Nor, it seemed, was she in a mood to be butted. “No. Fuck, Liza, you have never been one of these people.”

Knowing full well what Hanna meant, Liza folded her arms and said, “What people?”

“Funeral chasers. Grief vampires. Those ghoulish fucks who ring up parents whose kids aren’t even cold in the ground and start saying things like, ‘So, do you think they got the right guy?’”

“This is different. We’re here.”

“It is not different. There has been a tragic accident, and everybody is panicking.”

“It wasn’t an accident. He was pushed. The chef saw—” Turning around, Liza started walking quickly back towards the kitchens.

Hanna, trailing after, was still firing negatives. “No.”

“Come on, she’s not personally involved. She might be able to tell us something.”

“There is no us here.”

Liza knew she was talking about the investigation, but the words still hung in the air like really unwelcome snowflakes.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.” There weren’t enough sighs in the world. And suddenly running down to the kitchens to ask a stranger where she’d been at one o’clock that morning seemed the height of self-indulgent futility. “Sorry, I’ve been—you’re right, we should go back to the room and wait for all this to be over.”

Hanna looked small. Of course, she always looked a bit small on account of her height, but she looked small in the emotional sense. “I’m not sure I want to just be sitting upstairs stewing. Come for a walk with me?”

Honestly, Liza hadn’t been that keen on sitting around stewing either. “Yeah. That sounds nice.” And it did, if you ignored the context. The murder context and the marriage context.

Walking down the front steps of the hotel and into the gardens should have been a magical experience: a landscape blanketed in snow unfurling before them, the cloud-capped mountains of the highlands, trees limned with frost. But there was nothing like a corpse and the spectre of divorce to take the shine off the pretty scenery. At least the body had been moved—two of the staff had shifted it to one of the outbuildings a little after breakfast.

Out of nowhere, Hanna laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I just realised that thanks to Mr Ackroyd we can have a shit, miserable weekend and I won’t even slightly feel it’s my fault.”

Liza looked at her wife. Hanna’s ability to find humour in unexpected, often dark, places was one of the things that Liza loved about her. “It wouldn’t have been your fault anyway.”

“It would, though, wouldn’t it? I dragged you out here without even asking you. I was overcompensating. I always overcompensate.”

She did. There had been a time when Liza found it sweet. “It was thoughtful,” she said. Then in the spirit of honesty added, “In a way.”

“A controlling way.”