One by One

by Ruth Ware

  “Okay, I’m sorry, that—that was clumsy. It’s not what I meant. I just meant—I’m trying to explain—”

  I stop. I put my head in my hands. This is all I need. Danny was the one person on my side, the one person I felt I could rely on. Have I really screwed all that up, thanks to Topher?

  “When I was nineteen,” I begin again, more slowly this time, “I went on a skiing holiday with my boyfriend, Will, and my brother, Alex, Will’s best friend. We were skiing off-piste, and we were stupid. We got caught in a—” I swallow. I don’t know how to talk about this, how to explain the horror of what happened. Words aren’t enough.

  “We got caught in an avalanche,” I say at last, forcing the word out. “We triggered it. We were all wearing avalanche packs, but Alex didn’t manage to set his off. Will’s deployed, but it didn’t save him, he was buried too deep, and I couldn’t dig him out fast enough. I was the only person who survived.”

  I stop. I can’t go on. I can’t describe those nightmarish hours on the mountain, sobbing as I dug with numb bleeding hands through the hard-packed drifts to try to reach Will, who was trapped head down beneath a hundredweight of snow and ice. I dug and I wept, and I wept and I dug, using anything I could find in my pack—my lift pass, my water bottle, anything that could form a makeshift pick, for my poles and skis were long gone, ripped away from me somewhere far up the slope.

  It was too late. I knew that. I had known it even before I began to dig, I think, and as the hours wore on, and the snow lay all around in unmoving silence, I somehow found the strength to accept it. But still I dug. Not just for Will, but for my own survival. Because Will had the GPS locator beacon in his pack. And if I didn’t activate it, I would die along with him.

  The search and rescue eventually found us. Or rather, they found me. By the time they arrived I was hypothermic, cradling Will’s dead body. Alex was not recovered until the following spring.

  “I—I couldn’t go back,” I say, very quietly. “Do you understand that? I couldn’t go back to my old life. It was completely meaningless. I went home to bury Will, and then I came back to the mountains—at first because I couldn’t bear to leave without Alex, and then afterwards because…”

  I stop. The truth is, I don’t know why I stayed. Only that I couldn’t stand to be at home, with the pity of all my friends suffocating me, and my parents’ awful, crushing grief. And it seemed like a kind of penance to stay here, among the terrible austere beauty of the Alps, to keep forcing myself to look at the mountains that had killed Will and Alex.

  “That’s why you don’t ski off-piste,” Danny says hoarsely. He is looking at me very differently now. The anger has gone. There is only a kind of… pity left. It hurts to see it in his face, and I turn away, nodding.

  “Yes, that’s why. I still love skiing—which is perverse, I know. My parents think I’m crazy. My dad called me a masochist when I took this job. But I can’t seem to bring myself to leave the mountains, and you can’t live here year-round without skiing. But I don’t think I’ll ever go off-piste again.”

  “Fuck, Erin. Why didn’t you tell me?” Danny asks, but he doesn’t say it like he’s expecting an answer. I think he knows that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him—it was that I couldn’t bear to say it. I couldn’t bear to become a victim to him too.

  There is a silence, and then he folds me in his arms, and I rest my face against his warm, muscled shoulder and I close my eyes and breathe in the good, Danny smell of him. I feel the tears soak into the worn softness of his sweater.

  “So you’re proper posh, eh?” he says, with a rumbling chuckle, and I give a shaky answering laugh, and lift my head, wiping the tears off my nose with my sleeve. “You belong down there, with that lot, not up here in the servants’ quarters, with the hoi polloi.”

  “No, I don’t.” I say it more emphatically than I mean, and Danny laughs again, but I’m serious. “No, I mean it, Danny, I don’t belong with them anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. What they stand for—”

  I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence—the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.

  They are arrogant, that’s what I realize—maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them—just like I used to do.

  Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  “You’re saying Erin is behind this?” Miranda’s face is skeptical. She folds her arms, looking at Topher with narrowed dark eyes. Topher’s expression is defensive.

  “No. No, that’s not what I said—I simply—”

  “It’s what you implied though,” Miranda says. I realize something—Miranda does not like Topher. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this until now—perhaps it is the fact that she is so formal and polite. Now she is not bothering to hide her opinion.

  “I’m just saying, once is bad luck, twice is a hell of a coincidence. How many skiing deaths can one person be involved in?”

  “Oh, why don’t we stop beating around the bush,” Miranda says bitingly. “We all know why you’re desperate to throw suspicion on other people.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Topher says, and his voice is suddenly dangerous.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Miranda says. She steps up to him. Even without her heels, they are almost exactly the same height. “I’m stating facts. Most people in this room stood to gain a lot of money before Eva died. Very few people had a motive for wanting her out of the way. You were one of those few.”

  Rik and Carl exchange an uneasy look. Neither of them jump in to defend Topher.

  “One, that is fucking slander, and two, you are talking about my best friend,” Topher begins furiously, but then Tiger lifts her head and says something. It’s an almost inaudible croak, but all heads turn to her, and Topher stops midsentence.

  “What did you say?” Miranda swings around, and Tiger struggles upright, brushing her hair away from her forehead. Her face is blotched red and white.

  “She said something,” she repeats, her voice still hoarse with tears.

  “Who?” Rik comes and kneels beside her. His face is urgent, and he grabs Tiger’s arm. His gesture seems to have been harder than he intended, because she winces a little. “Who said what?”

  “Last night, Ani. I just remembered. She said something. She tried to wake me up, but I was—” She gulps, forcing back sobs. “She said, I didn’t see her. If only I’d been able to wake up properly, if only I hadn’t taken that sleeping pill—” She breaks off. Two huge tears roll down her face.

  “Tiger,” Miranda says uneasily. She crouches beside Rik. “Tiger, are you sure about this? Before you were saying you didn’t wake up.”

  “I know, I know I said that, but I was wrong, I remember now. I remember her shaking me. I remember the words.”

  Miranda shoots a questioning look at Rik and he gives a minute shrug back.

  “Well,” Topher says. There’s a touch of triumph in his voice. “Well, well, well. I didn’t see her. Now who’s got a reason to start slinging mud, Ms. Khan? After all, that sounds like it rules out half the room, doesn’t it?”

  “What does?” says a deep voice from the direction of the lobby.

  We all look around. Danny and Erin are standing in the doorway, side by side. Erin looks as if she has been crying. I am not sure if they have made up completely, but it looks like they have patched their differences enough to put up a united front. Topher looks slightly annoyed.

  “Tiger claims—” Miranda begins, but
Tiger interrupts with an angry sob.

  “I don’t claim anything. I heard her, I’m sure of it. Ani tried to tell me something last night—she shook my shoulder and she said, I didn’t see her. Only I couldn’t wake up properly. But it fits—it fits with what Liz said, that Ani had something she was trying to figure out, something she wasn’t sure of.”

  “I didn’t see her,” Erin repeats slowly. “Are you sure of that, Tiger?”

  “Yes,” Tiger says, more emphatically this time. “Yes, I was lying on the sofa just now trying to think back to last night, think whether I’d heard anything, and I remembered suddenly Ani coming over to me and shaking my shoulder. It was like a flashback.”

  “Which implies,” Topher says smugly, “that we’re looking for a woman. No? Her, that’s what Tiger said. Ani was trying to figure something out about one of the women in the party.”

  He glares at Miranda.

  “Not necessarily…” Danny says slowly. He is frowning. He scratches his head, thinking. “Maybe she wasn’t talking about the killer. Ani was the only person who saw Eva on the slope. Isn’t that right? Carl was the only other person on the bubble, and he didn’t see her. Right?”

  “Right,” Carl says shortly. “But what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, what if Ani realized she’d made a mistake? What if Eva never skied that slope after all?”

  “But she did,” Miranda says, with exasperation. “Elliot’s geotargeting proves that.”

  “It proves her phone is there,” Danny says. “But the only evidence we ever had that Eva was with her phone on that slope was Ani’s sighting. What if she realized she was wrong? What if… here, what about this—what if Eva faked her own death?”

  That last suggestion causes a little excited ripple around the circle. Faces brighten. People want to believe this. Danny’s suggestion is a solution that doesn’t require a murderer, and everybody would desperately like that to be true.

  But there is a problem. Two problems in fact. It is a solution that doesn’t explain Elliot’s or Ani’s death. It does not hold up for a minute. As they would realize if they thought about it. But I can see they are not thinking.

  Speaking up in front of the others makes my stomach curdle, but I have to say something. I can’t not.

  “Eva was on that slope,” I say reluctantly. “I saw her too.”

  Every pair of eyes in the room turns to me. It feels like they are boring into me. My cheeks flush. I want to sink through the floor.

  “What did you say?” It is Miranda, her voice almost accusing.

  “I said, I saw Eva too. I was in the bubble lift on the way down, and I saw her skiing as well—further up the slope than Ani did, but I saw her. She was on La Sorcière. Ani wasn’t mistaken. She must have been talking about something else.”

  “And you didn’t think to mention this before?”

  “I didn’t—it didn’t…” I trail off.

  “Not something else. Someone else,” Danny says flatly, and there is a moment’s silence. Everyone’s gaze travels around the room, going from one person to another. We are all realizing the same thing. If Tiger is right, there are very few people Ani could have been talking about. Topher folds his arms. Your move, his expression says to Miranda.

  “Tiger are you sure,” Miranda says. Now there is a note of desperation in her voice. “Are you absolutely certain Ani said her?”

  “I’m sure,” Tiger says stubbornly.

  There is a long, long, silence. Miranda stands up and walks out of the room.

  “I don’t care,” she shoots over her shoulder as she leaves. “I don’t care what Ani said. There is one person in this room who had a motive for Eva’s death. One person. Stop pretending that isn’t the case!”

  And then there’s nothing but silence, and the clack-clack of her heels on the spiral staircase as she runs up to her room.

  After she has gone, there is an extremely awkward silence. Topher is leaning against the mantelpiece, angry and flushed. Rik looks like a man being ripped in half. Tiger is slumped, with her hand over her face. Erin and Danny look intensely uncomfortable. Carl breaks the silence.

  “Yeah, but she’s right, isn’t she?”

  His voice seems to break some kind of spell, and Topher pushes himself upright and turns for the door.

  “Fuck this,” he says. “I’m not doing this anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Rik turns to stare at him, puzzled. “You’re not doing what?”

  “This. I’m not sitting here like fucking frogs in a pressure cooker. I didn’t kill Eva, no matter what Miranda and Carl want to believe, and I certainly didn’t fucking kill my best friend or our PA. And I’m not hanging around waiting to prove it by being the next person killed. I’m out of here. I’m going to cross-country it down to St. Antoine le Lac.”

  “You’re mad,” Rik says instantly. “The piste is ripped to shreds, there’s trees and rocks everywhere. And look at the weather for God’s sake! You’ll freeze to death.”

  Topher shrugs.

  There is a short pause.

  “You’re mad!” Rik repeats desperately. And then, “I’m coming with you.”

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 10

  It’s almost midday, and the group has spent the past hour or more discussing Topher’s decision and going back and forth over the stupidity—or not—of the idea. Topher, for his part, is packing determinedly. So far he’s got an avalanche pack, water, a torch, some energy bars, a rope, and he’s looking for a shovel, though I’m not sure how he imagines he’s going to use it. If there’s another avalanche, a shovel in his pack isn’t going to save him. But if he doesn’t manage to get down to St. Antoine before nightfall, he’s going to need some kind of shelter, so maybe it’s not such a bad idea. There’s worse survival tactics than a snow shelter.

  Above all though, he seems set on simply getting away—no matter how stupid or risky the plan. Miranda’s statement has unleashed something people were refusing to face before—Topher is the person who has benefited most from Eva’s death. He’s just been handed everything he wanted—sole control of Snoop. Rik and Liz, on the other hand, stand to lose millions of pounds if the buyout doesn’t go through, and I can’t imagine Miranda and Carl will survive this holiday with their posts intact. Whatever the facts, it’s difficult to believe they can continue working for Topher after basically accusing their boss of murder. There are some things you don’t come back from.

  So I can understand why he feels he can’t stay here—just as Inigo felt he had no choice but to leave when the group turned on him. What’s more surprising is that Rik seems set on going too—though I don’t honestly know how Topher feels about this. He has tried to dissuade Rik, but it’s hard to deny that two people will stand a better chance than one. It’s treacherous going out there, and if one person sprains an ankle, they’d be pretty much dead without a mobile phone. At least with two, you have a chance of sending for help.

  By twelve fifteen, Rik and Topher are standing in the foyer, looking at the large-scale map of the resort that we have pinned to one of the walls and discussing potential routes, when Tiger comes down the spiral stairs. She’s wearing her snowboarding gear, and she’s looking determined.

  “I’m coming with you too,” she says, without preamble.

  Topher frowns.

  “Tiger—”

  “No, don’t try to stop me. I’m as good a boarder as you—and I’m better than Rik.” She says it with no false modesty. “And I can’t stay here after what—” She gulps, stops, tries again. “After wh-what happened—”

  But she can’t finish. I can see that beneath her oversize jacket, her small fists are clenched.

  Rik and Topher look at each other, and I’m not sure what they’re thinking. Tiger is still the person who had the best opportunity for killing Ani, that part is undeniable. The two of them were lo
cked in a room together, and one of them didn’t wake up. But she was also pretty firm about Ani’s final words, words that deflected suspicion from Topher, which seems like strange behavior for a murderer. Plus Rik and Topher are two big, strapping blokes, each of them probably weighing almost twice as much as Tiger by themselves. If Tiger were the killer, it seems unlikely she could overpower one of them, let alone both. On the other hand, and I can almost see Rik and Topher calculating this in their heads, if one of them is a murderer, isn’t it better to have a third-party witness?

  The surrealness of this reasoning strikes me again, and I stifle a short, hysterical laugh, and then clap my hand over my mouth.

  “What did you say?” Rik says, turning to me, frowning, and I shake my head. Tears are leaking out of my eyes, but I can’t tell why.

  “Nothing, I’m sorry. Ignore me.”

  “Fine, you can come,” Topher says brusquely to Tiger, making up his mind.

  “Rik.” We all turn at the voice from above, and see Miranda coming down the spiral staircase too. Her expression is pale, but set. Rik’s face falls. He knows what’s coming, and he’s already shaking his head.

  “Rik, you can’t do this,” Miranda says. Her brittle voice seems to crack. She takes his arm, her fingers digging into his jacket. “This is incredibly stupid.”

  “Miranda, I’m sorry,” Rik says. His deep voice is very quiet, he’s trying to keep this between the two of them, but it’s impossible, with the rest of us just feet away. “I don’t want to go—but we can’t stay here and get picked off one by one like this. I think Topher’s right. We have to get to the police.”

  “But not with him.” She’s whispering, but the acoustics in this room are excellent. I can hear her, so I’m pretty sure Topher can. “Please, please, I’m begging you. Don’t go with him. I’m frightened you won’t come back.”

  “Mir—”

  “We’ll go together. I’ll get my skis on—”