Mьrrenis a small village, with very little prospect of getting any bigger. Being accessible only by helicopter or funicular railway, there is a limit to the quantity of sausage and beer that can be got up the hill to sustain its residents and visitors and, by and large, the locals like it that way. There are three big hotels, a dozen or so smaller boarding houses, and a hundred scattered farm houses and chalets, all built with that exaggeratedly tall pitched roof that makes every Swiss building look as if most of it is buried underground. Which, given their fetish for nuclear shelters, it probably is.
Although the village was conceived and built by an Englishman, it’s not a particularly English resort nowadays. Germans and Austrians come to walk and cycle in the summer, and Italians, French, Japanese, Americans - anyone, basically, who speaks the international language of brightly coloured leisure fabrics - come to ski in the winter.
The Swiss come all year round to make money. The money-making conditions are famously excellent from November to April, with several off-piste retail sites andbureau de change facilities, and hopes are high that next year - and about time too - money-making will become an Olympic sport. The Swiss are quietly fancying their chances.
But there is one feature in particular that has made Mьrren especially attractive to Francisco, because this is our first outing and we’ve all got a few butterflies. Even Cyrus, and he’s hard as nails. Owing to the fact that it’s small, Swiss, law-abiding, and hard to get to, thevillageof Mьrren has no police force.
Not even part-time.
Bernhard and I arrived this morning, and checked into our hotels; he in The Jungfrau, me for The Eiger.
The girl at reception examined my passport as if she’d never seen one before, and took twenty minutes to go through the phenomenal list of things that Swiss hoteliers like to know about you before they’ll let you sleep in one of their beds. I think I may have got stuck for a moment on the middle name of my geography teacher, and I definitely hesitated on the postal code of the midwife who attended the birth of my great-grandmother, but otherwise I sailed through it without a hitch.
I unpacked, and changed into a day- gloorange, yellow and lilac windcheater, which is the sort of thing you have to wear in a ski resort if you don’t want to be conspicuous, then ambled out of the hotel, up the hill into the village.
It was a beautiful afternoon; one to make you realise that God really can be very good sometimes with weather and scenery. The nursery slopes were almost empty at this time of day, there being a good hour of skiing time left before the sun dipped behind the Schilthorn and people suddenly remembered that they were seven thousand feet above sea level in the middle of December.
I sat outside a bar for a while and pretended to write postcards, every now and then casting an eye towards a herd of quite fantastically young French children who were following a female instructor down the slopes in crocodile formation. Each one about the size of a fire extinguisher, and dressed in three hundred pounds’ worth of Gortex and duckdown, they slithered and snaked behind their Amazon leader, some of them upright, some bent double, and some even too small for you to be able to tell whether they were upright or bent double.
I started wondering how long it would be before pregnant mothers started appearing on ski slopes, sliding down on their stomachs, yelling technical instructions and whistling Mozart.
Dirk Van Der Hoewe, in the company of his Scottish wife Rhona and their two teenage daughters, arrived at The Edelweiss ateight o’clock the same evening. They’d had a long journey, six hours door to door, and Dirk was tired, irritable, and fat.
Politicians aren’t usually fat nowadays - either because they work harder than they used to, or because modern electorates have expressed a preference for being able to see both sides of the person they’re voting for without having to lean over - but Dirk looked like he’d bucked the trend. He was a physical reminder of an earlier century, when politics was something you did between two and four in the afternoon, before squeezing into some fancy trousers for an evening of piquet and foie gras. He wore a tracksuit and furry boots, which is not considered unusual if you’re Dutch, and a pair of spectacles bounced around his breasts on a loop of pink string.
He and Rhona stood in the middle of the foyer directing their sumptuous luggage, which had Louis Vuitton written all over it, while their daughters scowled and kicked at the floor, deep in their furious, adolescent hell.
I watched from the bar. Bernhard watched from the newspaper stand.
The next day was a technical rehearsal, Francisco had said. Take everything at half-speed, quarter-speed even, and if there’s a problem, or anything that looks like it might become one, stop and check it out. The day after would be dress rehearsal, at full-speed, using a ski pole as the rifle, but today was technical.
The team was me, Bernhard and Hugo, with Latifa as back-up; which we hoped we wouldn’t have to use, because she couldn’t ski. Neither could Dirk - there being very few hills inHolland larger than a packet of cigarettes - but he had paid for his holiday, had arranged for a news photographer to be there to catch the care-worn statesman at play, and all in all was damned if he wasn’t going to give it a try.
We watched Dirk and Rhona as they hired their equipment, grunting and clumping with the boots; we watched them as they trudged fifty yards up the nursery slopes, stopping every now and then to admire the view and muck about with the gear; we watched as Rhona got herself ready to point downhill, and Dirk found a hundred and fifty reasons not to go anywhere; and then, finally, when we were all starting to feel itchy at having to stand still doing nothing for so long, we saw the Dutch Deputy Minister of Finance, white-faced with the stress of it all, slither ten feet down the hill and sit down.
Bernhard and I exchanged a look. The only one we’d allowed ourselves since we arrived, and I had to turn away and scratch my knee.
By the time I looked back at Dirk, he too was laughing. It was a laugh that said I am an adrenalin-maddened speed freak, who craves danger the way other men crave women and wine. I take fantastic risks, and by rights I shouldn’t still be alive. I am living on borrowed time.
They repeated the exercise three times, stepping an extra yard up the hill for each run, before fatness got the better of Dirk, and they retired to a cafe for lunch. As the two of them stumped off across the snow, I turned back to the mountain for a glimpse of the daughters, hoping to judge how good they were on skis, and therefore how far afield they’d be likely to go on an average day. If they were gangly and awkward, I reckoned they’d probably hang about the lower slopes, within reach of their parents. If they were any good, and if they hated Dirk and Rhona even half as much as they seemed to, they would be inHungary by now.
I could see no sign of them, and was about to turn back down the slope when I caught sight of a man, standing on a crest above me, looking down into the valley. He was too far away for me to be able to read his features, but even so, he was absurdly conspicuous. And not just because he had neither skis, poles, boots, sunglasses, nor even a woolly hat.