“Search me. We’d have to ask Burgh.”

For a while Liza carried on pacing, because storming downstairs to the manager’s office and demanding to see the corpses seemed to be verging on paranoid behaviour. Then again, if Sir Richard was right, they were trapped in a snowbound hotel with a faceless killer hell-bent on destroying them all. And that shifted the window on what counted as “paranoid” quite a lot.

So storm they did. Well, less storm really, more drizzle, although not before swapping custody of the USB key because carrying it was making Liza incredibly jumpy. They intermittent showers-ed downstairs to the manager’s office and knocked politely on the door. Then they just opened it up and walked in because, with all the shouting already coming from inside, it seemed like interrupting was less rude than eavesdropping.

“For the hundredth time,” Mr Burgh was saying to Colonel Coleman, “no. It’s a bad idea.”

“Bad idea for you, maybe. Not my fault you can’t shoot straight.”

Hanna leaned her head against the door frame. “Tell me this isn’t still about the gun cabinets?”

“Open ‘em up,” Colonel Coleman repeated, “let us all take our chances. It’s two days, you say; that’s enough time for the determined blighter to take down three or four of us easily, and I won’t have one of ‘em be me.”

“And you don’t think having everybody armed might turn the whole situation into—oh, I don’t know, a massive bloodbath?” There was no way Hanna was letting this one go.

“Risk worth taking. That’s the trouble with your generation: won’t take responsibility for yourselves.”

In a desperate plea to defuse the situation, Mr Burgh at last asked Liza and Hanna what they wanted.

At which point Liza realised quite how absurd what they wanted actually was. “We, umm … we wanted to look at the bodies of the four victims so far.”

And to Liza’s relief, Mr Burgh filled in the reasoning for her. “Think there might be more clues?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, nodding in a way that signalled that she was in no way entertaining the theory that one of the bodies was a fake or was secretly wandering around the hotel at night stabbing old women. “It’s definitely about clues.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Liza, in the Stables, with the Bodies

Monday afternoon

The bodies, it turned out, were being kept in the old stables, which hadn’t actually been stables for the best part of a century. The stabling function of the stables had been transferred to the new stables, which were somewhere else on the grounds, and the old stables were a sort of multipurpose leisure/gym space. Of course, now, with the heating turned off and the whole building rapidly cooling to the same freezing temperatures as the world outside, they were a multipurpose leisure/gym/morgue space.