The Red Mitten

by Stuart Montgomery

  The spraying operation continued for a few more minutes and then the machine moved away to the west, following the cables. When the silence returned it seemed deeper than before.

  Richard spoke into it. “I was thinking about Elin’s boyfriend earlier, when we were out in the hotel car park taking photos. I wondered what it must be like to be in his situation. He is an Asian man with a white girlfriend, and he is being confronted with racist slogans. But they’ve been painted as a protest about something that his girlfriend is doing. It must seem very mixed up, and very unfair.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then continued. “I must admit, I was a bit taken aback when I saw the slogans up close. I guess I had imagined that Norway would be immune from that kind of thing, especially up here in the mountains. Cut off from the outside world and uncorrupted by it. I don’t know why I had imagined that - maybe some kind of faith in the purity of the mountain environment.”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Anyway, enough of that. If the good Lord wanted me to blether on about race relations, He would never have given me these skis to wax.”

  From his rucksack he got out a little metal tub of wax, crayoned some of it on to the bases of his skis then set about rubbing it smooth with a cork. While his back was turned, Cally took the chance to swallow a benzo, her second of the day. She washed it down with some of the saft from her thermos. The drink was so sweet she could almost hear her teeth dissolving.

  Then she and Neep put some wax on their skis and they got under way again.

  As Cally had predicted, they soon turned on to a smaller track and followed it uphill through trees. Now she could see that they were moving away from houses and roads, away from electricity cables and helicopters. And that felt good. The purity of the mountain environment. She knew what Richard had been getting at. She could remember the intensity of her own feelings during her first trips to the Scottish mountains, when the time away from the oppressions in Aberdeen had given her a sort of hope.

  Now, in the shade of the forest, the air seemed colder and her poles creaked in the snow. Her skis seemed to slide effortlessly. Shafts of sunlight shone down through the trees, catching diamond dust in the air and illuminating fronds of pale-green lichen that hung from the branches. It was just perfect.

  The Scots pressed on for an hour, gradually gaining height. Then, abruptly, they left the shelter of the conifers, and a group of dark buildings was visible in the distance, clustered on a gentle slope that fell gradually to a flat expanse of wilderness. Cally knew without checking the map that this was Storhøliseter and that the DNT accommodation was split between two of the dozen cabins that had once been a cluster of summer farms.

  As soon as their track came out of the trees it was marked with tall canes stuck in the snow. According to the DNT website there would now be canes “at regular intervals” for the entire length of the tour. The organisation seemed tremendously proud of its nationwide network of thousands of kilometres of marked ski-routes, but Cally thought it was a contradictory sort of undertaking – trying to tame the wilderness. She knew for certain that it wouldn’t work in Scotland, at least not on the hills where she had skied with the club, on Deeside and in the Cairngorms. If you stuck canes on those hills you wouldn’t have long to wait - a nanosecond maybe - before the do-gooding intrusions were ripped out and burnt. She sensed she would get fed up with them when they got into the higher mountains.

  The canes reminded her of a project some of the Crombie staff had dreamed up a few years back, to grow peas and beans in a corner of the unit’s grounds. It was supposed to educate the residents about Where Food Comes From. And of course it hadn’t worked. Once prised from the safety of their pots, the plants had quickly died. But the canes had stayed in place for months afterwards, as if honouring the memory of the fallen seedlings.

  Slugs had gotten the blame for the crop failure, but Cally knew for a fact that the real culprit was one of the tougher boys, Alec Filshie. Even in those days he was a devious piece of shit, although she hadn’t realised that until much later. At that time she had been in love with him, besotted, and she had believed that he loved her. He had told her often enough that he did. She’d had no idea how big a liar he already was, or how big a bastard he would later become. She shivered at the memory. Thank God he was finally out of her life - and would stay out of it, if everything went to plan.

  Storhøliseter, when they got to it, was rustic in a deliberate sort of way. The angled-plank fence that surrounded the dozen cabins seemed to be only for decoration; surely it was too low to be of any practical use? And the decorative arched gateway seemed equally un-necessary, the more so because of the line of turf that grew on top of the arch. A turfed gate – what was the sense in that? All the cabins had roofs covered with similar turf, which poked out from under the snow. On all the buildings except the DNT ones the windows had picturesque shutters.

  It was all very nice, Cally thought. But in spite of its location it somehow seemed a bit soft, a bit lowland. This really was an easy tour.

  They unlocked the door of one of the DNT cabins, took off their boots as directed by a large notice in several languages, and went into a big room floored with wooden planks. The walls were also wood and so was the ceiling. There was an iron stove and a box of split logs beside it. Red and white check curtains chimed with the colours of the armchairs and settees. There was a bottled gas cooking range and a big walk-in cupboard stocked with food in tins and packets. Everything was immaculately clean. Off the main room was a bedroom with maroon-painted bunks and blue bedding, and with little tapestries on the walls.

  Cally thought that if Goldilocks were to appear at the door and ask for porridge it would seem just right.

  Neep seemed to share her feelings. He said, “It’s like something from one of those self-build programmes on TV, with an eccentric couple using their life savings to create a fantasy doll’s house in stripped pine.” He put on his film-trailer voice. “And, as the snows of July approach and the bank still hasn’t come up with the mortgage, will Hansel and Gretel be able to grow another roof in time?”

  Cally was aware that she was still technically the leader. She didn’t want to sound pushy, but on the other hand the thought of the three of them stuck in this place all afternoon and then all evening, wondering what to talk about, was deeply disturbing - even without the threat of Neep’s jelly baby game. She made a play of looking at her watch and said, “It’s only quarter to one. And the distance to the next cabin is less than the distance we’ve just done. What do you think? Should we press on?”

  Even Richard seemed relieved that she had asked the question.

  They stayed just long enough for a bite to eat.

  They were now about to start on “tomorrow’s route”, so they agreed that the lead should pass to the next person in line, which was Richard. Cally handed him the map, feeling pretty good about how things had gone so far. While they were eating, Richard checked the map and confirmed it was only twelve kilometres to the next cabin, which was called Storkvelvbu. He said it should take them about three hours at the rate they had been going, maybe less.

  Soon they were on the snow again, ready to go. On her way back out on to the cane-marked track, just after passing through the silly gate in the angle-plank fence, Cally stopped at a wooden signpost. Someone had placed a child’s mitten on it, a cheery red thing with big white snowflakes knitted into the pattern. It somehow seemed too vulnerable to be left out in the cold. She put it in her pocket. She would take it back to Vesterheim after the tour and leave it in the hotel’s lost-property box. It might mean a lot to someone.

  Then she tucked in behind her companions. Just like them, she was completely unaware that the decision to carry on would prove to be a very, very bad one.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 11

  For Elin Olsen the early afternoon was a time to catch up with administration and book-keeping. The hotel guests would be either out skiing or, if they had paid the supp
lement, eating lunch down in the dining-room. On a good day that meant a whole hour with no interruptions. Of course, Elin was well aware that a few more interruptions would probably have meant a few more guests. And a few more guests might have spared her the job of preparing yet another set of forecasts for the bank.

  Sitting at the computer behind the reception counter she clicked on the icon for the reservation system’s report function and waited for it to load.

  Business, undeniably, was not good. She could not hide that from the bank. On the other hand, it was undeniably improving, and had been improving steadily throughout the two and a half years since Elin and her then husband, Gunnar, bought the place.

  It had been dirt cheap, six million kroner for a seventy room monster and a lot of land. Less than the price of the modest Oslo house they had sold to fund the purchase. But it had been dirt cheap because of a ruined reputation, the only lasting achievement of an investment company that had tried to combine major plans for the future with minor aptitude for running the place in the present.

  In a very short time the company had transformed a full register into an empty one, and had run itself into bankruptcy in the process.

  Morten Espelund had once sat Elin down and told her the whole sad story. The investors had bought the hotel from him with the intention of converting the top-floor rooms into self-catered apartments. When that had been done and the new apartments had been sold, the capital proceeds were to be used to widen the ski piste. It would be extended across the whole area of land owned by the hotel – along the flank of the hill that sloped down to Olstappen lake. And when work on the piste had been completed, the company would build high-value cabins on both sides of it, to sell to wealthy people from Oslo.

  But it had all ended in tears.

  Even though a lot of private investors had been swept up in the early euphoria, and had bought shares in the enterprise, the project had been woefully under-capitalised. It ran out of money at an early stage, not least because the regular hotel guests were scared off by what they saw as an unwelcome change and the hitherto profitable hotel began to operate at a loss. Finally there was no money to pay the bills, and the administrators were called in to give the tattered fantasy a decent burial. Even today there was a lingering rumour that some of the local people had been heavily invested and had lost a lot of money. No-one would publicly admit to being in that category, but then it was not the kind of mistake you would boast about.

  Since taking over at Vesterheim, Elin had worked hard to spread the message that the development plans had been abandoned, and that the hotel would remain the nice old place it had always been. She had managed to get many of the Danish regulars to come back, and some of the Dutch. She still got a lot fewer Norwegians than she would have liked, but that was the case everywhere. She could thank North Sea oil for that. Norway’s Disaster was how it was known in the hotel trade, because of the way it had distorted everything. The oil-related workers felt too wealthy to want to stay in modest hotels, and the local people felt too ambitious - or too proud - to want to work in them.

  The computer application finished loading, and Elin forced herself to concentrate on the task in hand. She had hardly had a minute’s rest since discovering the vandal damage this morning and now she felt tired as soon as she sat down.

  What she wanted to do was produce a report that would compare this month’s projected revenue with the equivalent month last year. She knew it would show a positive trend, thanks mainly to the sports weekend. Special groups often failed to live up to expectation - like this week’s Aberdeen club, originally twenty people but gradually reduced down to three. But the sports weekend had come good. More than a hundred teenagers plus twenty adults. All on full-board for two nights, and with extra revenue for equipment hire and for the use of the conference room. It was a really nice booking for a low-season weekend, right in the “hole” that followed the school holidays.

  She set the parameters of the report and then let it run. She would print it off and take a copy to the bank in Lillehammer tomorrow.

  But as soon as the figures came up on the screen she could see that she had messed up the sorting specification, and would need to start again. Her tiredness hadn’t helped, but she knew that this kind of thing had never been her strong point. As soon as she could afford it she would hire someone to do it for her. When she and Gunnar bought the hotel all this stuff was supposed to be his responsibility, all the tecchie projects and the accounting. But that dream had been quick to fizzle out.

  It had seemed idyllic at the start. The romance. The white wedding at the in-vogue church on a snowy day. The hard years in Oslo while they worked and saved, and waited for an affordable country hotel to come on to the market. The excitement when one became available, one they would never have expected to fall into in their price-range.

  And then Gunnar had stuck it at Vesterheim for just one winter

  It was a winter in which he came to detest a daily programme that began before dawn in the ski-rental workshop, while Elin was busy in the kitchen, and then took him out on the machine to refresh the ski-tracks. Then there would be a late breakfast before they worked through the myriad minor interventions that made up their day. The main problem, it grew apparent, was that Gunnar just didn’t like people - Polish waitresses aside - and he came to refer his day as “death by a thousand interruptions”. Elin tried to convince him that dealing with interruptions was the basis of their job now. Helping the guests was what they did - it wasn’t a diversion from more important work they should have been doing. But he wouldn’t have it. He became more and more surly with the guests - to the point where Elin was afraid to leave him on reception. Finally, taking a waitress with him, he went back to his job as a spreadsheet ninja in Oslo’s financial district, where he could be confident of making real money but didn’t need to talk to real people.

  She shook away the memory and applied herself to the report. This time it worked. She was sending the output to the printer when a white estate car pulled up at the door, the word “Politi” in big letters along the side.

  Two plain-clothes police officers came into the building. The older one introduced himself as Inspector Arnt Dahle.

  “Have you found the vandals?” Elin asked.

  Inspector Dahle replied, “That’s not our case. We’re working on security for your sports weekend and one of the passport numbers you emailed to us has been flagged up. We need to talk to a Mr Richard Slater from Scotland, who arrived on Sunday.”

  “He’s on a ski-tour, and I’m not expecting him back for a few days.” Elin checked her screen. “Yes, that’s right, back on Sunday and then leaving on Monday. Anyway, if he has a passport problem maybe I can help. I’ve got his address details in the system.”

  “It’s not a passport problem. It’s a prison record. He killed a man.”

  Chapter 12

  The storm that hit Cally’s group had given subtle warnings of its approach.

  First there had been a plume of spindrift blowing horizontally from the steep-sided top of the mountain, Storhøppigen, as they climbed over its flank. Then, when they reached the thousand-metre contour and their route swung southward into a landscape of featureless hills, there had been a slight flattening of the light, just enough to add a grey tint to the snow.

  Thinking nothing of it, the Scots went straight ahead when they reached a critical route junction, aiming for Storkvelvbu. They could have turned left and gone down to the safety of the main valley. Or turned right and made for another DNT cabin, called Skirurusten, that was a few kilometres farther but at a safer low altitude. But instead they went forward, committing themselves to the high ground.

  Shortly afterwards, as if it had been waiting for their decision, the wind assaulted them with a raw ferocity.

  Richard brought his companions to a stop and offered some encouragement. “There was no mention of a storm in any of the forecasts,” he said. “So with luck it will blow over soon. Let’s ha
ve a bite to eat and put on some more kit. I’ll take another look at the map and fix our position with the GPS.”

  Cally was feeling good. Her training had paid off. After becoming a member of staff at Crombie House, she’d started to use the little fitness room, which hitherto - like all the other residents – she had regarded as too boring to contemplate. She had spent hours on the treadmill and the rowing machine, the bike and the cross-trainer. Initially she worked at a steady pace, but then she learned to vary it, and did ladders and intervals and challenges and fitness tests, anything that would keep her going through the boredom and fatigue. So she had grown fitter. And of course, as a bonus, the exercise had gradually burned away the feminine curves that had gotten her into so much trouble.

  Since leaving the cabin at Storhøliseter, she had found the skiing more strenuous, but Richard’s slow and steady pace had made the climbs manageable, and she felt that the high-mountain scenery more than justified the effort. She felt relaxed, in control. But even so, while she had her rucksack open, and while the men were distracted, she took the opportunity to pop a benzo, her first since Slangenseter.

  She was putting the pill in her mouth when Richard glanced up from his map. He looked away quickly then said, “When we start moving again, let’s keep close together. And I suggest you go in the middle, Cally, just to make you feel nice and secure.”

  Damn! She had been spotted. From now on she would be more careful.

  They set off again, expecting conditions to improve. But soon they had to contend not just with the strong wind, but also with a heavy white mist that Neep, while he was still in a mood to make jokes, said was like milk in its gaseous state. It first hid only the hilltops, but then in quick succession it blanked out the middle-distance features and then the near ones.