Of course I had known it was a possibility. Very likely, even, considering the length of time missing – over twenty-four hours – and the conditions out there. They would be a challenge even to someone who knew the terrain, who had any sort of survival skills. The missing guest, as far as I know, had nothing of the sort. As the hours went by, with no sign, the probability became greater.
As soon as we knew of the disappearance we had called Mountain Rescue. The response hadn’t been quite what I’d hoped for.
‘At the moment,’ the operator told me, ‘it’s looking unlikely we can get to you at all.’
‘But there must be some way you can get here—’
‘Conditions are too difficult. We’ve haven’t seen anything like this amount of snow for a long time. It’s a one-in-a-thousand weather event. Visibility is so poor we can’t even land a chopper.’
‘Are you saying that we’re on our own?’ As I said it I felt the full meaning of it. No help. I felt my stomach turn over.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. I could almost hear her thinking of the best way to respond to me. ‘Only as long as the snow continues like this,’ she said at last. ‘Soon as we have some visibility, we’ll try and get out to you.’
‘I need a bit more than “try”,’ I said.
‘I hear you madam, and we’ll get to you as soon as we are able. There are other people in the same situation: we have a whole team of climbers stuck on Ben Nevis, and another situation nearer Fort William. If you could just describe exactly your problem, madam, so I have all the details down.’
‘The guest was last seen at the Lodge, here,’ I said, ‘at … about four a.m. yesterday morning.’
‘And how big is the area?’
‘The estate?’ I groped for the figure learned in my first few weeks here. ‘A little over fifty thousand acres.’
I heard her intake of breath in my ear. Then there was another long pause on the end of the line, so long that I almost wondered if it had gone dead, whether the snow had cut off this last connection to the outside world.
‘Right,’ she said, finally. ‘Fifty thousand acres. Well. We’ll get someone out there as soon as we can.’ But her tone had changed: there was more uncertainty. I could hear a question as clearly as if she had spoken it aloud: Even if we get to you, how can we be certain of finding someone in all that wilderness?
For the past twenty-four hours we have searched as far as we can. It hasn’t been easy, with the snow coming down like this, relentlessly. I’ve only been here a year, so I’ve never actually experienced a snow-in. We must be one of the few places in the UK – bar a few barely inhabited islands – where inclement weather can completely prohibit the access of the emergency services. We always warn the guests that they might not be able to leave the estate if conditions are bad. It’s even in the waiver they have to sign. And yet it is still hard to process, the fact that no one can get in. Or out. But that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in now. Everything is clogged with snow, meaning driving’s impossible – even with winter tyres, or chains – so our search has all been done on foot. It has just been Doug and me. I am beyond exhausted – both mentally and physically. We don’t even have Iain, who comes most days to perform odd jobs about the place. He’ll have been spending New Year’s Eve with his family: stuck outside with the rest of them, no use to us. The Mountain Rescue woman was at least some help with her advice. She suggested checking first the sites that could have been used for shelter. Doug and I searched every potential hideout on the estate, the cold stinging our faces and the snow hampering our progress at every turn, until I was so tired I felt drunk.
I trudged the whole way to the station, which took me a good three hours, and checked there. Apparently there had been some talk amongst the guests of getting a train back to London.
‘One of the guests has gone missing,’ I told the station master, Alec. He’s a hulk of a man with a saturnine face: low eyebrows. ‘We’re looking all over the estate.’ I gave him a description of the missing guest.
‘They couldn’t have got on a train?’ I knew it was ridiculous, but felt it had to be asked.
He laughed in my face. ‘A train? In this? Are you mad, lass? Even if it weren’t like this, there’s no trains on New Year’s Day.’
‘But perhaps you saw something—’
‘Haven’t seen anyone,’ he told me. ‘Not since I saw that lot arrive a couple a days ago. No. Woulda noticed if there were a stranger pokin’ about.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps I could have a look around?’
He spread his hands wide, a sarcastic invitation. ‘Be ma guest.’
There wasn’t much to search: the waiting room, a single caretaker’s closet that appeared at one point to have been a toilet. And the ticket office I could see into through the window: a small, paper-strewn cubicle from which, through the money and ticket gap, came the scent of something sweetish, slightly rotten. Three crushed cans of soda decorated one corner of the desk. I saw Iain in there once with Alec, having a smoke. Iain often takes the train to collect supplies; they must have struck up something of a friendship, even if only of convenience.
Just beyond the office was a door. I opened it to discover a flight of stairs. ‘That,’ Alec said, ‘leads up to ma flat. Ma private residence’ – with a little flourish on ‘residence’.
‘I don’t suppose—’ I began. He cut me off.
‘Two rooms,’ he said. ‘And a lavvy. Ah think Ah’d know if someone were hidin’ themselves away in there.’ His voice had got a little louder, and he’d moved between me and the doorway. He was too close; I could smell stale sweat.
‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly eager to leave. ‘Of course.’
As I began my tortuous journey back towards the Lodge I turned, once, and saw him standing there, watching me leave.
Doug and I found nothing, in all the hours of searching. Not a footprint, not a strand of hair. The only tracks we came across were the small sharp impressions left by the hooves of the deer herd. The guest, it seemed, had not been active since the snow started coming down.
There’s CCTV in one place on the estate: the front gate, where the long track from the Lodge heads towards the road. The boss had it put up to both deter and catch poachers. Sometimes, frustratingly, the feed cuts out. But the whole lot was there to watch this time: from the evening before – New Year’s Eve – to yesterday, New Year’s Day, when the guest was reported missing. I fast-forwarded through the grainy footage, looking for any sign of a vehicle. If the guest had somehow left by taxi – or even on foot – the evidence would be here. There was nothing. All it showed me was a documentation of the beginning of this heavy snowfall, as on the screen the track became obliterated by a sea of white.
Perhaps a body had begun to seem like a possibility. But the confirmation of that is something so much worse.
Doug pushes a hand through his hair, which has fallen, snow-wet, into his eyes. As he does, I see that his hand – his arm, the whole of him – is trembling. It is a strange thing to see a man as tough-looking as Doug, built like a rugby player, in such a state. He used to be in the Marines, so he must have seen his fair share of death. But then so did I, in my old line of work. I know that it never quite leaves you, the existential horror of it. Besides, being the one to find a dead person – that is something else completely.
‘I think you should come and take a look too,’ he says. ‘At the body.’
‘Do you think that’s necessary?’