One by One(39)

“No, I do… I’ve seen you somewhere before. Did you waitress in London before you came here?”

“Sadly, no.”

“I do,” he persists. “I know you. I’ve thought it since I first arrived.”

“Mate, she said she doesn’t know you, and you’re pissed,” Danny breaks in, pushing past my shoulder to stand in front of me. Topher steps forward too, his expression turning ugly in less time than it takes for me to think, Oh shit.

Danny bunches his fists, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords, and for a minute the two men just stand there, chest to chest. I feel my heart thudding. Danny cannot hit Topher. He will get fired.

But Topher knows when he’s on thin ice, and it’s he who steps back, with a laugh that’s just the right side of ingratiating.

“My mistake. Mate.”

And then he closes the door, and Danny and I are left standing, looking at each other, wondering how much longer this can go on, before the ice cracks.





LIZ


Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

When I wake up, it is cold. That is the first thing I notice. It is a sharp contrast to yesterday, when I woke with a dry mouth and the feeling of having slept all night in a room a few degrees warmer than my bedroom at home.

I reach out and take a sip of the water on my bedside table. It is chilled, as if it has been in the fridge.

Under the extra duvets Erin dropped off I am still relatively comfortable, but I am not looking forward to getting dressed. In the end I reach out and grab the complimentary toweling robe off the end of the bed, dragging it under the covers with me to warm up before I put it on. I remember doing the same thing in my childhood bedroom when I was growing up, pulling my school uniform under the covers to get dressed. The room was in a badly converted loft, and in winter it was almost like sleeping outdoors. When I woke in the morning and breathed out, there would be a cloud of white hanging in the air. At night the moisture used to condense on the sloping ceiling and then freeze, so that I would wake to little runnels of ice on the wall above me. This is not as bad as that. I am in a luxurious chalet, not a Victorian terrace in Crawley, for a start. But as far as temperature goes, it is still painfully chilly.

I pick up my phone and peer at the screen. It is 7:19. The battery is down to 15 percent but I barely have time to worry about that fact because I am distracted by something.

I have a notification.

At some point in the night my phone has managed to connect to the internet. The reception is gone now, the bars grayed out to zero, but that notification is still there, proving that at least for a moment, there was a flicker of connection.

The second surprise is that it is from Snoop. I never get notifications from Snoop. You only get a notification if you get a new subscriber to your feed, and I never do.

Only… now I have. At some point in the night, someone snooped me. I’m not even sure how, since I wasn’t listening to anything. I had no idea that was possible. Although maybe when the Wi-Fi connected it somehow restarted my stream where I left off, just for a minute?

The realization gives me an odd feeling. There is no way to know who it was—you can only see who is snooping you in real time; once they log off the connection is severed, only the number remains. Then I dismiss the issue from my mind. In all probability it was a bot or a server glitch, or someone mistyping the ID of someone they actually wanted to follow.



* * *



Downstairs the rooms are quiet but considerably warmer, and there’s a pile of what I imagine must be yesterday’s croissants keeping warm by the woodburner in the lobby, and two big thermos flasks sitting on the hearth.

I pick up a croissant and go through to the living room to warm my hands at the fire while I eat it. I assume I am alone. But then something catches my eye and I turn to see Elliot, seated in an armchair, bent over his laptop. The sight surprises me for two reasons—one, his laptop is on and seems to be plugged in. And two, Elliot almost never comes out of his room except for meals. In fact, when I was working at Snoop, he didn’t even leave his office for those. He got whoever was doing work experience to bring him takeout—the same thing every day, black coffee and three Pret cheese-and-bacon croissants. It must have been very inconvenient when they stopped serving croissants all day and moved them to the breakfast menu. I find myself wondering what he did. Changed his lunch? Somehow I can’t imagine that. Maybe he started sending the work experience person out at 10:00 a.m.

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. I am definitely in the latter category. But now I pluck up my courage.

“Hi, Elliot.”

“Hello, Liz.” He says it flatly, but I know him well enough to know that’s not a measure of his enthusiasm. He greets everyone like that, even Topher, who is probably his favorite human being out of anyone.

“How come your laptop is working?”

“I always carry a battery pack.” He holds it up, a chunky thing the size of a brick that is plugged into the power port of his computer. Of course. How like Elliot to leave nothing to chance.

“But you’ve got no internet, right?”