The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [119]
The valley disappeared into the mist as the cable car crept upwards. There were only two other passengers. One was a woman in her seventies in a purple and silver snow suit that made Stevie’s look conservative, and a determined expression on her face. The other was a younger man carrying a pair of touring skis, his legs in yellow lycra, a backpack strapped to his shoulders.
Brave day to go touring, thought Stevie. It was hard enough tele-marking in good visibility. He must be fit. Yellow goggles obscured his eyes as he scanned the mountain below.
Stevie thought about how obscure, too, was the picture of the events around her. She had on her hands a villain who traded people, weapons and drugs like canned corn, his partners in crime—who happened to be politically connected heavyweights of indeterminable identity—and who were now convinced apparently that she, Stevie, was party to the inconvenient truth and ought to be buried. The young girl who had sparked off the whole debacle was still missing, presumably in the clutches of the villain, who could be anywhere. Her father was dead and Stevie was about to run off back to London and leave her to her fate.
Should she have tried harder to dissuade Kozkov? Had she made a terrible mistake in going to Kirril?
She thought suddenly of those signs in china shops: You break it, you own it. Only how did one pay for this?
The mountain was almost deserted. The cloud was cold and uninviting. Stevie left the piste and headed for the tree line. She did two quick turns then bent low, disappeared under the skirts of a large pine and waited. No movement, no people, no sound except the rumbling of a distant snow plough and, across the valley, the booming of the avalanche cannons. It was safe.
The fresh powder felt like silk on her shins and she glided along without a sound, bending and rising with her knees, turning her skis without effort through the half-buried pines, breathing in their resiny scent, filling her lungs with clean air. She let her body sail through the turns, swooping in wide arcs, enjoying the freedom of a bird, the silence of the forest. She felt her body relax and her mind clear. The mountain was working its magic; there was peace in this.
Didi loved the mountains and she had taken Stevie up high at every opportunity. They spent spring tramping along the wanderwegs, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and streams of melted snow; then skiing and ice skating and sledding as soon as the first snows fell. The mountains were home to Stevie as much as anywhere.
Im Heimeli appeared below her, the sloping roof heavy with snow, the small stone chimney smoking away. A hand thrust open the wooden shutters of the single upstairs window and a white duvet was thrust out to air. Stevie’s heart did a little dance. Didi was up.
Minutes later, Stevie was seated on the stone top of the kachelofen—the woodburning stove—drinking a bowl of coffee and milk.
Peter, the gentleman cat, lay curled politely next to her, his tail sallying forth every now and then to stroke Stevie’s hand.
Didi sat in her favourite chair by the window and smiled at her granddaughter. She was a tiny woman who compensated for her bamboo-like frame by wearing tweed trousers and a thick, caramel-coloured cashmere jumper, a large cameo brooch pinned at the shoulder. She had swept her white hair into a loose and elegant bun, and on her feet she wore tiny sheepskin slippers. A pair of old leather hiking boots stood drying by the stove.
‘What a delightful surprise, Stevie,’ Didi clapped her hands together. ‘We didn’t even know you were back in Switzerland.’
‘I missed you,’ said Stevie, smiling. ‘And I wanted to see what mischief was brewing at Im Heimeli.’ She looked around at the tea towels drying above the stove, the loaf of mountain bread on the breakfast table and sighed. ‘Nothing ever changes here. It’s marvellous.’
The interior of the chalet was all made of wood—Arve,