Case file
The Winter Ascent
The premise
A grand hotel below the Ferrenhorn, January 1899. Lord Edmund Severn has climbed everything a man can climb in summer. Now he has come for the north face in winter. The guides call it unclimbable, and there is one day of weather to do it in.
Last night the barometer finally turned. The porter poured his lordship's nightcap at 23:00 and left it on the mantel by the stair, as every night for a month. The hotel drank to the morning, and the lamps were out by 01:00. At 05:30 the valet went up to wake him for the climb, and found him in his chair by a cold fire. Lord Severn had died in his sleep.
The doctor wrote heart failure, and the hotel almost believed it — until the dispensary count came up three drams of laudanum short. The snow has shut the pass: no magistrate until the thaw. You have three rounds.
Who is at the table
Everyone introduces themselves with one public line before a word is said. Nothing below is a clue — this is only what the whole table already knows.
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Dr. Anton Weiss
The hotel's winter doctor: frostbite, sprains and mountain nerves for eleven seasons. When the pass is shut, his dispensary serves the whole valley.
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Tobias Gray
The Alpine correspondent of a London paper, wintering at the hotel to wire the first winter ascent to Fleet Street — or whatever else the mountain gives him.
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Matthias Kaufmann
Severn's guide through twenty summers — every summit his lordship ever stood on, Kaufmann stood one step below. This winter, for the first time, he refused the rope.
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Céleste Roche
Widowed young, she has run the Grand Hôtel alone for nine winters. The Severn climb filled forty rooms in January — a season conjured out of thin air.
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Adela Hart
The finest climber in the hotel after Severn — some in the valley say before him. The winter north face was to be hers in February.
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Grace Severn
Lord Severn's only daughter, arrived from London three days ago — the first time in ten years she has followed her father to a mountain.
Where you are
The Grand Hôtel du Glacier, eighty windows deep in snow. The smoking room, where the doctor's bag stood open all evening. The mantel by the stair, where the nightcap waited from 23:00 to 23:20. The terrace door that has never locked. The telegraph room — the only line down the valley. It snowed from midnight. Everyone who slept in the hotel is still in it.
Everyone at the table gets a character, three cards and one rule: you may hide things, you may not invent them. Between the acts a dossier appears on every phone with a new fact about somebody in the room — and it never clears anyone.
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