The Winter Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  The young English exclaimed with delight, and made a concerted scramble for the train with their cases, closely followed by Henry and Emmy. Mrs. Buckfast remarked that it was high time they put new coaches on this line—the wooden seats were a disgrace. The Baroness, with every porter in the place at her heels, walked slowly across the flat railway track with an expression of pure love on her face. The luggage was loaded, the train shrilled its whistle, and the last lap of the journey began.

  As the crow flies, it is about twenty miles from Chiusa to Santa Chiara: as the railway line winds, it is over thirty—thirty miles of tortuous, twisting track, of hairpin bends on the edge of precipices, of Stygian, smoky tunnels, of one-in-five gradients, and of some of the most breathtaking views in the world. Almost at once, they crossed the snowline, among pine trees. Soon Chiusa was just a huddle of pink and ochre houses far below. Valleys opened out gloriously, houses lost their Italianate look and became steadily more and more Alpine, with wooden balconies and eyebrows of snow on their steep, overhanging eaves. Up and up the engine puffed and snorted, nearer and nearer to the snowfields and the pink peaks. At village halts, white-aproned peasant women clambered on and off the train with baskets of eggs and precious green vegetables. Then they saw the first of the skiers. Round a steep bend, a glistening nursery slope opened up alongside the railway line, peopled with tiny, speeding figures. Excitement rose, like yeast. Up and up the train climbed, through three small resort villages, until at last a pink, onion-domed church came into view, clustered about with little houses.

  “Santa Chiara,” said the Baroness.

  They all craned to look. The village was set at the head of a long valley—a valley of which the floor itself was over 5,000 feet above sea level. All round, the mountains stood in a semicircle, at once protective and menacing. The village seemed very small and very brave, up there in the white heights.

  There was not, strictly speaking, a station. The train, showing signs of exhaustion, clanked and rumbled to a halt in the middle of a snowfield near the church: here, by a small green-painted shed, several hotel porters waited with their big luggage sledges, while skiers returning to the village for tea zoomed in an uninhibited manner across the railway line.

  As the Baroness got out of the train, there was a sudden flurry as two diminutive skiers hurtled down the slope, crossed the railway tracks, and swung round in perfect parallel cristiania turns to stop dead in a spray-shower of snow beside the train.

  “Mamma! Mamma!” they yelled, and the Baroness dropped her white pigskin dressing case in the snow and rushed to embrace them. The reunion was noisy, sentimental and rather moving: it was not for several moments that Henry noticed a slender, dark girl in black who had skied quietly but extremely competently down to the train behind the children, and now stood a few paces away, silently watching the outpourings of affection. She was very pale, in sharp contrast to the bronzed faces all round her, and she wore no makeup. She might have been beautiful, Henry thought, had she taken even the most elementary steps to make herself so: as it was, she seemed to concentrate on self-effacement, on anonymity.

  The first greetings over, the Baroness—one arm round each of her children—beamed at the dark girl and spoke to her in German. Then she said to Emmy, “I go now with Gerda and the children for tea. The porter will take you up to the Bella Vista, so I shall see you at dinner.”

  She gave instructions in rapid Italian to a burly porter who had “Bella Vista” embroidered in gold on his black cap, and then, as the children skied slowly down the hill to the village street, she ran after them, laughing and teasing, trying to keep up with them. The dark-haired Gerda let them get near the bottom of the slope, then launched herself forward with a lovely, fluid movement, and took the gentle hillside in a series of superbly executed turns, gathering speed all the way, so that she was waiting for the others at the bottom, as still and silent as before.

  As the porter loaded the baggage on to his sledge, Colonel Buckfast spoke for the first time that Henry could remember since Innsbruck.

  “Look,” he said, pointing upwards.

  They all looked. Behind the railway line, the mountains reared in white splendour: by now, the sun had left the village, but lingered on the rosy peaks and on the high snowfields. Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk.

  “The Bella Vista,” said the Colonel, almost reverently.

  There was a silence.

  “I didn’t realise it was so far up,” said Emmy at last, in a small voice. “How do we get there?”

  “We get there,” said Mrs. Buckfast, “in a diabolical contraption known as a chair-lift. Every year I say I’ll never do it again, and every year Arthur talks me into it. The very thought of it makes me feel sick. This way.”

  The Monte Caccia chair-lift, as all the brochures emphasise, is one of the longest in Europe. The ascent takes twenty-five minutes, during which time the chairs, on their stout overhead cable, travel smoothly and safely upwards, sometimes over steep slopes between pine trees, a mere twenty feet from the ground, more frequently over gorges and ravines which twist and tumble several hundred feet below. About once a minute, the strong metal arm which connects the chair to the cable clatters and bumps as it passes between the platforms of a massive steel pylon, set on four great concrete bases and equipped with a fire-broom and a sturdy snow-shovel in case of emergencies. For parts of the trip, the lift travels above the pistes, or ski runs, giving the passengers a bird’s-eye view of the expertise or otherwise of the skiers below. It is one of the coldest forms of travelling known to man.

  Henry was amused to see the varying reactions of the party (including himself) when faced with this ascent—especially when the first-timers grasped the fact that the chairs did not stop at any point, but continued up and down on an endless belt, so that one had to “hop” a moving chair as it passed.

  The Colonel slid expertly into his chair, and waved his hand from sheer exhilaration as he soared skywards: Mrs. Buckfast took her seat competently, but with resignation, having grudgingly accepted the bright red blanket proffered by the attendant. Caro, glancing at the seemingly endless cables stretching up the mountainside, turned rather pale and remarked that she hadn’t imagined it would be quite like this, and that heights made her dizzy.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it in no time,” said Roger, briskly. “There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened of. I’ll be in the chair right behind you. Just put down the safety bar, and then relax and enjoy the view.”

  Caro showed no signs of enjoying herself, but she got on to the next seat without further demur, clutching a little desperately at the vertical metal arm, like a nervous child on a roundabout, as the chair sped upwards. Roger exchanged a joke in Italian with the attendant, and had time to discover that his name was Carlo and that the lift stopped working at seven o’clock each evening, before he slipped casually into his chair, leaving the safety arm flapping. Jimmy made a loudly facetious remark about dicing with death, which made Henry suspect that he was genuinely apprehensive, but he hopped his chair gamely enough, the neck of a brandy bottle protruding from his hip pocket. It seemed to Henry that he had had to wait an eternity for his turn, but in fact the chairs came round so rapidly that it was less than a minute after the Colonel had boarded the lift that Henry—only partly reassured by Emmy’s encouraging smile—found himself waiting in the appointed spot for the next down-travelling chair to complete its circuit by clanking round the huge wheel in the shed; a couple of seconds later it came up and hit him in the back of the knees. He sat down, and the ascent began.

  The ride up to the Bella Vista was certainly cold: and over some of the more precipitous ravines Henry found it advisable to keep his eyes focused stubbornly on the heights to come, rather than glancing down to the huddled, snowy rocks below. But there was a magic, too, in th
e slow, steady, silent ascent—silent, that is, apart from the clatter and rattle each time the chair passed a pylon: and yet the unnerving effect of this noise was counteracted by a momentary sense of security, for the inspection platform of the pylon passed a mere eighteen inches below his dangling feet, and, noticing that a steel ladder led down from the platform to the ground below, Henry hoped fervently that if the lift did decide to break down, it would do so when he was passing a pylon, rather than at a moment when he was suspended over a precipitous gorge.

  To the right, about ten feet away, was the downward cable of the lift, on which a procession of empty seats followed each other towards the valley with the stately melancholy of a deserted merry-go-round. Just occasionally, however, a down-going chair was occupied—generally by a booted and be-furred lady of uncertain years. It was very much, Henry reflected, like being on an escalator in the London underground, watching the faces that glided downwards as one ascended, to come face to face and level for a fleeting moment before the inexorable machinery churned on. When it came to scenery, however, all resemblance disappeared. Instead of the garish rectangles of advertisement which London Transport provides for the entertainment of its passengers, there were vistas of snow, cloud and mountain, of pine trees and pink rock, of misty valleys and sun-touched peaks. At last, a tiny hut came into view at the top of an open snowfield—the trees were all but left behind. As the chair approached, a little wizened man with a walnut-brown face stood ready to take Henry’s arm and help him as he slid maladroitly out of the chair before it clattered on round the wheel to begin its descent.

  Emmy came sailing up serenely on the next chair, slipped gracefully out of it, and came over to stand beside Henry.

  “Well,” she said, “here we are. And isn’t it wonderful?”

  Far, far below them, Santa Chiara looked like a toy village laid out on a nursery floor, the minuscule houses dotted haphazardly round the apricot-pink church. Ahead, over the ridge where the ski-lift ended, a shallow, saucer-shaped sweep of snowfields stretched away to still more mountain peaks; and to the right, round the bend of a snow-banked path, was the Albergo Bella Vista. The rest of the party were already walking up the path to the hotel, stopping every few yards to draw each other’s attention to some fresh beauty. Henry and Emmy followed them slowly, hand in hand and very much at peace.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ONE OF THE CHARMS of mountain architecture is its consistency. The deep eaves and steep roof-tops, the wooden balconies and shuttered windows, have been universal above a certain altitude for centuries—simply because they are functional, providing the greatest comfort and security for men living among the snows. So the Albergo Bella Vista looked exactly like any other mountain chalet, with its neat mosaic of stacked firewood nudging one wall, its balcony-veranda and pale wooden shutters pierced with heart-shaped holes.

  In the hall—floors and walls of honey-coloured waxed pine—a man in a light blue suit, plump as a capon and with sparse grey hair trained carefully to hide his pink baldness, was oozing welcome.

  “Allow me to present myself… Rossati, Alberto… welcome to the Bella Vista, meine Herrschaften…ah, welcome back Colonel Buckfast…Herr Staines…if you would kindly sign the register… this way, bitteschoen… may I have your passports, please…”

  One by one the travellers signed in, surrendered passports, were allotted keys. By this time the luggage had arrived, having made the ascent on one of the two tray-shaped luggage carriers attached to the chair-lift. At last all was sorted out, and Henry and Emmy found themselves alone in their bedroom. It was of light wood, like the rest of the building—the floor bare of carpets, yet warm to the touch, for an enormous radiator shimmered heat from below the window. The big intricately carved bed had, in place of blankets, two vast white downy quilts, a foot thick and light as thistledown. A very large wardrobe, a plain deal dressing table, a washbasin and two upright chairs completed the furniture.

  An exchange in Italian with the chambermaid elicited the information that a bath was certainly available, at the price of 500 lire.

  “That’s more than five shillings,” said Henry, outraged.

  “Baths are always a terrible price in the mountains,” said Emmy, cheerfully. “I never reckon on having more than one a week. But just at the moment I think it would be cheap at a pound.”

  So they bathed luxuriously, and changed into clean clothes, and by a quarter to seven were ready to face the world and an apéritif.

  The bar ran the whole length of the building, one side of it being composed entirely of windows, which gave onto the veranda. It was dark outside, for the moon was not yet up, but still the snow glimmered faintly white below the ink-black sky. The furniture consisted of little tables covered in red gingham tablecloths, milk-white wooden chairs, and a long chromium bar with stools upholstered in deep red leather. On the bar, inevitably, an Espresso machine hissed and wheezed like a cauldron of snakes. Henry and Emmy perched themselves on stools, and a dark, smiling girl served them with Camparisodas. There was only one other customer in the bar—a man who sat at a table in the farthest corner and toyed with a glass of tomato juice.

  Indicating the stranger with the tiniest nod of her head, Emmy whispered, “Doesn’t look like a skiing type to me.”

  Henry half-turned to look. He saw a small, smooth man in his fifties: everything about him was chubby, from his fat little fingers caressing the stem of his glass to his short, stumpy feet, whose outline could not be disguised by his tapering suede shoes. His face was pink, round and benevolent, with small eyes that twinkled obscurely behind thick-lensed spectacles.

  After a minute or so Signor Rossati, the proprietor, came into the bar. He went quickly over to the man in the corner, and spoke to him quietly in German. The man nodded amiably, finished his drink, and the two went out together, deep in conversation. They crossed the hall and Henry heard the door of Rossati’s private office click shut, cutting off the voices.

  “Our host seems to be bilingual,” Emmy remarked.

  “Nearly everyone is, in these parts,” Henry replied. “We’re only just over the Austrian border, you know, and this province was part of Austria until 1919. Italian is the official language now, but German comes far more naturally to a lot of the people—especially in the smaller villages.”

  “Does it rankle at all, I wonder—being handed over arbitrarily to Italy?” asked Emmy.

  “Officially, no. Unofficially—yes, of course. But strictly under the surface. Nothing must upset the tourist trade.” Henry turned to the barmaid. “Do you speak English—parla Inglese?” he asked.

  She giggled, shook her head, and said she didn’t.

  “Tedeschi?”

  Her face lit up. “Ja, ja.” A quick stream of German followed, but Henry just smiled and shook his head negatively. To Emmy, he said, “You see? I’m not letting on I understand her, because I don’t want our English chums to know I speak German or Italian. But you heard what she said?”

  “She went too fast for me,” said Emmy. “My German isn’t all that good, you know. The best that can be said for it is that it’s better than my Italian,”

  “Well,” said Henry, “she was saying that German was her mother-tongue, and she’d be delighted to speak it with us since we don’t know Italian. It would be quite a relief, she said.”

  Suddenly the hall outside became shrill with a babble of Italian voices and a cheerful stamping of boots.

  “The sci-lift… finish…” said the barmaid.

  Through the open door, Henry saw the Baroness following Gerda and the children upstairs. A man’s voice said, “Maria-Pia…” and she stopped, letting the others go on ahead of her. A dark young Italian, in extremely elegant royal blue ski trousers, moved into Henry’s line of vision. He stood at the foot of the staircase, and placed a hand on the Baroness’s arm, restraining her, and talking urgently but softly. Gently, she freed her arm, shaking her head, but he caught her hand in his, pulling her down the stairs towar
ds him. At that moment, Gerda reappeared round the bend of the staircase, her pale face impassive. Abruptly, the young man released the Baroness’s hand, made some laughing remark, and ran upstairs past the two women, taking the steps two at a time. Gerda said something to the Baroness and they walked upstairs together. Meanwhile, Henry was amazed to see Colonel Buckfast and Roger Staines come in, dressed in full skiing regalia, their boots caked in snow.

  “Signori Inglesi… very much sci… already today…” said the barmaid, trying hard. “Co-lon-el Back-fist, he sci molto… you not sci?”

  “Not yet,” said Henry.

  “There’s a nasty, icy side-slip halfway down Run Three,” the Colonel was saying, in the hall. “Sensible of you to stick to Number One.”

  “I’m taking Run Three first thing in the morning,” said Roger, defensively. “I just thought the light was a bit tricky for it this evening.”

  “Very wise. Never run before you can walk,” said the Colonel, maddeningly. Then, in a lower tone, he added, “That cove Fritz Hauser is here again. Remember him? I saw him in Rossati’s office as I went out. Don’t like the fellow.”

  “Hauser? Oh yes, the fat little German…was here last year…can’t think why he comes when he doesn’t ski…”

  They went upstairs.

  Dinner started gaily enough. The Baroness, ravishing in black velvet trousers and a white silk shirt, sat alone—but talked merrily and loudly to the dark young Italian, who also had a table to himself. Gerda, presumably, took her dinner upstairs with the children, for there was no sign of her. The Buckfasts (Mrs. Buckfast resplendent in lilac crêpe) made quite a thing about their “usual” table, which was no different from any other, but somehow established seniority. Henry and Emmy, at Jimmy’s expansive invitation, joined up with the three young English at a large table in the middle of the room. The other diners were an unmistakably German family—a comfortably plump, blonde woman in her forties, an upright, sallow-faced man with a deep scar on his cheek, and a buxom girl, presumably their daughter, who wore no makeup, had her hair twisted into unbecoming earphone plaits, and never spoke a word. At a table in the corner, Fritz Hauser ate alone, rapidly and with serious concentration.