Dead Men Don't Ski

by Patricia Moyes

  In an awe-struck voice, Jimmy said, "Then it must have been Mario..."

  "Yes," said Henry. "I made up my mind very early on that Mario must be the murderer. All I needed was some conclusive proof, and also a clear idea of the motive."

  "Good God," said the Colonel, in a hushed whisper. "Mario..."

  "But look here," said Roger, "Mario was an old man, and he limped quite badly. You mean to say that he shot Hauser, and then lugged his body to the lift and put it on to a moving chair?"

  "But the chair wasn't moving," said Henry. "If you remember, the lift broke down. And it was that fact that gave me the proof I needed."

  "I don't understand," said Jimmy.

  Henry pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. "This," he said, "is a time-table of exactly what happened that evening, which Capitano Spezzi compiled. Taken together with something that Colonel Buckfast said in evidence, it proves conclusively that Mario was lying."

  "Something I said?"repeated the Colonel, reddening.

  "Yes," said Henry. "You told us that the lift broke down while you were waiting for it."

  "That's right," said Jimmy. "I could have told you that. It happened just after we'd bought our tickets."

  Henry consulted the paper. "It was five-past six when we all left the Olympia," he said. "Even allowing ten minutes—which is too generous—to get to the ski-lift, Jimmy would have been ready to board it at a quarter past six. Now, if there's a queue, and every chair is taken, six people get on to that lift every minute—I've timed it. Gerda had arrived at the top and was walking up to the hotel before I stopped the lift at a quarter to seven—which means that she must have been in her chair by seventeen minutes past sue, and she was the last person to go up. You, Colonel Buckfast, must have been in your chair at six-sixteen. And yet Mario insisted that the breakdown did not occur until seventeen minutes past, and entered the time most carefully in the log book which he kept in his cabin. Allowing for the fact that even electric clocks may vary slightly, I cannot believe that it took you from five-past six to seventeen minutes past to get from the Olympia to the ski-lift."

  "The lift broke down just as we reached it," said Caro. "We all had to wait until it started again. It must have stopped just after ten-past."

  "Exactly," said Henry. "Which made Mario's timing seven minutes out—which is a long time. Just to make sure, I asked Carlo about it—and although he didn't, unfortunately, log the time of the breakdown, he remembers that it was, in fact, before a quarter past that it happened There was another odd thing, too, Hauser was seen to leave the hotel at ten-past six. But even allowing for the breakdown, he didn't get on to the lift till sixteen minutes past. It certainly doesn't take six minutes to walk down that path."

  "Then what really happened?" demanded the Colonel.

  "This," said Henry. "Mario saw Hauser walking down the path at about eleven minutes past. He pulled the fuse himself—he could not risk anyone coming up for the next couple of minutes—and shot Hauser as he reached the platform. Then he put the body on to the chair, and restarted the lift."

  "But the gun—how did he get the gun?" asked Jimmy.

  "Nothing could have been easier," said Henry. "I always felt sure that Hauser would have shown some concern if the gun had been missing when he packed that morning. It's true that one of our party could have broken into the briefcase at the Olympia, but it would have been an extremely risky business—the lock was quite a solid one, and people were coming and going down that passage all the time. Also, there was my original objection that nobody could have counted on seeing Hauser again. But consider what an opportunity Mario had. Hauser's luggage was lying unattended in his cabin for nearly three hours during the morning. He had all the time he wanted to break open the case and extract the gun before he sent the luggage down."

  "I still don't see how you could be absolutely sure," said Jimmy.

  "I didn't need to have positive proof," said Henry. "You see, I had worked all this out before I realised that there had been an eye-witness to the murder."

  "An eye-witness? But that's impossible," Caro objected. "Everybody was either at the hotel or in the Olympia, and you can't see the ski-lift platform from the hotel, because of the curve in the path."

  "Oh, yes, you can!" said Henry. "From one bedroom. The top-floor room over the front door. It's high enough to see over the snow-banks of the path."

  "Trudi Knipfer's room," said Roger.

  "Exactly," said Henry. "She told us she had seen Hauser walking down to the lift. In fact, she saw more than that. She saw the murder. And she made up her mind what she must do about it, which was to keep her mouth shut. She had good reason for disliking Hauser, and she was determined not to give Mario away. I don't think she would have let Franco suffer for the murder—but she wasn't going to say anything until the last possible moment. She is a young woman of considerable character."

  "What I don't see," said Jimmy, "is why on earth Mario should have killed Hauser. After all, if his family was making so much money..."

  "Mario was a good man," said Henry, surprisingly. "He idolised his sons, and according to his own rights, he acted justly. I admit that some of this is guesswork on my part, and with Mario and Pietro both dead I suppose we shall never know exactly what happened. For a start, it's reasonable to assume that Mario blamed Hauser for Giulio's death. It's a nice point whether he was right or not. Certainly, Hauser had involved Giulio in the dope-ring— but my guess is that it was sheer greed for more money that made him set out on that lunatic run. Snow conditions were bad this year, and he couldn't wait until they improved to get his hands on some more cash. I also think that it was only on the day of Giulio's death that Mario discovered just what sort of contraband his son was smuggling. We know that they had a quarrel, and Mario did his utmost to prevent Giulio from attempting the run. The last straw came when Mario discovered that Pietro was being enlisted to take Giulio's place. He determined to put a stop to it at all costs, and the simplest and most direct way he could think of was to kill Fritz Hauser. He took the gun, probably intending to kill Hauser at lunch-time. But when he heard that Hauser was proposing to return to the hotel in the afternoon, he changed his plan."

  "What on earth did Trudi Knipfer think when Mario was killed?" Jimmy asked.

  Henry sighed. "She thought, of course, that Mario had committed suicide—and she was pretty scathing with me because I hadn't come to the same conclusion. Actually, it's just what I would have thought myself, if it hadn't been for..." Henry paused. "In fact," he said, "it was what I had been hoping for. I had no desire at all to arrest the old man. I suppose it was very wrong of me, but I went around the village that morning making it as clear as I could that I suspected Mario. I knew he would hear of it in the Bar Schmidt at lunchtime—and from his wife—and I thought it would give him a way out. As it happened, he chose the more honourable way."

  "What do you mean?" asked the Colonel.

  "He was very distressed at Franco's arrest," said Henry. "Everybody remarked how ill he was looking, and it's no wonder. So when I came up on the lift after lunch that day, he asked me if he could come and see me in the evening. He was, of course, intending to make a full confession. The thing that finally decided him to do it was a talk with Pietro. We've been told a lot of lies about what was said. The real gist of the conversation, I am sure, was a final appeal from Mario to Pietro to abandon the idea of dope-running, and a flat refusal on Pietro's part. So Mario played his trump card—he told Pietro he was going to confess to the murder, and, incidentally, to tell us the whole story of Giulio and Pietro and the dope-running."

  Henry paused, and rubbed the back of his head with his band. "I don't think Pietro was wholly wicked," he said. "I don't think he would have killed his father just for financial gain. But the Vespis are a law unto themselves, and it may well have seemed to Pietro that it was more merciful to save his father from the agony of trial and sentence. I don't know. In any case, that was probably his excuse to himself for wh
at he did By now it had become an obsession with him to get hold of the money which was so nearly in his pocket. He had a further consignment of cocaine from Hauser—we found it in his anorak pocket. To Pietro, the money he could get for the cocaine meant escape from the valley, which he hated. It meant escape to make his fortune —you know that he had wild, impracticable dreams of going to America and getting rich. Santa Chiara wasn't big enough for him. Two things stood between him and his crazy ambition. One was the fact that the Immenfeld run was closed by the police: the other was his father's threat to confess. So he decided to kill Mario."

  "It's horrible," said Caro. She shuddered.

  "How did Pietro get hold of the gun?" Roger asked.

  "Mario had kept the gun locked up since Hauser's death," said Henry. "He carried only two keys in his pocket. One was the key to his front door, and the other was the key of the radiogram which Giulio had bought. That is where the gun must have been hidden. But Mario had forgotten that Pietro also had a key to the radiogram. After Mario had left the house on the day he was killed, Rosa found Pietro standing beside the gramophone. He must have just unlocked it, and taken the gun out. It was still unlocked when I saw it the next day."

  "But Henry," said Jimmy, "this is all very well, but Pietro couldn't possibly have killed Mario. You and I both saw him off on his way down to the village, and he must have been more than half-way down when Mario was killed. Do you mean he shot him from below the ski-lift?"

  "No," said Henry. "That was the most baffling part of the whole case. When Mario was killed, I had a moment of terrible doubt. I thought I had been wrong about the whole thing. Then I went over the facts of the first murder again, and I decided that I couldn't possibly be mistaken. It had to be Mario. That being so, who would want to kill the old man—except his son? Pietro was the only person who had any reason to take drastic measures to prevent Mario from making his confession. And yet, on the face of it, the thing was impossible. He started off from here at half-past five, and arrived at Carlo's hut soon after a quarter to six. A perfectly reasonable time for the run, considering that it was dark."

  "There's no way he could have shot Mario," said the Colonel, flatly. "That was good going, even for a first-class skier."

  "That was my problem," said Henry, "and I couldn't solve it. So Capitano Spezzi and I decided to give Pietro all the scope we could, and try to trap him. The Immenfeld run was declared open on Saturday. We knew Pietro would make his getaway attempt on Sunday—the only day he would not be missed until the evening, since there is no ski school. We had no real hope of charging him with the murder. And then—this morning—I suddenly realised how he could have done it. It was something that Emmy said."

  "The most ridiculous thing," said Emmy. "It was a remark I made about my bottom."

  "Your what?" said the Colonel, turning scarlet.

  "My bottom," said Emmy. "After I had my accident. I told Henry that I'd sat down hard on the edge of my ski, and my bottom was as corrugated as one of the pylon platforms.

  "I fail to see what interest that can have for the rest of us," said Mrs. Buckfast, coldly.

  Henry grinned. "I'd better go back a bit further," he said. "Pietro's plan was highly ingenious. It was designed to give him a complete alibi. The crux of the scheme was a stupid bet that Pietro had taken with some of the other instructors to attempt the Gully early yesterday morning."

  "He did it, too," said the Colonel. "I saw his tracks."

  "And what has Emmy's bottom got to do with all this?" Caro demanded.

  "Emmy," said Henry, "went down on the lift at nine o'clock on the morning after Mario's murder—before it started to snow. Now just think. Did any of you know that the pylon platforms were made of corrugated iron?"

  There was a thoughtful silence. Then Jimmy said, "I've never seen them when they weren't covered in snow."

  "Precisely," said Henry. "The snow began about ten o'clock that morning. But at nine o'clock, Emmy saw one of those platforms swept clear of snow. She must have noticed it subconsciously as she came down."

  "It was about the third pylon from the top," said Emmy. "I didn't really think about it. I just registered it as odd that the one platform should have been swept."

  "But why was it swept?"The Colonel was utterly bewildered. "I don't see what you're driving at."

  "It had to be swept," said Henry, "to remove the evidence of footprints on it."

  Everybody looked blank, so Henry went on. "This is what Pietro did. He set off from here down Run One, having taken pains that Jimmy and I should see him off, and he drew our attention particularly to the time. As you know, Run One crosses under the lift at the third pylon. Pietro skied as far as that, like the wind—it would take him about a minute. Then he stopped, took off his skis, and climbed the ladder on to the platform. He used the fire broom on the pylon to sweep the snow off, so that his footprints wouldn't show, and he also smashed the bulb in the pylon light—Emmy pointed that out to me, too, and I was too dumb to realise what it meant. Then he hopped a chair— it's difficult, but possible to do from the platform—and rode up to the top again, taking his skis with him, of course. There he shot Mario, put his body on to a chair, and left the gun on his father's lap, knowing that it would either fall off half-way down or else still be there as evidence of suicide when Mario reached the bottom. All that would take him about ten minutes. That gave him five minutes to get back to Carlo's hut."

  "Impossible," said the Colonel.

  "Not," said Henry, "if he went by the Gully."

  There was an incredulous silence. "You mean he did the Gully in the dark?" asked the Colonel at last, in an awestruck voice.

  "Yes," said Henry. "In the dark. It was an extraordinary feat, but then Pietro was an extraordinary skier. He got to the bottom, and established his alibi by talking to Carlo. All that remained in the way of evidence were his ski-tracks in the Gully. Pietro got up early the next morning, and when he found that it hadn't snowed, he climbed just a little way up the mountain, out of sight of the village. Carlo was one of the men who had taken the bet, and I checked with him this morning. Pietro had arranged to make the attempt at a quarter to nine: but when the lads turned up, they found Pietro just completing the run, and they accepted the evidence of his ski tracks as proof that he had done it. He told them that he had had to start earlier in order to get out of the house before his mother woke up, and they believed him without question. Everybody knew Rosa Vespi's feelings about Pietro making the attempt."

  "The Gully ... in the dark," the Colonel repeated, wonderingly.

  "It was a counsel of desperation," said Henry. "I can't help admitting that it was extremely bad luck that he didn't get away with it. If the snow had fallen an hour earlier—if Emmy hadn't noticed the pattern on the pylon platform ... but there it is. Like a fool, however, I didn't put two and two together until this morning, and to make matters worse, I overslept. You can imagine my feelings when I heard that three other people had set off with Pietro to Immenfeld."

  He looked at Roger and the Colonel, and smiled. "Unfortunately," he said, "all your minds worked in the same way. The Immenfeld run was open again, and all four of you—I include Gerda and Pietro—had reasons for wanting to do it alone, and reckoned you could sneak out unobserved if you went later than the other skiers. As far as you two were concerned," he added, "I imagine you were just trying to avoid each other's company. The Colonel wanted to take things slowly, and Roger wanted to race. Neither of you wished to say openly that you were bored with each other, and it had become an accepted thing that you should ski together. Am I right?"

  The Colonel went deep purple, and murmured something unintelligible about not being as young as he was. Roger looked at his feet, and said, "Yes, you're quite right. I'm sorry, sir," he added, to the Colonel. "You see, I'm trying to work my speed up. I thought I might try to get into a team of some sort one day."

  "Quite right, too," said the Colonel. "Apologise. Must have been an old bore for you to ski with."
They beamed at each other.

  "As for Gerda," Henry went on, " she, too, had reasons of her own for wanting to get away from Santa Chiara— personal reasons. I think that it is likely that she ... well, it doesn't matter now. The fact remains that you all turned up at the start of the run at the same time, and so did Pietro. He could hardly refuse to go with you, though to do him credit, he did try to prevent you from going. But you can see how embarrassing your presence was to him. This wasn't just a routine smuggling run. With Hauser dead, that little racket would have dried up anyway. No, Pietro was planning to disappear—permanently. He had a murder on his hands and a small fortune in illicit dope in his pockets—and he was on his way to stage his own death."

  "Good heavens," said the Colonel.

  "It was to have been a repetition of Giulio's, of course," said Henry, "with a broken ski or so as evidence—but no body. That wouldn't be over-surprising. Sometimes the victims are buried in snow, and the bodies aren't found until the spring."

  "How do you know all this?" asked Roger. He sounded very shaken indeed.

  "From your friend at the ski shop in Immenfeld," said Henry. "It didn't take much persuasion to make him tell us the whole story. Pietro had arranged the plan with him by telephone. Pietro would stage the accident on the dangerous slope—then walk down into the trees, where rat-face was to be waiting with the money for the dope, and a nice ,set of false papers. He had his finger in a lot of nasty rackets, that chap. Of course, it wouldn't have worked out like that. Capitano Spezzi had a very efficient reception committee waiting in Immenfeld. And then I heard that all four of you had set off together. Pietro was in a desperate position, and I guessed he wouldn't abandon his plan at that stage. There was only one answer— a tragic accident involving all four of you, with only three bodies to be found. Not a very nice thought."

  "So if the Baron hadn't caught up with them in time..." Caro's voice quavered, and she grasped Roger's hand.