The Valley Would Rather Not

She went back on the Wednesday and sat down at the coffee table without being invited, which in Vasslia is a form of violence, and put her hat on the table and said good morning to each of the five people at it by name. Old Sverre Lid. His nephew. The two Haugen sisters who had run the post office until there stopped being one. Erling Brenna, who ran the grazing cooperative and eleven other things.

They were extremely pleasant to her for fifteen minutes. She learned that the winter had been hard, that the winter had been mild, that both of these were true in ways that depended on whether you kept sheep, that the road authority were fools, that the road authority did their best, and that it was a terrible thing about the man on the hill, absolutely terrible, and had he family.

"He had a dog," said Ida. Nobody knew what to do with that, which was why she had said it. Sverre Lid, who was eighty-four and had stopped caring about the shape of a conversation some decades earlier, said that a dog was worse, in a way, and one of the Haugen sisters said Sverre, and Sverre said well it is, and there was a silence.

"He was in here Thursday," said Ida. "Somebody asked him where he was stopping." A general and immediate agreement that yes, somebody had, and it was so hard to say who, so many people through on a Thursday. She let that sit for a while. She had learned that the useful thing about a lie everyone has agreed on is that nobody has agreed on the details of it.

"He said Fjellstad," said Erling Brenna. He said it easily, the way you say a thing you have already decided to say. "It was me that asked him, I should think. I asked him if he had somewhere, because it was Thursday and it was forecast, and he said Fjellstad, and I said that was a good hut and he would be all right in it." He turned his cup round on the saucer. "Which he would have been."

Ida looked at him. He was sixty or so, with the build of a man who had loaded hay into his fifties, and a face that had been out of doors for all of it, and he met her eye the whole time without any of the sliding that people do. "You asked him," she said. "Somebody had to," said Brenna. "He was going up on his own and he did not know the hill."

She thanked them all and put her hat back on and went out, and behind her the conversation did not resume, and she stood on the step in the cold for four or five seconds longer than she needed to, listening to five people not talking, which told her nothing at all that would ever go in a file and which she noted down in the car anyway.

He came to find her that afternoon at the station, which was a room with a stove behind the community hall, and he brought a folder. That was the first thing that unsettled her: he had brought a folder, and he had brought it within six hours of her sitting down at his coffee table.

The folder had the cooperative's hut list in it. Nine huts, six of them on the summer grazing and three up on the shoulder, with the state of each and the date of the last inspection and the name of whoever held the keys, and Erling took her through all nine in order although she had asked about one.

"Fjellstad we did in October," he said. "New felt on the north pitch, and we took the old stove out and put the one from Lidhaugen in, because Lidhaugen is coming down anyway. Shutters were sound. Woodstack we top up in November, and it was topped." He turned the page round so she could read it the right way up, which she found she resented and could not have said why.

"And the keys?" "Two on the board at the co-op and one with me and one at the shop for anybody walking in the summer." He counted them off. "There is no great security about it, constable. It is a hut. There is nothing in it worth the walk except the stove and the wood, and anybody who needs those is welcome to them, which is more or less the point of the whole arrangement."

"He had a key on him." She watched Brenna's face very carefully when she said it and got absolutely nothing, and later she would think about the fact that she had got nothing, and about how strange it is that a man is not surprised to hear a thing he already knows and equally not surprised to hear a thing he does not.

"Then he had one off the board," said Brenna. "Or off Johanne. Either. That is how it works and I would not want you thinking anybody had been careless, because they had not, they had done exactly the right thing." He closed the folder. "He had a key and a hut and a stove and a full stack. Whatever went wrong up there did not go wrong because this valley failed to look after him."

And there it was, she thought, watching him go out to his pickup. He had come six hours after she sat down at a table, with a folder, to tell her that the valley had done nothing wrong. She had not, at any point, in any conversation, with anybody, suggested that it had.

She dried the oilskin notebook slowly over four days on a shelf above the stove, turning it twice a day, which is not the correct forensic procedure and which she wrote down that she had done, on the grounds that a thing written down is a thing you have not hidden. Bergen would have done it properly. Bergen would have done it on the first of March.

Most of it was levels. Columns of figures in a small tight hand, with station names down the left, and the names meant nothing to her until she found a page where he had sketched the shoulder of the hill and put the stations on it, and then all of it meant something and she sat down.

He had been shooting a line along the six-hundred-and-forty metre contour, all the way from the Storli farms round the head of the valley to the foot of Skarvet. Twenty-two stations. The last four had dates against them from the week he died, and the very last, station nineteen, had a date and then a second date under it in the same pencil, four days later, and then a word.

The word was, as far as she could make it out through the water damage, MOVED. Underlined twice. And under that, a fresh column of figures that did not agree with the first column of figures for the same station by rather more than half a metre.

Ida did not know what a benchmark was, exactly, or what it meant for one to move, or whether half a metre was a great deal or nothing at all. She knew that a man had written a word in capitals and underlined it twice, and that people do not do that about their own errors. They do it about somebody else's.

She rang the number on the receipt from Voss and got a hire company. She rang the company on the back of the notebook and got an answering machine and left a message that she thought sounded reasonable and, playing it back in her head afterwards, did not. She rang Bergen and asked whether they had traced his employer and was told that they had and that it was a consultancy and that she would be told in due course.

Then she sat with the notebook open on the desk under the lamp for a long time, at the page with the word on it, and thought about a man who finds something wrong on the fourth of February and goes back on the eighth to check it and writes it in capitals, and then, two days after that, walks past a hut he has the key to and lies down in the snow.

On the Friday she started asking about the night of the tenth, which she had put off because she knew what it would do. There are eleven houses in the valley with a sightline to the Fjellstad shoulder, and she went to all eleven, and at every one of them she asked whether anybody had seen a light up there on the Monday night.

Six said no. Three said they did not look. One, the Haugen sisters, said that they were in bed by nine and had been for forty years, thank you. And the eleventh was Marit Brenna, who was Erling's wife, and who kept her hands in the sink the whole time Ida was in the kitchen and answered every question to the window.

"You would see it from here," said Ida. "You can see the whole shoulder from this window. If there had been a lamp up there you would have seen it." "I would have," said Marit, "if I had been looking." "Were you looking?" "I do not sit at the window at night, constable. I have things to do." The water ran. Nothing was being washed.

Ida changed direction, because she had learned that the second question is the one that gets answered. "Was Erling at home on the Monday night?" And Marit said yes, straight away, with no gap in it at all, and then she said, into the window, "He was at the co-op until late, and then he was home," and there was a gap in the middle of that, and it was in the wrong place.

Driving back down, Ida found she was gripping the wheel and made herself stop. She had nothing. A word in a wet notebook. A woman who did not turn round. A man who brought a folder. If she had written any of it in a report to Bergen the man on the telephone would have made the diary noise, and he would have been within his rights.

She stopped at the turning where you can see the hut and switched the engine off and sat looking at the shoulder for a while, and it began to snow, and the shoulder went, quite quickly, from a shape to a suggestion to nothing at all. That was how fast it went. Six minutes, perhaps, from a black building you could not possibly miss to no building at all.

And then it stopped, and the shoulder came back, and the hut was there again exactly where it had been, plain and obvious against the snow, and Ida sat in her cold car and thought: yes, but he had a lamp, and he had a key, and if the weather took the hut away from him for six minutes then in the seventh minute he would have walked to it. So why did he not.