One by One

by Ruth Ware

But Carl… Carl is looking at her with a kind of horror, and I know that he has joined the dots that Danny and I had already figured out. “Bollocks to backing you up,” he says abruptly. “Don’t you get it?”

“I think she took a pill,” I say. “She was talking about it at breakfast. But—what do you mean, thinking about stuff?”

Oh no

“No, I didn’t—” she says, with a catch in her voice. “I just—I keep feeling like there’s something wrong… something I saw… I just—like, can’t put my finger on it.”

She's next

But I know why Miranda is pushing this. She knows that Tiger is the number one suspect for Ani’s death.

“Well, there ain’t no point in sugarcoating this,” he says. “My key’s gone. Someone’s half-inched it.”

“Let me introduce you,” Topher says, with great malice, “to Lady Dorothea de Plessis FitzClarence, youngest daughter of the Marquess of Cardale.”

Alex died in an avalanche. With his best mate.”

Alex FitzClarence died in an avalanche in the alps with his best friend, Will Hamilton. The only survivor was Will’s girlfriend, Erin FitzClarence.”

“I’m saying, this isn’t the first time our little Erin has been involved in a fatal skiing accident.”

“It’s what you implied though,” Miranda says. I realize something—Miranda does not like Topher.

“We all know why you’re desperate to throw suspicion on other people.”

“She said, I didn’t see her.

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?”

“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?”

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?

Topher thought I would be like putty in his hands. Soft. Malleable. Pliant. He thought that because of the kind of person he saw—someone meek and quiet, dressed in bad clothes, who never said boo to a goose.

“I never really wanted the money, to be honest. It never felt like mine. It was such a stupid sum, and for what?” “Being in the right place at the right time, I guess?” I say with a laugh, but Liz doesn’t smile back. She shakes her head again, although I’m not sure what she’s denying.

“I wasn’t carrying a GPS locator. I had to dig out my boyfriend to activate his beacon, knowing he was already dead.”

“It was my fault, you see,” she says. She picks up her cards. Her hands are trembling a little. “I suggested we go. Off-piste skiing. I was the one who wanted to do it. I killed them.” She swallows. “That changes a person.”

“Sorry.” I don’t say anything else. From my experience, if you keep quiet, people get nervous. They talk. They fill the silence with their own conversation. You can find out a lot that way. Sure enough, after a pause, Erin answers my question without me having to restate it.

Then I turn over and feel in my pocket for the key. It is gone.

Anon101 is geoclose, whatever that means.

Littlemy Anon101 I am Littlemy. Which means… Anon101 must be… Liz.

I even remember thinking that she was clearly wearing far too many layers, and wondering why, on such a nice day. Now I know why. It wasn’t inexperience at all. It was planned. It would not have been very hard to have a second ski jacket on underneath the first. It would have taken seconds to unzip the baggy blue jumpsuit, take off the scarlet ski jacket beneath, and put it on over the top. With her helmet, goggles, and dark-colored ski pants, anyone seeing her at a distance would take it for granted that she was Eva.

I remember Danny’s words. I dunno. We could probably give them all motives if we needed to. He’s right. Alibi is the key, not motive. And I have just smashed Liz’s alibi to pieces. There is one problem—if I’m right, that fact puts me next in line to be killed.

I could kill Erin. That is not the issue. I could put a pillow over her face, just like I did with Ani, but here is the problem: If I kill Erin, everyone will know it was me. There is no one here for miles around. I would have no hope of persuading anyone that an unknown intruder broke in and smothered her in her sleep.

What I saw in her eyes when she stood, frozen in my doorway that night, was the sudden realization of what she had seen. What she had not seen. The empty glass spheres of the bubble lift, returning back down to the station, when one of them should have contained me. She realized what it meant. I could tell that straightaway, from the moment our eyes locked and hers filled with sudden fear. She hurried back to her room, locking the door behind her. She probably felt safe. She didn’t know I had a passkey.

If I am right, Liz has killed three people—but I don’t think she is killing for fun.

She knows something. She suspects something. I just don’t know what. All I know is that Ani was killed in her sleep, and so I don’t dare to let myself drift off.

Erin knows. I was not sure at first, but as the time stretches out into what feels increasingly like an endless night, I am sure of it.

Only then, in the silence as I formulate my words, there is a double beep. Very faint, and coming from upstairs, but completely unmistakable. It is a sound that sets my pulse racing even before I have pinned down what it is. It is the sound of a text message coming through.

Liz is staring at me, like she’s trying to figure out what’s going on behind my face. Oh my god she knows. She definitely knows. She just isn’t sure enough to act on her suspicions. I have to be very, very careful.

“Of course,” she echoes, and for a second, just a second, her hand strays towards her pocket, where the missing passkey must have been hidden, in a totally involuntary gesture that I would have missed if I hadn’t been watching her every move.

I finger the empty packet of sleeping pills in my pocket. I think about what I have to do.

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.

Whatever Liz thinks about Eva, and that unnamed investor, and maybe even Elliot—Ani, out of everyone, didn’t deserve this. She couldn’t have. Only a monster could have killed Ani.

Did… did Eva send Liz in there, knowing Norland would likely make a pass, knowing Liz would fight him off and then… what? The pieces click into place, with a horrible finality. Then Eva would have video of a man, a potential investor, sexually assaulting her employee.

She sent Liz in there like a lamb to the slaughter. What she didn’t know was that Liz was no lamb.

I think about them all the time. About Elliot, being postmortemed in some French morgue. About Eva, still up there, frozen in the mountain passes like Sleeping Beauty. And about Ani too, I guess. Fuck.

“Gonna miss you, you stupid cow.”

“I forgot to say—download Choon!” “Choon?” “It’s the new Snoop, mate. Only better. C, H, double O, N.”

CHOON, mate. Oh—and my ID, it’s DANNYBOI. Luv ya.