One by One
And Liz nods, and turns for the stairs.
LIZ
Snoop ID: ANON101
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 0
Snoopscribers: 1
There is something wrong with Erin. I am not sure what. She said she was worried about Danny, but if that’s the case, I don’t know why her fears came on so suddenly. She was quite cheerful until about two hours ago. Then she got nervous and edgy.
We have been lying in the darkness for perhaps an hour or more, but she is not asleep. It’s not just that she’s not snoring—out of the corner of my gaze I can see her eyes are still open, reflecting the light from the fire’s embers as she blinks. She is lying there in the darkness, silently watching me. She is thinking about something. But I do not know what.
What is she thinking?
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to look as normal as possible.
A few minutes later I hear the creak of the mattress springs. Erin is cautiously swinging her legs out of bed.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
She jumps like a criminal caught in the middle of something, and puts her hand to her heart.
“God! Liz, you scared me.”
“Sorry.” I don’t say anything else. From my experience, if you keep quiet, people get nervous. They talk. They fill the silence with their own conversation. You can find out a lot that way. Sure enough, after a pause, Erin answers my question without me having to restate it.
“I didn’t mean to wake you. I couldn’t sleep. I’m going to the t-toilet.” She is shivering. I can hear her teeth beginning to chatter. It is very, very cold in the room now. The fire has died down to glowing ash.
“Okay.” I roll over, pulling the covers up to my chin. “Don’t forget the pipes are frozen.”
“I kn-now.” She opens the stove to put in another log. “I’ll use one of the upstairs bathrooms. I think we’ve flushed both the d-downstairs loos already.”
I don’t say anything. I just watch her as she wraps her coat more tightly around her, and then pads up the stairs. Then I turn over and feel in my pocket for the key.
It is gone.
ERIN
Snoop ID: LITTLEMY
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 5
Snoopscribers: 10
Bloody hell. My heart is pounding as I tiptoe up the staircase. I don’t know where that lie about the toilets came from, but I’ve never been so thankful for frozen pipes. They have given me exactly what I needed—an excuse to go upstairs.
I have no idea what the truth is about the key. Did Liz take it? I don’t dare to ask. Maybe someone else sat on that sofa when I wasn’t around. Or maybe Liz found the key and picked it up but has been too scared to tell anyone in case they suspected her. There could be a dozen innocent explanations. Or there could be one, very damning one.
Either way, I could not lie there in the darkness listening to her soft, regular breathing a second more. I had to do something. And at last my subconscious overrode my racing thoughts to prod me about something I had totally forgotten.
Elliot’s charging block. The giant external battery he was using to power his laptop, before he died and his computer was destroyed. If I can get to that battery and plug my dead phone in, maybe I can get a sliver of connection. It’s worth a try. It’s also not something Liz could possibly object to. And yet, for reasons I can’t face examining, I don’t want to tell her.
Why not? my brain whispers as I tiptoe along the corridor, in time with my steps. Why not?
Because I don’t trust her.
Why not?
Because… I swallow, hearing the dry click of my jaw in the eerie silence. Because in my heart of hearts, I do think she could have killed Eva. I don’t know how, but my fear over these last two hours has shown me something I would not have believed before tonight: I do think Liz has it in her to kill. It’s not just the key—though that is concerning enough. The panic I felt when I opened the door of my room and saw her standing there, smiling blankly at me, her face hidden behind those silvery lenses—there was something deep and true and real about that panic. It told me something I had not admitted to myself before: I am afraid of Liz. She may be meek and quiet and almost painfully reserved, but behind that meekness, I believe there is steel, and yes, I think she could kill someone. I believe that in a way that I never believed it of Inigo, or even Topher, despite all the evidence piled up against him.
Out of everyone here, I believe Liz could kill in cold blood, and conceal that fact from us all. No one pays attention to her. And for a killer, that’s a kind of superpower.
I am almost at Elliot’s door. I am walking as silently as I can now, remembering the way Liz’s steps along the corridor were audible in the room below. I take the passkeys out of my pocket, and choosing one, I insert it gently into the lock, turn it, and open Elliot’s door, very, very quietly.
It creaks, just a little bit, and I hold my breath, hoping Liz didn’t hear. But there is no sound from below. If she came up, I would have no excuse for being down this end of the building. The natural thing would be for me to use the staff bathroom, up the far end. Or, if I couldn’t be bothered to walk that far, to access one of the guest bedrooms closer to the stairs. Not Elliot’s. Not a room with a—
The smell hits me as I open the door. It’s a smell I remember from the teaching hospital.
There is a dead body in this room—beneath the reek of urine and the incongruously homely smell of spilled coffee, it smells of death. Not badly, the room is too cold for that, but unmistakably. A fetid, animal kind of smell.
There is no way you would choose to use this room for anything, if you had another option.
The smell makes me gag, but I push the urge down and edge across the room to the far side of Elliot’s desk. And there it is—sitting like a cinder block on the floor, a single red LED piercing the gloom. My heart gives a thump of relief. And almost at the same time I notice two things. The first is that a phone is plugged into the charging block, and it’s switched on, and fully charged. Elliot left his phone charging. Of course he did.
But the second thing I see is that he has an android, and mine is an iPhone. My phone is in my pocket, but I can’t use his charger.
I want to kick myself. I should have collected my own charger first—that was incredibly stupid of me. Do I have time? Ordinarily it would take me less than a minute to run to the other end of the corridor, slam through the staff doors, and grab my charger from beside my bed. But now, I can’t run. I can’t slam through the doors. I can’t afford to make a sound.
I make up my mind. I will try Elliot’s phone first. You can dial some emergency numbers from the lock screen—I just have no idea whether 112 or 17 are among them.
I pick it up and the screen jumps into life, but with a lurch of disappointment I see there is still no reception—just an x by the grayed-out scale. I can’t call anyone.
Still, there are a bunch of app notifications on the lock screen, and it’s with a flicker of hope that I scroll down them, trying to figure out if the phone has connected at all during the past twenty-four hours. If it’s getting even tiny blips of reception, that might be enough. If I can get into the phone I could send a text, which would just sit there in the outbox until the phone connected. I wouldn’t have to do anything. Just wait for it to send.