Christmas in the Snow (23 page)

She stared down into her coffee, wondering why she had come in here. She never talked. Her entire adult life had been an exercise in not talking. Doing, that was her thing. Doing achieved far
more than talking ever could.

‘I am Father Merete, by the way,’ he said, watching her.

‘Allegra. Allegra Fisher.’

‘Fisher?’

The way he said it – as though it was remarkable or rare in some way – made her turn. ‘Yes.’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose you are related to Valentina Fisher?’

Her jaw dropped open. ‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘It has been in all the papers about the woman they found on the mountain. A local sensation.’

‘Really?’

He nodded, clearly assuming she knew more about it than he.

‘Apparently she was my grandmother,’ Allegra said after a minute, resentment in her voice.

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ The way he said it suggested he was. He sounded sincere, but then she thought he must have to deliver that line a lot in his work.

‘Thank you, but I didn’t know her, so . . .’ Her voice trailed away. It felt strange being comforted about the loss of someone she’d never even heard of until this week,
much less ever known.

‘Still. It’s a tragic loss of a woman who, by all accounts, was a central figure in the community. I understand she was only twenty-one when she died, and yet she is very much
remembered in the town, even after all these years.’

Allegra’s eyes scanned his face. ‘Do you know much about what happened?’

‘Only what has been in the newspapers, although some of my older parishioners have lit candles for her these past few weeks – they knew her personally.’

‘Do they know any background on what happened?’

Father Merete shook his head. ‘They seem to be as confused now as they were then. They don’t understand why she went out to the hut in such violent weather and snow
conditions.’

‘What are these huts? Shepherd huts?’

Father Merete looked taken aback by her ignorance. ‘You don’t know about your family?’

She shook her head. ‘Until last week, I thought my family hailed from Sheen in London. I never heard anything that suggested we had Swiss relatives.’

But as the words left her mouth, the cuckoo clock she’d found in the loft with Isobel popped into her head. It was one of Switzerland’s most iconic exports and even depicted a Swiss
chalet. Just a coincidence?

‘Well, maybe it is not my place to tell you,’ Father Merete hesitated, reading the conflict in her face.

‘But I don’t know who else can. My mother’s family are all dead, and my mother is an only child. Please, Father. I’d be grateful for anything you could tell me. If
everything the police are telling me is true, I know less than anyone about my own history. I need somewhere to start in trying to understand it all.’

He nodded. ‘Well, as I have been led to understand, your family, the Engelbergs, owned one of the largest dairy farms in the valley.’

‘Dairy? You mean cows?’

‘No, goats. Long before tourism ever came to Zermatt, this was a farming community, and your family had some of the biggest and best pastures here. Your ancestors would have spent eight
months of the year living up on the slopes as the animals grazed, and the mountain huts were their home during the warm months. But no one ever stayed in them when the snow came. They were too
vulnerable to avalanche, and the temperatures get so low you would freeze to death. And Valentina, having been born and raised into farming life, would have known that.’

Allegra frowned. ‘And no explanation was ever given for why she was up there?’

‘According to her husband, they had had dinner together. He went out to check on the animals before they went to bed, and when he came back, she had gone. Disappeared.’

‘Just like that?’

Father Merete shrugged. ‘Apparently so.’

‘But people don’t just disappear from their own homes,’ she argued. ‘Surely the police didn’t accept that story. Didn’t they look into the possibility of foul
play?’

Father Merete smiled. ‘You have to understand they were different times back then. We didn’t have the resources we have now, and the conditions in which Valentina died, they’re
classified as a once-in-a-hundred-years phenomenon. The January of 1951 was one of the most catastrophic events in Swiss history – over a thousand avalanches in a three-day period. When she
wasn’t found in the town, the only other conclusion that could be drawn was that she was on the mountains, and everyone knew there was no way she could have survived.’

Allegra nodded, staring up again at the intricate stained-glass windows. Her eyes settled on Mary.

‘How likely is it that she’d have been Catholic?’

But she already knew the answer. The Advent calendar had been found alongside the cuckoo clock. And the figurine of the Madonna and child had been in one of the very first drawers.

‘Almost certain. Even now over eighty per cent of the villagers are Catholic.’

She nodded, the mug quickly growing cool between her hands.

Father Merete twisted slightly so that he was angled more towards her. ‘Have your family had any thoughts yet, about the burial arrangements?’

She looked back at him. ‘That’s the thing. There isn’t a body to bury, as such. Just . . .’

He leaned in, saving her from having to say the words. ‘I understand. We often receive the remains of people who have died on the mountains.’

They were quiet again.

‘Is cremation . . . ? Is it an option? For Catholics, I mean.’

‘The Catholic Church does not object to it, and I agree it would seem the best solution in this situation.’

Allegra looked down at her hands. ‘It’s hard to know what to do – what’s right, I mean. My sister and I have come out here to take her remains back to England with us,
but now that I’m here and I see the . . . scope of life here, the beauty and scale of the mountains . . .’ She swallowed again, wishing she could be more eloquent, but her mind was a
mess. ‘This was the only life Valentina would have known. It doesn’t seem right somehow to bring her back to
London
. And the mountain was her final resting place after all.
I’m beginning to feel we shouldn’t take her away from here.’

The priest was quiet for a moment. ‘She was your mother’s mother, you say?’

‘Yes, but I’m here on my mother’s behalf. She isn’t well enough to do it herself. I’m her legal advocate.’

‘So your mother is in England now?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does she think? Perhaps it would be a comfort to her to have her mother’s remains in England with her, especially after so many years missing.’

Allegra’s eyes met his. ‘She doesn’t know.’

‘She doesn’t know that her mother’s body has been found?’

Allegra inhaled deeply. ‘My mother is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, Father. She is easily upset and confused. Very often, she believes she is a child and that her mother is
still alive.’

He was respectfully quiet for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry. It is a sad situation that I see too frequently. Do her doctors believe she should not be told?’

‘If Alzheimer’s was all there was to it, then they said there was a chance we could tell her; sometimes she seems perfectly well.’ She sighed. ‘But there is more to it.
Long before she fell sick, my mother buried her mother, thirteen years ago in England.’

Father Merete straightened up. ‘I don’t understand.’

Allegra took a deep breath, wondering where to start when she didn’t have all the answers herself. ‘Well, according to the police, the woman who raised my mother wasn’t her
mother at all, but her aunt, Anya. Valentina and Anya were sisters.’

She watched Father Merete’s frown deepen.

‘All of this has only to come to light because I had to provide DNA samples to the police for them to confirm identity of the remains. And when it proved that Valentina was my maternal
grandmother, it also proved that my mother’s entire life had been a lie.’

Father Merete was silent for a few moments, deep in thought. ‘You said your mother’s family were all dead, but what about your grandfather? Surely he can enlighten you?’

Allegra shrugged. ‘He died when my mother was a toddler.’ She saw his expression. ‘What?’

‘You are sure about that?’

‘Well, yes, of course . . . That’s what I was told. It’s what Mum always said, and she was obviously repeating what Granny had said to
her
. There was never any reason
to . . .’ She swallowed.

No. There never had been any reason to question the stories she had been fed about her mother’s family. The lies had always been on her father’s side, but a DNA test and a phone call
had changed all that, wrecking the foundations of her world and casting her most beloved people as liars.

She looked at him with sudden nervousness. ‘He’s not dead?’

‘Let me show you something.’

He rose and she followed him into an antechamber where an oak refectory table sat in the middle of the room, bedecked with a purple and gold embroidered runner and a baroque golden cross.

He lifted a huge black tome from a sideboard and carried it over to the table.

‘Our parish records,’ he said, placing one hand over it. The leather was cracked and stippled beneath his hand, the gold lettering – spelling something she didn’t
understand – all but faded. ‘Every birth, baptism and marriage is recorded in here from the last two hundred years.’

‘Really?’ she asked in astonishment.

He nodded, opening the book with care and laying the cover flat. ‘Now, we know Valentina died in January 1951, so . . .’ Slowly, he slid his fingers into some pages towards the back
third of the book and peered down.

‘That’s 1894,’ he murmured, withdrawing his fingers and moving down a half-inch. ‘And . . . 1943. Right, yes.’ He opened the pages wider, using both hands to lay
the front two-thirds flat. ‘OK . . .’

She watched as his eyes scanned the decorative calligraphy, his finger moving lightly over the pages as he repeated Valentina’s name under his breath.

‘Ah yes,’ he said after a while. ‘Valentina Engelberg. Married 3 October 1946 to Lars Fischer.’

‘Lars Fischer,’ Allegra repeated slowly, immediately clocking the difference in spelling of their surname. Her breath caught. Was that it? The typo she and Isobel had been hoping
for? The proof that this woman, Valentina, belonged to a different family of Fishers, one with a ‘c’ in their name, and not hers after all? The DNA test said otherwise but there was
always a chance it was wrong – contaminated, flawed . . . And she’d never heard the name Lars being used by her grandmother, Anya. Not once.

‘Now, if we look here . . .’ He closed the book and brought over another, almost identical book. ‘This contains the deaths and burials records,’ Father Merete said,
carefully laying the book open. ‘You said your mother was told her father died when she was a toddler?’

‘Yes. Uh, I think she said she was three.’

‘And your mother was born in which year?’

‘On 23 February 1948.’ Her brain automatically – habitually – did the maths. If Annen and the DNA test and these records were correct, if her grandmother’s family
had
owned pastures here, if her grandmother
had
died here in 1951, then in all likelihood her mother, who had been born three years earlier, would have been born here too, surely?
Was she really supposed to believe her mother was Swiss and had never once mentioned it?

‘So then if she was three, her father would have died in 1951 as well.’ Father Merete found the 1951 entries and opened the book fully, stepping back slightly so that she could look
through the names herself.

‘Lars Fischer,’ she mumbled over and over, her finger drawing an invisible line down the page as her eye took in every name . . . but not his. ‘He’s not there,’ she
said finally, frowning.

‘No.’

‘So then maybe he moved and died outside of Zermatt? He wanted to set up a new life for himself after his wife died.’

‘Possibly,’ Father Merete nodded. ‘Or maybe he hasn’t died at all.’

‘But . . .’ Allegra’s mouth opened, even though no further words followed. She didn’t want to say the words out loud because each one would dismantle the memory of the
grandmother who’d been her world. The one who’d got her through it all.

‘You should know there is a Lars Fischer in my congregation.’

Allegra blinked at him, her brain automatically rejecting the idea, her head shaking side to side.

‘He is in his late eighties now. He usually attends service every week.’

Usually? She looked back at him. ‘But not recently?’

Father Merete raised his eyebrows. ‘He hasn’t been to church for a few weeks now. Not since the news broke that Valentina had been found.’

Allegra looked at him, still resisting what he was trying to tell her: that their grandfather was alive and not just alive, but here. She had a typo on her side and she wasn’t going to
give it up without a fight. There was still a chance she could disprove the priest’s and the policeman’s and the scientist’s version of the truth and go back to believing in her
grandmother’s. Anya’s. ‘There’s just one more thing I’d like to see,’ she said, masking her defiance with a smile and knowing exactly how she could prove
they’d all got the wrong family. She was a Fisher, no ‘c’. Period.

‘You’re up!’ Allegra exclaimed in astonishment as she fell through the door.

‘Up’ was a loose term. Isobel was actually lying flat out on the red leather sofa, her legs dangling over one arm, her ski kit still on.

‘Ugh! Don’t shout!’ Isobel winced painfully, staring back at her with rheumy eyes. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, trying to sit up but only managing a feeble
half sit-up before collapsing back down again. ‘God, I can’t believe you went out without me.’

‘You were comatose.’

‘
So
?’

‘I did you a favour letting you sleep it off. I thought you might appreciate being allowed to sleep in for once.’

There was a short silence. ‘I don’t suppose you got any milk, did you?’