a few lifts ahead of us.”
“A few?” Topher says. “How’s that? There was no queue at all.”
Carl reddens.
“Well, look, there’s no point in beating about the bush. I—well I fluffed getting on the bubble if you must know. Ani and I were supposed to be getting in after Eva, but I tripped over my bindings. Fell over, and the lift doors closed, and Eva went up with my skis still stuck in the rack. It took me a few minutes to get myself sorted again, and then Ani and I caught the next lift after that.”
“Could she have got confused and got off at the first station?” Miranda says with a frown, but Ani shakes her head.
“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I saw her, when we were coming up in the bubble. It goes right over that black piste—the really steep one that Topher wanted to do.”
“La Sorcière,” I put in, and Ani nods.
“That’s the one. And I saw a skier coming down it. She stopped for a second on the ridge and kind of raised her hand, waving at me. And I realized, it was Eva.”
“How could you tell at that distance?” Rik says, sceptically. “It could have been anyone.”
“I recognized her red jacket. It’s, like, really distinctive. No one else here has one like it, and we were the only people on that lift.”
I look around the circle, and she’s right. Topher is in mustard and khaki, Rik and Carl are both in black. Miranda is in a kind of purple jumpsuit. Inigo has a green jacket and black salopettes. Tiger is wearing kind of shabby surfer chic that looks like an eighties denim bomber jacket and cargo pants, but that I suspect is actually pretty expensive snowboard gear. Liz is wearing a faded navy-blue all-in-one that’s too big for her and looks as though it was borrowed from a friend. And Ani herself is wearing the bright sea-blue jacket and white salopettes that I noticed earlier. None of them could possibly be mistaken for Eva.
“When we got off at the top my skis were waiting,” Carl says. “She must have taken them off the lift and then skied off.”
“Didn’t you notice she wasn’t at the top?” I ask, and Rik shakes his head, looking rueful.
“No, the visibility was really poor and well… look, if you must know there was a bit of… well, argy bargy at the top.”
Argy bargy? What the hell does that mean? I’m about to ask when Miranda butts in.
“You might as well say it plainly, Rik. The lift attendant came out to tell us the avalanche warning had gone up to red, and they were closing the whole mountain, but half the party ignored the warning and deliberately skied off before they could get the nets out.”
“I’m so sorry.” Inigo at least has the grace to look embarrassed. “It was a total misunderstanding. I thought he was saying now or never, so I, uh, pushed off.”
“So wait, some of you skied home,” I say slowly, “and some of you took the bubble back down?”
Nods all round the circle.
“Naturally we stopped for a bit at the big pine by the shortcut back to the chalet to see if anyone was catching up, but when we saw people traveling back down in the bubble, we skied down to the bottom of the lift,” Topher says. “So we waited there for another twenty minutes, only for the bastards in charge of the resort to close that lift too. At that point we concluded Eva had fucked off back to the chalet, but since we were now downhill from the chalet with no functioning lift, we had no choice but to ski down to St. Antoine and get the funicular back up.”
“Okay… okay…,” I say, trying to make sense of it. “So the last time anyone is absolutely certain they saw her, she was skiing La Sorcière?”
Ani nods, turning to Carl for confirmation, who says, “That’s the size of it.”
“But La Sorcière was closed,” Topher explodes. “That was the whole fucking problem.”
The whole fucking problem is that your colleague and cofounder is missing in extreme weather conditions, I think, but I don’t say it. I am thinking about La Sorcière, about its treacherous, icy slopes, and the way the loose powder builds up on the sheet ice beneath, making every turn a throw of the dice between a painful skid and a mini avalanche. I’m thinking of its brutal moguls, hidden by the drifting