Dead Men Don't Ski

Not everybody’s cup of tea—hotel stuck up all by itself at the top of a chair-lift. Can’t get down to the village at all after dark, you know.”

As they had all realised in their loneliness on Innsbruck station, the English and Americans have not yet discovered Italy as a winter sports’ country. No other English voices greeted them.

Great barrels of spaghetti and macaroni of every shape and colour jostled festoons of children’s shoes strung up like Breton onions; picture postcards (of course) shared a counter with sugared almonds and cheese; Parma ham glowed pinkly delicious beside disorganised heaps of sunglasses; graceful flasks of Chianti dangled from hooks alternately with

Emmy always remembered the scene that followed as a sort of El Greco tableau. The lean, cadaverous figure of Carlo, his long face creased into vertical lines of distress, lit sharply by the stark glare of the single bulb in the cabin: the skeletal shapes of the empty chairs as they clattered on their way: the huddled figure lying motionless in the

All at once, Henry had an extraordinary impression of tension, as if each remark had more than its surface meaning, as if purposeful streams of innuendo were being directed by the speakers towards—whom? Everybody? One other person? He glanced round.

As they walked up the hill towards the chair-lift, Emmy said, “I’m somehow surprised at Jimmy being worried about money—he must be terribly rich.” “He only has the same currency allowance as the rest of us,” Henry reminded her.

The faces were pale, true, but—Henry noted with a sinking heart—quite aggressively merry and free from any sign of stress: the voices were unnaturally loud and friendly. The whole dingy place had the air of a monstrous end-of-term party.

Henry Tibbett was not a man who looked like a great detective. In fact, as he would be the first to point out, he was not a great detective, but a conscientious and observant policeman, with an occasional flair for intuitive detection which he called “my nose”. There were very few of his superiors who were not prepared to listen, and to take approp

His face was long, and creased with deep lines of intolerance, and his lean, vulpine features were crowned incongruously by a green Tyrolean hat.