, but I can’t believe that either of them would deliberately cause an accident. No, Kate – you’re still in shock, you’re imagining things.’

  ‘I’m not, you know. The fact is that it’s the second near-miss I’ve had since I came.’ I explained about the icicle that might have smashed down on me if I hadn’t slipped on the path between the Alte Post and the annexe. ‘Either I’ve suddenly become accident-prone, or someone is going out of his way to give me a message that I’m not welcome here.’

  Stephen’s jaw tightened. ‘My God, if you’re right, I’ll find out what’s been going on if it’s the last thing I do! As for you, though, Kate – you stay out of it, do you hear? Leave me to do the investigating after you’ve gone home. For the rest of your holiday, you’re the only person I intend to keep an eye on. Whether your mishaps are accidental or deliberate, you’re obviously not safe to be out on your own.’

  We stayed in the sun lounge for what remained of the afternoon, talking more cheerfully and fortifying ourselves – after allowing a decent interval for the soup to settle – with a glutinous mixture of chocolate cake and coffee. Alpine air does wonders for the appetite, but the food isn’t for the figure-conscious.

  By the time the lights were switched on and the lounge began to fill with resident holidaymakers returning from the ski slopes, my hair had dried completely. My hand was painful, but it had ceased to throb. I’d stopped feeling shaky. I was almost prepared to write off the spill from the toboggan as an accident.

  Stephen met the owner of the toboggan at the foot of the ski lift, and exchanged it for his own skis. Then we walked back to the annexe of the Alte Post, and he waited in the lobby while I changed.

  No girl in her right mind goes out for the evening wearing ski boots. Inevitably, as soon as we set out to walk down through the village to catch the little local train, my ordinary smooth-soled boots began to slip. Stephen caught my arm in a reassuringly firm clasp and, tactfully steering clear of the cemetery, took me along a quiet footpath that cut across the snowfield behind the houses and rejoined the main road just above the railway halt.

  Crowds of tired and happy skiers were waiting to return to Innsbruck. We had to stand, jammed tightly and swaying all together as the train swung and rattled down the lower mountainside. A group of young people near us began to sing, and their song was taken up further along the carriage. Stephen caught my eye, and we exchanged smiles. Then the engine’s brakes went on suddenly, we all lurched, and I found myself with my face pressed
against his shoulder.

  It wasn’t at all an unpleasant sensation. For a weak-kneed moment I longed to stay there, resting against him, sensing the security of his warmth and strength. This, above all, was what I had missed since Matt’s death; the minor expressions of love. Not the greater so much as the smaller intimacies: the hand to hold, the shoulder to lean on, the entwining of arms and fingers …

  I stood upright again, and inched myself away. Matt was dead, and my capacity for love had died with him. Stephen Marsh was an agreeable and attractive man, but I was not interested in him. He began to look at me intently, hopefully, and I reproached myself for letting him think even for a moment that I might be co-operative. I smiled at him again, but this time with a warning of frost. His wry smile in return told me that he understood.

  The streets of Innsbruck were lightly powdered with fresh snow. We walked first to the old terraced house where Stephen rented what he described apologetically as a grotty room, and he left me in the hall among a clutter of ski gear and a pungent mixture of cooking smells while he raced upstairs to change his ski pants for jeans and his ski boots for battered suede. It was, he told me, going to be a strictly informal evening, and that suited me very well.

  Dinner with Jon Becker would, I imagined, have been formal in the extreme; though come to think of it, I wouldn’t have put it past him to have taken me back to his apartment, shown me the kitchen and expected me to cook a three-course meal for himself and his son. Becker was the kind of man, I guessed, who believed that women have clearly defined rôles, and that they should keep to them. In his view, it seemed, because I am a woman I ought to be not merely prepared but actually glad to spend my holiday looking after his neglected child!

  ‘What are you frowning about?’ asked Stephen as he came downstairs to join me. ‘I’m sorry about this place – I did warn you that it was grotty, but I’m living as cheaply as possible so that I can afford to ski. I don’t actually enjoy squalor, though. My prospects are modestly comfortable, even if my present lifestyle isn’t.’