“Fuck, Erin. Why didn’t you tell me?” Danny asks, but he doesn’t say it like he’s expecting an answer. I think he knows that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him—it was that I couldn’t bear to say it. I couldn’t bear to become a victim to him too.

There is a silence, and then he folds me in his arms, and I rest my face against his warm, muscled shoulder and I close my eyes and breathe in the good, Danny smell of him. I feel the tears soak into the worn softness of his sweater.

“So you’re proper posh, eh?” he says, with a rumbling chuckle, and I give a shaky answering laugh, and lift my head, wiping the tears off my nose with my sleeve. “You belong down there, with that lot, not up here in the servants’ quarters, with the hoi polloi.”

“No, I don’t.” I say it more emphatically than I mean, and Danny laughs again, but I’m serious. “No, I mean it, Danny, I don’t belong with them anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. What they stand for—”

I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence—the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.

They are arrogant, that’s what I realize—maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them—just like I used to do.

Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.

LIZ

Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

“You’re saying Erin is behind this?” Miranda’s face is skeptical. She folds her arms, looking at Topher with narrowed dark eyes. Topher’s expression is defensive.

“No. No, that’s not what I said—I simply—”

“It’s what you implied though,” Miranda says. I realize something—Miranda does not like Topher. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this until now—perhaps it is the fact that she is so formal and polite. Now she is not bothering to hide her opinion.

“I’m just saying, once is bad luck, twice is a hell of a coincidence. How many skiing deaths can one person be involved in?”

“Oh, why don’t we stop beating around the bush,” Miranda says bitingly. “We all know why you’re desperate to throw suspicion on other people.”

“What are you suggesting?” Topher says, and his voice is suddenly dangerous.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Miranda says. She steps up to him. Even without her heels, they are almost exactly the same height. “I’m stating facts. Most people in this room stood to gain a lot of money before Eva died. Very few people had a motive for wanting her out of the way. You were one of those few.”

Rik and Carl exchange an uneasy look. Neither of them jump in to defend Topher.

“One, that is fucking slander, and two, you are talking about my best friend,” Topher begins furiously, but then Tiger lifts her head and says something. It’s an almost inaudible croak, but all heads turn to her, and Topher stops midsentence.

“What did you say?” Miranda swings around, and Tiger struggles upright, brushing her hair away from her forehead. Her face is blotched red and white.

“She said something,” she repeats, her voice still hoarse with tears.

“Who?” Rik comes and kneels beside her. His face is urgent, and he grabs Tiger’s arm. His gesture seems to have been harder than he intended, because she winces a little. “Who said what?”

“Last night, Ani. I just remembered. She said something. She tried to wake me up, but I was—” She gulps, forcing back sobs. “She said, I didn’t see her. If only I’d been able to wake up properly, if only I hadn’t taken that sleeping pill—” She breaks off. Two huge tears roll down her face.

“Tiger,” Miranda says uneasily. She crouches beside Rik. “Tiger, are you sure about this? Before you were saying you didn’t wake up.”

“I know, I know I said that, but I was wrong, I remember now. I remember her shaking me. I remember the words.”

Miranda shoots a questioning look at Rik and he gives a minute shrug back.

“Well,” Topher says. There’s a touch of triumph in his voice. “Well, well, well. I didn’t see her. Now who’s got a reason to start slinging mud, Ms. Khan? After all, that sounds like it rules out half the room, doesn’t it?”

“What does?” says a deep voice from the direction of the lobby.

We all look around. Danny and Erin are standing in the doorway, side by side. Erin looks as if she has been crying. I am not sure if they have made up completely, but it looks like they have patched their differences enough to put up a united front. Topher looks slightly annoyed.

“Tiger claims—” Miranda begins, but Tiger interrupts with an angry sob.

“I don’t claim anything. I heard her, I’m sure of it. Ani tried to tell me something last night—she shook my shoulder and she said, I didn’t see her. Only I couldn’t wake up properly. But it fits—it fits with what Liz said, that Ani had something she was trying to figure out, something she wasn’t sure of.”

“I didn’t see her,” Erin repeats slowly. “Are you sure of that, Tiger?”

“Yes,” Tiger says, more emphatically this time. “Yes, I was lying on the sofa just now trying to think back to last night, think whether I’d heard anything, and I remembered suddenly Ani coming over to me and shaking my shoulder. It was like a flashback.”

“Which implies,” Topher says smugly, “that we’re looking for a woman. No? Her, that’s what Tiger said. Ani was trying to figure something out about one of the women in the party.”

He glares at Miranda.

“Not necessarily…” Danny says slowly. He is frowning. He scratches his head, thinking. “Maybe she wasn’t talking about the killer. 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?”

“Right,” Carl says shortly. “But what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, what if Ani realized she’d made a mistake? What if Eva never skied that slope after all?”

“But she did,” Miranda says, with exasperation. “Elliot’s geotargeting proves that.”

“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?”

That last suggestion causes a little excited ripple around the circle. Faces brighten. People want to believe this. Danny’s suggestion is a solution that doesn’t require a murderer, and everybody would desperately like that to be true.

But there is a problem. Two problems in fact. It is a solution that doesn’t explain Elliot’s or Ani’s death. It does not hold up for a minute. As they would realize if they thought about it. But I can see they are not thinking.