She wanted Tania and Rose to know just how much she wished them to find the same kind of happiness she had enjoyed with Mike. That she thought they’d probably both already found it, if they would just open their eyes and see things clearly. And she wanted them to know just how much she treasured their friendship. But that it was all her fault Mike and Poppy had died and, as a result, she didn’t want to try to find a place in the world. That she knew, now, how much she wanted to be wherever Mike and Poppy were. She wanted to find some peace. How she was sorry, how she couldn’t cope with the idea of any more days without her family and how she hoped they could forgive her, because she knew this was the best decision.
Tania looked around at the frozen horror on Rose’s face, the disbelief on Madeleine’s.
‘We’ve got to find her,’ she said.
‘Shit,’ said Rose, as she fumbled the laces on her snow boots. She took a breath and tried again. How hard could it be to tie a sodding bow? Eventually, the laces complied, she jerked tight an extra loop on each boot to make sure they stayed tied, then looked around. Everyone was ready, hastily dressed in ski trousers and with jackets tightly zipped, snoods and fleece hats covering heads, gloved hands clutching torches raided from the storeroom.
She didn’t vocalise the questions occupying most of her immediate thoughts. How on earth were they going to find Clara? She didn’t have an avalanche transceiver built into her jacket like Lysander and Tania did, so where would they begin the search? Conditions outside were awful. Tom had phoned the emergency services, members of the PGHM– the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne– were on their way, and although he’d relayed the message from them that everyone was to remain in the lodge, there was no way they could sit around and twiddle their thumbs. However hopeless their searching might feel, it had to be better than doing nothing. Even if they would all be floundering around in the dark.
Tania and Lysander knew the area best, with Rose the next most familiar with their surroundings. However, with the wind raging outside, snow being whipped in every direction and snowbanks pushed up according to the whim of the storm, Rose looked out at the unfamiliar scene with no more confidence in the geography than someone visiting the place for the first time. They split into teams of two, the idea being to have someone who knew the area better with someone who didn’t. There was a brief argument about also pairing one of the men with each of the women, but when that meant Madeleine would have to pair with Lysander, Rose shook her head.
‘No, Maddy and I will stick together.’ She shot a worried look at Lysander but he simply nodded.
‘Tom,’ he said, ‘You’re with me.’ He flicked the switch on his torch, checking it was working. ‘We’ll head out towards Rhodosand search that side of the wood.’
Gull had laced himself into some snow boots Tania had unearthed in the storeroom. It occurred to Rose that he’d already been wearing his ski trousers when Tania woke them. She frowned as Gull glanced at Tania and she said they would check to the left of the property, work their way out towards the old cattle sheds and the piste– Grande Pillar– which ran along that side of the property. After seeming to be so comfortable in one another’s company, they now looked awkward, as if they’d been arguing. Regardless, Tania hauled open the door and clambered out onto the bank of snow, and Gull followed.
‘Keep your phones on,’ Tania said. ‘And if we haven’t found any sign of Clara in an hour’s time, we’ll regroup, OK?’
Everyone nodded. Tom and Lysander headed out, followed by Madeleine. Rose slammed the door behind her and led Madeleine around to the back of the property. They half walked, half climbed over the banks of snow which had formed. The cold wind had crusted the top of the swathes, and some of the time the crusted surface held their weight, but Rose’s feet kept dropping into the drifts, sometimes just a few inches deep, sometimes up to her knees. It was exhausting, and they were making frustratingly slow progress, with Madeleine having the same problem, squeaking with surprise every time she disappeared up to her knee, or hip, in the snow.
Eventually, they made it into the tree-line. Rose leaned against one of the trunks to grab a breath.
‘How the hell are we ever going to find her in this?’ It was the first time she had vocalised her thoughts. She didn’t want to give off negativity, but the wind whipped the words from her mouth; the trunks of the firs all looking identical and the lights from their torches dancing in the darkness revealed precious little in the way of detail.
Perhaps they should have stayed put and left it to the professionals.
‘No sign of any footprints,’ Madeleine yelled. ‘Or perhaps that should be foot holes.’ Beneath her hood and the scarf that she had wrapped around her chin, Rose could still see the glimmer of irrepressibility on Madeleine’s face. Rose allowed herself a quick laugh, which was promptly stolen by a gust of wind.
‘Let’s head into the trees,’ she shouted, gesticulating at the lines of conifers. Madeleine nodded. Once they were amongst the trees, perhaps they would be more sheltered from the worst of the storm.
The path, which usually led out over the little bridge crossing the mountain stream and towards the cowshed at the very edge of the piste, was gone. Once the lights from Snow Pine Lodge had faded and all they had were their torches, Tania struggled to identify any of the landmarks she usually used to guide herself. It was bizarrely disorientating, to know an area so well and yet suddenly not to know it at all.
Not a million miles away from how her entire life felt, at this moment.
Gull was making slower progress than her, he kept sinking into unexpectedly deep patches of snow. She waited for him. She was partly grateful that he was still here, that he hadn’t mentioned returning to his chalet once they realised Clara was missing; had resolutely said he would help when they realised why she was gone. But he was slowing her up. She looked around, willing him to hurry.
Tania knew the PGHM were unable to use a helicopter in these conditions, and that would mean they were at least an hour away, an hour that Clara might not have. If she were serious about her intentions, it wouldn’t take long to freeze to death in these conditions. It was one thing to endure subzero conditions, to dig yourself into a snow cave and conserve what little body heat you might have, to hang in there and cling to life while you waited for help to arrive. It was quite another to use the conditions to achieve the opposite effect.
‘Hurry, Gull.’ She couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice, even though it was clear he was moving as quickly as he could.
‘Keep going,’ he called, waving her on. ‘I’ll follow.’
She headed in what she thought was the right direction for the mountain stream, her feet juddering on and sinking into the snow to differing depths with every step. There seemed no sign of any other prints in the snow, no clue that Clara had come this way, but there hadn’t been any sign leading in any direction– and they had to look somewhere.
Eventually, her familiarity with what few landmarks remained told her they were nearing the stream. She couldn’t see it, nor the little footbridge which she’d crossed with Gull only a few evenings previously. Stopping to take a breath, she half turned to check on Gull’s progress. As she did so, the bank of snow she was standing on gave way, and what had been solid under her foot became quicksilver. As one foot and then the other slid away from her, the suddenness of the movement threw her off balance and she pitched forwards into what had been snow, but which now was rapidly turning into snow-filled air.
As she fell, Tania flailed her arms, desperately trying to keep some idea of which way was up, with the powdery snow obliterating her vision. She hit something solid with a knee– a rock, she assumed– the burst of pain like a bright explosion in her confusion, another shooting pain joining the first as her hip collided with something else. She slid further, the pain intensifying as she slithered to a halt on the bruised side of her body. She pulled in a breath, trying to work out where she was and how badly she was damaged. In the couple of seconds it took to register that nothing else screamed with pain, and she wasn’t buried under snow, a new sensation seeped in, weaselled its way alongside her other thoughts and then overwhelmed them. She was getting really cold, really quickly. And this cold was right against her skin, it had somehow trickled inside her clothing and was everywhere. And then her brain reasserted itself.
It was ice-cold water. She was in the stream.
Chapter 38
‘This is hopeless,’ Madeleine muttered as she shone the beam from her torch behind another of the endless fir trunks. She shone the beam around in an arc, catching the reflective strips on the back of Rose’s jacket in the light, thinking for a second that she’d found something other than snow, and trees, and more snow. ‘Clara, where the hell are you?’ She didn’t expect a reply. The stark facts were that if Clara was determined in her intentions, they were never going to find her. Not in time, anyway.
And, in the meantime, Clara’s closest friends were out in terrible conditions, risking their own lives to try to save hers.
Madeleine couldn’t help the wave of anger crashing through her thoughts, as Rose moved to another tree, then another. The desperate exhaustion in her movements wrenched Madeleine’s heart into her throat. What had Clara been thinking? How dare she put her friends through this? Didn’t she know they would risk everything for her? And how were Rose and Tania ever going to enjoy Christmas again– or even a trip to the mountains for that matter– if all they managed to find was her body?
