Kneeling down in the snow, she had a go at comparing them anyway. And it soon became clear that, to the untrained eye, a footprint in the snow just looked like a vaguely foot-sized oval.

“Not sure?” asked Hanna, who was taking the whole adventure in remarkably good spirits now her risk of death had dropped from immediate to merely likely.

“No.” Liza frowned. “I think that one’s me. I’m pretty sure those are you because you have tiny feet and wear deep treads. That might be the vicar, and I didn’t get a picture of the professor, so it’s anybody’s guess.”

Disheartened but not dissuaded, they carried on with their circuit. They found another pair of tracks leading into the wood, which Liza felt fairly confident identifying as Sir Richard and Aunt Tabitha. Although, honestly, she was working this out more from context clues—she’d seen them walk in together along roughly this path—than from any real skill at tracking.

The next set of prints leading in was older, the snowfall of the last half hour or so already dusting them over so that they were little more than divots, but the toes were wide and the feet short, making her suspect that this was where Belloc had come to meet whoever it was he thought he was coming here to meet.

Completing the circuit revealed three more sets of tracks, one towards the woods and one away. One of those, Liza concluded, had to be the professor. He was the only other person she knew had left the woods recently, rather than coming into them. Unfortunately, since she hadn’t seen where he’d gone, she couldn’t tell which were his. But either way, she realised with a kind of sick thrill, the other set of prints had to belong to the killer.

She photographed all three sets of tracks in as much detail as she could and followed each of them to their ends, only to find they all came from the hotel, which, when she thought about it, was the only place they could have come from. Which was fine. That confirmed that the killer was in the hotel. And once she could eliminate the professor’s footprints, which she … might not be able to do because she hadn’t seen his shoes, and even if she had they were still just tracks in snow, and …

It was all beginning to feel an awful lot like nothing. Because one aha moment didn’t actually crack a whole case open. It didn’t even mildly dent it. But then, what had she expected? She wasn’t a detective. She wasn’t even an amateur detective. She was a podcaster with a failing marriage.

Chapter Twelve

Liza, in the Hedgerow, with a Hunch

Saturday evening