A Winter Grave

Prologue

NOVEMBER, 2051

Little will heighten your sense of mortality more than a confrontation with death. But right now such an encounter is the furthest thing from Addie’s mind, and so she is unprepared for what is to come.

She is conflicted. Such a day as this should lift the spirits. She is almost at the summit. The wind is cold, but the sky is a crystal-clear blue, and the winter sun lays its gold across the land below. Not all of the land. Only where it rises above the shadow cast by the peaks that surround it. The loch, at its eastern end, rarely sees the sun in this mid-November. Further west, it emerges finally into sunshine, glinting a deep cut-glass blue and spangling in coruscating flashes of light. A gossamer mist hovers above its surface, almost spectral in the angled mid-morning sunshine. Recent snowfall catches the wind and is blown like dust along the ridge serpentining to the north.

But she is blind to it all. Distracted by a destiny she appears unable to change. Such things, she thinks, must be preordained. Unhappiness a natural state, broken only by rare moments of unanticipated pleasure.

The wind seems to inflate her down-filled North Face parka as well as her lungs. Her daypack, with its carefully stowed flask of milky coffee and cheese sandwiches, rests lightly on her shoulders, catching the breeze a little as she turns towards the north. The peaks of the Mamores rise and fall all around her, almost every one of them a Munro, and in the distance, sunlight catches the summit of the towering Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, the loftiest prominence in the British Isles — a little of its measured height lost now with the rise in sea levels below.

She stops here for a moment and looks back. And down. She can no longer see the tiny arcs of housing that huddle around the head of the loch where she lives. Kin is the Gaelic for head. Hence the name of the village: Kinlochleven. The settlement at the head of Loch Leven.

Somewhere away to her left lies the shimmering Blackwater Reservoir, the sweep of its dam, and the six huge black pipes laid side by side that zigzag their way down the valley to the hydro plant above the village. The occasional leak sends water under pressure fizzing into the air to make tiny rainbows where it catches the sunlight.

Finally, she focuses on the purpose of her climb. An ascent she makes once a week during the fiercest weather months of the winter to check on the condition of the flimsy little weather station she installed here — she stops to think — six years ago now. Just before she got pregnant. Fifty kilograms of metal framework and components, carried on her back in three separate trips during the more clement summer months. A tripod bolted to the rock, a central pole with sensors attached. Air temperature and relative humidity. Wind speed and direction. Ultraviolet, visible and infrared radiation. Solar panels, radio antenna, a satellite communication device. A metal box that is anchored at the summit to sandstone recrystallised into white quartzite. It contains the data logger, barometric pressure sensor, radios and battery. How it all survives here, in this most inhospitable of environments, is always a source of amazement to Addie.

It takes her less than fifteen minutes to clear the sensors of snow and ice, and to check that everything is in working order. Fifteen minutes during which she does not have to think of anything else. Fifteen minutes of escape from her depression. Fifteen minutes to forget.

When she finishes, she squats on the metal box and delves into her pack for the sandwiches thrown together in haste, and the hot, sweet coffee that will wash them down. And she cannot stop her thoughts returning to those things that have troubled her these last months. She closes her eyes, as if that might shut them out, but she carries her depression with her like the daypack on her back. If only she could shrug it from her shoulders in the same way when she returns home.

Eventually, she gets stiffly to her feet and turns towards the north-facing corrie that drops away from the curve of the summit. Coire an dà loch. The Corrie of the Two Lochans. She can see sunlight glinting on the two tiny lochs at the foot of the drop which give the corrie its name, and starts her way carefully down the west ridge. There is a mere skin of snow here, where the wind has blown it off into the corrie itself, rocks and vegetation breaking its surface like some kind of atopic dermatitis.

Before the Big Change, long-lying snow patches had become increasingly rare among the higher Scottish mountains. Thirty years ago they had all but vanished. Now they linger in the north- and east-facing corries in increasing size and number all through the summer months. Melting and freezing, melting and freezing, until they become hard like ice and impervious to the diminished estival temperatures. She had watched this patch in the Coire an dà Loch both shrink and grow across the seasons, increasing in size every year. The next snowstorm will bury it, and it will likely not be visible again until late spring.

But today there is something different about it. A yawning gap at the top end. Like the entrance to a hollow beneath it, disappearing into darkness. Maybe it had been there during her last visit, and she had simply not seen it. Obscured by snow, perhaps, which was then blown away by high winds. At any rate, she is intrigued. She has heard of snow tunnels. Periods of milder weather, as they have just experienced, sending meltwater down the corries to tunnel its way beneath the ice of long-lying snow patches.

She forgets those things that have been troubling her, and slithers down the ridge and into the corrie. The snowfall that fills this narrow valley is peppered by the rocks that break its surface from the scree below, and she has to make her way carefully across it to where the snow patch it hosts lies deep in its frozen heart. Twenty metres long, seven or eight wide. Maybe two-and-a-half deep. She arrives at the lower end of it, swinging herself round to find herself gazing up into the first snow tunnel she has ever seen. It takes her breath away. A perfect cathedral arch formed in large, geometric dimples of nascent ice stalactites above the rock and the blackened vegetation beneath it. Light from the top end of the tunnel floods down like the water before it, turning the ice blue. Big enough for her to crawl into.

She quickly removes her pack and delves into one of its pockets to retrieve her camera, then drops to her knees and climbs carefully inside. She stops several times to take photographs. Then a selfie, with the tunnel receding behind her. But she wants to capture the colour and structure of the arch, and turns on to her back so that she can shoot up and back towards the light.

The man is almost directly overhead, encased in the ice. Fully dressed, in what occurs incongruously to Addie as wholly inadequate climbing gear. He is lying face down, arms at his side, eyes and mouth wide open, staring at her for all the world as though he were still alive. But there is neither breath in his lungs, nor sight in his eyes. And Addie’s scream can be heard echoing all around the Coire an dà Loch below.