Snowfall Read online

  ‘Heavens, I wasn’t criticizing – actually I was comparing your invitation this evening very favourably with Jon Becker’s.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Stephen dismissively.

  He took my arm again, but lightly, and we made for the centre of the small city. Here, in the mediaeval Altstadt, traffic is banned and at night all the buildings are softly and subtly illuminated. It was like being made free of a magnificent three-dimensional stage set. We wandered the wide streets, admiring the tall narrow façades of the handsome patrician town houses with their oriels, their carved reliefs, their coats of arms; the vaulted stone arcades, over which projected tradesmen’s signs and emblems, intricately wrought; the slender baroque church towers, lifting their snow-capped domes against the blue-black night sky.

  But this was a living and breathing city, not a stage set. The absence of traffic made it possible to hear the crunch of footsteps on snow and the chiming of clocks from towers, but the predominant sounds were of voices and laughter. The Altstadt was alive with strollers, as warmly wrapped as we were against the cold. And under the arcades, every other entrance seemed to be a Weinstube from which warmth and music came spilling out every time a door was opened.

  Stephen was obviously well-known and well-liked by the student population. Hands were raised to him from across the street, and greetings called in both English and German. But we were both taken by surprise when a voice called out, ‘Hallo, Kate. Hi, Steve!’

  We turned. Phil Sloan came hurrying up, beaming, one arm round his wife. He introduced Stephen to her. ‘Fancy meeting you two,’ he said.

  ‘Nice to see you about again, Rosemary,’ I greeted her. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  She gave me a brave but rather muzzy smile from between the folds of a hand-knitted scarf. ‘Quite a bit, thank you. The cold’s still hanging about, of course.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with colds. I always say,’ explained Phil brightly, as though he imagined that the comment was original, ‘that if you leave them alone they take about a week to go, and if you dose yourself they don’t last more than seven days.’ He squeezed his wife’s shoulder. ‘Bear up, darling, only another five days to put up with it!’

  ‘It’s such rotten luck that you should have it now,’ I said.

  Rosemary nodded ruefully: ‘Still, I’m hoping to make the most of being here, cold or no cold. I don’t feel up to ski-ing, but I’m looking forward to sitting in the sun tomorrow. We must come down here shopping one day, too, Phil.’

  ‘Window shopping,’ said her husband sternly, brushing up the ends of his moustache with his forefinger, ‘that’s all you’ll be doing, my girl!’ He turned to Stephen, dropping his masterly pose and becoming anxious. ‘Do you know, the prices have doubled since I was here last. I was going to take Rosemary into one of these wine bars – just to give her an idea of the Tyrolean atmosphere – but I don’t see that we can manage it. Not that I’m mean, but we’re planning to take on a hefty mortgage … Anyway, seeing you, I thought that you might perhaps know somewhere a bit cheaper? Respectable, of course, but not a tourist trap.’

  Stephen gave him directions for finding some of the inexpensive student haunts away from the main tourist drag, where we intended to go ourselves. Phil Sloan cheered up, and thanked him.

  ‘Might see you both later, then,’ he said. He and his wife walked away slowly, their arms round each other, exchanging such intent looks that if the precinct hadn’t been pedestrianized they would surely have wandered straight into the traffic.

  ‘They’re a wet couple,’ commented Stephen as we moved out of earshot.

  ‘I think they’re rather sweet,’ I said. I didn’t add that they made me feel melancholy, and about a hundred years old.

  He grinned at me. ‘You’ve obviously got a nicer nature than I have. Well, let’s go and find something to eat. I took the precaution of not telling the Sloans my usual place, so there’s no risk of finishing the evening in a foursome.’

  ‘They are on their honeymoon,’ I pointed out. ‘I imagine they want our company even less than we want theirs.’

  Stephen took me to an old inn in the university quarter. In the main room, at the back, students in the unisex uniform of jeans and long hair shuffled and twitched to the beat of international pop music, but there were tables nearer the door where it was possible to sit and hold a conversation without shouting into each other’s ears. We ate internationally too – spaghetti Milanesi – and I decided to try the drink that Jon Becker had recommended, Magdalener, the wine of the South Tyrol. It was heavier and fuller-bodied than I really cared for, but I loved the colour, a deep rich ruby.

  It was a strange coincidence that, just as I was sipping the wine, I should see Jon Becker himself. He stood in the doorway, straight-backed, handsome enough and disdainful with it, surveying the room. I turned to tell Stephen, but by the time we looked for him again, Becker had gone.

  It was silly to let myself be worried, but I couldn’t help it. Once again, I had the feeling that I was being watched.

  ‘Odd, for him to come here and then rush off again, wasn’t it?’ I said nervously.

  Stephen shrugged. ‘Not really. This place is practically an extension of the university. I don’t suppose he deigns to eat or drink here himself, but it would be one of the first places to try if he happened to be looking for someone.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Good lord no! He’d never expect to find you in a place like this.’

  ‘Why not? He knew that you were going to take me out this evening. It probably sounds foolish, Stephen, but I keep having this sensation of being watched – I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see Toni Hammerl lurking in a corner behind a glass of beer.’ I tried hard not to sound too neurotic about it, but all the same I took a good look round. I couldn’t see Toni, but that didn’t allay my worries.

  ‘Oh, come on, Kate … you’re imagining things again! It’s understandable, of course. Coming to the place where Matt died was bound to upset you. That doesn’t mean, though, that you have any reason for these suspicions.’

  I twisted my pendant – Matt’s climbing disc – in my fingers. ‘But that’s unfair! You were the one who suggested –’

  ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry I ever said anything to you about your pendant. Look, I’ve been thinking about it, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to: yes, there is some mystery about Matt’s death; yes, it seems likely that both Hammerl and Becker know something about it; yes, you’re right, they don’t want us to probe. But, Kate dear –’

  Stephen stretched a hand across the table and put it lightly over mine. His brown eyes were serious with sympathy. ‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘that although I climbed two or three times with Matt, I never knew much about him. Not as much, for example, as I know about Toni Hammerl. Now I can’t say that I like Toni, he’s a bit of a show-off on skis and he likes to imagine that he’s a devil with the girls, but he comes from a well-known and respected local family. I’ve no reason to think that he’s been up to no good. And then there’s Jon Becker. Well, Jon and I have almost nothing in common; as you’ve gathered, we’re not what you might call friends. But as far as I know he’s almost boringly respectable. I’m quite sure that there’s nothing suspicious about either of them.’

  ‘But you just said that they’re probably concealing something about Matt’s death –’

  ‘I know.’ His fingers tightened on mine. ‘I didn’t want to say this, but I can’t let you spend the rest of your holiday imagining that something sinister has been going on. We have to face the possibility that what Becker and Hammerl are concealing isn’t necessarily to their own discredit.’

  I felt a sudden shiver, a frisson of disquiet. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean …’ I tried to withdraw my hand, but he held it firmly.

  ‘Remember what I told you about climbers, Kate? They have a sense of camaraderie, and if something unpleasant happens they tend to close ranks. Now I don’t know about this, I’m
just guessing, but it’s possible that when Matt died he was doing something particularly rash. Perhaps he’d accepted some kind of challenge; perhaps the weather was bad and he insisted on climbing against local advice. The point is that Becker and Hammerl may well be trying to head you off simply because they want to spare you additional grief. Don’t you see that? So stop worrying about them, and stop brooding about the accident. Becker’s advice was quite good, you know – you must try to start looking forward instead of back.’

  He smiled at me reassuringly, released my hand and looked round the room. ‘I was relying on seeing Christoph, my student with the bushy beard, and asking for the loan of his car to take you back to Kirchwald. No sign of him, though. Excuse me for a minute. I’ll see if I can get him on the ’phone.’

  Stephen left me, and I was glad; I needed time to sort out my emotions. But perhaps he knew that, and was being tactful …

  I sat nursing my bandaged, aching left hand, and thought about what he had said. Yes, I could see his point: much as I’d loved Matt, I wasn’t blind to his faults. His streak of vanity made him sometimes over-confident; what’s more, he had enjoyed challenges. A couple of drinks, a challenge, and Matt would have had a go at the towering Olympic ski jump.

  Perhaps Stephen was right. It wasn’t impossible that Matt’s death was the result of his own folly, and if so I ought to be grateful to Jon Becker and Toni Hammerl for trying to keep the facts from me, instead of suspecting them at every turn. I was being utterly ridiculous! Why on earth should I imagine that they were watching me?

  Someone else was, though. A man I’d never seen before: small, thin, leathery and wizened-faced as an elderly jockey. He sat, alone except for a half-full glass of beer, a few tables away, wearing a black roll-necked sweater that was patched with leather at the elbows and smoking an Austrian cigar so thin and knotted that it looked like a piece of twig. And he was definitely looking at me. His stare was unwavering, almost hypnotic. He made me nervous; my unbandaged palm felt suddenly damp.

  But Stephen was coming back. I half-rose, clutching at his sleeve. ‘I know you think I’m imagining things,’ I babbled, ‘but I am being watched. The man over there –’

  He looked where I pointed. There was only an empty chair, and a ring of foam sliding down an empty beer glass.

  Chapter Seven

  My tension drained away as quickly as though a plug had been pulled. ‘Oh …’ I said feebly. ‘Well, there was a man looking at me …’

  Stephen laughed. ‘Only one? Come off it, Kate – there are plenty of unattached men in this place, and one or two of them were bound to start eyeing you when they saw you on your own. You’re tired and shaken-up and emotionally disturbed, and I should have had more consideration than to bring you out tonight. Let’s get you back to Kirchwald.’

  ‘Did you get in touch with Christoph?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. Never mind, we’ll go back by train. It’s not far to the valley railway station – can you walk, or shall I get a taxi?’

  I insisted on walking. Neither of us was in the taxi-taking income bracket, and besides I was glad of an opportunity to clear my head after being in the smoky, noisy inn.

  The night air had the good clean smell of snow. Stephen took my arm – on account, he explained kindly, of my propensity for falling – and we strolled along the main street, the Maria-Theresien-Strasse. It was, I remembered, the street where Jon Becker and his son lived; yes, very handy for the shops and the sights. I felt a little more cordial towards Becker, after what Stephen had told me, but even so I knew that nothing would induce me to play the rôle of au pair girl in his establishment. I would much rather settle, during the next few days, for Stephen Marsh’s pleasantly impecunious company.

  We were so busy talking that I didn’t give a thought to the time. When the city’s clocks began to strike, Stephen stopped in mid-sentence and looked at his watch with an exclamation of disbelief.

  ‘But the valley train stops running just after ten! We’ll have to dash to catch the last one – come on!’

  He grabbed my undamaged hand and we ran, taking the road rather than the pavement because it was swept clear of snow. Fortunately there was nothing more than local traffic in the streets – we could see, ahead of us, the lights of all the heavy traffic roaring past the city on an elevated section of motorway – and we made it to the small valley station without losing anything more than our breath.

  The train was waiting, filled with people from the villages in the valley who had been spending as much as possible of the evening in Innsbruck. Like Cinderella’s, their social life evidently had to be inconveniently curtailed. Some had cut it even finer than we had, and came jostling past as Stephen went to the ticket office and asked for a single to Kirchwald.

  ‘But how are you going to get back?’

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, I’ll walk – good exercise.’

  ‘But it’s all of four miles! No, Stephen, you can’t do that on my account.’

  ‘No problem. You’ve had a difficult day, and I want to see you safely back to the Alte Post.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of your doing that. It’s very kind of you, but I’ll be perfectly all right – good heavens, you’ve been to enough trouble to reassure me. Besides, I expect Rosemary and Phil will be on the train somewhere, and I can walk back to the hotel with them.’

  He continued to argue, but with decreasing enthusiasm. It was the ticket clerk who finally made up Stephen’s mind for him by pushing back his money and slamming down the shutter. Stephen scooped it up, looking guilty but understandably relieved.

  ‘Anyway,’ he told me, ‘I’ll be up at the hotel tomorrow morning. We’ll try a little gentle ski-ing – right?’ He smiled down at me, looking very much as though he intended to kiss me good night and chance an unfavourable reaction. But that problem, too, was solved by the station staff; a bell rang, and a metal gate was pulled across between us.

  ‘Fine,’ I called over my shoulder as I hurried to the train. ‘And thank you for today, Stephen. Good night!’

  I walked down the open carriage to a vacant place on one of the wooden bench seats, and sat down thankfully. I felt very tired indeed. What I wanted was to get back to the hotel, take a warm shower and fall into bed.

  Above all, I wanted to get back to my normal frame of mind. Ever since I’d been here in Austria – correction, ever since Stephen had spoken about Matt’s disc; no, correction again, ever since I’d stood beside Matt’s grave – I had felt uneasy, suspicious. And it was all so unnecessary. Even if poor Matt had met his death in circumstances that were less straightforward than I had been led to believe, there was nothing to be done about it.

  Matt was dead, and knowing more than that would serve no purpose. Jon Becker had pointed this out to me, and I could see now that he had meant it kindly. After all, he would know exactly how I felt, having been bereaved himself. ‘The details don’t help,’ he had advised me. ‘Just try to come to terms with the fact of your friend’s death, and let the rest go.’

  Well, I was ready now to do just that. After all, everything that had bothered me since I came to Kirchwald had a perfectly rational explanation. There was nothing I need be suspicious about, no point in worrying, no reason for me to feel uneasy.

  Except that, a little further down the carriage, sat a small man smoking a thin knotty cigar; a man with a monkey face, in dark clothes, arms folded, swaying with the motion of the train and watching me without a blink.

  I wasn’t going to be stupid about this, was I?

  Like everything else, it had a rational explanation. The man’s weatherbeaten skin suggested that he lived out of town; so, he’d been to spend the evening in Innsbruck, had happened to see me at the inn, had stared then because he fancied me and was staring now because, by a coincidence that wasn’t all that strange, we happened to be returning to our respective villages on the last train.

  To our respective villages. Stephen had told me that there were bigger ones further up
the line, so the chances were that the man didn’t live in Kirchwald. And however much he might fancy me, he wouldn’t follow me off the train because then he’d be stranded for the rest of the night. So he wouldn’t get off at Kirchwald, of course he wouldn’t. There was absolutely no need to worry.

  I really must file down my fingernails; they dug in quite painfully when they happened to come into contact with my palm.

  There was nothing at all significant about the man’s clothes; the fact that they were dark was simply another coincidence. In the Tyrol, country men are mountain men, and mountain men are brought up on skis. He was wearing a rustic form of ski wear, not only the heavy black sweater but shabby black cord breeches and black stockings. The only lighter colour was that of his brown boots – clumsy, old-fashioned leather ski boots.

  Perhaps he didn’t fancy me at all. Perhaps he was the dark-clad man who had nearly sliced off my head with his skis in that wickedly low jump this morning.

  My hand seemed to be bleeding again; there was a stain on the bandage. Perhaps it would ease off if I stopped gripping the wooden armrest quite so tightly. I mustn’t be neurotic. The man wasn’t following me, he didn’t mean me any harm, he wasn’t even going to get off the train at Kirchwald –

  Oh … he was getting off the train at Kirchwald.

  There was nothing so grand as a platform at the wayside halt below the village. The train just stopped beside a toytown shelter at a point where the line crossed the road up from Innsbruck, and the passengers spilled out. The night was moonlit, and I looked desperately for Rosemary and Phil, not caring that they wouldn’t welcome my company. I needed theirs, badly, but they must have caught an earlier train.

  The monkey-faced man seemed to be studying a timetable that was fixed to the wall of the shelter. I was sure that he was simply biding his time.