half past one. They said they’d be back by one at the latest, and Danny is shouting expletives from the kitchen as the minutes tick past and his risotto clogs.
At one forty-five he sticks his head out the door with a face like thunder, and I shake my head.
“There’s only one thing I hate more than fucking stealth vegans and that’s wankers,” he growls, and disappears, the swing door clacking behind him.
And then, suddenly, there’s the clatter of ski boots on tiles, and I hurry into the lobby to hear noises from the ski entrance, the unmistakable sounds of people clumping along a hard floor, clanging open the heated ski lockers that line the corridor.
“Eva?” someone calls irritably. “Eva, where the fuck are you?”
No answer.
Then the insulated door to the lobby swings open and Topher comes in wearing ski gear and thick socks, looking pissed off.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says shortly when he sees me. “Where the fuck is Eva?”
“Eva?” A retort about his rudeness hovers on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it back. “Sorry, Topher, I have no idea.”
He stops, halfway to the stairs.
“You mean she’s not here?”
“No, you’re the first back.”
He stands there, quite still, the expression on his face wavering between irritation and concern. Then he calls over his shoulder.
“Miranda, she’s not here.”
“You’re kidding.” Miranda is the next out of the door. Her face is bright pink, with the painful flush that always follows extreme cold. “Huh. Well… I guess at least that means we didn’t freeze our arses off for no reason. But what do you think could have happened?”
“Maybe the lift closed before she could get on, and she skied back down into St. Antoine to get the funicular?” Topher says, but Carl has come out now and is shaking his head.
“She got on before me, mate. She was on that lift, I’d swear to it.”
“And I saw her,” Ani says. They gather in the lobby, sweaty and confused, melting snow dripping from their jackets. “I told you, Carl and I were coming up in the lift and I saw her skiing down.”
“What’s the matter?” Rik says, coming through in his turn, shaking the snow off his black salopettes. Miranda turns to him, and now her face is definitely worried.
“Eva’s not here.”
“She’s not here?” Rik’s expression is blank. “But—but that’s not possible. There’s nowhere else she could be.”
They all begin talking at once, offering up different theories, many of them totally impossible based on the geography of the resort.
“Hold up, hold up,” I say, and amazingly they all fall silent. Somehow, they want leadership, and I am the closest thing to it. “Start from the beginning. When was the last time you were all together as a group?”
“At the bottom of the Reine ski lift,” Ani says, promptly. “We had a discussion about whether to break for lunch there, or do one last run. Topher made the point that it was uphill from the ski lift to the chalet, so we had to do a run, and we agreed to go up to the top station and do either La Sorcière or Blanche-Neige, depending on ability.”
I bite back my reply to this. La Sorcière is a bitch of a run. I’ve been skiing all my life, and there’s no way I’d do it in this weather. Even Blanche-Neige with this visibility is no joke for inexperienced skiers. Not for the first time it strikes me that Topher is kind of a jerk.
“But when we got up there Liz had some kind of breakdown,” Topher says bitterly.
“Toph,” Rik says sharply, with a jerk of his head towards the ski door, and I look over Topher’s shoulder to see Liz plodding wearily across from the boot room. She is covered in snow and looks utterly exhausted, even more so than the others.
“When we got to the top the weather was pretty extreme, and Liz decided to take the lift back down,” Miranda says smoothly, but looking at Topher’s mutinous face I can well imagine the discussion that decision must have entailed. Part of me is amazed at Liz’s strength of mind, that she didn’t let herself be bullied into trying the run. But fear can make people amazingly resilient.
“The rest of us waited up there for the others,” Topher says. “But Eva never came.”
“But she did,” Ani puts in. “We saw her, Carl and I. Didn’t we?” She nudges Carl, who nods.
“Yeah, no doubt about it, mate. We saw her get on the bubble