Presumed Dead by Vince May

workers who had been
bringing up the rear, helped him by surging forward and linking arms to form a
safe corridor for the stretcher party who were making their way to the train.
Batard saw the stretcher safely onto the train, had a few words with his men,
then made his way back to the Montenvers Hotel, where Ross was waiting.
    Louisa Dulac’s body had been found around
noon under two feet of snow, roughly half way up the Charpoua Glacier, not far
above the refuge hut where Philippe had nursed Alice. Louisa had been carried
down onto the glacier during the night by an avalanche from her former resting
place, high on the mountainside, where she had lain buried, undisturbed and
frozen in the snow for three months.
    A yellow Labrador named Miel had first
detected her. He’d been working his way up the glacier in near blizzard
conditions with his owner, Christian Lochet, a mountain guide from Chamonix,
when he’d caught a faint scent of her under a freshly deposited mound of snow.
He’d snuffled and pawed at the spot to indicate that there was something there
until his master noticed and went over with his pole. Carefully probing the
pile of snow, Lochet had soon found there was an area about the size of a human
body where his pole would only go a little way in. He’d dropped to his knees
and had dug the snow away by hand until he’d uncovered Louisa’s frozen corpse.
    After that, he’d used his whistle to
attract the attention of the other searchers, and together, they’d signaled for
a stretcher to be brought up and had loaded her onto it, after first wrapping
her in a red blanket.
    Ross had heard the news on Jacques Batard’s
radio along with everyone else who was crowded into the Montenvers Hotel. When
the news came, there had been a mass exodus from the hotel and a stampede to
the observation terrace, but they need not have rushed. It had taken the
stretcher-bearers followed, by the rest of the search team, nearly three hours
to bring Louisa up to the terminus.
    Ross had been asked by Batard not to come
to the observation terrace, and had been happy to comply with the Captain’s
request. Instead, he’d gone to his comfortable room on the top floor of the
hotel, from where he could see the action both through his window and on the
television. As the stretcher came into view, he stood at the window and raised
his brandy glass in a toast. ‘To you, my dear,’ he said aloud, before gulping
down the neat liquor. After that, he turned the television off and sat down
quietly to wait for Batard.
    A few minutes later, there was a knock on
the door. Ross called, ‘Come in.’
    Jacques Batard opened the door and walked
into the room with his hat in his hand and a somber look on his face. ‘Well
Monsieur, that is that. My men are taking her down to the hospital now. I am
very sorry.’
    Ross was giving his best impression of a
man devastated by bad news. ‘Did you see her?’ he asked quietly.
    ‘Yes Monsieur.’
    ‘How did she die?’ Ross asked earnestly.
‘She didn’t suffer at all, did she?’
    ‘From what I could see, Monsieur,’ Batard
said gently, ‘she must have fallen. Her head and face are badly injured.’
    Ross buried his face in his hands and
wailed, ‘Oh my God.’
    ‘Please Monsieur, I do not think she would
have suffered.’
    ‘But how could it have happened?’ Ross
pleaded, ‘Why did it happen?’
    ‘All we can think is that Madame must have
decided to follow the path up the glacier and that she slipped and fell.’
    Ross considered this for a moment then
said, ‘So you are saying it was just a simple accident, an act of God?’
    ‘Yes, Monsieur, sadly we have many such
accidents in the mountains every year,’ Batard said, shaking his head.
    Ross made a great display of sobbing into
his hands for a while longer, then looked up again and asked, ‘What happens
now?’
    ‘Madame’s body will be taken to the
mortuary at the hospital in Chamonix.’
    ‘Will there be an autopsy?’ Ross