One
Have you ever seen an avalanche? I have. I’ve heard it too, and it’s the most awesome, terrifying thing. The roar of it vibrates in the air and that wall of snow rushing down the mountainside makes the whole world shake and tremble. I only saw it briefly, over my shoulder, as I skied for my life, and I promise you, I never want to see it again. But that roar, like a wild animal about to devour you, I still hear that in nightmares.
I could so easily have died that day, buried beneath goodness only knows how many feet of snow. I try not to think about it, but I know it will be a long time, if ever, before I can get up the nerve to ski off-piste again. And I’ll probably never be up to it physically, anyway. I shattered my leg as well as breaking my wrist and my collarbone when I shot over the overhanging rock that saved my life and where I lay stunned whilst the snow roared past, a foaming white ocean I could no longer see.
When I woke up in hospital I was grateful for the pain because I was alive to feel it and I might so easily not have been. Later, as the weeks and months dragged by, I became awfully tired of it, and frustrated. Let’s face it, I’m no saint. When my leg throbbed relentlessly and I had to have more surgery I had to work very hard to keep reminding myself how lucky I had been. I had. I had! But there were times when I felt I was being sucked down more surely than if I’d been buried alive that day.
I never did find out what started that avalanche, but I know it could have been something quite insignificant. Like a pebble starting a landslide, when a little shower of rubble becomes a cascade, so that ocean of snow may have begun with one little breaker. But of course it didn’t end there. Long after the snow had settled, the chain of events that avalanche started was rolling relentlessly on. Leading me, though I didn’t realize it, into a web of blind alleys and dark secrets towards a nightmare that would put my life in danger all over again.
Everything that happened began with the avalanche. My questionable decision to go off-piste that day was the catalyst. If I’d stayed on the slopes, I wouldn’t have ended up badly injured; if I hadn’t been injured, I wouldn’t have been at home in Stoke Compton, bored and frustrated, looking for something to help the days pass more quickly. I’d have been simply getting on with my life. Tim and I might still have been together, and I’d have been too busy with my job – a reporter on the regional daily, Western News – to think of anything beyond Crown Court cases and the regeneration plans for the city docks area and the occasional interview with some local celebrity. I would never have begun asking questions about an old case of arson that had happened in my home town, thirty miles away.
Would I have pursued it if I’d known what lay in store? The answer to that has to be yes. I’m a journalist first and foremost; I’m nosy and persistent. And I have a strong sense of justice. But I had no idea, none at all, of the nightmare I was letting myself in for. Or that I was to discover, the hard way, that sometimes the very people you think you can trust turn out to be those you can’t trust at all.
But I’m going too fast. If I’m to tell you what happened, make any sense of it, I have to start at the beginning. Well, what was the beginning for me, anyway.
When I got out of hospital I was still incapacitated to a certain degree, and definitely in need of some tender loving care. Coping by myself in the city flat I shared with Tim was barely practicable given the way things were. If he had been in a nine-to-five job within striking distance, I could probably have managed, but he wasn’t. He’s a captain with one of the budget airlines, which means he works irregular shift patterns and is often away overnight. Tim in a luxury hotel in Malaga or Madeira with the rest of the flight crew wouldn’t be a great deal of help to me if I needed urgent help.
I wasn’t sure, in any case, if I wanted to rely on Tim. For some reason I was having second thoughts about whether he was the right one for me. I couldn’t actually pin down what had changed, only that it no longer felt right. Perhaps it was just that I was unsettled after the accident, depressed and seeing things through a dark haze; that was probably it. But I would have expected to want to cling to security, not push it away. I looked at Tim and felt this nagging doubt in the pit of my stomach; wondered if it had been the glamour of his job that had attracted me, not the real man inside the smart black uniform with gold braid on the shoulders. All sorts of things about him started irritating me, just silly little things really, like the way he raised a critical eyebrow and turned down the sound system whenever he came into the room, as if I was noise-polluting the planet all by myself, or tidied the magazines and newspapers I’d been leafing through into a neat pile or even whisked them away altogether. Once upon a time I’d found such habits endearing, now I prickled with annoyance. And I didn’t like it. If I was going to spend my life with this man, it didn’t bode well.