Let the Cold Do It

Chapter One: The Caretaker

The cable car came up out of the cloud like something being hauled from deep water.

Clare Tait stood at the top station with her hood down, watching the carriage swing into view, and she counted the pylons out of habit: four, five, six. Nine years and the count hadn't changed. The wire still made that sound over the sheaves, a soft repeated tick, like a clock that couldn't quite settle.

"You'll want to move," said Luca Ferro. "She comes in fast in a crosswind."

He was thirty-one or thereabouts, broad through the shoulders in a way that came from work rather than sport, with his mother's dark eyes and a habit of standing very still. He had met her at the bottom station that morning, checked her name against a list, and said almost nothing for the eleven minutes of the ride except to point out the avalanche paths on the north face as if she were a tourist.

The carriage docked. Two builders got out, stamping, carrying rolls of copper pipe. Behind them came a case of wine and four sacks of cement, and after that the doors closed and the carriage went back down into the cloud, and Clare Tait was on the mountain.

Rifugio Alta Vena sat on a shoulder of Monte Sperla at two thousand three hundred metres, a long stone building with a low roof pitched steep against snow, and a timber wing added in the sixties that leaned very slightly downhill, as if tired. In front of it a terrace of old boards ran out to a stone parapet, and beyond the parapet there was nothing at all for about six hundred metres, and then the valley of Vallecorta lay under its own weather like a town at the bottom of a glass.

She had been here once before, at twenty, in a borrowed jacket, in the dark, with a torch that kept failing.

"Caretaker's room is at the end of the old wing," Luca said. "It's cold. The stove smokes if the wind's east."

"That's fine."

"Most people say it's fine before they've had a week of it."

"Then I'll say it again in a week."

He looked at her properly then, for the first time. "Where did you work before?"

"Hotels. Seasonal." It was true as far as it went. "Then a warehouse in Bristol. Then a ferry."

"And you want three months alone with builders at two thousand three hundred metres."

"I want three months where nobody talks to me," Clare said.

Something eased in him at that. He almost smiled. "Then you'll like it here."

That was the eleventh of November.

*

The job was exactly what the advertisement had said, which surprised her. Winter caretaker, Rifugio Alta Vena, November to February. Duties: heating and water systems, snow clearance, fire watch, stock control, supervision of contractors on site, liaison with lift operator. Requirements: mountain experience, first aid, ability to work alone. Accommodation and food provided. Pay was poor. Applications to M. Ferro.

She had read it eleven times in a launderette in Bristol before she applied. She had used her own name, because a false one would have unravelled the first time somebody asked for a bank account, and because the only person on the mountain who would recognise the name Tait was the one she most wanted to stand next to.

Marta Ferro came up twice a week that first month. She arrived in a long grey coat and boots that were always clean, and she walked through the building with an architect's roll under her arm, and she talked, constantly, in a low warm voice, to the builders, to the plasterer's boy, to the wall itself.

"This is not a restaurant," she told Clare on the second visit, standing in the gutted dining room with snow blowing in through a hole where a window would be. "A restaurant is a place where you go and eat. This is a place you have to earn. Eleven minutes on a wire above a drop. Fourteen seats. Four nights a week, five months a year. People will beg."

"They already are," said Luca, from the doorway.

"They already are," Marta agreed, pleased. She turned to Clare. "You keep it alive for me until February. That's all. Keep the pipes from bursting and the roof from filling and don't let the men steal the wine. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

Marta held her eyes a moment longer than the question needed. She was sixty, or close to it, small, with grey hair cut very short and a face that had spent its life outdoors and its evenings under kitchen lights. There was nothing cruel in the face. That was the thing Clare kept coming back to, later, in the dark. There was nothing cruel in it at all.

"Good," said Marta. "You have honest hands. I like hands more than references."

She went down on the four o'clock carriage. Clare stood on the terrace and watched the little box sink into the cloud, and then she went in and cooked pasta for eight builders and did not sleep.

*

By December the mountain had closed around them.

It happened faster than she expected, even knowing how it went. The snow came in on the third of the month and did not stop for nine days. The track that switchbacked up from the valley — the one the snow-cat used — vanished under two metres and then, when the wind got at it, under a slab that Luca looked at for a long time through binoculars and then declared "asleep, but not deeply."

After that there was the wire, and only the wire.

Six builders stayed on, sleeping in the half-finished new wing in bunks with three duvets each, and Clare fed them and thawed their mortar and dried their gloves on the rail above the stove. They called her Chiara. There was Aldo the foreman, sixty-two, who had built the top station of the cable car as a young man and told her so most days; and Beppe the plumber, who sang; and a plasterer's apprentice called Nino who was seventeen and homesick and whom she taught to play cribbage.

She liked them. That was inconvenient. She had come up here with a shape in her head, hard and cold and simple, and the builders kept putting warm things in the way of it.

At night she worked.

The refuge had a cellar office with a desk that had belonged to the old hut warden, and a filing cabinet full of forty years of paper that nobody had ever thrown away: delivery notes, guest books, weather logs in three different hands, a folder of correspondence with the commune about the septic tank. Clare went through it a drawer at a time with a head torch, listening to the building creak.

She was looking for one name and she found it on the nineteenth of December, in a guest book for the season nine years before, in the column for staff arrivals.

*Wolter, N. — kitchen (trainee) — 3 mesi*

Nellie Wolter. Twenty years old, from a village on the Austrian side, three months' apprenticeship in the kitchen of a mountaineering hut that had a reputation because a woman called Marta Ferro had come up in her thirties and turned bean soup into something the newspapers wrote about.

Below the entry, in different ink, somebody had written *partita* — left — and a date.

The date was wrong by four days.

Clare sat with the book open on her knees for a long time. Then she photographed the page, and put it back, and went out onto the terrace in her socks and boots and stood in the wind until her face stopped working.

She knew what the correct date was. She could have written the whole thing out from memory, the way you can recite a thing that has been read aloud to you in an official room while you sat with your hands in your lap and understood that your life was being taken apart.

Nine years ago, on the fourth of February, at 21:14, Clare Tait — twenty years old, six weeks off her assessment, on radio duty at the valley station of Vallecorta mountain rescue because the duty officer had flu — had taken a call from the refuge.

She had logged it. She had logged it as she was trained to: time received, caller, location, nature. *21:14. Rifugio Alta Vena. Ferro, M. Kitchen staff member missing, last seen approx 17:00 on terrace, believed descended trail toward Passo. Weather: wind SW 60, vis nil.*

Believed descended toward the pass. Four hours earlier.

So the search went to the pass. Two teams, four hours of it, in a whiteout, down a trail where a girl in kitchen clogs and a fleece would have been dead in forty minutes and where, therefore, they found nothing at all. It was nearly four in the morning before anyone thought seriously about the building itself, and it was 04:40 when Gianna Bellini's team came back up onto the terrace of the refuge and found Nellie Wolter curled at the foot of the parapet under a skin of new snow, with her hands inside her sleeves.

And afterwards, at the inquiry, the timings didn't fit. The refuge said the girl had gone missing at five. The rescue log said the call came at 21:14 — four hours late, unforgivably late, and Marta Ferro said, gently, that she had telephoned much earlier than that, that she had called as soon as they knew, that perhaps the girl on the radio had misheard, and Gianna Bellini, who had led the search and taken the radio call from the refuge on her own handset, confirmed a last-sighting time of five o'clock and said she had passed it on.

Somebody had mistimed the call. That was the finding. *An inexperienced volunteer, alone on the radio, recorded the callout incorrectly and the search was directed accordingly.* No prosecution. A recommendation about training. A paragraph in a report.

Clare had been twenty-one when the report came out. She had lost the volunteer post, and with it the assessment, and with it the only work she had ever wanted, which was to be the person who came up the hill when it went wrong. She had spent nine years being reasonable about it. Being reasonable had nearly killed her.

She stood on the terrace in the dark, at the exact spot, and said aloud, "I wrote down what she said."

The wind took it. It always did.

*

She had one other thing, and she kept it in a plastic wallet inside her sleeping bag.

It was a photocopy of the log page, made illegally at the valley station in the week before she was told to hand in her key. Her own handwriting: neat, upright, the numbers made carefully because she'd been nervous. *21:14.* And underneath, in the notes column, five words she had written because the caller had said them twice and she'd wanted to be accurate.

*Caller states she went at five.*

Said twice. She had written it because Marta Ferro had said it twice.

Only it wasn't Marta Ferro's voice on that call. That was the part nobody had ever asked her about, because nobody had asked her anything much. The refuge had rung down, and the voice had been a woman's, quick and hoarse, and it had said *this is Alta Vena, Ferro, we have a girl missing,* and Clare at twenty had written *Ferro, M.* because who else would it be.

Nine years later, alone in a stone building above the cloud, she was fairly sure the voice had belonged to somebody else. And she had come up here to find out who, and to make one of them say so out loud, in front of a witness, before she died of being reasonable.

*

On Christmas Eve the builders got drunk and Aldo told the story of the girl who froze, because at some point on any mountain somebody tells that story.

"She went out for a cigarette," he said. "On the terrace. And the whiteout came up the face and turned her round, and she went the wrong way, and she was twenty metres from the door."

"That's not it," said Beppe. "She ran. That's what they said in the village. She ran from somebody."

"They say that about everything."

"Who?" said Clare.

Beppe shrugged and looked into his glass, and Nino looked at the floor, and Aldo said, comfortably, "The mountain. People run from the mountain and it takes them. That's all a whiteout is. It tells you a lie about where the door is."

Later, clearing up, she found Nino still awake by the stove.

"My aunt worked here," he said. "After. In the summers. She said the signora never let anyone go in the cellar."

"Which cellar?"

"The old one. Under the terrace. For the snow." He drew it in the air. "You know? Cut into the rock. They used to cut ice out of the couloir and pack it in there and it would keep to August. My aunt said it was full of junk and the door was locked and the signora had the only key and if you asked she went very quiet."

Clare put down the pan she was holding.

"Where's the door?"

"Behind the panelling," said Nino. "In the boot room. They panelled over it, but you can see the shape if you know."

*

They stripped the boot room on the seventh of January.

Marta wanted the wall out to make a run of coat hooks and a bench, and Aldo took the pine off in sheets with a wrecking bar, and behind it there was a door frame of larch, black with age, and a plank door with an iron hasp on the outside.

The builders got it open with a bar. Inside, the barrel vault went back nine metres into the mountain, cut by hand a hundred and thirty years before, the rock still showing the marks of the picks. It was empty except for two broken chairs, a coil of hose, and a rectangle of dry hay in one corner where somebody had once made a floor. It smelled of stone and old cold. There was a hatch in the vault at the far end, boarded over, where the ice had been dropped in from the terrace above.

"Beautiful," said Aldo. "Look at the stonework. She'll put wine in here."

Clare went in with her head torch because she could not have stopped herself. She walked the length of it, and put her hand on the hay, and stood underneath the boarded hatch and looked up at it.

When she turned back, her torch swung across the inside of the door frame, low down, and she stopped.

At knee height, on the larch, where the wood was softest, somebody had scratched three words.

They were not carved. Nobody had used a knife. The strokes were ragged and doubled, gone over and over, some of them skidding out of line, and in the grooves there were dark deposits the colour of rust. Fingernails. Hours of it, in the dark, at the height of a hand when you are sitting on a floor with your back against a door.

*MARTA SAW ME*

Clare heard herself breathe.

She took eleven photographs, close and wide, with the tape measure in shot and with her own gloved hand beside the words for scale. Then she went out into the boot room where Aldo was sweeping up nails and said, "Don't let anyone touch that frame."

Aldo looked at her over his glasses. "It's coming out anyway. Rotten at the foot."

"Don't let anyone touch it," Clare said, "until I've spoken to the signora."

She did not speak to the signora. She lay awake instead, in the caretaker's room, doing arithmetic she had done a thousand times, and at four in the morning she understood that she had just made the worst mistake available to her, which was to say the words out loud on a mountain with nine people on it.

The following afternoon Luca brought the snow-cat up the emergency track with the avalanche window open and a load of larch for the new bar.

By five, the door frame of the snow cellar had been taken out with a saw. By six it was in the stove in the builders' wing, and Beppe was complaining that green larch made the flue spit.

Clare found Luca on the terrace, checking the tension on a snow fence.

"The frame," she said.

"Rotten," said Luca. "Aldo said so."

"There was writing on it."

"There's writing on everything in an old hut." He didn't look up. His hands went on working, quick and careful. "Sixty years of climbers with knives. Names, dates, women's names, filth. Half the beams in the old wing have got something on them. If you're going to be frightened of that, it's going to be a long winter."

"It said *Marta saw me*."

Luca's hands stopped.

It was a small thing, less than a second, and it told her everything about what kind of winter it was going to be. Then he straightened up and looked at her, and his face was pleasant and blank, and he said, "Old huts are full of nonsense, Chiara. Somebody's joke. My mother's had that name up here for thirty years and people write things about her because she's hard on staff." He wound the wire off his glove. "You should sleep more. People get strange when the days are short. I've seen it in caretakers before."

"Who's *me*?" said Clare.

"There is no *me*," said Luca Ferro. "There's a burned bit of wood."

He walked away down the terrace, and she watched him go, and she thought: he is not surprised. Whatever this is, he has known it for a long time, and he has been carrying it, and it is heavy.

She stayed.

Over the next three weeks she wrote four letters. One to a lawyer in Vallecorta whose name she got from a notice in the bottom station. One to the mountain rescue association, asking for a copy of the original search log under a freedom-of-information provision she was not sure applied. One to Nellie Wolter's mother, at an address in a village she found in an old telephone directory in the office, saying only that she had been the volunteer on the radio, that she had never believed the finding, and that she was now working at the refuge.

One to the Vallecorta *carabinieri*, which she did not send, because she had nothing but a photograph of some scratches on wood that no longer existed.

She gave the letters to Luca to take down, because there was no other way for post to leave the mountain, and she watched him put them in the inside pocket of his jacket, and she thought about that for a long time afterwards.

No reply came from any of them.