For a moment, Liza sat on the sofa looking through the pamphlets advertising scenic walks and historic sites. She’d really hoped—well, not hoped exactly; perhaps idly fantasised—that she’d walk in and there’d be some kind of journal open on a desk with a page of notes reading, “Everything I Know about Mr B, by Perseus Belloc.” Instead, she’d found the room tidy—immaculately tidy, in fact—which meant that if she wanted to find anything, if there was anything to find, she’d need to search the place.

Hanna had stretched out on the bed. She didn’t look comfortable. “You’re really tempted to turn this place upside down, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Liza flipped over one of the leaflets restlessly. “No. Maybe. I just thought—he must have known something. But you’re right. It feels wrong to do to him what somebody just did to us. Even if he’s dead. Maybe because he’s dead.”

Hanna patted a space next to her. “How about you come lie down?”

It was an increasingly tempting idea. Setting aside the irrelevant paperwork, Liza got up, switched off the lights, and tried to get comfortable. Hanna’s hand found hers in the darkness, and for a long while they just lay there, fingers twined together, trying to be in the moment instead of in their heads.

Her eyes closed, Liza felt her breathing slide into an easy rhythm and listened to the night sounds of the hotel. It was an old building and its timbers creaked in the dark in ways she was beginning to find familiar, almost comforting.

“Do you remember,” Hanna whispered into empty space, “the weekend we spent camping in Cornwall?”

“It rained for three days straight and we had to sleep in mud, and the campsite toilets backed up, and so we had to walk twenty minutes to the nearest pub every time we wanted to use the loo?” Liza remembered it. She remembered it very clearly. It had been utterly miserable, and she would probably have left before lunch on the Saturday if Hanna hadn’t insisted they see it through. And if the engine hadn’t fallen out of their old car.

“That’s the one. I’m just trying to work out if that’s still our worst ever holiday, or if this one just beats it.”

“Well, on the one hand,” said Liza, “our lives were never actually in danger in Cornwall.”

There was a shifting in the dark as Hanna rolled over, fishing the USB key out of her pocket and staring at it for a moment before handing it over to Liza. “You say that, but we could have drowned if it had rained much harder in the night.”

Letting herself relax just a fraction, Liza laughed. “I told you we should have gone home.”

“And miss all that beautiful scenery we could barely see?”