Except, given the way she’d seen forensics work in actual cases she’d studied, the reports would be more likely to come back saying, “There’s a thirty percent chance that one of you is being an arsehole here, but we can’t reliably say which.”

Besides, where did it all go wrong wasn’t even the right question. Because it hadn’t. It wasn’t like they’d stopped loving each other. Liza was pretty sure you couldn’t get as titanically furious as she and Hanna sometimes got with each other if you didn’t, on some level, give a shit. It was just … somewhere along the line, everything had become so much work.

And to give Hanna credit, she was doing the work. This holiday was proof of that. Of course, as usual she was doing the work without consulting her, y’know, wife, so she lost some major points there. But on the long list of things of which Hanna could never be accused, apathy definitely came near the top. Apathy, and unwillingness to speak her mind.

It was no use. Sleep wasn’t happening and pretending to sleep wasn’t helping. Easing gently out of bed, Liza made her way over to the window and stood staring out into the snow. Their room was on the east side of the hotel, overlooking the road they’d driven down on the way in. Not that it was visible now. Even without the snow, the rural night meant everything beyond the golden light of the hotel windows was swathed in shadow, just eerie impressions of forests and mountains in the distance. It was, all in all, an unfairly romantic place to be physically when you were in such an unromantic place emotionally. For a couple with its shit together, it would, she was sure, have been a once in a lifetime experience.

In a fit of sentimentality, she looked back at Hanna still curled up in bed. It was a cliché, but there was something about the artless vulnerability of sleep that made her—made everyone, Liza supposed; that was the cliché part of it—look almost mythologically beautiful. Like some nymph that one of the more arseholey Greek gods (insofar as that narrowed it down) had trapped in an enchanted slumber at the back of a cave. Well, at the back of a cave in a rather nice hotel in Scotland.

With a heavy sigh that expressed a bewildering cocktail of feelings that Liza preferred not to think about, she came back to bed.

Or at least, she would have come back to bed if she hadn’t been interrupted by a scream.

Chapter Five

Emmeline, in the Courtyard, with the Body

Friday night / Saturday morning