Chapter 2
Florrie Norheim was used to being dropped in to perilous landing pads and icy tarmac strips between mountain valleys at any number of high-altitude resorts. She was used to being the only other person on the plane. She’d pour her own drink. She’d carry her own bags. She’d hit the ground running.
Throughout her career as, variously, a chalet girl, au pair, resort concierge, and tutor-nanny, she’d grown used to making her way, all by herself, to wherever she’d landed a contract, quickly settling in to her temporary digs.
Whether it was swanky ski lodges in St Moritz or Zermatt, luxury resorts in Lake Louise or Lech, chalet schools in Crans-Montana or Courmayeur, billionaire’s mountain retreats in Banff or Alta Badia, she would fit right in within hours of touching down, fighting her jet lag and setting about making herself indispensable.
By the time her host-employer had realised they had a jewel in their hands, she’d have been headhunted by some other rich family promising her a pay increase, Saturdays and Sundays off, with free spa, slope and gym membership and all manner of other perks of the job, and she’d be packing her bags to clock up yet more air miles.
It wasn’t that she had a problem staying still, she’d tell herself.
She couldn’t help being in demand, and there was a whole wide world to see.
She’d been doing this for over a decade, never staying in one place for more than a year, and even though she’d flown right through her thirtieth birthday yesterday (red-eyeing it between Aspen and wherever she was now above Scotland), she was showing no signs of hanging up her salopettes and staying put anywhere any time soon.
But there was something very different about this posting.
For the first time in her life, she wasn’t travelling under her own steam.
Maxim Norheim, her father, had arranged this job, and he was relying on her to represent him.
This wasn’t nannying rich people’s kids.
This was her first foray into the family business.
‘I’m taking a risk, not sending one of your brothers, you understand?’ her father had said, as Empressa, his terrifyingly efficient PA, pinged the tickets across to Florrie’s mobile. ‘But if they must insist on breaking legs or taking month-long honeymoons, what option do I have!’
‘I said I can do it. You don’t have to worry,’ she’d assured him, standing in front of her father’s huge desk in his huge office with the lights and snowfall of Aspen sparkling behind him.
He’d always looked at her in that same way, with a mix of baffled pride and incomprehension.
He understood his sons: they were sharp-suited, profiteering, firmly planted, just like him.
Florrie had always been altogether different.
She’d sidestepped the family business until now, preferring to slum it in what Maxim thought of as undemanding gap-year jobs she could never stick at.
Still, the Norheim family name carried a prestige amongst the world’s cloud-dwelling elite, and so sending the inexperienced Florrie Norheim to Scotland was, in her father’s opinion, still better than sending anyone else, or so he’d told her when he begrudgingly floated the idea, only a couple of weeks ago.
Looking out through the thick glass of the plane window, the snow-dusted summits below appeared much the same as any other mountain range, though perhaps the lower elevations were a tad too green for December the first? Where was all the snow?
An older woman in the seat across the aisle leaned towards Florrie and said something over the noise of the engines as the plane buffeted through rain-soaked clouds and the captain announced the Highland Hopper was making its descent for its first stop of three on its way to somewhere called Colonsay.
‘Visitin’ haim fur Christmas, ur yi?’
It took Florrie a moment to process the woman’s accent.
Her first language was English, like her father’s family, and she also spoke her mother’s Norwegian and a little German, both of which, she knew, closely fed the language of the Scots, but she was still surprised to find her ear unalive to the contours of the woman’s words. ‘Hjem’ she knew.
‘Stayin’ wi’ faimly?’ the woman attempted, like Florrie was a stubborn Christmas nut to be cracked.
‘Am I… visiting family? Oh, uh, no. I’m here on business, just for a few days.’
The woman had bundled herself into the seat opposite upon boarding at Edinburgh, stowing her Harvey Nichols shopping bags and telling the twenty other passengers on board that she’d spent a long weekend Christmas shopping with her sister ‘who bides in the toon’.
Florrie had smiled, unsure why anyone would announce their private business to a plane full of strangers, but then some of the others, all speaking in variations on the lady’s highland accent, had received this story with interest and poured forth their own reasons for flying, and for the whole flight they’d chattered and passed around bags of Christmas candy and private details about their lives like this was a school trip.
Florrie wasn’t one for sharing, at least not when it came to herself. She had, however, opened the eye-wateringly expensive cookies she’d bought at the airport in Aspen and offered them around.
‘What kind of business are you in?’ the woman asked, modifying her accent in response to Florrie’s hard-to-place transatlantic one.
What kind of business was she in, Florrie wondered?
No kind. Not exactly. She’d spent years avoiding getting caught up in her father’s snow sport and mountain resort business consultancy, which had made him rich.
She’d always opted to skirt the peripheries of that world, working for a tiny fraction of her brothers’ earnings and probably grafting ten times as hard, but it had meant staying free, and she couldn’t put a price on that.
‘Auditing,’ she replied, partly because it was enigmatic enough to satisfy the woman – hopefully she wouldn’t press for details – and partly because it was completely true.
Her instructions were clear. Fly in, survey the business, conclude it is beyond rescuing, shut it down, and get on the very next available flight out of there.
‘And you’re putting down at the auld aerodrome,’ the woman said, not a question at all.
Florrie had never heard of an aerodrome before but the word had a curious place-lost-in-time vibe that she didn’t yet know to take as a sign of what to expect.
As she looked down through the drizzle at the patchwork of hills and mountains dotted with black lochans below, she made out a strip of tarmac and a little grey boxy building that she guessed was the aerodrome. It all looked extremely unpromising.
The plane dropped sharply and the landing strip loomed larger. The woman eyed her beadily across the aisle like she was wondering if Florrie might be some kind of foreign spy, which in a way she was.
Her father’s words rang in her ears over the clunk of the landing gear lowering.
‘No friendships, no niceties, no promises. You’re there to assess how unfixable their problems are.
Gather your evidence, write your report and deliver the news they’re too scared to admit to themselves. Their time is up.’
She hadn’t taken three planes to get here just to let her father, or herself, down. Florrie’s stomach lurched as the wheels hit the tarmac. Rain streaked horizontally across the window while they braked hard and came to an abrupt, bumping stop.
‘Best o’ luck to you,’ the woman said, pressing a toffee into her hand as Florrie pulled her rucksack from the overhead bin. She was the only passenger alighting at the Cairn Dhu aerodrome.
‘Thank you,’ she said, slipping the sweet inside her pocket. She wouldn’t need luck. She simply had to be cruel to be kind. She was a Norheim, after all.