A part of Liza’s brain that she couldn’t quite switch off noticed that Vivien Ackroyd was dressed rather strangely, in a long coat, stout boots, and pyjamas. “Where have you been?” Liza asked, as much from a desire to stall as from actual curiosity.

“Well, it was coming down so hard,”—Mrs Ackroyd blinked snowflakes from her eyes, which seemed stung by the weather—”and Malcom said one of us should probably check the car was all right, and I said he should go, and he said I should go, and we flipped for it and I lost, so here I am.” She trudged forwards. Even with the detectives and the manager in the way, she’d be in plain sight of the body in seconds. “And I get back to find everybody outside and—my God.”

Mrs Ackroyd’s pace quickened to a speed that was frankly unsafe in the weather, and she slipped more than once, so that by the time she reached her husband’s body she was practically crawling.

The polite thing to do—perhaps even the right thing to do—would have been to pick a direction. To either walk up to the poor woman, like the bespectacled professor did, kneeling down beside her and saying things that seemed to comfort her; or else walk away. But Liza couldn’t help just watching. A tiny, tragic drama was unfolding in front of her, and the piece of Liza that was trained to turn things into stories wanted to capture it and script it and pin it down.

Hanna tugged at her arm. “Come on, I’m freezing.”

Only a little reluctantly, Liza let herself be tugged. But when she shot a last look back at the crime scene, she saw something new. A woman in a red dress, standing in the shadows beneath the tower, one finger pressed to her lips.

Chapter Six

Ruby, in the Dark, with a Red Dress On

Saturday, the small hours

“Reassure me,” said Hanna when they got back to their room, “that this isn’t happening.”

“That what isn’t happening?”

Hanna pulled off her shoes and wriggled very firmly into bed. “That we aren’t trapped by a blizzard in a remote Scottish castle with a dead man, the person who killed the dead man, an obnoxious detective of ambiguous nationality, and a possibly mythical underworld kingpin.”

“Ah.” Liza sat down opposite and saw to her own footwear. “Then no. I think all of that is happening.”

A suspicious look crept across Hanna’s face. “Tell me you’re not enjoying this.”

“No.” Even to Liza the denial sounded too deny-ey to be plausible. “But, well, it is … it is interesting though, isn’t it?”