One by One(85)

She looks away at that, and then buries her face in her tea so that her glasses mist with steam.

“I couldn’t stay after that,” she says, very quietly. “I left Snoop—and I never looked back. I went to work somewhere completely different, a banking call center. It became like this horrible nightmarish episode in my life that was done and gone. Until the buyout happened. And I was dragged back into all of this.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say again, and it’s true. I am sorry. Sorry for that poor kid dragged into a world she didn’t understand.

But I still don’t completely understand. She was assaulted. She was trying to get away from an attacker. And even if Liz didn’t trust the court to believe that, and I can see why she wouldn’t, why did Eva have to die? She kept Liz’s secret.

And then, in a horrible, blinding flash, I get it.

Topher was the one who gave Liz those shares, on the tacit understanding that she would back him up if it ever came to a crunch like this. She owed him everything.

But Eva—Eva knew something about Liz that could ruin her. At the very least, she would be embroiled in a messy, public court case, and I know enough about Liz to know that that would be torture to her. At the worst, she might be looking at a manslaughter charge, and prison.

Whether she articulated it or not, Eva was the one who covered up what happened. She held that evidence in her hands. And she must have been holding that fact over Liz’s head all these years.

No wonder Liz could never find the courage to say how she was planning to vote.

She could vote to betray her mentor, the man who hired her, stuck up for her, got her the shares in the first place.

Or she could vote against the person who held her life in her hands. The person who could send her to prison to rot.

When the realization comes, it’s with a twisted lurch of sympathy for Liz.

I think of that poor, young girl—fresh out of university, swimming in waters far too strange and dangerous for her to navigate. Because Liz was the victim not of one horrible situation—but of two. Eva had helped her out of one nightmare, only to create another of her own making—blackmailing the girl she had professed to help.

Of course Liz did the sensible thing. She told Eva that she was voting with her. But what about next time? And the time after that? How could she live her life knowing that Eva had this secret to hold over her head anytime she needed something Liz was unwilling to give?

No. She needed to make herself safe forever. She needed to get rid of the person who had started all this, the only person who knew her secret.

She needed to kill Eva.





LIZ


Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

“So that’s it,” I say at last. I put my tea to my lips for a long time, pretending to gulp it thirstily down.

Erin is staring at me, but I can’t tell what her expression is. It looks slightly horrified—but that could be sympathetic horror at what I’ve been through. Does she believe me? I can’t decide.

Don’t you want to drink your tea? I want to ask, but I can’t say that. It would sound suspicious. Instead, I raise my cup to my lips again, hoping to convey the message by subliminal suggestion. To my delight, it works. Erin picks up the cup. I see the muscles of her throat work as she swallows.

“So you had no choice,” she says faintly, and I try to arrange my face in the expression I think she will expect to see. A kind of… pained regret. And it’s true—I do regret this. That night, most of all.

“I never wanted any of this,” I say. “I just feel like I’ve been swept up in something awful and horrible.”

Erin shakes her head, but not like she is telling me she doesn’t believe me. More like she’s condemning whatever brought us here. She is staring down into her cup. I can’t see her face very well. That bothers me, but then she takes another sip of tea, and I begin to feel more relaxed.

I put my own cup to my lips too, in order not to seem suspicious. I’m careful not to actually swallow any of the liquid inside.

“I’ve worked out what you did,” Erin says, as she puts the cup on her knees, nursing it with her hands. I can see from where I’m sitting that it’s half empty, and I begin to feel more confident. “It was very clever. You had a ski jacket like Eva’s. You met her at the top of the lift—”

She pauses, and I know why. She is trying not to spell out what I did, as if it will offend me in some strange way. But it’s okay. I have to live with what happened, there is no point in not facing up to it.

I was waiting at the top of the lift when Eva got off, right by the barrier where I had pretended to lose control and almost ski over the edge with Rik earlier that day. Of course, I didn’t lose control at all. It was a deliberate slide to give myself the chance to check out the edge up there. I wanted to see if it was as close as I remembered, to see if the barrier had been raised since my last visit, two years ago.

Nothing had changed. It was perfect.

The irony is I’m actually a very good skier. But Topher and Rik and the others were all too willing to believe that a girl from a Crawley comprehensive wouldn’t know one end of a ski pole from the other. The truth, had they ever bothered to ask me, is that I loved skiing—right from the first time I went on a school trip, at age fifteen. I had never set foot on a ski slope before, but I remember the teacher saying admiringly, “You’re a natural, Liz!”