Beck had told Jonas to put the headlights on again, and they shone out over a field of snow. Beck shivered inside his borrowed coat. He hadn’t enjoyed removing anything from a dead body, but their need for it was greater than Kolberg’s.
He walked a few steps out onto the snow, and crouched down to prod the ground. The cold immediately bit to the bone. His fingers sunk through the snow and only went in for a couple of inches before they hit solid rock. He grimaced — this wasn’t looking good. It was too thin for what he had in mind. He needed a couple of metres.
He looked thoughtfully across the track, which ran down the ridge of a shallow slope on the mountain. The other side of the track, behind the van, was upwind. Snow could have piled up on the lee side of the slope. He tapped on the driver’s window.
“Put it into reverse,” he said.
There was a moment while Jonas complied, and then the van’s reversing lights came on, lighting up the snow behind it. Beck walked out into the snow, and immediately sank in to his knees. This was more promising. He waded further. The ground rose and fell in shallow dips and rises, and one gully in particular caught his eye. Only the top of it was picked out in the van’s lights — the rest was dark shadow. But he could see enough to check it out, and he liked what he saw.
He hurried back to the van.
“Switch off,” he said. “We’re digging a snow cave.”
Jonas stared at him.
“Yes? What do we do when we’ve dug it?”
“We sleep in it.”
“You mean we’re going to sleep in the snow?”
“Snow is an amazing insulator, believe it or not. It’s freezing but it traps so much air it actually keeps the warmth in really well. Hey, I bet your ancestors did it all the time.”
“My ancestors used to pillage and plunder England. It doesn’t mean I want to copy them. But, hey — look what I found stuffed under the seat.”
For a moment, Beck just stared at the bundle which Jonas thrust at him. It looked like… but no, it couldn’t be…
“That’s my gear!”
He almost snatched it from Jonas’s hands. Yup — coat, trousers, hat, gloves.
“Mine is here too. And our boots.” Jonas frowned. “They kidnapped us — why would they take our things too?”
Beck was too busy shrugging off Kolberg’s too-big coat and pulling on his own things to answer for a moment. One answer did come to mind and it wasn’t a pleasant one — though it only confirmed what he already knew.
“Because they meant for us to disappear completely,” he said. “If we’d just vanished but our stuff was still there, then people would know we’d been taken. If we’d disappeared with our outdoor stuff, they’d assume we had gone somewhere deliberately — sneaking off for some adventure. Our disappearance would be a tragic accident, but no one would suspect anyone else had been involved.”
It was one more reminder that this hadn’t all been a misunderstanding. Someone, for some reason, really had wished them dead.
In a couple of minutes, they were properly dressed for a night on a Swedish mountain and Beck felt a lot better about what he was planning. They were still in for a freezing cold night, and a cold day after as they made their way to Riksliden, but he had an extra layer of warmth and protection that he wouldn’t have had otherwise and that was what counted.
There was one more thing they needed, which Beck had spotted when they checked the spare wheel compartment. The compartment was sealed off with a metal lid — a flat square metal plate that was light and strong, and just what Beck needed. He unscrewed it and they trudged with it through the snow to the gully.
Now the van’s lights were out, their eyes could adjust to the moonlight and there was enough of it to see what they were doing. The gully was about ten metres long and three deep. The last time Beck had done this had been high in the mountains of Alaska, with his friend Tikaani, and there had been plenty of snow to dig into. They had been able to excavate a proper cave for themselves, well protected from the elements and from the storm raging a few centimetres above them.
The snow here wasn’t deep enough for that — but on one side of the gully it had piled up thick, and that was all they needed to dig out a sideways trench that would keep them alive for one night. Beck pushed the edge of the lid into the snow and started to scrape.