‘Stalking the guests. That’s an invasion of privacy.’

‘Is it now?’ she said. You might think she’s flirting, but at this point I’m not so sure. You won’t hear about us locking lips until Chapter 27, when I’m naked, if you’re wondering.

‘Is there anyone else in the chalets?’ I asked.

‘Just your group booking. Half are empty.’

‘Okay. And this camera, does it move? It’s not a great angle.’

She shook her head. ‘If we didn’t bolt it into its case, it’d snap off every time there was a storm. Besides, it’s not a security camera, it’s a snow cam. It’s just meant to show people what the resort’s like on any day, so they can plan their drives, you know . . . pack tyre chains’—she paused a second to let me digest the insult— ‘. . . and the right clothes, or see if they should book a lift pass or not. It’s also not a video feed, see – it’s snapshots.’

She clicked play, and I saw it was indeed a series of photos playing on a reel, one taken every three minutes, the timer in the bottom left jumping forward with each image. She let it play. Occasionally there was a blob of grey, which was someone walking to their chalet, but it was pretty much useless, because every person was too blurry a shadow to make out any features. The only positive was that it covered part of the driveway, but even then, the timing had to be right to nab a photo of a moving car in the three-minute window. I knew from making the trip a couple of times already that it was a slow-ish walk through the snow from the chalets to the guesthouse, so the one positive was that, unless someone was really hurrying, it would catch most people, unidentifiable as they might be.

Juliette let the tape roll. It must have been on fast-forward, because each photo was held on the screen for about twenty seconds rather than three minutes. Just before 11 pm, a person moved towards Chalet Four, which I knew was Sofia coming to visit me. A dozen or so frames later, she headed out of shot back to Chalet Two. It was hard to tell direction or intent from a loose shadow, but it lined up well enough that I was happy with my summation. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of someone else sniffing around Chalet Two between the two photos of Sofia, but I was out of luck. Whoever it was had completely missed the three-minute window, which was either an amazing fluke or very well planned. The film skipped forward through the night, uneventful, with just the occasional smoker from the guesthouse, and two shadows holding hands and looking at the stars. Noticeably, no one walked up the hill to the golf course.