Now that the screen was brighter, the white glancing sharply off the lens made me squint. The photos started filling up with shadows that were more distinctly human in the unfiltered daylight. In the next couple, the shadows grouped together, trailed up the hill like lines of ants. I thought I might have seen Andy and me meeting out the front of my chalet, but couldn’t be sure. The morning flickered past: the truck arriving (it was stupidly big); the congregation in the entranceway was close enough that you could actually see people’s faces; Michael being arrested. The damn photo timing lined up with Erin embracing him, her hand in the back of his jeans. I mean, come on.

‘You said this was for people to check the conditions before they come up here? Does that mean it’s on your website?’

‘Yeah, it’s a live feed. It’s pretty obvious too – the feed’s on our homepage.’

‘So if someone had your website open, they could have timed it, and deliberately moved in the gaps between the photos, to avoid being spotted?’

‘It would never work with our reception.’

‘True. But the timing never changes – it’s every three minutes. If you set your watch to it, you wouldn’t even need to watch the feed to move between the frames.’

‘I guess so.’

‘And it takes Crawford, let’s say, an hour to get up here if he guns it? And yet there’s no panic on the screen, no one’s rushing up the hill until later, and no one’s notified the hotel staff in the full intervening hour. Someone found a dead body, called the cops, and, what, went back to bed?’

‘You think the killer called it in? They wanted the police here?’

‘Once you eliminate the impossible—’

‘—whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,’ she finished. ‘That’s cute. Yeah, I’ve read pretty much all of Sherlock Holmes too. A holiday lodge is the Lost Sock Portal in the back of your washing machine for mouldy paperbacks: no one buys them, no one brings them, yet they’re always here. Consider me a bit of an expert. So – am I to assume your entire plan is the elimination method?’

‘I mean,’ I stammered, because that had been my entire plan, ‘I thought it was a fairly widely accepted place to start.’ I tried not to focus on a particularly long sliver of skin desperate to be plucked from her bottom lip.

‘Widely accepted.’ Her tone was incredulous, but playful. ‘It astounds me that that bloody man created the world’s most famous example of rational problem-solving, and we are all supposed to forget he was an absolute crackpot.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘And you write crime novels?’ She flung her arms up. ‘I hate the ones where the main character is a writer anyway.’