When I get back into the living room, Erin is hunched over, staring into the fire. I sit beside her, gingerly flexing my knee, though it’s feeling a lot better than it was.

“We’ve got a problem,” I say.

She looks up, as if startled at the sound of my voice.

“What? What did you say?”

“We’ve got a problem,” I repeat. “The water isn’t working. I think the pipes have frozen.”

“Fuck.” She closes her eyes and rubs her face as if she is trying to wake herself from a nightmare, which I suppose in a way she is. “Well, there’s nothing we can do except sit tight. Danny and the others must be there by now. We just have to make it until morning. If we can manage that without freezing to death.”

Her words are unsettling, the more so because I realize that even with my snowsuit on, the chalet is almost unbearably cold now. My breath in the kitchen was a cloud of white. Upstairs must be subzero.

“Maybe… should we sleep down here?” I ask.

“I—I guess. Yes. I suppose it makes sense.”

“I’ll go and get my bedding,” I say, making up my mind. Erin nods.

“I’ll make the sofas up into beds. They fold out.”

I’m almost out of the room when she says, “Liz?”

And I look back, expectantly, wondering what she’s about to say.

“Yes?”

“Liz, I just wanted to say—thanks. Thanks for staying here with me. And I’m sorry it turned out like this.”

“It’s okay,” I say, but somehow the words are hard to say. There is something in my throat—an unexpected kind of lump. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

And then I turn and hobble into the lobby and up the spiral stairs, before she can see the tears in my eyes.

ERIN

Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 5

Snoopscribers: 10

When Liz’s footsteps disappear along the corridor, I slump back in my seat with a sigh and run my hand over my face. I’m sorry. I don’t know what possessed me to say that, except that out of everyone here, it’s Liz I feel most sorry for. I’m not even sure why exactly—maybe because it was so plain, right from the start, that she never wanted to be here. Topher, Eva, however awful this weekend has turned out to be for both of them, they brought it on themselves in a way—choosing to come here, brandishing their money, pushing people around like little chess pieces in their battle for control of Snoop.

But Liz—Liz is just a pawn, like me, caught up in something she never asked for, never wanted.

And yet not once has she complained. Where Topher has grumbled about the crap food, and Carl has stamped and roared and threatened legal action, and Rik has blustered about health and safety and corporate responsibility, and Miranda has made accusations—Liz has just trudged on, putting up with it all, even though under her self-effacing manner I’m sure she was as scared as anyone.

My ankle throbs as I force myself to standing, and I begin to move aside the sofa cushions, ready to pull out the mattress hidden inside the frame. But as I pick up the last cushion, I see something lying underneath it, right where Liz and I were sitting. It glitters in the firelight, and for a second I think it’s a brooch or a piece of jewelry—but when I pick it up, I realize it’s a key. A very familiar one.

It’s a staff key.

Automatically I feel in my pocket, assuming it must have slid out of my jeans when I sat down, but mine is still there, hard and reassuring against my backside.

Only… it’s not reassuring at all.

Because if my key is in my pocket it means… oh God, it means… this is Danny’s key.

Danny’s key that was stolen.

The key that was taken by the killer.

I stand there for a very long time, completely frozen, just looking down at the key in the palm of my hand and trying to cudgel my brain into figuring this out. Somehow, someone got hold of this key—probably during the kerfuffle over getting entry to Tiger’s room, after Inigo’s disappearance. It’s not hard to imagine someone slipping it surreptitiously out of the lock while we were all preoccupied with checking if Tiger was okay. Whoever took it used it to gain entry to that same room in the middle of the night, and kill Ani. And then at some point after that, presumably this morning while we were all distracted by talking about the plan to ski down to the village, it slipped out of their pocket and fell between the sofa cushions.

The only question is: Who took it? Who was sitting on that space on the sofa this morning? Because I cannot for the life of me remember.

I shut my eyes, trying to picture the scene—Tiger lying on the sofa, sobbing, Miranda trying to comfort her, Rik handing out whiskeys… I need to place all the characters in the room, one by one, figure this out.

Danny and I were standing. I remember that clearly. Topher… Topher was leaning up against the mantelpiece. Miranda was kneeling on the floor by the coffee table. Liz was in one of the armchairs by the fire. Rik and Carl… they were on a sofa, but which one? I squeeze my eyes shut harder, and have a sudden vision of Rik leaning forward, filling up the whiskey glass at the far end of the table. It was the other sofa, the one beneath the window. Which means… I open my eyes.

It means Tiger was lying on the sofa where I found the key, her hip right on the point where the cushions join. It would make complete sense—the key could so easily have slid out of her pocket while she was lying there crying. Except… it makes no sense at all. Tiger is the only person who didn’t need a key to kill Ani. She was already in the room. And if she wanted an alibi, she could have simply said she forgot to lock the door.

But no one else occupied that seat after the key went missing, apart from me…

And Liz.

As if hypnotized, my gaze drifts upwards, to the ceiling, where on the floor above Liz is moving around her room, gathering up duvets and pillows. I can hear the faint creak of the floor joists, and then the sound of her door shutting.

I hear the shush, shush as she drags the duvet along the corridor.

Then I hear the halting noise of her feet on the spiral stairs, going carefully this time; she does not want to slip again.

Then she appears in the doorway of the living room, her hands full of bedcovers, her face unreadable in the dim light, the firelight flickering off her big, owl-like glasses, and with a funny little pang I remember that very first day, the way she reminded me of an owl, paralyzed by the lights of an oncoming car.

She still looks like an owl, but suddenly the resemblance seems very different, and quite another kind of chill comes over me as I realize I was right all along—but so very, very wrong.

Because here is the thing. We think we know owls. They are the soft, friendly, blinking creatures of children’s rhymes and stories. They may be wise, but they are also slow, and easily confused.

The problem is, none of that is true. Owls are not slow. They are fast—lightning fast. And they are not confused. In their own element—the dark—they are swift and merciless hunters.

Owls are raptors. Predators.

That was what I saw in Liz, right back on that very first day. I was just too blinded by my own preconceptions to recognize it.

In the dark, owls are not the hunted, but the hunter. And right now, it is dark.