“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t staged. And if it was, maybe they were Mr B’s agents. Only to cover everything up their plan was to kill a whole lot of people and make it look like a …”

“Like a ‘Ten Green Bottles’ situation?” Hanna didn’t sound totally convinced, but she was going with it.

“Exactly,” Liza continued. “And they start by faking Malcom’s death, then they take out Belloc. But then Malcom turns on Vivien because she’s a loose end, and now we’re all chasing ghosts, but actually he’s still out there somewhere …”

Hanna gave her a matter-of-fact stare. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” Liza made a gesture of calculated non-specificity. “In the grounds.”

“Living on berries and leaving no footprints?”

She had a point. This wasn’t exactly adding up.

“And who would that make this?” Hanna pointed as close to the direction of Malcom’s body as she could without looking directly at it. “Nobody else has gone missing. Did they bring a corpse with them?”

She had several points. “Okay, okay, this was probably a bit of a stretch.”

“No.” Hanna’s tone was gentler than Liza expected. “It was worth checking out.”

Feeling the cold, Liza shivered, and Hanna came over at once to put her arms around her. “I think …” Liza went on. “I think I just really hate the idea of it being one of the ones left, you know? I mean, I realise we aren’t, like, friends or anything, but … well … we’ve kind of got to know these people, and I don’t want any of them to be a serial killer.” She huddled down, resting her cheek against the top of Hanna’s head. “Is that pathetically sentimental of me?”

“I think as sentimentality goes, ‘I’d rather people weren’t serial killers’ is a low bar.”

That was comforting. Slightly, at least. “Come on,” Liza said, “let’s go back in. I’m freezing out here.”

They trudged out of the old stables and towards the hotel, still too recently-corpse-exposed to appreciate the gentle brush of snow across the grounds, or the bright, welcoming façade of the hotel against the mountains.

Inside they followed the sound of shouting through the hotel, down past the kitchens and, to Liza’s dismay and Hanna’s mounting and obvious infuriation, towards the gun room. Returning to the company of the other guests made Liza suddenly both paranoid about and aware of the USB drive that was still in her wife’s breast pocket.