One by One - Ruth Ware Page 0,4

Justin Bieber. And whoever else. Slebs love it—it’s the new Instagram. It’s like, you can connect, yeah? But without actually giving away too much information.”

I nod slowly. I can actually kind of see the attraction of that.

“So it’s basically famous people’s playlists?”

“Not playlists,” Danny says. “Because the whole point is that it’s real time. You get what they’re listening to right now.”

“What if they’re asleep?”

“Then you don’t get anything. They don’t appear in the search bar if they’re not online and listening, and if you’re snooping on someone and they stop listening, their feed goes dead and you get the option to shunt along to someone else.”

“So if you’re snooping on someone and they pause a song to answer the phone—”

Danny nods.

“Yeah, it just cuts off.”

“That’s a really terrible idea.”

He laughs and shakes his head.

“Nah, you’re not getting it. The whole point is…” He stops, trying to formulate something unquantifiable into words. “The whole point is the connection. You’re actually listening to the same thing at the same moment as they are—beat for beat. You know that wherever she is in the world, Lady Gaga is listening to the exact same thing you are. It’s like”—inspiration strikes, and his face lights up—“it’s like, you know when you’re first going out with someone, and you’re sharing a set of headphones, one earpiece in their ear, one earpiece in yours?”

I nod.

“Well, it’s like that. You and Lady Gaga, sharing her earphones. It’s really powerful. When you’re lying there in bed, and they switch off, and you know that somewhere they’re probably doing the exact same thing as you, rolling over, falling asleep… it’s pretty intimate, you know? But it’s not just celebrities. If you’re in a long-distance relationship, say, you can snoop your bloke and listen to the same song at the same time. Assuming you know his Snoop ID of course. I keep mine locked down.”

“Okay…” I say slowly. “So… like… your feed is public, but no one knows it’s you?”

“Yeah, so I have like two followers, because I’ve not bothered to hook up any of my contact list. Mind you, some of the most popular Snoopees are totally incognito. There’s this one guy in Iran, HacT, he’s called. He’s in the top ten Snoopees pretty much every month. Well, I say in Iran, but there’s no actual way of knowing. That’s just what it says on his Snoop biog. He could be from Florida.”

An alert pings on his phone, and he brings it up.

“Ah, yeah, see? This is someone I’m subscribed to, Msaggronistic. She’s this French Canadian chick in Montreal, she listens to some really cool punk stuff. That alert was telling me she’s come online and she’s playing…” He scrolls down the notification. “The Slits, apparently. Not sure that’s my cup of tea, but that’s the thing, it might be. I just don’t know.”

“Right.” I’m not sure I’m any the wiser really, but it’s sort of making sense.

“Anyway,” Danny says. He gets up and starts clearing our plates. “That’s what I meant, these tech start-ups, you could actually imagine them calling their head of finance ‘chief bean counter’ or whatever the fuck he was called. They’d think it was edgy or something. Coffee?”

I look at my watch—2:17.

“I can’t. I’ve got a couple of rooms still to do, then the pool.”

“I’ll bring you one up.”

I stand and stretch, working the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. It’s physical work, cleaning. I never realized how much before I started this job. Heaving Hoovers up and down stairs, scrubbing toilets and tiles. Doing nine rooms on the trot is a workout.

* * *

I’m finishing the pool when Danny comes in with a cup of coffee. He’s wearing his usual trunks—the smallest, tightest ones I’ve ever seen in real life. They are banana yellow, and when he turns around to put my coffee down on the lounger, you can see that he has BAD BOI written across his butt in scarlet letters.

“Don’t make any splashes,” I warn him, as he stands poised at the edge of the pool, his arms outstretched. “I’m not mopping again.”

He says nothing, just sticks out his tongue, and then does a perfect, splash-free dive into the shallow end of the pool. It’s not really deep enough for diving, but he skims the bottom and comes up safely at the far end.

“Come on, the bloody place is clean enough. Get in.”

I waver. I haven’t Hoovered the dining room, but I don’t know if anyone would be able to