Jim’s fascination with explosives made Lenny despise him more. Jim was the incendiary expert in the resort but he was a pig on skis. Lenny and the two other guys who took turns to help out ‘lanching in the high season, got all the revenge they needed for being pulled off the trails to do this shit by scoring with any girl Jim looked at sideways. Girls don’t care much about dynamite when they get a chance of a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.

‘Aw Christ. What is he doing up there?’

Lenny got off the snow cat, sinking up to his knees in the soft snow, and cupped his gloved hands to a mouth ringed with white lip salve. ‘Jimbo! I’m losing toes down here. Get a fuckin’ move on!’

He saw the stooping figure of Jim look up, and then Lenny felt the explosion an age before he heard it.

Jim’s body dissolved rather than blew apart. His flesh pushed tennis-ball-sized holes in his Goretex smock, and the face that he had washed for twenty-six years and shaved for ten, remained nearly intact as the skull to which it had been attached splintered into a macabre approximation of a fibre-filled breakfast cereal. Lenny had just enough time to watch one of Jim’s arms windmilling through the air on its own like a stick you threw the dog.

Before the pieces that made up Jim McKenzie could attempt a landing, they were lost in the fountain of snow and rock that was heading towards Lenny. He didn’t run or shout, but then that would have been hard with only half a face left, the eye on the remainder of his face hanging uselessly down his cheek. The rock hit him on the left side of the head, knocking him sideways, and as his exposed brains quivered, ready to obey gravity, the snow melted into every orifice, as though it were disinfecting the wounds.

Six heli-skiers on their way to some dream powder in the back country saw the explosion from the air and thought nothing of it. The pilot, Abe Foster, thought a great deal about it. Avalanche explosions are small, and the avalanches they cause rumble, roll and then stop. This was a mother of a bang, with plumes of thick black smoke spiralling up from Wolf Mountain as though terrorists had hit an oil terminal. The whole hill seemed to be disintegrating.

Abe took the chopper up another five hundred feet and banked west to take a better look. It was bad. Christ help any poor sucker in the vicinity of a blow like that. Abe got on the radio and called patrol, then turned the chopper round, and, ignoring the whining from his dumb-assed stock-broker passengers, headed back to Silver.