Mike thought about marking the trail outside the trees with his skis first. Just so the wagon could find them. But even as he thought about it he wondered why. Every patroller worth the white cross on the suit would run instantly to the injured skier and assess the situation. Not pussy about with skis when someone was lying there needing help. He was nervous. No explanation. Just nervous.

Grabbing the picture back into his head of how the boy might be alive and in pain, Mike moved forward. He heard Betty and Lachlan shouting, somewhere, in another time.

He shouted back. ‘Here! Through here! Below you.’

That pink Rossignol. It had Sean painted on it in big fat clumsy letters with a windsurfing sticker of a cartoon piranha partially obscuring the n. He remembered everything about that ski. The scratches, the stickers, the angle it jutted out of the snow. He remembered it very well indeed. When he got to what was left of Sean Bradford, and saw the mess of flesh, guts and bone that was loosely attached to that ski, Mike could barely remember his own name.

‘Jesus fucking Christ! Jesus Jesus Jesus!’

Good in a crisis, thought Eric sarcastically as he watched Pasqual Weaver shrieking and clutching at her breast. The police incident tape made a whirring sound as it fluttered in the wind where it was attached to the trees, and more than twenty people tried to stand upright on the treacherous edge of the darkening trail.

Pasqual leaned against her snowmobile, a female constable’s arm round her shoulder, and continued to practise her mature managerial skills by making a series of sounds from the back of her throat that sounded like ga. She’d made the mistake of marching across the trail, ducking under the tape and making straight for McGee. She needed through there. This was her patch and they would damn well let her past.