A Hiding To Nothing

By David Wallen

High on one of the most dangerous glaciers in the French Alps a young couple go missing.
Meanwhile in Paris a former Russian Spetznaz Special Forces agent ransacks their apartment. What is he searching for?
Are they dead? Or have they engineered their own disappearance?
And why should Geneva-based UN refugee official Don Ward take such an interest in their plight, risking his own life and that of his Estonian lover?
His naive curiosity leads from the Alps through Paris to Istanbul and beyond as he tries to fathom out the connection between a Missing Persons notice in a ski resort and a flow of refugees away from strife in the Caucasus.
A Hiding To Nothing is an adventure that takes in missing Russian millions and the internecine wars that still dog parts of the former Soviet Union. Don Ward, as a UN refugee expert could expect to have answers but he will find himself out of his depth until a chance clue from a patient in a North of England nursing home provides a breakthrough.

DAVID WALLEN is a former journalist who worked for a variety of UK and international newspapers in many places around the world, including Geneva where much of A Hiding To Nothing is set. He currently runs a London-based public relations consultancy. David was a contributor to a major history of the 20th century. This is his first novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Wallen
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466147355

David Wallen

David Wallen is a former journalist now running a top PR company in London. A Hiding To Nothing comes from the time when I spent a lot of time working in Geneva and some of the other places that appear in the book. Les Deux Alpes, where my hero Don Ward first hears of the missing couple is a popular ski resort in the French Alps. It leads into the aptly named La Grave - one of the most dangerous and frightening glacier runs in the Alps, a route that is dangerous at the best of times. The first time I was in Les Deux Alpes someone had gone missing at the top of the mountain. I don't think they ever found him. I have had probably thousands of news and feature stories printed in the media around the world but this is my first novel. I was a contributor to the Chronicle of the 20th Century and earlier ghost wrote a history of Finland in the 20th century - even though I have never been there.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Petr Kornilov looked down at his shiny black toe caps. Yes, maybe he could just see the reflection of his face in their lustre.

He had beaten men with less glossy shoes in his days at the Spetnaz academy at Ryazan south of Moscow. Discipline was good in those Soviet times and it would be again. Personal standards would not slip now.

The creases in his trousers led vertically upwards over the dome of his knees. Crisp and neat. His manicured finger nails pristine.

He adjusted his red woven silk tie and pressed the ancient doorbell.

Pauline Ducros, 68 but feeling 75 from years of cleaning the stairs right the way up to the top of the apartments, shuffled to the door.

She placed her left eye to the spy hole and attempted to focus through the fish eye. Decently dressed, looks a gentleman, she thought.

Kornilov could sense her stare and smiled.

Un moment. There was no knack to turning the large brass doorknob that opened the heavy black door to the six storey block in the 16th arondissement of Paris. It had never been easy to turn.

The door slowly eased open, etching the same scratches across the black and white tiled hallway it had always done.

M'sieur? Mme Ducros wiped her hands on her apron to remove the musty brass smell of the handle and gestured the subtle smile she usually gave to gentlemen in the direction of the Russian.

Kornilov's glossy right toe cap stepped forward onto the tiles. His right hand pushed against Pauline's face and brushed the old lady aside. She stumbled first against the side of the stairs then slumped onto the floor face down on the scratched black and white tiles.

Marc Chopinet? said the Russian sharply. Marc Chopinet?

Mme Ducros struggled to find her breath, gasping. Her heart felt high in her chest, her stomach wanted to vomit from the shock of the violence.

Chopinet? Kornilov asked again. There was no raised voice, no anger in the tone just a frightening firmness. Marc Chopinet. Where is he?

Third floor, Mme Ducros murmured through a rasping breath still facing the floor. Up there, 3B.

Merci

Kornilov ran briskly up the stairs two at a time. He tried the door handle but it stayed still. He threw his shoulder at the door of 3B. Below Pauline could hear the sound of ancient splintering wood as she lay on the cold tiles.

The door opened immediately.

An instant assessment. Kornilov looked on a scene of clothes strewn across the bed, cupboard door wide open, wardrobe still ajar. In the small kitchen a half baguette lay on a chopping board. Rock hard.

He walked over to the desk, pulled out the drawers, tipped them onto the carpet. Bills, old coins, a few Turkish lire bank notes, pens, writing paper.

He stuffed an itemised France Telecom bill in his pocket.

It was only then that he noticed the computer on the dining table surrounded by piles of magazines.

Kornilov pressed the button on its base and slowly it whirred into life. A picture of a smiling woman with long dark hair and blue eyes came up as the wallpaper.

He clicked the mouse on Search and typed Istanbul. The mouse clicked.

The machine whirred lightly as it searched. Nothing.

He typed Turkey. Again nothing. He entered Chechen. Nothing. This boy had not been stupid.

The Russian had been in the apartment around five minutes. He couldn't afford to stay much longer.

He thought for a moment and typed in Chopinet

The machine whirred through the files again. This time luck. Two or three references came up in what were obviously files registering the software in Marc Chopinet's name.

The machine continued. Then there it was, something that was obviously an address book.

Kornilov moved into the Outlook address book files. It was there Jean Chopinet, Ave Marjolin 32, Paris 14.

He scribbled down the address.

A quick glance at the watch. Just a minute more maybe. He switched off the computer and continued to turn the apartment upside down. This was one skill they hadn't taught at Spetznaz school but his powers of observation made him efficient.

It was then that he spotted a neatly folded letter on blue bond notepaper. An address in York, England was written neatly in a woman's hand in the top right hand corner.

Kornilov's English was not good enough to quickly decipher the writing except that the letter ended Can't wait to get Christmas over with, Love Frances.

It went into his right jacket pocket.

The phone numbers might help, the addresses would certainly be useful but otherwise there was nothing to indicate where the Frenchman and his English girlfriend had disappeared to.

Kornilov looked across the scene of destruction and turned to go. He walked across to a tall mirror beside the bed and adjusted his tie again, this time catching a faint trace of Burberry cologne as his wrists approached his face.

He stepped over the piles of paper now littering the floor, walked quite calmly out of apartment 3B and down the stairs.

Pauline Ducros was sitting on the bottom step while an elderly man in a dark brown suit with and his hand on her shoulder spoke into the hallway telephone.

The left and right shiny toe caps moved calmly down single step by single step.

Just a minute, shouted the elderly man as Kornilov stepped above him.

The Russian smiled. Thank you Madame, 3B was correct.

Kornilov stepped to the right and around the shaking form of Mme Ducros.

Here, what are you up to? said the elderly man. He held the handpiece to one side as if to protect it.

Old men can be foolishly courageous. He stood up and made a grab for Kornilov's jacket.

It was a reckless thing to do.

Kornilov turned, grabbed the elderly man by his collar and pushed him against the wall. There was a sickening crunch as he smashed his own forehead against the bridge of his nose.

The old man screamed in pain as warm blood spurted from his nostrils. He fell to the floor in a groaning pile.

Kornilov flicked his own lapel as if to ensure it was straight, opened the black door and stepped outside into a waiting Mercedes.

It was red and highly polished.

CHAPTER TWO

There could be no going back. Frances knew that whatever lay down the whiteness of the snow-filled valley they called La Grave had to be the way forward for them, the only way forward.

Tears streaked her cheeks. But were they caused by fear of what they were running from, dread at what lay ahead or just the vicious wind? She had no idea.

They had to go through with this escape, buy time to think. She and Marc had known that when they left the small ski studio apartment that morning.

Nonetheless she was surprised, perhaps disappointed they had even opened the lifts all the way to the summit. They had both bought six day lift passes in their own names. They had brushed the left hand side of their ski gear against the sensors at the bottom of the lifts, the turnstiles had beeped, a green light had come on and they were let through to the cable car.

Their smart cards had registered on the system. In any enquiry it would show that they had set off up the mountain – but that was all.

The snow had enveloped the village and vast peak above it for three days bringing most mountain life to a halt. But today it had cleared a little and she could hear the booms of the explosions caused by the avalanche patrols as the cable car had swung them ever higher up onto the glacier.

The French ski resort of Les Deux Alpes had long since disappeared beneath them in a veil of icy mist as the cable car swung higher.

She was in no condition to run. The fear as well as the altitude caused an ache in her lungs. She wanted to vomit.

Marc stood silently beside her staring further up the mountain she walked out of the cable car top station. They clunked out in the swirl of a million crystals of ice blowing across the top of the glacier.

Just one more lift to the summit. It would tow them further up the glacier. It was minus 20 Celsius and a sign warned of the dangers of the altitude. Already her breath was condensing to form a skin of ice across her face as she struggled into her ski bindings, already her eyelashes were starting to freeze as she pulled her goggles around her face. Above them towered the teeth of the Meije, one of the last peaks in the Alps ever to be conquered, disappearing now and again in the fast moving snow clouds.

Frances was as low in morale as she thought it was ever possible to be. Her life, which had seen its own peaks of happiness since she met the man beside her was now about to change totally. They were embarking upon the unknown.

This way, said Marc in a tone not quite sharp but certainly firm enough to indicate that there could be no going back.

Their skis chattered across the hard packed surface of the drag lift and she turned her face away from the north wind as it bit into her left cheek. She tried again to clear her mind of everything that had happened in the past week, the mad escape from Istanbul, the desperate fleeing of Marc's Paris apartment.

Every few seconds a white swirl of wind reduced visibility to nil. She would need every bit of her wits to ski down to La Grave, every last grain of skill, every last calorie of energy. But it would be the only way out.

There was nobody to share the desolation with them as they left the top of the drag lift and started to walk even higher to a position above the valley. Any tracks had long since vanished with the wind.

They were alone. Completely.

An ice-encrusted sign pointed into the nothingness with just the words La Grave. Some mountain guide or pisteur had placed crossed poles alongside, an indication that the route was closed.

But they'd expected that and just walked round them.

She could just see Marc's eyes through the orange plastic of his goggles. They gave nothing away. There was no hint of doubt there.

He pointed further up the slope and they began to move slowly on, propelling themselves with ski poles attempting to grip the windswept ice. Neither spoke now. With the wind that would have been pointless.

But with her hood pulled tight around her head and face and all flesh covered from the penetrating cold Frances did not need any other noise. The rasping of her high altitude breath was miserable company enough.

Twenty minutes of agonisingly slow poling forward found them at a point where they could turn down towards La Grave.

The grey and white panorama of mountains spread to Italy one way, Mont Blanc the other. But today there were no bright colours enhanced by the brilliance of a mountain sun. Instead streaks of cloud and the ever screaming ice crystals leant all a cold dark blue hue.

Her chest rose and fell, aching with every movement. Her bronchial passages felt sandpaper dry.

Marc gave a nod as if to ask if she was all right. She nodded back.

Her lover of just four months gestured with his hand towards a vast deep slope of whiteness opening up before them, a huge concave slope dropping away quickly and frighteningly out of sight. Again there were no tracks, no obvious route. But there was no deep powder snow either, the wind had reclaimed all that for the sky again.

She had never had any doubts that she should stay with Marc despite the fact that it was he who had got them into such stupid trouble. Together they could find at least an element of security.

The Frenchman pointed his sticks into the hard snow and off into the wind turning and turning again on his skis down the straight fall line of the slope. He was trying to lose height, to escape this vicious wind as fast as possible, to get the cold blast over with. She followed as close behind as she could manage given that she was so frightened she couldn’t even balance properly.

He wouldn't leave her, of that she was certain. Their destinies were stuck together now, like it or not. The Russians, Chechens, Georgians, whoever they were, wanted both of them together.

But she could easily become lost - or worse - should they become separated here.

They took a wide traverse above a shallow valley and then around a narrow col and into another abyss dropping away beneath. It was hard to discern the precipitous glacier from the snow covered rocks to the side. The bulk of the glacier was tumbling down beneath them while off to the side were rocks and deep gullies.

Both were excellent skiers and at first their skis moved relatively easily on the exposed slopes where the new snow had been whisked away.

But then they turned onto what was patently a more sheltered slope. Their skis instantly dipped deep below the surface as the snow deepened.

Deep powder.

In bright sunlight it is the good skier's fantasy. Today Frances found it an infuriating obstacle. There was no thrill as the crystal veils flew up around her neck and face while she struggled to keep turning and turning again all the time trying to check her speed.

A steep slope opened beneath them in the greyness of the afternoon. What could have been transfixing beauty was now marked by an ominousness she found completely intimidating. The sheer emptiness of the slope, its very lifelessness hinted of nature's malice.

Here and there as the glacial surface changed angle she could make out the dimpled indication of a crevasse deep beneath the snow. It sent a further chill through her panting body.

High above more clouds skudded in, running dark finger shadows across the valley walls. Frances stopped.

Marc wait, wait please. I need a rest, she yelled.

But he was some 50 metres below her now carving one 'S' shape after another down the slope. He did not hear her.

She pushed off slowly again frightened by the way the slope dropped away so steeply.

The snow was knee height. Weightless diamonds of ice blew around her face sticking to her goggles, impairing her vision.

Suddenly Frances heard a deep rumble.

Through the myopia of her iced-up goggles she noticed the snow beside her was no longer stationary. It was beginning to move. It happened in a second but it seemed to her a minute before she realised its significance.

Panic gripped. Her skis started to go everywhere other than where she attempted to steer them. Christ, she screamed, Avalanche. No God, don't do this as well. Maaarc,

Her screams vanished as the rumble was joined by a hiss while the slope gathered its own violent pace.

The instinctive reaction was to lean back and she quickly lifted her tips to push up through the surface of the snow again. But she was losing her balance. The spray of the powder rose ever higher so she could see nothing and only go where gravity took her.

In what must have been just a couple of seconds her right ski stick all but disappeared into the sliding snow as she pushed hard to try and go faster than the gathering momentum of the river of snow.

Her left pole flew skywards as she fell clumsily to the right then she leant quickly again to the left to attempt to regain her feet.

Sheer panic, sheer survival, sheer confusion. An ecstasy of fumbling, Wilfred Owen wrote. Stupidly the phrase kept coming into her mind as she attempted to concentrate. Owen's First World War soldier had been struggling to get a gas mask on as the clouds of death drifted towards him. She was trying to avoid her own collapse into weightier white clouds.

Frances attempted to control her skis, her sticks, her balance, her vision, none of which wanted to co-operate. All the time she was trying to ski as steeply, as fast as she could to get away from whatever the mountain had in store.

The rumble turned into a roar as the snow accelerated past her.

Then it picked up the back of her skis throwing them up and over her head as she nose dived into the white river of ice crystals.

She rolled and rolled again, the heavy snow ramming its cold poison down her throat, ripping off her hood, tearing her goggles from her face as she in some primal reaction, attempted to turn into a foetal ball. She was tumbling, unaware of where was up or down, pummelled every way by the snow.

But just as soon as it started it stopped.

She tried to gasp for air but her chest was weighed down. She tried to see but all was dark. Frances could move neither limb nor digit beneath the cold mass. Perhaps this was how it would end.

CHAPTER THREE

The small poster at the entrance to the cable car station seemed half-hearted in message considering what appeared to have happened.

Somewhere up on the massif of the glacier above, Frances Webster and Marc Chopinet were missing. Down here people shuffled forward in the lift queue. Hardly anybody even glanced at the fading poster stuck to a window. According to the information on the paper the two had probably been skiing both on and off piste, had maybe ventured into the unpatrolled and dangerous terrain of La Grave and had simply not come back.

That was it. If you knew anything, spotted anybody like them (although heaven knows why you should) or heard anything that might be of use to the authorities there was a number to phone. Doubtless the calls would be few.

The poster, with a print from a photograph taken by the police from the camera later discovered in their holiday apartment, showed them on the sun terrace of a mountain restaurant enjoying a break like the thousands of other ski tourists in Les Deux Alpes.

It gave away very little. They were smiling, sun tanned. The fact that they were both wearing hats and sunglasses indicated it was cold but bright weather.

But, as Don Ward noticed when he shuffled past the poster into the electric hum of the station, touching his lift pass against the sensor panel, they had disappeared six weeks ago.

Some poor sod among the pisteurs, maybe a farmer bringing sheep up onto the high pastures or early spring walkers would doubtlessly have the unpleasant task of being the first to come across the bodies when the snow began to recede in late April. They would raise the alarm and nature would have taken over the role of the police in this investigation.

Whoever found them would take months, if not years, to get the impression of their decomposing bodies out of mind. And in the little gendarmerie of Les Deux Alpes another file would be closed.

That was it at best. Of course the other scenario was that they may never be found, or some future glaciologist would come across their preserved remains many years into the future when the glacier spat them out and everyone would try and and surmise about their life from what was left.

Don lifted his skis up into the battered metal holders on the side of the creaking gondola car and climbed in alongside three strangers from the queue. He fumbled to take off his gloves, unzipped the right pocket of his ski suit and took out his own rapidly decomposing packet of Fishermen's Friends.

The gondola crept forward out of the station and swung noisily out on the wire above the nursery slopes packed with kids on half term.

It was still minus five outside and little warmer inside the condensation lined cab. He pulled his hat over his forehead and briefly thought poor bastards as he pondered on what feature on this ostensibly friendly mountain had claimed the two vanished skiers.

Nobody had even noticed that Webster and Chopinet were missing for five days, the length of time their Paris registered Renault had lain untouched in the car park near another lift some distance away.

The police, whose previous height of excitement that season had been guiding traffic around a bus which had slipped into a ditch on the ice, had been called when the woman whose job it was to clean out their apartment for the next guests knocked on the door and, finding it locked but silent, used her house key to enter.

A pair of Frances's jeans lay on the floor near the bed. The tiny kitchen still had the crumbs from a hastily prepared breakfast across its work surface and a coffee cup lay half-empty with the beginnings of mould on the surface.

The woman, Marie Genet, saw an old-fashioned wind up travel alarm clock by the bed next to the window had stopped. Some English change lay on the bedside table next to an airport novel and a box of tissues. But it was otherwise entirely normal, just like any other apartment on any other morning.

Except that they were supposed to be going home today, the rental of the apartment was up.

She had waited half an hour shuffling up and down the landing outside. She wanted to wait longer but frustration, and the knowledge that the next guests would be arriving in three hours got the better of her. The people from the apartment to the left had already gone; those on the right were just moving their luggage out. She approached them shyly.

They had seen nothing, indeed they thought the lack of noise through the painted breeze-block walls meant that there was nobody occupying the apartment.

Madame Genet telephoned the rental company – no reply. She was puzzled. Her brother worked in the local police force though. They knew her and would advise what to do. She phoned the gendarmerie.

An hour later officer Victor Balaguer sauntered into the car park beneath. He walked up the single flight of steps to the landing and knocked on the door. Balaguer took off his kepi and asked what the problem was.

A quick search through the top drawer in the cheap plastic coated chest of drawers found a set of Renault keys with the registration number on the tag, presumably duplicates to others they might have had with them.

Alongside them two passports, one British, Frances Webster, born 16th March 1980 in York, England. The second was French. Marc Chopinet, born 7th August 1979, St Cloud, just outside Paris. And there was the camera. He switched it on and glanced back through a few pictures – just a few shots of a couple up on the slopes, nothing unusual at all.

Balaguer radioed the office. There were no messages about anyone found the worse for wear in the towns clubs or bars, nothing to link them to the broken limbs and torn ligaments casualties in the hospital down the valley. Nothing to explain their disappearance.

It was the next day before somebody even questioned why the green Renault had seemingly lain untouched in the car park next to the Jandri Express lift station in the centre of the village.

Officer Balaguer's colleague Jean Dumand spotted it in one corner of the car park and recognised the registration from the key fob. It being Sunday morning Balaguer was more interested in the football on the TV than rushing to resolve their little mystery. Nonetheless he pulled on his boots and his blue jacket, went to the gendarmerie, took the car keys out of the brown manila envelope he had placed them in the previous afternoon and walked over to the Jandri Express.

Inside the car were empty crisp packets and soft drinks tins, one small mountaineer's rucksack containing two 50 metre lengths of climbing rope, a couple of torn piste maps and in the glove compartment a scratched Silva compass.

The conclusion was becoming disturbingly clear even to the lazy minds of officers Balaguer and Dumand. Webster and Chopinet were obviously somewhere up the mountain, presumably dead by now unless they were sheltering in a refuge, probably swallowed deep inside a crevasse high on the glacier.

For the next three days the pisteurs and guides of Les Deux Alpes searched. The lift company checked the couple’s names against lift ticket purchases. They could see that they had bought six day passes and the system had registered that they had gone up the mountain and when. But that was all.

They knew the couple were not on the lower slopes, they were patrolled every night to cover any ordinary recreational skiers lost or lying there with injuries.

Gradually as they ventured further afield to take in the valleys which dropped down off the side of Les Deux Alpes a possible conclusion slowly become clear. They must be somewhere in the largest off-piste area accessible via the Jandri Express cable car - La Grave.

Don Ward's gondola rumbled one third the way up the mountain and he alighted. There he followed a sign pointing towards a route up the mountain and skied off down a path along the side of a huge bowl to another chair lift.

There were aspects of skiing alone he liked, and those he hated. He could ski as fast or as slow as he wanted, take a tough black mogul field full of bumps or opt for an easy schuss down a simple blue run. He could often be a loner, but not necessarily by choice and he missed the camaraderie skiing with friends could bring, the mutual testing of each other's skills at this sport which gripped him like no other.

He missed the way skiing with others of his standard would generally lead to faster times, to pummelling calf muscles, aching lungs and fits of laughter at the stupid antics going flat out would entail.

Don had visited Les Deux Alpes once before some years ago. Working for the UN in Geneva there were plenty of other resorts just as testing much nearer to home but he remembered it had a good snow record and long high runs.

He had been drawn to the Southern Alps resort for the simple reason that the snow reports were brilliant, half a metre of fresh white stuff just dumped on the lower slopes and nearly a metre on the higher, way up on the glacier at 3600 metres.

He jumped on a chair lift to take him up to the intermediate station on the Jandri and got in line with about 10 others clumping along into the big gondolas which would lift him up to 3,200 metres.

He leant against the perspex window watching his breath condense and thought.

They were thoughts about the two on the poster. The woman was quite stunning, long dark hair, perhaps slightly larger than average mouth, perfect teeth and eyes that even on what must have been a holiday snap seemed to glow with excitement. What was that she had been wearing? Some kind of dark ski suit with what looked like a huge snake embroidered around the shoulders?

He imagined himself offering to take a picture of the two on the alpine terrasse just for the chance of speaking to her. What a waste. OK, it was sexist crap to think such a way, nonetheless, what a loss.

At the top he walked out and caught another lift up to 3600 metres. The air was thin here, so thin he was aware of having to pull for breath as he hauled himself up the metal grating steps and out into the bitter cold.

A sign warned that this was high glacier skiing. Skiers should respect the altitude and the mountain and not wander off the marked pistes without a guide.

But Don Ward had never really respected anything too much ever since his boyhood in Liverpool.

The second son of a local authority clerk living in what was thought of locally as the posh borough of Huyton he had attended the local grammar school and enjoyed a youth not without problems in its own right.

His family really might have been better apart. Don's parents hadn't divorced but they should have. He recalled them moaning throughout his childhood about money, behaviour, taste - although heaven only knows what arbiters of taste they supposed themselves to be in this dreary suburb of monotony.

His two brothers had, to his view, slipped into the same kind of mindlessness his parents had demonstrated most of his life.

Most thoughts towards them all now were negative, depressing. That fact disturbed him, he wondered what it meant about his own personality - how they in turn viewed him - yet could find few clues.

Don's father had been smart but lazy, a couch potato with no interests besides television. It seemed his mother's chief role in his life had been to tell him off, to rebuke and scold. Everything he had ever done she found something wrong with.

That could have turned him into the sort of gibbering wrecks several of his school mates, and his brother, had now become.

But Liverpool, although sometimes a cruel city, produces those who can thrive on hardship. It has a culture that supports those sharp enough to see the bright side of its roughness. No surprise that its culture had turned a good 50% of Liverpudlians into comedians in one form or another. It endowed them with a sharp cockiness, a wit if not necessarily a wisdom.

So when Don Ward read the sign at the top lift station his view was that the warnings were for wimps.

His dark hair was turning grey at the temples. He was 6 foot 2 inches tall and quite stockily built. Don liked to think he was fit although heaven knows why, the only work outs he did were a few press-ups and stomach curls on the floor of his Geneva apartment. But he was confident in his strength.

He could have turned back down the mountain, simply bombed down the smooth glacier run facing back towards Les Deux Alpes.

But stuff it, he thought, he'd go higher. He stamped his boots into his bindings and feeling the tight inefficiency of his lungs at this height poled off towards the glacier drag lift which would give him his final ride to a point below the rock peak of the top of Mount Meije. Above the La Grave valley.

It was cold, stark. Human beings weren’t meant to be here. Wasn't Mount Meijle one of the last peaks in the Alps to be climbed? He looked up at the jagged dark teeth of the peak. It was easy to understand why humans were late comers round these parts.

There was nobody on the drag lift. The snowscape was all but deserted.

But at the top of the lift the attendant was trying to shovel some fresh snow out of the way. He started to walk back into his wooden hut as Don neared the end of the lift then turned and gave a friendly wave to one of the few skiers silly enough to make it up this far.

Don waved back.

Then he spotted the notice on the window. It was of the missing skiers again.

He stopped and edged back towards the hut just for another glimpse of the woman in the photograph.

She was gorgeous wasn't she? he shouted at the attendant.

Yes, monsieur, but no use to anyone now, he joked back cruelly in return.

They're both down there somewhere. He pointed in the direction of La Grave.

Want to go and find them?

What do they reckon happened then?

Avalanche, crevasse, both. Who knows. They'll find them in the spring though. Maybe.

Why do they reckon they're in La Grave then?

Well they think they may have gone down there when the route was closed to anyone without a guide. It had been snowing for a few days and the temperature had been up and down. There were one or two avalanches but then it snowed heavily again. It's impossible to tell where they might be.

I might give it a go myself, said Don.

Well it's open now but I wouldn't recommend it without a guide, said the pisteur.

Oh, it's all right, I've done it several times in the past. I know my way down all right, said Don.

It was a lie. He'd skied La Grave once before years ago with a group. But then he liked to bullshit. He especially liked to bullshit himself.

He waved to the lift attendant and pushed on towards the head of the valley. No flies on me, he murmured to himself putting on his old, long since abandoned scouse accent.

God, don't I talk some shit, he thought. There was nobody around at the top of this vast glacial plateau. The only company was the wind.

But then Don Ward liked to issue challenges to himself, to play chicken with his own psyche. Like when he and his mates used to hang around on unmanned level crossings during the school holidays seeing who would be the last to bottle out as the trains came.

It was like that silly times in Ibiza in his twenties when he and his friends had again played chicken in the pool by the beach, seeing who would be the last to dare dive in as the bar owner drained the pool to clean it. They had given up then only when the owner's son was already standing in just a few feet of water in the shallow end scrubbing down the walls with some solution of ammonia.

God obviously favoured the foolhardy.

Don knew now he was technically quite capable of skiing La Grave, he just didn't know the way down. But it would come back.

Yes, he knew it was quite unpatrolled, marked or pisted. It was all too easy just to head off in one direction, perhaps following the erroneous tracks of some earlier skier and quite unwittingly slide straight over the edge of one of the many cliffs that dotted the valley high above the tree line.

It was said that they pulled the body of a snow boarder out of one crevasse the previous spring still with his arms stretched out. There was still a look of shock on his face as he had propelled himself off what he had stupidly thought was just a small cliff.

He could make out a couple of fresh tracks heading down the valley. Well at least someone had been through here today. OK, you shouldn't follow tracks without knowing where they lead. Still it was better than nothing.

He had about €100 in his pocket. The distance meant he would probably have to get a taxi back to Les Deux Alpes but the cash would cover him.

And wouldn't he feel good? He’d feel superb, high on a cocktail of adrenalin and fear by the time he reached the village in the valley. Achievement, that was what it was about, the delight of pulling in gasping lungs full of cold crisp air.

He stopped and took in the view by way of excuse, then set off again. At this altitude it was like being laden with the lungs of someone who had smoked Capstan Full Strength for 40 years. He pressed on.

It looked easy as he pushed off slowly following the tracks of the other skiers. He tried to remember the scene and the route from those years before. But snow covered mountains change. No he didn't recognise this.

Here and there some windblown crud, sometimes the exposed top of a rock where the often ferocious wind at these heights had blown the snow away.

He was following just the tracks now, fantasising. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one of them carried a sign This track was made by a mountain guide, you are safe to follow. But no such luxury.

The tracks went down a steep run, the kind of slope where a fall would have sent the skier tumbling helplessly hundreds of metres.

Certainly there were no crevasses that he could see. But then they would be hidden in these conditions. Often fresh snowfalls act to just build a bridge over a narrow crevasse, totally disguising its yawning danger, a crocodile's mouth covered over in shaving foam.

Irrationally he kept wondering if he would come across a corner of fabric of the woman's ski suit, red or black cloth emerging just above the snow.

Would he then be the one to find the corpses and enjoy a modicum of fame in the local press as he, Don Ward of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees scooped them out of their snow graves before the freezing centuries confirmed their grip.

Yes, there were enough dimpled surfaces around here that could have been snow covered crevasses.

This mountain had zero tolerance. He was following unknown tracks completely recklessly, breaking the rules. But he felt he'd get away with it.

The slopes were steep and intimidating and his thighs ached as he made every laborious turn. Here he would be skiing on a good smooth surface, the next moment his skis would plunge deep into unexpected powder snow throwing his body forward as the crystal blanket wrapped around his legs and checked his speed.

After several minutes he began to regret his foolhardiness. There was not a soul around his part of the mountain so far as he could see.

He could disappear off the face of the mountain just like the Frenchman and the English woman and nobody would know. It would be days before anyone paid attention to his own tatty car in the gondola car park.

Days - what, it could be bloody weeks. They might just think that the banged up Golf GTI belonged to a chalet rep. Christ, he could break a leg, tear a ligament here and the first to hear his cries of pain would be the marmots wakening from their winter slumber.

On and down, on and down he went. Don looked across a mountain-side strewn with big boulders, a valley side of irregular gradient, just the kind of place to harbour unseen dangers, where the snow might suddenly run out over clifftops, replaced by honest-to-goodness 3,000 metre free fall air.

He stopped on a steep degree slope and felt slightly sick.

Not quite as tough as he had kidded himself at the top now, are we, he thought.

It was the personal confidence trick he had played on himself too many times with often dangerous results. Don Ward had a habit of pretending to himself that everything was fine when he knew damn well deep down that it wasn't.

He could do it physically, like the night when he conned himself that the two drunks on London's Embankment tube station were no match for him - and had paid for it with a lost wallet, aching groin and split eyebrow.

Or the time when he kidded himself that what he called his great affair