The post-mortem ran to eleven pages and the part everyone quoted afterwards was not the part about the poison.
Multiple healed fractures, left ulna and radius, of differing ages. Scarring consistent with repeated puncture wounds to both forearms and the anterior thighs, historic. Dental damage, upper left quadrant, untreated at the time and imperfectly corrected since.
Note. The puncture scarring is extensive and follows no pattern I would associate with self-injury. On the radiographic evidence the subject was between fourteen and seventeen years of age when the majority of it was inflicted.
Five of them went up the mountain on the Friday, and the road behind them was closed by four, and not one person in the car noticed it happen.
"Say it properly," said Freddie Kerr-Wallace, from the driver's seat. "Za-VAD-ski."
"I'm not doing this."
"Nina did it. Nina did it beautifully."
"Nina," said Nina Alderton, without looking up from her phone, "has a first-class degree and a flat in Stoke Newington and does not do impressions any more."
"Nina has a flat in Stoke Newington," said Jonah Pike, "that her father bought."
There was the particular silence of five people who had known each other since they were eleven and had long ago agreed which insults were allowed.
The lodge came up out of the trees at half past four, low and long and lit from the inside, and every one of them made a sound.
It was not a cabin. That was the word Freddie had used on the group chat — cabin, free, February, he's got a cabin — and what stood in front of them had underfloor heating and a wall of glass facing forty miles of snow going blue in the dark, and a wood store stacked to the roof by somebody who had thought about it a year in advance.
"Right," said Saskia Boyd, very quietly. "How much do you think he's actually got?"
And the door opened.
He had been beautiful for about six years by then, and it still did something to the air when he came into it.
That was the thing none of them ever said out loud on the drive up, though all five had looked him up: that the boy whose head they had held under the second-floor tap had come back from his year out four inches taller, with his jaw grown into itself and his teeth done and the accent sanded down to something that could have come from anywhere, and had then, with what Freddie described at the time as unbelievable cheek, made rather a lot of money.
"You came," Emil said.
He said it the way a man says a thing he has been looking forward to. He took Nina's bag out of her hand before she could offer it. He held the door with his back and let all five of them past him into the warmth, and he counted them as they went — a small movement of the chin, one, two, three, four, five — which Rory Meikle noticed and thought nothing of at all.
"No signal," said Jonah, holding his phone up at the window like a man testing for rain.
"None from November to March. The mast is on the other side of the ridge." Emil was opening wine, his back to the room. "There's a landline, but the weight of the snow takes the line down every year, usually the first week."
Freddie laughed. "So we're stranded."
"Completely," Emil said.
He turned round, and he was smiling, and he handed Freddie the first glass.
"It's why I asked you for February."