Christmas in the Snow (28 page)

‘Did people actually live in these houses?’ she asked, subtly trying to peer up the stairs. What was up there?

‘Some of us still do,’ Connor replied with a chilly tone, glancing back at her.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . It’s charming. Just not what I was expecting,’ Allegra said, as Isobel jabbed her in the ribs.

‘Davos is our headquarters. This is just a regional field office. There’s only me and two others in our team, and our “office” – if you want to call it that –
is on site up the mountain. We don’t need more than this in town. Besides, there is a limited supply of office space in Zermatt, as you might expect. Seemingly the council only wants
superchalets developed here.’

‘What are you doing up there? On the mountain, I mean.’

‘We investigate avalanche dynamics at the test site. We are developing an avalanche detection system that can deliver information concerning avalanche activity in a specific terrain to
safety authorities. That means setting off controlled explosions and assessing how and where the snow comes down.’

‘So you’re an avalanche expert, then,’ Allegra said drily.

‘Yes.’ He said the word with a certain reluctance and she guessed the irony of the situation that had brought them together wasn’t lost on either of them. ‘Ah, got
it,’ he muttered, pulling down a box and checking the number written on the side.

He stared down at it for a moment, his back to them both, and Allegra sensed his manner change slightly.

He turned. ‘So this is it. Your grandmother’s box.’ He held it out to them. Allegra glanced over at Isobel in astonishment. It was tiny, not ten centimetres by ten
centimetres.

Allegra took it, stared down at it: the hard proof that had forced a seismic lateral shift in their genealogy, the scissors that had simply and silently cut through the tight knot of stories and
memories that had wound and bound and knotted around them. There it was, sitting innocuously in a cardboard box that fit in the palm of her hand.

Slowly, Isobel reached for it. ‘That’s
it
?’

Allegra spoke up quickly, embarrassed the man would think they were avaricious, the so-called trophy-hunters after all. ‘And are all these boxes filled with . . . last possessions like
this?’ she asked quietly, her eyes on the shelves behind him.

He paused. ‘Yes. Mostly it’s just artefacts like a camera or old boots that have been lost by hikers, but we archive it all in case they can be traced to a missing person on our
files. The seasonal movement of the snowpack and ice melt means objects can sometimes travel of their own accord down the mountain, a distance away from where they were lost.’

‘Are there many people missing?’

‘Officially two hundred and eighty people in the Valais region since 1926.’

Two hundred and seventy-nine now, then. ‘And how often do you find the . . . bodies?’

‘More and more regularly. The glaciers are retreating at an unprecedented rate. The Ober Gabelhorn glacier, on the opposite side of the valley to where we found your grandmother, shrank by
almost three hundred metres last year.’ He shook his head. ‘The mountains keep many secrets and for a long time. But not forever. We always find out in the end.’

Allegra nodded, her eyes sliding over to the teeny-tiny box in her sister’s palm, thinking about how it wasn’t just the mountains that had kept a secret – her family had
too.

Isobel continued staring at the small box. ‘I don’t know why I thought it would be bigger,’ she murmured. ‘I thought there would be something . . . dramatic. Something
substantial that would explain it all, you know?’ She looked up at Allegra.

‘I know. Me too,’ Allegra nodded, rubbing her arm lightly.

Connor’s eyes slid between the two women as their disappointment grew. ‘You need to sign a release form.’

He pulled a sheet of paper from a box file on the shelf and, finding a pen, wrote the case number and Valentina’s name in the blanks. He pointed for Allegra to scribble her signature on
the dotted lines so that the contract would be fulfilled, the brief business between them ended: a mouth swab, a signature and now a stranger’s last known possessions were theirs. A woman
they’d never heard of, much less met, had become their responsibility.

‘OK, then,’ he said, pushing the biro lid back on and indicating they could take the box away. ‘It’s all yours.’

Allegra had to stop herself from replying with a sarcastic ‘Really?
All
of it?’ Instead she said: ‘Can I ask you something?’

Connor looked back up at her.

‘You found her, right?’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘Yes.’

She swallowed. ‘What did it look like, the hut?’

He held out his arms, indicating the room they were standing in. ‘Not much different to this. But just one room, one window. It was a lot smaller.’

‘Smaller,’ she echoed, imagining the walls in here closer, the ceiling lower. Less space, less security, the sound of a mountain falling down upon them . . . ‘It must have been
pretty much destroyed, then, by the impact.’

He fell still. ‘Strangely, no. Not like you would have thought. It had been wedged into a crevasse, so one wall was completely smashed against the rock; the others were at broken angles
but still up. We think it must have surfed the snow to have remained so intact.’

‘Surfed?’

‘Like this one, the hut was built on stone pillars to protect from snow in the winter and also to keep vermin from entering. We think it must have been in the run-off zone of the
avalanche, when it would have been losing volume and power, but there was still enough force to lift the hut and carry it the distance to the crevasse.’

She tried to visualize the mountain hut skimming the froth of an avalanche, a young woman helpless inside. She tried to imagine the terror Valentina must have felt as the hut
‘surfed’ with her in it, not knowing where she was going, unable to see what was coming next . . . The sensation of falling as the hut left the slopes . . . the terrible noise as the
wall cracked and splintered, the sudden stop and silence of the stone. Those had been the final moments of her mother’s mother?

‘Why . . . why has it taken so long to find her? Surely people searched? They must have had search parties looking for her? Someone must have realized the hut had
gone
?’

‘Yes. But over the three-day window that she disappeared, there were over a thousand avalanches. Hundreds perished; many were never found. It was impossible to send out rescue parties in
the immediate aftermath – conditions were too unstable and dangerous. And afterwards, the devastation was so great, the snowpack so deep . . .’ He held out his hands in a helpless
gesture. ‘And when the spring melts occurred, in this instance the hut had been swept away from where it had been standing. It wasn’t actually far from the original spot, but there was
no way of knowing where it had been moved; most people just assumed it had been destroyed altogether by the force of the snow.’

She looked away, nodding, the full horror of her grandmother’s death becoming more real, more tragic, with every revelation. ‘So how did she die, then, if the hut itself wasn’t
destroyed?’

‘We think suffocation. Her left tibia was broken, but the hut was swept into a gully and the entire void would have filled with snow. The force of it would have been as hard as concrete.
It was unsurvivable. The snow cover was so hard-packed it never melted, even in the summer months. That was why it wasn’t found.’

Allegra saw the anomaly immediately. ‘So then how did you discover it if the snow didn’t melt?’

He tried to supress a sigh and Allegra became aware she was coming across as an interrogator, trying to trip him up almost, machine-gunning questions at him that must be as difficult for him to
answer as they were for her to hear. ‘As I mentioned, the glacier is retreating, which means more and more meltwater is rushing through the gully, and that erodes the snow there. It was
enough to expose some of the tiles on the roof and I spotted it from a path.’

‘When was this?’

‘In September, near the Ober Gabelhorn glacier.’

Isobel had had enough. ‘Come on, Legs, let’s just go.’

But Allegra shook her head. She had to know everything; she had to understand – even if these facts made a liar of her grandmother and revealed her as a monster. Because the truth, no
matter how brutal, was always easier to bear than lies.

‘One more thing. What was it you actually found in there? Her body, I mean . . .’ She swallowed.

He seemed to understand what she wanted to know. ‘We found a skeleton.’

Isobel juddered like she’d been pushed and Allegra’s arm instinctively shot around her like a safety rope. Isobel was right. It was time to go.

Only . . .

‘A skeleton?
A skeleton?
’ Isobel repeated fiercely, a telling crack in her voice. ‘So then how did you come to tally up an anonymous heap of bones with
our
family
? None of us had ever even heard about her. There was no proof she was anything to do with us till Legs had to do the DNA test. What right did you have to drag us into this? We already
had a granny – the best!’

Huge, hot tears rolled down her cheeks, but her eyes were ablaze and Connor looked at the floor awkwardly.

‘It was because of this,’ he said, flipping open the paper file and pulling a photograph from it of a small cowbell with a faded red leather strap looped to it.
‘Valentina’ could be seen inscribed in the grain of the leather. ‘We found this round the wrist bone; when we checked the name against local records, a Valentina Fischer was
recorded as missing in January 1951.’

It was useless trying to push Valentina away from them. No matter what they said, no matter how they protested their grandmother’s innocence, all the records, all the facts pointed to
Valentina being theirs too. Allegra curled her arm around her sister’s shoulders and herded her out, pushing the box in her pocket so that they could use their hands to get back down the
rudimentary steps.

Ten minutes later, they were sitting in the coffee shop, nursing hot chocolates and staring at the little box on the table between them. It was relatively quiet in there, compared to the heave
of yesterday’s visit, and neither one of them was saying very much. The gruesome details of Valentina’s death couldn’t help but arouse sympathy in them for her plight, but at the
same time, every gesture of acceptance towards Valentina eroded their history with Anya. They were caught between two women – two sisters – two histories that were insupportable to each
other, because as much as their hearts lay with the grandmother they had known and loved, how could they ignore the facts, which were telling them a woman had died in terrifying circumstances, far
too young and leaving behind a child – their mother?

‘I guess we have to open it sooner or later,’ Allegra said, one finger poking the box lightly.

‘S’pose,’ Isobel said, pointedly looking out of the window and showing that it wouldn’t be her who did it.

Taking the butter knife, Allegra slit through the packing tape and opened up the flaps, peering in. She pulled out a short, two-inch stub of red candle, the wax tears still clinging to it; she
placed it on the table in silence, meeting Isobel’s angry eyes with apology. Besides it, she placed the miniature cowbell, with the red leather strap that had appraised the police of her
identity in the first place. The leather itself was badly perished, cracked and stained with tidemarks, but ‘Valentina’ was still clearly visible when held up to the window and light
speckled in through the punchmarks.

Looking in again, Allegra frowned, this time pulling out two rings. One had a yellow-gold band with three diamonds set along it. The other was incredibly plain, the metal very dark and dull,
with no stone or embellishment at all. It bellied out like a signet ring, but there was no crest or insignia on it.

‘That’s it,’ Allegra murmured, setting them down on the table beside the cowbell and candle.

‘Huh, don’t fancy yours much,’ Isobel muttered, picking up the diamond ring, her eyes briefly meeting Allegra’s with a flash of devilry.

Allegra grinned, grateful for the light relief. ‘It’s not much to speak of, is it?’ she said, picking up the dark ring. She slipped it on her right ring finger. A perfect fit.
‘A candle, a bell and two rings.’

‘Maybe the other stuff rotted in the snow. Her clothes and stuff.’

‘Yes.’

‘If it was just a shepherd’s hut, there probably wasn’t much in there anyway.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Allegra agreed. ‘She must have been wearing these when she died.’ She held up the ring on her finger and gestured towards the one Isobel was
holding.

‘I guess so. That bloke just now said she had the bell on her wrist too. Does it still work?’

She lifted the bell from the table and shook it lightly. Nothing happened and she turned it upside down. ‘Huh. Rusted solid. It won’t work.’

‘It can probably be treated with WD-40 or something. It’s a pretty thing.’

But Isobel had already lost interest in the cowbell. ‘They’re really different, aren’t they?’ she said, indicating the rings.

‘Hmmm?’

She held up the diamond ring by the base. ‘This one seems pretty flashy, but didn’t you say they were goat farmers? You wouldn’t have thought a goat farmer could afford
that.’

Allegra considered for a moment. ‘No, but Father Merete did say the farm was one of the largest in the valley. They may have been asset rich.’ She shrugged. ‘Or maybe it was a
family ring, passed down through the generations.’

‘So what about your one, then? That’s totally the other end of the scale.’

Allegra laughed lightly. ‘Oh, I see! We’ve already decided on dividing up the spoils, have we?’

Isobel looked mortified. ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

‘Iz, I’m just joking.’ She took a sip of her hot chocolate. ‘Try it on, though. Does it fit?’

‘It needs a good clean,’ Isobel said, sliding the diamond ring on her right ring finger too. ‘Wow. We must have been similar builds?’

‘Unlikely. Mum’s only five foot five.’