One by One(42)

“Hi, um, hi everyone. Sorry for dragging you out of your rooms like this, but Danny and I just wanted to give you an update on our situation. Danny spent the morning trekking out to our two closest chalets, which unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, for the inhabitants—seem to be unoccupied. One is very badly damaged, but it doesn’t look like anyone was there at the time of the avalanche. The other one was out of the path of the fall so it’s fine, but again, there’s no one home. We were hoping to find someone with a two-way radio or a satellite phone, but it’s not looking good so far. There’s one more chalet up at this level, but it’s about three miles away, so Danny’s going to wait until the weather clears before he heads out to check on that one.”

“And have you managed to make contact with search and rescue?” Rik says.

“Yes and no,” I say. “As you know, Inigo made contact yesterday and told them about our situation, but we haven’t been able to get through since, and without access to a satellite phone, I don’t think that’s going to happen until the power is restored. The power cut seems to have wiped out the remaining mobile phone reception. But the key thing is that they do know we’re here. We know from what Inigo said that we’re on their list, we just have to be patient while they work through the more critical rescues.”

“Do they know about Eva though?” The question comes from Tiger, her voice even more husky than usual, as if she is holding back a strong emotion, and a silence falls over the room as I try to answer it.

“Inigo told them that’s she’s missing yes. But they don’t know the latest. However—”

I stop and swallow. I knew this would be hard, but this is ridiculously hard. I see Liz’s eyes, luminous with distress, reflecting back at me from the other side of the room, Topher’s anguished face; Ani shading her eyes with a hand to hide the sudden tears that Tiger’s question has provoked. I take a breath, steady myself on the arm of a chair, trying to take the weight off my ankle, give myself space to find the right words. What I want to try to tell them is that even if we can get Elliot’s information to the search and rescue team, it’s not going to help. Eva’s already dead, and now she’s probably under thousands of tonnes of snow as well. There is no chance of anyone rescuing her alive; in fact, there’s not even any certainty that they will be able to recover her body. Some of the high passes never melt, even in summer. If Eva is buried at the bottom of one of the steep ravines, well, that’s it. There aren’t enough resources and money in the world to make that recovery.

“The position she’s in—” I stop, swallow again, but before I can find words to go on, Carl is interrupting.

“How do we know she’s definitely there though?” His expression is truculent. “I mean this whole place has shit phone reception. How can Elliot say those coordinates are right?”

I look around for Elliot. Where is he?

“My understanding is that GPS doesn’t rely on phone reception,” I fumble, still desperately scanning the room for his face, willing him to step in and explain the technicalities of how Snoop gets its geolocation information. I am way out of my depth here. “I mean obviously you have to relay the positioning, you can’t do that without some kind of information exchange, but the GPS coordinates themselves don’t rely on mobile towers for accuracy, they’re… satellite, I think? Is that right, Elliot?” But I can’t see him. “Where is Elliot?”

Other people are looking around now, asking themselves the same question.

“He was up in his room when I last saw him,” Ani says, frowning. “He was working on something. He’s probably got his headphones on, didn’t hear the gong. I’ll go and get him.”

She turns and runs lightly up the spiral staircase and we hear her footsteps receding down the corridor towards Elliot’s room, and the rat-a-tat on his door.

No answer. She knocks again, more loudly, and then calls, “Elliot?” through the wood.

There is a pause. I imagine her cautiously opening the door, venturing forwards to tap Elliot on the shoulder… but my mental picture is broken into shards by a scream. And not just a little shriek of surprise either. This is a full-throated panic-cry.

With my injured ankle, I’m not first up the stairs. Topher, Rik, Danny, and Miranda are ahead of me, and Liz and Carl both jostle past me halfway up. By the time I reach the first floor I can hear Ani’s sobbing cries of “Oh God, he’s dead, he’s dead!” and Topher’s brusque, impatient, “Stop being hysterical.”

When I finally make it to the end of the corridor and push my way into Elliot’s room, everything looks completely normal, except for two things.

Elliot is lying slumped across the little desk by the window. He is facedown in a pool of black coffee, spilled from a cup tipped on its side.

Next to his desk, on a towel on the floor, is his computer, and it has been smashed to pieces.





LIZ


Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

Elliot is dead. You can tell that without even touching him. There is something about the unnatural way he is slumped, one arm hanging limp, the spilled coffee pooling around his face and in his eyes.

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.