I told Katherine I’d meet them downstairs after she helped Audrey pack, and headed after Marcelo, questions brewing. I was distracted passing the library on the first floor. The fire still sizzled in the hearth at the back of the room, the warmth bracing my cheeks, beading sweat on my brow. Or maybe the heat was coming from my stomach, crawling up my neck. Because intuition was telling me that little pieces of the mystery were coming together, but not yet into a whole. I browsed the shelves of Golden Age mysteries. Audrey had put Mary Westmacott in the wrong spot, hiding under a different name in the Ws, so I moved her back to the Cs. I ran my thumb over the spines, perhaps seeking inspiration for a denouement. Knox didn’t have a rule against it, but in all the books in front of me, it was implied that the detective didn’t simply give up and head down the mountain at the end.

But those detectives were smarter than I was. I had no author pulling my marionette strings, no gifts bestowed upon me. I would not qualify for the Detection Club. I remember thinking the only thing I was sure of was that I was missing something. Something small. That there’s always one thing in these books that unlocks everything else, and it is so often the smallest of things. There was something I couldn’t see. Not without a good old-fashioned Holmesian magnifying glass, anyway. Or a loupe.

And then I solved it.

In these kinds of books, there’s often some impressive metaphorical illustration of the deductive moment. The detective will be sitting and thinking, and maybe the jigsaw in their head slowly locks into place, or maybe it’s fireworks, or dominoes; maybe they’re stumbling down a dark corridor and they finally find the switch. Either way, the information collides in a fascinating waterfall of discovery that compels them to the Eureka moment. I promise you it is not so dramatic in reality. One second I didn’t know the answer, and the next I did. I checked my suspicion by walking to the mantle, and then I was sure.

To keep Ronald Knox happy – since all clues lighted upon must be presented to the reader – here are the clues I used to put it together: Mary Westmacott; fifty-thousand dollars; my jaw; my hand; Sky Lodge’s snow cams; Sofia’s malpractice suit; a Brisbane PO box; Lucy cocking an imaginary gun against her head; a double-occupancy coffin; vomit; a speeding fine; a handbrake; a loupe; physiotherapy; an unsolved assault; a chivalrous and shivering husband; ‘the boss’; a jacket; footprints; Lucy’s nervous wait; a pyramid scheme; sore toes; my chalet’s phone; my dreams of choking; Michael’s new-found pacifism; and F-287: a dead pigeon with a medal for bravery.