“It’s here,” Elliot says, pulling up a GPS map, where a red flag shows the location of the coordinates he’s tapped into the search bar.

As soon as I see the pin, my heart sinks down into my stomach, and I feel myself going cold with dread.

“Where is it exactly?” Topher is saying, but his voice sounds very far away now. Danny suddenly puts a hand to his mouth, and I know that he has just figured out what I already knew.

The pistes are marked on Elliot’s maps, but not the elevations, and without the simplified three-dimensional rendering of the resort’s official piste map, it’s not very easy to put together the geography of the peaks and valleys. Eva’s little dot is showing very close to the La Sorcière run. So close in fact that she could almost be on the run.

But she’s not. Because if you’ve skied the run, as I have, many times, what you know is that there is a sheer drop to the side of La Sorcière. A drop that falls hundreds, maybe thousands of feet into a deep, inaccessible valley. Somehow, in the blinding snow, Eva must have done exactly what I feared in the first place—she has skied over the edge.

“If we can give these coordinates to search and rescue—” Topher is saying, with the kind of blithe confidence that only the CEO of a major international company could muster, but I interrupt.

“I’m sorry, Topher, I’m so sorry—”

“What do you mean?”

“This—” I swallow, I try to find a way of putting the news that’s not too brutal. “This dot, it’s off the side of the piste.”

“Eva’s an excellent skier,” Topher says confidently. “Off-piste, even in this weather—”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about a bit of loose snow. I mean she’s skied off the piste. Off the edge. La Sorcière—” I swallow. There is no way of saying this nicely. “That section of La Sorcière runs alongside a sheer drop. A very steep one.”

Topher looks at me blankly, unable, or unwilling, to understand what I’m trying to tell him.

“What do you mean?” he says at last.

“Topher, if Eva is really where that dot is showing, she’s dead.”

I regret the starkness as soon as the words have left my mouth, but they are said, and they can’t be unsaid.

Topher’s face goes white. Then he turns to Elliot.

“How accurate is this positioning?”

“GPS is typically accurate to about five meters,” Elliot says. He looks… God, I don’t know. Unperturbed almost? Can that be possible? Surely not. No one could be that callous. Even if they were, wouldn’t they at least try to feign some kind of concern? “But you can get interference—bounced signals and so on. I’m not totally sure how the mountains would affect it. It’s not impossible it’s a few meters off.”

“So, what, ten meters? She could be on the piste,” Topher says, desperately, but we can all see, looking at the map’s scale, that that’s not possible. Even fifty meters wouldn’t put her back on the run. “Or—or she could have dropped her phone skiing down.”

“If she’d dropped it, I think it would be on the run,” I say very quietly.

“She could have thrown it off the edge, for fuck’s sake!” Topher cries.

No one responds to this. It’s true, of course, but the obvious response is why, and no one can bring themselves to say it, not even Elliot, who simply nods in acceptance of the fact that Topher’s remark is essentially correct. All we have found is Eva’s phone. It’s just very hard to work out how it could have got where it is now without Eva.

“Fuck,” Topher says. He gropes his way to the footrest I was using to prop up my injured foot and sits, as though his legs will no longer hold him up. “Fuck.”

“If she’s dead,” Elliot says flatly, “what does that mean for Snoop? Is Eva’s husband a shareholder now? Will he get a vote on the buyout?”

“Fuck!” Topher looks wild-eyed, as if he can’t believe what’s happened. “Arnaud? I—I don’t know! Jesus, Elliot, how can you—”

He breaks off… I can see his brain ticking. Even now, below his grief, he is still Snoop’s founder as much, if not more, than he is Eva’s friend.

“I suppose—I remember now, when we set it up. There was something about this. It was supposed to stop the company passing out of control of the original shareholders without their agreement. I’m pretty sure that shareholders can’t sell or give away their shares—they can only offer them for sale to Eva and me. I mean—”

He stops. Swallows.

“To me.”

LIZ

Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 0

Eva is dead.

I don’t know how the word gets out, but once the whispers start they are like frost creeping across a window. Soon everyone knows. In the living room Miranda and Tiger are exchanging urgent whispers.

“I know,” I hear Miranda hiss. “But we have to figure out some kind announcement for when we’re back online, Tiger. There’s no way we can keep a lid on news this big, and if it leaks, it’ll be worse in the long run.”

“I can’t believe it.” Ani comes to sit beside me on the couch. Her face is swollen and blotched, even in the dim light from the stove and candles. “Have you heard?”

I nod. I don’t trust my voice. In spite of everything, in spite of all that’s happened and all the years since I left Snoop, my feelings are still too raw.

“I can’t believe it!” Ani repeats desperately. “Oh God, this is awful. Poor, poor Eva. Rik says they may not even be able to recover a body. Oh God poor Arnaud. And he doesn’t even know. How will he tell Radisson? How do you explain to a child of that age that Mummy’s never coming home?”

Radisson. The name stabs me like a knife. I had almost forgotten that Eva had had a child in the years since we worked together.

“I don’t know,” I say hoarsely.

“Fuck knows what this means for the buyout,” Carl says morosely from the other end of the room, and Ani rounds on him.

“Carl! How can you even think about that?”

“I know.” Carl holds up his hands. “Look, I’m not being selfish here, I won’t be getting any million-dollar payouts, will I. I’m not talking about the money, I’m talking about the safety of the company. I’m still chief legal officer at Snoop and I have to think about this stuff. Snoop doesn’t poof out of existence because Eva’s had an accident. All our employees don’t go away. I’ve got a duty to them and to the company. I’d be saying the same if it was me who skied off a cliff. Well, I mean, assuming I could still talk.”

“Carl’s right.” Rik comes up behind us unexpectedly, looming out of the shadows, and puts his hand on his colleague’s shoulder. His face, in the candlelight, looks uneasy. “However crassly he’s phrased it. Eva’s death is a tragedy—there’s absolutely no doubt about that—but in the coldest possible way, it’s got very little to do with Snoop. The company is a completely separate entity to any of us—even Eva and Topher. The buyout offer is still on the table. The clock’s still ticking. We still have to come up with an answer. Eva’s death doesn’t change that.”