No. That was too much. Sure, they were in a snowbound castle in the Scottish Highlands with two amateur detectives (one deceased), somebody who appeared to be an actual duchess, a vicar with a shady past, and a femme fatale who’d just given Liza the McGuffin from a mid-2000s corporate thriller, but that didn’t mean common sense had gone totally out the window.

Liza had been staring at the meaningless numbers for a couple of minutes when she started to wonder if Hanna shouldn’t be back by now. And when she’d spent another couple of minutes not staring at the meaningless numbers because she was too worried, she was forced to conclude that Hanna should definitely be back by now. She closed the laptop and went to the door, then closed the door and went back to the laptop, because while everything else in this hotel might have been dissolving into irrationality, she just about had it together enough to realise that if she left and Hanna came back, they’d get into an endless loop of searching the hotel for each other and stressing out needlessly.

It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine.

She shouldn’t have let Hanna go off alone. Not when whoever was out there was still out there. And sure, the mysterious murderer’s MO so far hadn’t involved ambushing people while they were walking around the hotel, but so far none of the murders had been that similar to each other. Which—well, what did that mean? Did it make them more likely to be the work of one killer, or less likely? You’d think a single killer would kill the same way. Unless … what if Sir Richard was right and it was some kind of avenging angel serving up ironic punishments? What if in the mind of the killer, Malcom Ackroyd had been, like, getting above himself and heading for a fall? And Belloc had been overconfident and too convinced that nobody could hurt the master detective? If she or Hanna were going to get ironic-punishment-murdered then this felt like a good time for it to happen. Do you see, you weren’t there for your wife emotionally, and so you got murdered when you weren’t there for her physically. It was exactly the kind of thing that …

No. No. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened at all. She was just getting in her head and—

The door burst open; a figure—a man—burst through; and Liza grabbed the nearest object she could grab and swung with all her strength.

Chapter Twenty

Hanna, in the Bedroom, with the Numbers

Sunday evening

“Ow!” yelped Burgh as the lamp collided with his shoulder.