One by One

by Ruth Ware

Eva van den Berg, cofounder. Topher St. Clair-Bridges, cofounder. Rik Adeyemi, head of beans. Elliot Cross, chief nerd.” Danny snorts out his soup through his nose, but I carry on. “Miranda Khan, friends czar. Inigo Ryder, Topher’s ‘boss.’ Ani Cresswell, chief Eva-tamer. Tiger-Blue Esposito, head of cool. Carl Foster, lawman.”

“I didn’t know you spoke French, Liz,” Eva says. She turns around to look at me. She is smiling. She says the words like she is handing out gold stars.

“You are such a dark horse,” Eva says admiringly. I know she is trying to flatter me, but her words have a patronizing edge considering English is her second language, after Dutch, and she is fluent in German and Italian as well.

Eva and Topher I’ve got already. Carl Foster, the guy who slipped in the snow, is a stocky white man in his forties with a buzz cut and a pugnacious expression, but he’s cheerfully downing champagne in a way that suggests he’s not brooding on the moment outside the door. Judging by her surname, Miranda Khan is probably the very elegant Asian woman over by the stairs.

There is one other guest who’s standing alone. A woman, in her late twenties, standing hunched in an inconspicuous corner by the fire, as if hoping no one will speak to her.

Her uneasiness is in sharp contrast to the rest of the group, who are already laughing and refilling their glasses, in defiance of the advice about acclimating to altitude.

This woman looks more like an owl—a hunted, panicked owl caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

There are ten people in the lobby, not nine. “Um… excuse me,” I say quietly to Topher, “is one of your party staying elsewhere?” He looks uncomprehendingly at me. “I’ve only got nine guests on the list,” I explain. “You seem to be ten. It’s not a problem exactly—we can sleep up to eighteen—but there are only nine rooms, so I’m just wondering…”

“We forgot Liz,” he says, more emphatically this time. Her jaw drops, and she looks over her shoulder at the girl by the fireplace before mouthing a silent echoed fuck at her business partner.

He has olive skin; sharp, Slavic cheekbones; and the most extraordinary topaz-blue eyes I’ve ever seen. “Inigo,”

“Did I miss something?” “Yes,” Eva says briskly. “You’re sharing with Carl. Now run along and break the news to him.” Inigo’s face falls.

I hate them.

Eva was a catwalk model,

If I wore a chain-mail vest, it would pinch the skin under my arms and clank when I walked, and strangers would laugh and say, “Taking up jousting, love?” And it would rust where my sweat seeped into the links, and stain my clothes, and I would hate myself even more than I do already.

She is pretty and tanned, with shiny chestnut hair, and she is wearing a neat white blouse tucked into dark blue jeans. She looks self-possessed, assured, everything I am not. Only one thing is out of place—the thin, pink tracing of a long scar that runs across her right cheekbone, disappearing into her hair. It stretches as she smiles at me, and I’m… surprised, I suppose. She looks like the kind of person who would cover such a thing up with makeup. But… she hasn’t.

Erin

She is swaying in time to the beat and wearing a very short sweaterdress that exposes slim, toned legs, made more diminutive by her Doc Martens boots. For a minute I can’t place her, and I have a flutter of panic, but then I clock the ombré hair and nose ring. She is the woman who was holding the yoga mat when she arrived, and the realization enables me to remember her name. Yoga. Tiger. Tiger-Blue Esposito. Head of cool.

Tiger

Miranda, stalking her way across the room. Her black hair is loose, a dark satin curtain down her back, and she’s wearing a stunning black silk jumpsuit, cinched in to show an enviably tiny waist, and midnight-blue velvet stilettos.

Liz descends the stairs. She’s wearing the lumpish, unflattering black dress that I saw when I encountered her in her room earlier, and my heart sinks for her. It’s cut all wrong for her shape, making her look like a bunch of potatoes in a sock, and you can tell from the way she’s holding herself, plucking at her VPL, that she knows it.

Who is this woman? Why are they so keen to keep her happy? It’s almost like… I frown, wondering. It’s almost like they’re afraid of her. But that’s absurd.

“Toph, please. This was supposed to be a celebration—” “It was supposed to be a fucking ambush—” Topher says.

“Happy? At this rate we’ll be lucky to come out of it with everyone alive.”

Rik looks at Miranda and raises one eyebrow, in a kind of wordless exchange that speaks more about their relationship than anything physical. There is something going on here. They are more than just colleagues, whether they realize that themselves or not.

And then out of nowhere, little Liz pipes up that her grandmother just died and left her ten thousand pounds. And she says she’ll put it into the company. Only she wants security. Not interest—she wants shares in the company, and not just any shares—but voting shares. Well, we left it to the lawyers to argue the split, but the end result was thirty percent shares to Topher, thirty percent to Eva, nineteen to Elliot, nineteen to me, and two percent to Liz.”

That ten grand will be worth around twelve million if the buyout goes ahead.”

I do hear the tail end of Miranda’s reply to something Rik said. “Well, you’re probably right. But in that case, we’ll just have to make her, won’t we?”

We’ll just have to make her.

“What do you mean? There’s no one here called Will.” “You were dreaming last night, shouting about someone called Will. I heard you through the wall. It woke me up.” Fuck.

“When we got to the top the weather was pretty extreme, and Liz decided to take the lift back down,” Miranda says smoothly, but looking at Topher’s mutinous face I can well imagine the discussion that decision must have entailed. Part of me is amazed at Liz’s strength of mind, that she didn’t let herself be bullied into trying the run. But fear can make people amazingly resilient.

A precipice lies just meters from the side of the piste in places; in conditions like this, you could simply sail off the edge into nothingness. That is why they shut La Sorcière first, out of all the runs in the resort. Not because they’re risk averse, or health and safety nuts, or don’t trust experienced skiers to navigate it, but because the twists and turns are a death trap in low visibility.

“Eva’s missing,” I tell him in a low voice, and his expression switches instantly from irritation to concern. “What, really missing? Not just gone AWOL?” “I don’t know; it’s hard to tell. They’ve all acted like complete fuckwits. They split up, no one kept track of who was in which party, and Eva seems to have gone off by herself to ski La Sorcière.”

“Alone?” Danny’s jaw drops. “But, there’s a red avalanche warning. Why the hell didn’t the pisteurs shut the run?” “Apparently they did. She must have ducked under the netting or something, or somehow got lost and traversed across to the wrong run.”

“Where is it exactly?” Topher is saying, but his voice sounds very far away now. Danny suddenly puts a hand to his mouth, and I know that he has just figured out what I already knew.

Somehow, in the blinding snow, Eva must have done exactly what I feared in the first place—she has skied over the edge.

“If she’s dead,” Elliot says flatly, “what does that mean for Snoop? Is Eva’s husband a shareholder now? Will he get a vote on the buyout?” “Fuck!” Topher looks wild-eyed, as if he can’t believe what’s happened. “Arnaud? I—I don’t know! Jesus, Elliot, how can you—”

I don’t normally talk to Elliot. He is very hard to make conversation with, though perhaps that is not my fault. Eva once told me that he divides women into ones he would like to sleep with and ones who are not of interest to him.

At least when Elliot says, “Have you got a problem with that?” you know he genuinely wants an answer. When my father said it, there was only one answer you were allowed to give: No, Daddy. And then get out of the way as fast as possible, before the blow landed.

“I’ve got concerns about that update. I don’t think people realize how much information Snoop is gathering on them. I think when this update makes the level of tracking visible, we might have a backlash on our hands.”

But it is not only that. It is what has happened to his computer that makes it clear. Elliot would have died before he let anyone touch that computer.

I promise you, he was dead. Dilated pupils, absent pulse, the works.” I don’t mention the puddle of piss under the chair. Danny doesn’t need to know about that.

“How the fuck did someone get to him, if that’s what happened? Something in the coffee?” “Maybe, I don’t know.”

“There’s something in the cup,” I tell Danny, who is not coming any closer than he can help. “Something white.”

But why? Why would anyone want to kill Elliot? His shares? His support for Topher? With Eva dead, is it possible someone is trying to undermine Topher’s support?

There is only one plausible reason for this action—to hide something on the computer itself. Something Elliot knew. Something that got him killed.

Oh God, oh Jesus—he wanted to tell me something… I swallow. “Danny, what if Eva’s death wasn’t an accident?”

“God. You’re right. Oh my God.” His face is ashen. “Elliot,” he says brokenly. And then he begins to cry.

Several people here had a powerful financial motive for Eva’s death. Specifically Topher, and Elliot. Plus anyone else who was opposed to the buyout for their own private reasons.

“This is a fucking shitshow,” Carl says angrily. “And I should sue the arse off you. Thousands of pounds to stay in a tin-pot little shithole with a psycho on—” “Oi,” Danny breaks in. He steps forward so he is close to Carl’s face. “That’s enough of that, mate. Erin and me are not responsible if you brought some psychotic fucker with you from the airport.”

Erin seemed pretty concerned that we hadn’t heard anything. And I can see her point. You’d have thought they’d have got someone up here, right? Even if it was just a scout.” “But we heard him, Rik, we heard him calling them.” “We heard his end of the conversation, yes. But how do we know he actually made the call?

“I heard Rik and Miranda, they were saying—” He stops, swallowing heroically, and I see there are tears in his eyes. “I think they think I was making it up. That I didn’t talk to the police, or if I did that I didn’t stress the urgency of the situation enough. But why?” He looks up, his extraordinary blue eyes swimming with tears. “Why would I do that? Unless I’d—unless I’d k-k—” But he can’t say it. Unless I’d killed her.

We came off the lift at the top, and Topher was talking about setting off, and Inigo said, ‘But, like, we can’t,’ because of waiting for Eva, and I said, ‘Gosh no, didn’t she tell you? She’s already left. I saw her skiing down the black run.’ I’m not sure if Topher heard me, but Inigo definitely did. He can back me up.” He can back me up.