FOUR

      The next morning was bright and sunny and the snow, which had been falling all night, had stopped, leaving the world freshly minted. When Ballard got up, heavy-eyed and unrested, he found Mrs Evans in the kitchen cooking breakfast. She scolded him. ‘You should have let me know when you were coming back. I only learned by chance from Betty Hargreaves last night.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot. Are you cooking for three?’ Mrs Evans usually ate breakfast with him; it was a democratic society.

      ‘I am. Your friend has gone out already, but he’ll be back for a late breakfast.’

      Ballard consulted his watch to discover that he had overslept by more than an hour. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

      When he had showered and dressed he felt better and found McGill in the living-room unwrapping a large parcel. ‘It came,’ said McGill. ‘Your truck got through.’

      Ballard looked at what was revealed; it was a backpack which appeared to contain nothing but sections of aluminium tubing each nestling in an individual canvas pocket. ‘What’s that?’

      ‘The tools of my trade,’ said McGill. Mrs Evans called, and he added, ‘Let’s eat; I’m hungry.’

      Ballard toyed with his breakfast while McGill wolfed down a plateful of bacon and eggs, and pleased Mrs Evans by asking for more. While she was out of the room he said, ‘You asked me here for the skiing, and there’s no time like the present. How’s your leg?’

      Ballard shook his head. ‘The leg is all right, but sorry, Mike – not today. I’m a working man.’

      ‘You’d better come.’ Something in McGill’s tone made Ballard look at him sharply. McGill’s face was serious. ‘You’d better come and see what I’m doing. I want an independent witness.’

      ‘A witness to what?’

      ‘To whatever it is I find.’

      ‘And what will that be?’

      ‘How do I know until I find it?’ He stared at Ballard. ‘I’m serious, Ian. You know what my job is. I’m going to make a professional investigation. You’re the boss man of the mine and you couldn’t make a better witness. You’ve got authority.’

      ‘For God’s sake!’ said Ballard. ‘Authority to do what?’

      ‘To close down the mine if need be, but that depends on what I find, and I won’t know that until I look, will I?’ As Ballard’s jaw dropped McGill said, ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes at what I saw yesterday. It looked like a recipe for instant disaster, and I spent a damned uneasy night. I won’t be happy until I take a look.’

      ‘Where?’

      McGill got to his feet and walked to the window. ‘Come here.’ He pointed at the steep slope above the mine. ‘Up there.’

      Ballard looked at the long curve, blinding white in the sunlight. ‘You think …’ His voice tailed away.

      ‘I think nothing until I get evidence one way or the other,’ said McGill sharply. ‘I’m a scientist, not a soothsayer.’ He shook his head warningly as Mrs Evans came in with a fresh plate of bacon and eggs. ‘Finish your breakfast.’

      As they sat down he said, ‘I suppose you can find me a pair of skis.’

      Ballard nodded, his mind busy with the implications of what McGill had said – or had not said. McGill dug into his second plateful of breakfast. ‘Then we go skiing,’ he said lightly.

      Two hours later they were nearly three thousand feet above the mine and half way up the slope. They had not talked much and when Ballard had tried McGill advised him to save his breath for climbing. But now they stopped and McGill unslung the backpack, dropping one of the straps over a ski-stick rammed firmly into the snow.

      He took off his skis and stuck them vertically into the snow up-slope of where he was standing. ‘Another safety measure,’ he said conversationally. ‘If there’s a slide then the skis will tell someone that we’ve been swept away. And that’s why you don’t take off your Oertel cord.’

      Ballard leaned on his sticks. ‘The last time you talked about avalanches I was in one.’

      McGill grinned. ‘Don’t fool yourself. You were in a little trickle – a mere hundred feet.’ He pointed down the mountainside. ‘If this lot goes it’ll be quite different.’

      Ballard felt uneasy. ‘You’re not really expecting an avalanche?’

      McGill shook his head. ‘Not right now.’ He bent down to the backpack. ‘I’m going to do a little gentle thumping and you can help me to do it. Take off your skis.’

      He began to take aluminium tubing from the pack and to assemble it into some kind of a gadget. ‘This is a penetrometer – an updating of the Haefeli design. It’s a sort of pocket pile-driver – it measures the resistance of the snow. It also gives us a core, and temperature readings at ten-centimetre intervals. All the data for a snow profile.’

      Ballard helped him set it up although he suspected that McGill could have done the job just as handily without him. There was a sliding weight which dropped down a narrow rod a known distance before hitting the top of the aluminium tube and thus driving it into the snow. Each time the weight dropped McGill noted the distance of penetration and recorded it in a notebook.

      They thumped with the weight, adding lengths of tubing as necessary, and hit bottom at 158 centimetres – about five feet.

      ‘There’s a bit of a hard layer somewhere in the middle,’ said McGill, taking an electric plug from the pack. He made a connection in the top of the tubing and plugged the other end into a box with a dial on it. ‘Make a note of these temperatures; there’ll be fifteen readings.’

      As Ballard took the last reading he said, ‘How do we get it out?’

      ‘We have a tripod and a miniature block and tackle.’ McGill grinned. ‘I think they pinched this bit from an oil rig.’

      He erected the tripod and started to haul out the tube. As the first section came free he disconnected it carefully and then took a knife and sliced through the ice in the tube. The sections were two feet long and the three of them were soon out. McGill put the tubes back into the pack, complete with the snow cores they contained. ‘We’ll have a look at those back at the house.’

      Ballard squatted on his heels and looked across