From the window, they split up to look for footprints. Now that the snow had stopped falling, prints were lasting longer without being covered, but in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious figure showing up at a window, that proved to be a mixed blessing. The staff and guests had been coming and going all day, with people wandering out for walks or heading down to the old stables to look at corpses, and so there were dozens of trails to follow, leading all over the grounds and crisscrossing each other in unhelpful ways.

To her mild embarrassment, Liza was only about seventy percent certain she could identify, and thus rule out, the tracks that she and Hanna had made earlier in the day, even with the pictures on her phone to act as a reminder. So between them, the two groups divided the grounds in half, with Liza’s group taking the east and the colonel’s group (or Sir Richard’s group—there seemed some disagreement between the gentlemen as to who precisely was in charge) taking the west.

They swept down towards the woods where Belloc’s body had been found—there were tracks leading that way, although Liza suspected they might have been old—and it wasn’t until they’d lost sight of the other group and were just losing sight of the hotel that Liza realised something very important, and deeply troubling.

Of the three of them, only Ruby had a gun.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Liza, in the Corridor, with a Key

Monday night

They were in the copse now, where there wouldn’t be any footprints, and if the mysterious figure had come this way it was an open question whether they really wanted to find him. Or, as Liza kept pointedly reminding herself, her. Although the most sinister her in the equation thus far was right with them: clearly visible, clearly armed, and clearly up to something.

With her back to a tree, Ruby stopped, which made Liza and Hanna stop too out of a kind of unspoken sympathy. And for a moment, the three of them just stood there listening to the wind and their own breathing.

“Is it still safe?” asked Ruby, having apparently convinced herself nobody was in earshot.

Liza nodded, not quite so convinced herself.

“It won’t be long now,” Ruby went on, apparently to the middle distance. “If he’s coming for me, he’ll come soon. But he won’t until he’s sure that those numbers aren’t getting out.”

Propped against her own tree, Hanna sucked in a sharp breath. “Yeah, that kind of sounds like you’ve screwed us.”

“I would, but you keep turning me down.”