‘No!’ she shouts up at me. ‘I need some time to myself.’ She bolts down the stairs and I feel a gust of cold air as she wrenches the heavy chalet door open and I hear it bang closed behind her.
I go downstairs and find Cass sitting alone on the huge sofa.
The sofa gives a whoompf as I sit down next to her and say, ‘Mind if I join you?’ It’s quiet in the chalet now so I guess Inigo has finally gone to sleep.
Cass smiles gratefully. She pulls her jumper down over her hands, though the fire is roaring and it isn’t even remotely cold in here. ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ she says, ‘but please don’t feel you have to keep me company.’
Sitting close to her I see again how young she is and feel sorry for her. Why is she with an oaf like Simon?
‘How have you found the week?’ I ask. ‘This isn’t your first time skiing, is it?’
She pulls a face. ‘No, it’s not. I did a season as a chalet girl a few years back, but my employer kept us very busy and I didn’t get to ski much at all. So while I have skied, I’m no expert and didn’t fancy skiing too much in this weather.’ She pauses. ‘It’s all been a bit weird here, hasn’t it?’
I nod. ‘Yeah. There’s certainly been a lot going on.’
There’s another awkward pause.
‘To start with I felt stressed about being here because Simon had been with an old girlfriend,’ Cass continues, babbling. Maybe she feels she has to fill the silence. ‘I’ve been jealous and insecure about loads of things since Inigo was born. Silly really, especially in light of everything else that’s happened since. Things get put into perspective when someone’s found dead.’
‘I guess they do,’ I agree, but I am no longer listening to Cass. Instead, I’m thinking about Simon having been to La Madière before, and trying and failing to remember if Ria also said she’d been here before or not.
I realize, to my shame, I haven’t had a proper conversation with Cass this entire week, so I continue, ‘Remind me how you and Simon met?’
She blushes. ‘Oh. This sounds terrible but … I catered a dinner party for him and his ex-wife. Like I said, I was once a chalet girl like Millie, then I set up a small catering company when I got back to the UK. Simon and I kept in touch and I did some business lunches for him and … well.’ There is a pause. ‘They were already pretty much separated by the time we met, and he started confiding in me and … one thing led to another. Once they were officially divorced, Simon asked me to marry him.’
But I am still only half-listening to Cass as I am desperately racking my brains to recall if Ria said she had been here before. I’m pretty sure she has. Was it with Simon? Was she the girlfriend Cass is referring to, whether Cass knows it or not? Has there been something between them in the past? Is that why Ria’s been so strange this week? Has Simon made another pass at her? Is that why she won’t come down from her room?
I feel myself growing hot and try to tune back in to what Cass is saying, but it sounds like blah blah blah blah blah.
I remember that it was Ria who booked the chalet, but I can’t remember whose idea it was to get Simon along on this particular trip. Was it mine? Olivia’s? Or Ria’s? I can’t think straight with Cass burbling on next to me so I get to my feet and say:
‘Oh gosh, Cass, I’m so sorry but I’ve got to make an urgent call. Let’s talk again later, OK?’
She looks startled and says: ‘Oh, yes, OK, of course,’ and I feel momentarily bad as I realize she was confiding in me but I can’t worry about that now. I’ve got my own problems to think about.
I go back up to our room to try and remember who came up with the idea of this week. And while I’m up there, I might see if I can sneak another look at Ria’s iPad. Usually she keeps it well locked down, and she’s been exceptionally cagey about it this week. Perhaps there is something in there she doesn’t want me to know about. I might have another look.
43
January 2020, La Madière, France
Adam
By late afternoon I am on a coach. It’s not a fun journey – you would think people would be cheered by the prospect of getting to their holiday destination at long last. But no – all the talk around me is of how much time they are losing when they should already be on the slopes, with people competing over who has the worst holiday-from-hell story, who has lost the most money, who has had the worst journey, who has spent the longest time awake/on the road/away from a functioning loo, and who has been inconvenienced to the greatest degree. Sometimes I feel like interrupting to ask if anyone here has ever finished a holiday leaving a relative dead on the mountainside and then had to come back years later to deal with the fallout, but of course, I hold my tongue. I don’t yet know the logistics of identifying Will’s body. I don’t even know where it is. Do I have to see it? I’m not sure. I don’t know if I want to. But the kind-sounding man from the resort who phoned after I’d had the call from the police seemed to think I might like to visit the spot where he was found ‘to pay your respects’, as he said in his perfect English.
After several hours of a tortuously slow journey, we pass a sign which announces our arrival in La Madière. No doubt the resort will have changed hugely since I was here. I think about Nell. I wonder where she is now? Probably married to someone rich. She was always quite shallow, if fit. I wonder if she’s happy? And I think about Will. Lying dead in the snow all that time. Dead, without the privilege of being happy or not.
He didn’t deserve to die. But I am not going to be blamed. Whatever it takes, I refuse to let what happened mess up the rest of my life.
44
BEFORE
Not long after finishing catering school, I got a job as a chalet girl. There was a rigorous interview process and I had to cook a three-course meal for a board of tasters. By then I was an excellent cook and had spent hours on social media studying how a chalet girl tends to look and how she is expected to behave. Even though I had never been near a ski resort, let alone a ski chalet, I aced the test and a few weeks later, I left for the Alps.
That was my first time outside the UK. Anna helped me apply for a passport and even paid the fee for me, though I’m sure she’s not really allowed to. It was also the first time I’d been on a plane. I felt like I was holding my breath the whole way; it seemed so unreal. Meanwhile my new colleagues, as I guess you’d call them, chatted and joked like it was nothing at all to them. It probably was nothing at all to them – I imagined most of them had been on several flash holidays every year since they were tiny.
Nonetheless, there were a few exclamations of ‘ooh, look, snow!’ as our coach drove in the resort. Only ever having seen short-lived sprinkles of snow at home, I could hardly believe my eyes. There was so much of it! It was like something from a film, or a Christmas card. Everything was white and glistening. Enormous icicles which looked like they could kill someone if they fell hung from the chocolate-box-style buildings.
As well as paying for my passport, Anna also helped me buy a decent pair of walking boots before I left. ‘Call it an early Christmas present – can’t have you getting cold feet!’ she’d said. Thankfully, the chalet company provided not only a uniform but also a logoed ski jacket which we had to wear at all times while outside the chalet, even when we were not officially on duty. This was a huge relief to me, having seen the price of ski jackets.