“Sorry. I didn’t mean … I just … sorry.” Liza looked down. Partly out of contrition, partly because she wanted to inspect the ground. With everything that was going on in her life at the moment, it was a lot easier to focus on the abstract. On clues and timelines and, in this case, on footprints. There was snow here—a little of it, at least. But any marks that might have been left by the killer had either been dusted over by whatever had blown off the loch in the last ten minutes, or else obliterated by people walking around and looking in the boathouse. “Do you—if you don’t want to, we don’t have to—but do you think we could just, kind of, scout the area a bit? If the killer’s gone, they must have left the woods somehow, and—I don’t know, maybe we’ll find tracks?”

Hanna was glaring but, in her defence, it looked like it was meant as a supportive glare. “And you’ll be careful?”

“As a—as a very careful person.”

If they were serious about following footprints, their best bet, Liza decided, was to skirt the edge of the copse. Although, since at least a half-dozen people including Belloc had been to the woods in the last half hour, it might turn out to be a gigantic waste of her time, because how would she even begin to tell whose tracks were whose? After a second’s thought she pulled out her camera and, after photographing Belloc’s body from two or three different angles for completeness, took close-ups of the soles of his shoes. Then she stood on one leg and photographed her own.

“What are you …?”

“Comparison. Can I do yours too?”

Sighing and wincing, Hanna forgot about her bad arm just long enough to use it to prop herself on a tree while Liza photographed her boots. “Just so you know, I’m going to pretend this is a fetish thing.”

“Noted.”

The next step was to nip back inside the boathouse, explain to the assembled guests there that she was going to go hunting for footprints, and get them all to let her photograph their feet. A plan that, to her genuine shock, worked perfectly smoothly. Then, armed with a phone full of comparative shoe pictures, she took Hanna around the edge of the tree line until they found the first set of tracks, on the northernmost side of the woodland facing the hotel. The new snowfall was already obscuring the details, but they were deep enough that you could make out size and shape well enough. Unfortunately, Liza was ninety-nine percent sure these were the tracks that she, Hanna, and their companions had made coming in, because there seemed to be a lot of them, and they all muddled over each other.