Just after the clock ticked past 1 am, Juliette started gripping the mouse harder. She was watching for something. A few photos later, she found it and clicked pause. ‘I thought this was interesting,’ she said. ‘Green Boots is not on any guest or staff list, and no one over the hill has reported anybody missing. I radioed across to the other resorts, and it’s all people are talking about, but no one knows anything.’ Juliette pointed at a print-out on the desk, a list of names, which I assumed were all the guests, with small inky ticks next to each one. Accounted for, I guessed. Lucy had already told me this, but it was good to have it confirmed.

I was wondering why she was so interested, oscillating between her wanting to tell me just enough to misdirect me and the fact that nothing much happened up here and she was probably craving a bit of excitement, when I spied, underneath the list of names, a much thicker document with yellow sign here sticky tabs poking out. While most of it was obscured, I could see the top corner, which had a logo familiar to me as belonging to a well-known real estate firm. (Some words stand out in crime books, don’t they? There’s no real way to refer to things of such obvious consequence obliquely, so I may as well put it in bold: there was a property contract on her desk.) Maybe she was not so snowed in after all.

Juliette continued. ‘Which means the dead man came in the middle of the night. So maybe that’s him.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘I checked, and the car’s in the lot now. We could have Crawford run the plates and get us a name?’

Her use of ‘we’ implied some level of side-kickery that I wasn’t expecting. Namely, because it seemed out of all of us, including the policeman, Juliette had done the most investigating so far. I was reminded again that I’m only the protagonist by virtue of me writing this down, not because of aptitude. I leaned in. There were two headlights in the driveway. It was easier to tell direction with cars than people, and it was clear the vehicle was headed towards the parking lot. And while the headlights were reflecting off the night-vision filter to overexpose the image, it was obvious that the car was a four-wheel-drive Mercedes.

‘That’s my stepfather’s car,’ I said. ‘Marcelo. The one who was doing all the belligerent yelling this morning.’

‘Oh.’