Two Hundred Metres

The call came at ten past seven, which in Vasslia in February is still full dark, and Ida Brekke took it standing in her own kitchen with one boot on. A skier coming down off Skarvet had found a man face down in the drift below the Fjellstad hut and had then skied ninety minutes to the shop to say so, because there is no signal above the treeline and there has not been since the mast came down.

She wrote the name as the skier gave it and spelled it back to him twice and still got it wrong the first time. Halvard Nesse. A surveyor, apparently, working for somebody in Bergen, and the skier knew this much only because the man had been in the shop on Thursday buying batteries and had answered a polite question about his work at rather greater length than the question had wanted.

Ida had been the constable in Vasslia for six years, which was five and a half years longer than she had told her mother it would be. In that time she had attended two avalanche recoveries, one drowning under ice, a great many domestic arguments that stopped the moment she came through the door, and no deaths at all that anybody had needed to explain.

She put the second boot on. She rang the doctor, who said she would come, and rang Bergen, who put her through to a man who wanted to know whether the pass was open, and when she said the pass was shut until the twenty-eighth he made a small noise that she recognised immediately and disliked for the rest of the case. It was the noise of a diary being consulted rather than a map.

The snowmobile started on the third try. She took the valley road as far as the turning and then went up the old summer track under the spruce, and the beam of the headlamp made a moving room around her about nine metres across, and outside that room there was nothing at all in any direction for two hours.

Above the treeline the wind had done what it always does on that shoulder, which is to scour the ridge bare and pack everything it lifts into the hollow below, so that the last kilometre was slow and unpleasant and twice she had to get off and walk the machine through. The sky went from black to the colour of a wet stone. She could see the hut from a long way out.

That was the thing that got her, before she had seen the body, before she had seen anything at all. She could see the hut from a long way out. It sat on its shelf of rock with the shutters up and the chimney capped for winter, plain and dark and perfectly obvious against the snow, and she thought: whatever else has happened here, nobody got lost.

The skier had marked the place with a ski planted upright, which was sensible, and had otherwise not touched anything, which was more than sensible and she made a note to tell him so. The man lay on his front in a shallow scoop of wind-crust about two hundred metres below and east of the hut, with his head pointing downhill and his arms out in front of him as though he had gone down in the middle of a stride.

His jacket was open. His hat was thirty metres further up the slope, and one glove was near the hat, and the other was still in the jacket pocket. Ida had read about this and had never seen it and stood for a while looking at it, because she had learned that the first ten minutes at a scene are the only ten minutes in which you see it rather than your idea of it.

Doctor Aud Fenne arrived an hour later on the other machine and knelt in the snow for a long time without saying anything much. Then she sat back on her heels and said that she would need the body down and Bergen would need it after that, but that if Ida wanted the short version now, the short version was cold. No wound she could find. No blood anywhere in the snow. Nothing under the fingernails.

"The jacket," said Ida. "I know," said Fenne. "Paradoxical undressing. They get hot at the end, or they think they do, and they take things off. It is not evidence of anything except the last twenty minutes." She stood and worked her hands inside her mitts. "Ida, this is a man who died of exposure in February at nine hundred metres. That is not a mystery. That is a Tuesday."

"He is two hundred metres from a hut." "He is two hundred metres from a hut in a whiteout, possibly, at night, possibly, having come off the ridge from the wrong side, possibly, and men have died forty metres from their own front doors." Fenne was not being unkind. She had been the doctor here for twenty-two years and had signed a great many certificates that said what they said.

Ida walked the two hundred metres up to the hut and stood on its step and looked back down at the shape in the snow and the two women beside it, and then she looked at the hut door, which was shut, and the padlock, which was on, and the shutters, which were pegged, and the woodstack under the eave, which was full because it is always kept full, that being the entire point of a hut like that.

She went back down. The light had come up properly by then, the flat blue-grey light that is all the valley gets in February, and she could see the whole of the shoulder and the whole of the way he had come and the whole of the way he had not gone. It was two hundred metres. It was two hundred metres of open ground with a black building on it.

They emptied the pockets at the surgery, on a steel table, with Fenne holding the bag and Ida writing, because the correct way to do this is slowly and out loud and twice. Wallet, with four hundred kroner and a card and a photograph of a dog. A phone, dead, which she put in a bag for Bergen. A pencil worn down to the length of a thumb.

A notebook, oilskin-covered, swollen with damp, which she did not open there. A folding rule. A compass with a cracked bezel. A packet of the batteries he had bought in the shop on Thursday, unopened, which she looked at for slightly longer than she needed to. Two boiled sweets. A receipt from a petrol station in Voss dated the ninth.

And a key. Ordinary, brass, worn bright on the shoulders the way keys get, on a loop of orange baling twine with a scrap of card knotted into it. On the card, in pencil, in a hand that was not the dead man's, somebody had written the single word FJELLSTAD.

Ida put it down on the steel and looked at it and did not say anything for long enough that Fenne looked up. "There it is," said Fenne. "So he had the key." "So he had the key." "Which makes it worse, or better?" "I do not know yet," said Ida, and wrote it down, and the writing took a while because she wrote out the whole of the word on the card and then the colour of the twine.

Fenne went to wash her hands. "You want it to be something," she said over the water. "That is not a criticism. Everybody does, the first one. But sometimes a man has a key in his pocket and does not use it because he is already too cold to think, and that is all that happened, and the only thing left is telling his people."

"Has he people?" "Bergen will find out. There is a dog in the photograph, so somebody is feeding a dog." Fenne dried her hands. "I will write exposure. I will write it honestly and I will write that I could not examine him properly here and that the post-mortem is Bergen's. That is what I have got."

Ida bagged the key last, and sealed it, and signed across the seal, and then stood in the corridor of the surgery with the bag in her hand under the strip light. Two hundred metres. A padlocked door. A key in the pocket with the name of the hut written on it in somebody else's handwriting. She could not make those three things sit together, and she had learned to distrust the feeling that they ought to.

The man in Bergen rang back at four. He was pleasant. He explained that with the pass shut they could not get anybody up, and that the body would come out by helicopter when the weather allowed, and that the case would sit with her in the meantime and then transfer when the road opened on the twenty-eighth. Eleven days. He said eleven days as though he were offering her something.

"And after the twenty-eighth?" "After the twenty-eighth it comes to us and we look at it properly." "You will look at it as exposure." A pause exactly long enough to be an answer. "We will look at it as what the pathologist says it is, constable." Which meant exposure, because the pathologist would find a man who had frozen, because a man had frozen.

She understood the arithmetic of it and did not particularly resent it. There were fourteen hundred people in the valley in winter and one of her, and there were four hundred thousand people in Bergen and a great many of them doing things to each other that were unambiguously crimes. A surveyor who walked into a whiteout was not going to win that competition.

But there were eleven days in which the file was hers, and in which everybody who might have anything to say about Halvard Nesse was on the wrong side of a shut pass with nowhere at all to go. Ida had never in six years had anything she would have called an advantage. She recognised this one immediately and it made her uneasy, which she also recognised.

She drove down to the shop before it closed and bought milk she did not need and stood at the counter while Johanne cashed her up, and asked, in the tone that everybody in the valley can hear coming from four hundred metres, whether the surveyor had said anything on Thursday about where he was staying. Johanne said he had said the Fjellstad hut. Very clearly. Twice, in fact, because somebody at the coffee had asked him again.

"Who asked him again?" Johanne wiped the counter, which did not need wiping. It is a small shop and there is one coffee table by the window and on a Thursday morning in February there are always the same six or seven at it. "I do not remember," she said. "It was busy." It had not been busy. Johanne did not look up.

Ida carried the milk out to the car and sat in it for a minute with the engine off and the shop light making a yellow rectangle on the snow beside her. Then she wrote the date at the top of a clean page, and under it the word ELEVEN, and under that, because she was tired and because it was true, the sentence: nobody in this valley is going to help me.