One by One(35)

“I could heat up soup or something on the woodburner,” he’s saying, his brow furrowed as he tries to read a label with the aid of his mobile phone. “Jesus, what a carve-up.”

The knock makes us both jump, and we stare at each other, and then Danny goes to the door. It’s Topher again, but he’s wearing a very different expression to the ingratiating one he used to ask us to magically fix the lights. He looks… I’m not sure. I don’t know him well enough to tell. He could be pissed off, or gravely worried.

“Yes?” Danny says abruptly, but I heave myself to my feet and hobble past him. There is a reason Danny doesn’t deal much with front of house. He’s got no tact and no patience. But the fact is that however bad the situation is, Topher and Snoop are still our guests, and we still need to behave like we’re representing the company.

“Topher,” I say, and then I see Elliot hovering behind him. “Elliot, how can I help?”

“Elliot thinks he’s found Eva,” Topher says without preamble.

“What?” It’s the last thing I’d expected. Questions jumble through my mind. Where? How? “Is she okay?”

“We don’t know.” Topher pushes past me and Danny and unfolds a laptop, putting it down on the stainless-steel kitchen work top. It lights up the circle of faces with an unearthly glow as he taps in a password. A screen of garbled code comes up. It means nothing to me.

“To be precise,” it’s Elliot’s deep monotone, “we know the location of her phone.”

“Her phone?”

“One of the reasons I didn’t want to agree to the buyout,” Topher begins, “is because Elliot’s been working on a major update to help monetize Snoop. We’re calling it geosnooping in beta, but that probably won’t be the final name. As you may know, Snoop is as anonymous as you want it to be at the moment—you can’t tell where someone is, all you’ve got to go on is what they declare in their profile.”

“Right,” I say slowly.

“But Elliot’s been working on an upgrade that will allow people to view other Snoopers within a fifty-meter radius. You won’t know exactly where they are, but you’ll know they’re close to you.”

“Okay, I get that.”

“It hasn’t gone live yet. But as part of the preparations for rolling it out we changed the permissions Snoop requires to give the app access to your location. Basically Snoop knows that information whether you choose to display it or not—it’s part of the data profile we share with stakeholders to create income.”

“Right…,” I say again, trying to get him to cut to the chase. I don’t care about the inner workings of Snoop, and I think I know where this is going. “Are you saying you used this information to find out Eva’s location?”

“Yes. Elliot’s been able to hack into the back end and get the GPS coordinates of Eva’s phone.”

“It’s here,” Elliot says, pulling up a GPS map, where a red flag shows the location of the coordinates he’s tapped into the search bar.

As soon as I see the pin, my heart sinks down into my stomach, and I feel myself going cold with dread.

“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.

The pistes are marked on Elliot’s maps, but not the elevations, and without the simplified three-dimensional rendering of the resort’s official piste map, it’s not very easy to put together the geography of the peaks and valleys. Eva’s little dot is showing very close to the La Sorcière run. So close in fact that she could almost be on the run.

But she’s not. Because if you’ve skied the run, as I have, many times, what you know is that there is a sheer drop to the side of La Sorcière. A drop that falls hundreds, maybe thousands of feet into a deep, inaccessible valley. Somehow, in the blinding snow, Eva must have done exactly what I feared in the first place—she has skied over the edge.

“If we can give these coordinates to search and rescue—” Topher is saying, with the kind of blithe confidence that only the CEO of a major international company could muster, but I interrupt.

“I’m sorry, Topher, I’m so sorry—”

“What do you mean?”

“This—” I swallow, I try to find a way of putting the news that’s not too brutal. “This dot, it’s off the side of the piste.”

“Eva’s an excellent skier,” Topher says confidently. “Off-piste, even in this weather—”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about a bit of loose snow. I mean she’s skied off the piste. Off the edge. La Sorcière—” I swallow. There is no way of saying this nicely. “That section of La Sorcière runs alongside a sheer drop. A very steep one.”

Topher looks at me blankly, unable, or unwilling, to understand what I’m trying to tell him.

“What do you mean?” he says at last.

“Topher, if Eva is really where that dot is showing, she’s dead.”

I regret the starkness as soon as the words have left my mouth, but they are said, and they can’t be unsaid.

Topher’s face goes white. Then he turns to Elliot.