One by One

by Ruth Ware

  “They had an argument, over whether I should go. I remember Rik saying, Do you think this is the image we want to project? He didn’t know I was listening, of course. They were in Eva’s office, and I was listening in via the intercom. And Eva said, For fuck’s sake, Rik, it’s not rocket science, I can make her presentable. And she’s one of us on paper now, thanks to Toph, so she might as well look the part. Then she paused and said, Besides, Norland likes her type. He likes them young. So I knew what was going on when Eva got me to come over to her house before the party and offered to lend me a dress, because she knew I was on a budget after pouring all my money into Snoop. When she said it like that it sounded perfectly reasonable, kind, even, but I knew the truth.

  “Well, you’ve seen Eva. You know what she’s like. There’s probably only about three women in London who could squeeze into her jeans. But we found something, somehow, and Eva made up my face, and when we arrived at the bar and were introduced to the executives from the other company—I don’t know—I actually started to feel like a real Snooper. Eva introduced me not as her PA but as Liz, who is a minority shareholder, and they talked to me with respect, and as the evening wore on I really started to believe this was it—this was the life I had been waiting for. I don’t normally drink much, but I drank that night. I drank a lot—a lot of cocktails, and—”

  She stops. The kettle is hissing and bubbling, and she picks it up gingerly by the handle and fills each of the cups, then drops a tea bag in the top.

  I take the one she hands to me, looking down into it surreptitiously. I don’t want to aggravate her suspicions, but given how Elliot died, it would be stupid of me not to check. The melted snow is a little cloudy, and the tea is starting to leach out of the bag and color the hot water, but I can still see the bottom of the cup and there’s definitely nothing there. No pills, anyway.

  “And?” I prompt, very gently, and then when she looks away, I say, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to pry. If this is too painful—”

  “No,” she says, with a rush. “It’s okay, honestly. I—it helps in a weird way, talking about it. I just haven’t thought about it in so long. We all got very, very drunk. And somehow—I can’t remember how—I ended up going with Eva… with one of the executives from the bar. It was just the three of us. Topher was going to come, I remember that, because he was in the taxi, but then at the last minute he bailed out and asked the driver to drop him off. We arrived at this house in Pimlico, and my God, it was amazing—it was so beautiful, this Georgian building, stories high, with a balcony right at the top overlooking the river…” She is staring past me now, as if she is looking at something I can’t quite see. “He took us upstairs, and we went out onto the balcony, and he gave us champagne and we chatted for a while, and then Eva excused herself and went to the bathroom.”

  She breaks off. But I don’t think it’s because she can’t go on. Not quite. It’s because she is trying to work out what to say, how to say it.

  “He tried to assault me,” she says at last bluntly. “He had his hands down my top, I was trying to push him away. And I—I—”

  She stops, she puts her hands to her face.

  “I pushed him. I pushed him hard. I pushed him off the balcony.”

  “Oh my God,” I say. Whatever I expected, it was not this. “Liz, I’m—I’m so sorry. I—”

  The implications are buzzing in my head, even as I stammer out my pathetically inadequate attempts at sympathy.

  She killed a man.

  But it was self-defense.

  But Liz is still talking, ignoring me, rushing on, as if she wants to be past this part of the narrative.

  “I broke down when I realized what I’d done. But Eva—she—she was amazing. She came running, and when she saw what had happened she didn’t ask any questions, she just got us both out of there, and when it came out in the paper, it was written up as a tragic accident. There were drugs and alcohol in his system and people; they just assumed that he fell I suppose, or that he threw himself over. No one ever mentioned that Eva and I were even there. It just goes to show what money and influence can buy, I guess.”

  She looks away at that, and then buries her face in her tea so that her glasses mist with steam.

  “I couldn’t stay after that,” she says, very quietly. “I left Snoop—and I never looked back. I went to work somewhere completely different, a banking call center. It became like this horrible nightmarish episode in my life that was done and gone. Until the buyout happened. And I was dragged back into all of this.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say again, and it’s true. I am sorry. Sorry for that poor kid dragged into a world she didn’t understand.

  But I still don’t completely understand. She was assaulted. She was trying to get away from an attacker. And even if Liz didn’t trust the court to believe that, and I can see why she wouldn’t, why did Eva have to die? She kept Liz’s secret.

  And then, in a horrible, blinding flash, I get it.

  Topher was the one who gave Liz those shares, on the tacit understanding that she would back him up if it ever came to a crunch like this. She owed him everything.

  But Eva—Eva knew something about Liz that could ruin her. At the very least, she would be embroiled in a messy, public court case, and I know enough about Liz to know that that would be torture to her. At the worst, she might be looking at a manslaughter charge, and prison.

  Whether she articulated it or not, Eva was the one who covered up what happened. She held that evidence in her hands. And she must have been holding that fact over Liz’s head all these years.

  No wonder Liz could never find the courage to say how she was planning to vote.

  She could vote to betray her mentor, the man who hired her, stuck up for her, got her the shares in the first place.

  Or she could vote against the person who held her life in her hands. The person who could send her to prison to rot.

  When the realization comes, it’s with a twisted lurch of sympathy for Liz.

  I think of that poor, young girl—fresh out of university, swimming in waters far too strange and dangerous for her to navigate. Because Liz was the victim not of one horrible situation—but of two. Eva had helped her out of one nightmare, only to create another of her own making—blackmailing the girl she had professed to help.

  Of course Liz did the sensible thing. She told Eva that she was voting with her. But what about next time? And the time after that? How could she live her life knowing that Eva had this secret to hold over her head anytime she needed something Liz was unwilling to give?

  No. She needed to make herself safe forever. She needed to get rid of the person who had started all this, the only person who knew her secret.

  She needed to kill Eva.

  LIZ

  Snoop ID: ANON101

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 0

  Snoopscribers: 1

  “So that’s it,” I say at last. I put my tea to my lips for a long time, pretending to gulp it thirstily down.

  Erin is staring at me, but I can’t tell what her expression is. It looks slightly horrified—but that could be sympathetic horror at what I’ve been through. Does she believe me? I can’t decide.

  Don’t you want to drink your tea? I want to ask, but I can’t say that. It would sound suspicious. Instead, I raise my cup to my lips again, hoping to convey the message by subliminal suggestion. To my delight, it works. Erin picks up the cup. I see the muscles of her throat work as she swallows.

  “So you had no choice,” she says faintly, and I try to arrange my face in the expression I think she will expect to see. A kind of… pained regret. And it’s true—I do regret this. That night, most of all.

  “I never wanted any of this,” I say. “I just feel like I’ve been swept up in something awful and horrible.”

  Erin shakes her head, but not like she is telling me she doesn’t believe me. More like she’s condemning whatever brought us here. She is staring down into
her cup. I can’t see her face very well. That bothers me, but then she takes another sip of tea, and I begin to feel more relaxed.

  I put my own cup to my lips too, in order not to seem suspicious. I’m careful not to actually swallow any of the liquid inside.

  “I’ve worked out what you did,” Erin says, as she puts the cup on her knees, nursing it with her hands. I can see from where I’m sitting that it’s half empty, and I begin to feel more confident. “It was very clever. You had a ski jacket like Eva’s. You met her at the top of the lift—”

  She pauses, and I know why. She is trying not to spell out what I did, as if it will offend me in some strange way. But it’s okay. I have to live with what happened, there is no point in not facing up to it.

  I was waiting at the top of the lift when Eva got off, right by the barrier where I had pretended to lose control and almost ski over the edge with Rik earlier that day. Of course, I didn’t lose control at all. It was a deliberate slide to give myself the chance to check out the edge up there. I wanted to see if it was as close as I remembered, to see if the barrier had been raised since my last visit, two years ago.

  Nothing had changed. It was perfect.

  The irony is I’m actually a very good skier. But Topher and Rik and the others were all too willing to believe that a girl from a Crawley comprehensive wouldn’t know one end of a ski pole from the other. The truth, had they ever bothered to ask me, is that I loved skiing—right from the first time I went on a school trip, at age fifteen. I had never set foot on a ski slope before, but I remember the teacher saying admiringly, “You’re a natural, Liz!”

  And I was. I am not sporty, as a rule. I don’t do well with anything that requires teamwork, or running in circles. I disliked getting red-faced and sweaty, everything jiggling unpleasantly under a sticky T-shirt, while girls shouted at me to pass the ball, no not that way, oh for God’s sake Liz! Until I wanted to run away and hide from them all.

  But skiing was different. Skiing is solo—and it is strategic. You have to think on your feet, making split-second decisions that could save your life or send you hurtling down a sheer slope at a hundred kilometers an hour.

  I loved it.

  I managed to go back again during my A-levels, and twice at university—the very cheapest trips I could manage: coach to Bulgaria, to stay in a Soviet-era concrete monolith; Ryanair to Romania, to a self-catering Airbnb with hot-air vents that smelled of ham. But it was worth it. It was worth the scrimping and the saving and the long nights spent crunched into economy coach seats, barreling down German autobahns in the middle of the night.

  They did a corporate ski trip when I was at Snoop, wooing investors. Of course, they didn’t invite me. But since I left Snoop, since I have been earning my own money, I have been back to the Alps every year, sometimes twice. And I have become a very, very good skier. Not quite as good as Eva, who has been skiing every year since she was a toddler. But almost. And I have been to St. Antoine twice. I know La Sorcière very well indeed.

  When she got off the lift, I was over by the barrier. I called out to her, pretending that I was in some kind of difficulty, and when she skied over I waited until she was right next to me, bending over, looking at the binding of my boot, and then I gave her an almighty push, toppling her backwards over the shallow safety barrier.

  The barrier caught her in the back of her knees and she went down like a skittle and landed in the thick, untouched snow, right on the edge of the precipice, her skis windmilling in the air. For a minute I didn’t think it had worked. I thought she was going to stay, sprawled on the narrow ledge of snow, crawl her way back to the barrier, ask me what the hell I was playing at.

  But then there was an imperceptible sound—like a sigh. The snow ledge began to shift and tilt, and a crack appeared at the top. For a second I saw Eva, frozen in horror, looking up at me, holding out her arms like I was going to be her savior—and then the whole ledge gave way, and she was gone.

  I waited for a moment, and then I unzipped my jumpsuit and pulled out the scarlet jacket I was wearing underneath. I put it on over the top of my navy blue ski suit, pulled my scarf up, and settled my goggles over my face. Then turned my skis to face down the run, and I began to ski La Sorcière.

  I would be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult. It was. Its twists and turns, full of sheer drops, heart-stopping hairpin bends and vertical ice sheets where I couldn’t do anything but a kind of controlled fall. If I hadn’t known the run well, I think it would have killed me. But I have never skied better.

  I stopped halfway down to catch my breath and wait for the trembling in my legs to subside, and it was then that I saw Carl and Ani, traveling high above in the bubble. I looked up, safe in the knowledge that my goggles were pulled up and my hat was pulled down, and that no one could possibly tell who was wearing the distinctive scarlet ski jacket. I waved my ski pole, establishing my alibi, and Ani saw me, and waved back.

  It was just my luck that she saw something else too: the empty bubble lifts making their way back to the valley floor. The bubble lifts that should have been taking me back to St. Antoine.

  I saw the recognition in her eyes that night when she came to my room. I saw her literally put two and two together standing there in the doorway, the puzzlement changing to horror as she made her excuses. Suddenly she didn’t want to speak to me anymore. She wanted to get away—figure out what to do, and short of putting a hand over her mouth and dragging her into my room, I couldn’t think of any other alternative. So I let her go.

  I knew then what I had to do. I thanked my lucky stars for Tiger’s insomnia, and the instinct that had prompted me to pocket the passkey when Danny left it in the door earlier that day.

  Although that wasn’t luck really, was it. The truth is, I am not a lucky person. Yes, the Tiger thing went my way—but so much else has gone against me. And the passkey—that wasn’t luck. That was me. A split-second decision that looked like it was about to save my skin.

  Because the thing is, I may not be lucky. But I am good at thinking on my feet. Perhaps that is why I like skiing so much. It is the same skills, the same twisting and turning, the same heart-pounding excitement. The same drop in your stomach when you realize you’ve made a stupid mistake, and then the same lift of excitement when you realize you can maneuver your way out of it.

  I felt bad about Ani though. Bad in a way that I didn’t about Elliot. Elliot deserved what happened to him. He didn’t have to poke, and pry. That was his choice. Ani’s choice was no choice at all—she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like me. And that is a tragedy. But it’s not my fault. I have to remember that. None of this is my fault.

  “Wh-what did you say?” Erin asks me, and I realize I must have muttered some of those words aloud. I’m about to answer when I look at Erin more carefully. She appears almost… drunk. She is listing to one side.

  “Nothing, don’t worry. Are you tired?” I ask. I am trying not to sound too hopeful. She nods.

  “Yes, I feel—” her voice is slurred, and when she blinks, it is as if her facial muscles are moving in slow motion. “I feel really sh-strange.”

  “You must be exhausted,” I say. I try to sound soothing, but my heart is beating faster with excitement. I put my untouched tea down on the table and wipe the dregs off my mouth, and I peer into Erin’s cup. It is all but empty. “Why don’t you lie down?”

  “I feel strange…,” she says again, but her voice trails off. She lets me help her to lie horizontally on the sofa. Her body is heavy. I have no idea how many pills she has drunk. Three or four, maybe? I had eight left and I put them all into the kettle, trusting to the boiling water to dissolve them. I had no idea whether the heat would damage the chemicals, but I knew that Erin would be on the lookout for me tampering with her cup, and I was right—she watched me like a hawk as I put in the tea bag and poured out the water.

  The kettle was my only chance—slipping the pills in one by one as I packed in the snow, relying o
n the white snow to camouflage the white pills, and the strong, unfamiliar taste of milkless tea to mask any odd taste. And, almost unbelievably, it seems to have worked. Erin has drunk the whole cup. Elliot had five, ground up in his cup, and it killed him. Erin is smaller and lighter, and she had about half the water, which means approximately four pills. Four should be enough, assuming the heat of the water hasn’t degraded the active ingredient. I will have to make sure of that. I can’t take her silence for granted. But first there is something I have to do. Something quite urgent.

  With a sideways glance at Erin, who is lying sprawled on the sofa, drool coming out of the side of her mouth, I leave the living room. I run as quickly as I dare up the stairs to Elliot’s room. The door is unlocked, and I open his phone again. Then I navigate to the text messaging app, and Erin’s message to Danny. SOS. Please send help. IT’S LIZ.

  His reply is still there. Fuck. Erin is that you?

  The precipice is in front of me—and expertly, I swerve to avoid it.

  No, I type. I already told you—this is LIZ. Erin has just confessed everything—and she’s talking about killing herself. PLEASE COME NOW.

  And then I press send.

  ERIN

  Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

  Listening to: Offline

  Snoopers: 5

  Snoopscribers: 10

  I lie completely still, listening as Liz peers into my cup and then stands over me, breathing heavily. Then she seems to make up her mind, and I hear the soft sound of her socked feet retreating into the lobby and the creak as she begins to make her way up the stairs.

  I hold still for as long as I can bear, and then I sit upright, wincing at every rustle of fabric, every squeak of the sofa springs.

  My arm and thigh are drenched with tea—but thank God, Liz didn’t seem to notice the spreading dampness on the sofa, only the empty cup.

  The pills were in the kettle. I suspected as soon as I tasted the first gulp of tea—there was a strange, chemical acridity, and a very faint sweetness that must have come from the sugarcoating. And when I saw Liz putting the cup to her lips but only pretending to drink, I was certain of it. After that, I knew what I had to do. I had to pretend to drink too—taking advantage of the cover of darkness to slop the tea down my arm, onto the sofa, every time Liz turned away.